Never a Number
A journalist, a murderer, an improbable friendship
Ten
“Defeated Without Stain...”
My acclimation to Martinsville was still formative when I took a seat in the courtroom of Henry County Circuit Court Judge John D. Hooker to cover the trial of Ben Brim.
A little over six weeks into my tenure as a cops and courts reporter for the local daily I still struggled with the Southside Virginia drawl of the locals who, likewise, grappled with the flat, Midwest accent of an outsider who, as some took pains to note, ain’t from ‘round here.
A southern delicacy - egg, cheese, and country-fried steak squeezed inside a homemade biscuit the size of a hubcap - was meanwhile introducing me to regional cuisine, not in a healthy way.
And by then I understood that a fair number of folks I encountered here and there were exercising their Constitutional right to bear arms, something that discouraged me from making eye contact with drivers of vehicles sporting Confederate battle flag bumper stickers that declared “Hell No, I Ain’t Fergitten.”
Those first weeks also exposed me to sudden loss of life, a harsh remove from death as I’d known it - the mortician-enhanced remains of departed elderly relatives.
My baptism occurred the afternoon a 10-71 (shooting) broadcast over the newsroom police scanner scrambled me to a city subdivision.
A cop guarding the door waved me inside (my predecessor’s advice to talk guns with law enforcement types already paying dividends). He gestured to a hallway off the living room. Passing the kitchen I spotted another cop cradling an infant.
The hall led to the bedroom where a woman in her mid-to-late twenties sprawled across a blood-saturated bed. A revolver rested on the floor beneath an outstretched hand.
A volunteer rescue squad responder disrupted my uneasy gaze at the yellow-gray pallor of skin, the open, unseeing eyes.
“Post-partum,” he said matter-of-factly, quickening as a mournful yelp drifted from the front of the home.
The EMT pointed me out of the bedroom, shutting the door behind me.
I passed the husband in the living room, the cop quietly encouraging him not to go “back there.”
I never counted how many times the first brush with unvarnished death repeated itself at scenes of murders, suicides vehicular fatalities, and freak accidents during my 18 months in Martinsville. But it happened enough that never again was I fazed by mortality.
A newspapers.com (a digital archive of over 30,000 newspapers) review of Bulletin stories published the third week of April, 1976 revealed that no tragedies demanded my attention in the days leading to the Brim trial.
The search did however turn up an A7 story that reminded me I’d spent the prior day, April 14, in Hooker’s courtroom as well. (I presume the story is mine; Bulletin bylines, awarded by editors, never topped stories that didn’t appear on the front page).
The wrap-up reported on guilty pleas by four defendants, one who confessed to attempting to rape a woman at gunpoint after breaking into her home.
Hooker suspended an eight-year sentence at the request of the victim and her husband, telling the couple, “If you don’t feel concerned about the way you were exposed then I don’t see why this court should get uptight about it.”
The antebellum courthouse where Hooker presided for 30 years hosted its last trial in 1996, the year Henry County relocated its court functions to a government campus in suburban Collinsville.
The space now houses the Martinsville-Henry County Heritage Center and Museum. The first-floor clerk’s and property deed office (which until the Civil War purportedly documented the purchase and sale of human beings) chronicles the area’s economic transformation from the growth and production of plug (chewing) tobacco to a heyday as a mid-20th Century furniture and textile manufacturing powerhouse.
Hooker’s old courtroom is an event space, the site of music performances, community events, and occasional wedding.
Built in 1824, the still-existent bones of the building replaced a fire-destroyed log structure (circa, 1793) that became a hub for the first county settlers - farmers who carved tobacco fields from the loamy soil of Blue Ridge piedmont straddling the Virginia-North Carolina line.
(Lawmakers in 1791 divided the sprawling county named for patriot and first Virginia governor Patrick Henry into two jurisdictions. The western half assumed his given name; the eastern, his surname. A footnote: Patrick and Henry counties share the distinction of being the first Virginia municipalities named for an American).
A 1929 expansion preserved the Federalist-style integrity of the original courthouse, specifically the porticoed framing of a porch off the second-floor courtroom.
A sculpted Confederate infantryman stands sentry atop an obelisk of Virginia granite outside the main entrance. Dedicated in 1901 by the Mildred Lee Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the monument venerates “The True Confederate Soldiers of Henry” 500 of whom paid the ultimate sacrifice in the service of an army “Defeated Yet Without Stain.”
It was not unusual for reporters at a paper with a single staff photographer to do double duty by shooting the pictures illustrating feature stories.
Which is why I brought my 35mm Minolta to an interview with the first Black attorney admitted to the Martinsville and Henry County Bar Association.
Following our chat, I suggested an outdoor setting for the photo.
I spotted the ideal location the instant we stepped out of his downtown office.
The irate calls to the newsroom started shortly after the afternoon paper with my story hit subscriber doorsteps. The editors, suffice it to say, did not appreciate the irony of a Black face posed before the shrine honoring the “True Soldiers of Henry.”
Eight months after he sent Brim away, I was back in Judge Hooker’s courtroom for the jury trial of a Henry County husband accused of shooting his wife in the back. The defendant claimed he acted in self-defense, an assertion disputed by relatives and acquaintances of the victim whom, they testified, had never fired, nor owned, a firearm.
It was mid-December and the jurors, in the spirit of the season, rejected the prosecution’s bid for a second-degree murder conviction. Finding the husband guilty of manslaughter, they fined him $1,000. Hooker advised the defendant to pay up in a timely fashion, wished him luck and told him he was free to leave.
A more exacting punishment awaited outside the courtroom door where the dead woman’s brother threw the widowed husband halfway down the second-floor stairwell. No worse for the wear, he exited via the front courthouse door into a more amicable reception from friends and loved ones gathered at the obelisk.
A felony conviction and tumble down the stairs notwithstanding, the accused that day arrived in court that day with three advantages: Competent (and paid) legal counsel, a Christmas jury, and the color of his skin.
As I remember it, defendants of color with cases before Judge Hooker rarely departed through front door of the courthouse, but mostly exited - as Ben Brim had on April 15th of the same year - in handcuffs through a rear entrance off limits to the public.