Never a Number
A journalist, a murderer, an improbable friendship
ELEVEN
Trial and, decades later, questions…
The cheery yellow tones of the former Henry County Courtroom belie the gravity of the criminal cases and civil disputes adjudicated in a space predating the Civil War by 36 years.
Now hosting Martinsville-Henry County Historical Society community functions, the room looks exactly as it did when I covered proceedings there a half century ago.
Then, as today, the flags of the United States and Commonwealth of Virginia still flank a Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington behind the bench.
A second Stuart rendering, that of Thomas Jefferson, overlooks the jury box - unoccupied throughout the April 15, 1976 bench trial that determined the fate of Ben Brim.
The pretrial Martinsville Bulletin coverage of the murder of Lum Moore consisted of three stories, the first (and most comprehensive) detailing the injuries suffered when the 71-year-old was felled by the blunt end of an axe in his rural Henry County. He died at the Martinsville Community Hospital two days after the mid-September, 1975 attack.
“It appeared Moore was struck in the forehead by a heavy, sharp instrument. There was a deep cut on his forehead (from) a blunt object and he apparently lost a lot of blood,” County Sheriff’s Investigator J.L. (Joe Louis) Hairston told the paper.
Co-investigator James Kendrick added that Brim “had not intended to rob the house when he broke in, but only to ‘pick’ at the retired farmer.” Kendrick, the story noted, “could not say exactly what Brim meant.”
Brim seven months later took a seat at a defense table before Circuit Court Judge John D. Hooker. Henry County justice moved swiftly in those days.
Court-appointed defense attorney Benjamin Gardner’s opened with a gambit to quash statements Brim purportedly made to investigators days after being taken into custody.
Gardner acknowledged Hairston and Kendrick had properly advised Brim of his right to have an attorney present in the initial stages of the investigation but said they subsequently neglected to re-advise him prior to the unrecorded interview during which Brim incriminated himself. The defense attorney charged Brim’s Miranda rights were further violated when Kendrick, knowing the suspect couldn’t read or write, asked him to choose the name of a lawyer from the Yellow Pages.
Hooker didn’t buy it, ruling “In my judgment, the accused when he made the statement in question fully understood his rights and waived these rights knowingly, voluntarily, intelligently, by proceeding to make a rather full and complete statement of just how and why he killed Lum Moore with the axe.”
(Hooker invited Gardner to appeal the decision. He did. It was upheld by a state appellate court).
The formal case against Ben Brim consisted of five prosecution witnesses, and none for the defense.
A state medical examiner provided forensic details about a death caused by “blunt force injuries to the head with skull fractures and laceration and contusions to the brain” - injuries consistent with a blow from “a heavy blunt instrument, probably with corners.”
Henry County Commonwealth’s Attorney Roscoe Reynolds then called Guy Spencer and Ann Penn, among the neighborhood friends who’d hung out with Brim in the hours prior to the Moore assault.
Spencer recalled Brim parting ways with a group that included his sister, Shirley, when the others decamped around dusk to the trailer Penn shared with her family, located under 200 yards from Moore’s residence.
About an hour later, Penn testified, she heard Moore shout, “Ben, get out of my house and leave me alone.”
The 15-year-old said she informed her mother that “...Lum was out there screaming, and I asked (if she was going to do anything about it.”
“And what did she say?” Reynolds inquired.
“Well, she didn’t, she didn’t pay no attention to me (because Moore) hollered a lot.”
Reynolds summoned Hairston, who revisited details of the crime based on the confession Hooker allowed into evidence at the start of the trial.
The day’s final witness, the Virginia State Police investigator who took handwritten notes of the interrogation when the recording shut down, verified Hairston’s account.
Were it not for what happened next, the trial would likely have faded from memory within months, never mind years.
But a judge in semi-rural Virginia going off on a U.S. Supreme Court-imposed capital punishment moratorium that precluded him from sentencing a young Black man to death obviously made an over-sized impression on an idealistic young reporter freshly re-located from the Midwest.
Hooker instead regretfully ordered that Brim “be confined in the penitentiary of this Commonwealth for life.”
My A1 story the next day highlighted the ruling on the confession, Hairston’s theory about the attack on Moore being motivated by robbery, Hooker’s jeremiad, the verdict and sentence. I omitted what I deemed the irrelevant testimony of Spencer and Penn.
Nothing has emerged in the reporting, research, and conversations since Brim’s 2020 release to suggest he was incarcerated for a crime he did not commit, the extraordinary length of his sentence notwithstanding.
Still, a troublesome episode that occurred within minutes of Brim setting foot in Henry County for the first time in 44 years pointed to something amiss in the Joe Louis Hairston version of the crime that resulted in his conviction.
A cryptic reference buried in a 1976 Bulletin round-up of 40 county grand jury indictments, including the true bill that advanced Brim’s trial to circuit court, confirmed that to be the case.