REDEMPTION IN A SMALL TOWN

Facts in Evidence

It was a Monday, and Mary Richards, a teacher and librarian at Oliver Springs High School had gone off to work, leaving her two older sisters alone in their sprawling house. The way the story has always been told, the three sisters had taken a day-trip to Knoxville the previous weekend they had gone to the city to buy dresses and while there, they had decided that they would go to a movie together during the week. All three of them had been eager to see "Gone With the Wind."

Gone With the Wind, movie poster

It was about noon and Mary Richards had decided to send home a note to her sisters, perhaps confirming their plans. The task fell to the pair of third-graders. According to a synopsis of the case, compiled years later by the local historical society, the boys failed in their mission and "reported that they heard strange noises and had noticed a man with a light moving around in the basement."

Like many other aspects of the case, the boys' accounts change somewhat over time, but three other witnesses, two more schoolboys and a neighbor who had stopped by about noon to deliver groceries, also reported that they had heard strange noises in the house. The neighbor later told authorities that she thought she had heard the muffled voices of two whispering men, but that no one had come to the door when they knocked.

At first, Mary Richards was not unduly concerned. Perhaps her sisters had left the house to run a few errands, or perhaps they were otherwise engaged and hadn't heard the knocking on the door. A few hours later, however, Mary Richards did begin to worry, particularly after she had learned that her sisters, devout Christians both, had failed to show up at their regular missionary meeting at a neighbors' house.

She went home to investigate.

It is an image that has become seared into the collective memory of the old-timers in Oliver Springs, the picture of Mary Richards, standing at the kitchen door, the horror of what had happened sprawled out before her.

Sylvia Lynch, the professor who has been studying the case for a possible book, recounts how one man remembered that image.

Miss Mary screams, kitchen door

"One gentleman that I talked to ...he actually went up when he saw all the commotion and ...he ...could hear Miss Mary screaming," Lynch said. "She began to scream and some of the neighbors came running over and they found the bodies," Lynch said. "When he heard all this commotion, it was just about the time school was turning out so he was on his way home and he went up and looked in the kitchen door and he saw one of them ...on the floor."

"It ...was ...brutal ...It was not just like a gunshot and fall to the floor. Apparently, there had been a struggle."

Among the first to arrive on the scene was A.T. Hill, a neighbor and friend who also happened to be a former Anderson County deputy sheriff. So gruesome was the scene that Hill, according to published reports, refused to go in to the house alone. He screamed for help and soon Bill Sharp Jr., then a young undertaker in town, joined him.

Within minutes, the two men had all the company they could possibly want and then some. There was no police department in Oliver Springs in the 1940s, only a local marshal who relied on the Anderson County Sheriff's Department for most of the law enforcement.

Oliver Springs, Tn, downtown

So the investigation, such as it was, was begun by two of the town's best-known citizens, Hill and undertaker Sharp Jr. Hardly experienced crime-scene investigators, even by the comparatively lax standards of the 1940s, the two men exercised little control over the house, the evidence or the crowd of shocked onlookers, authorities said.

Whatever evidence there had been was compromised when curiosity-seekers estimates of the size of the mob have ranged from 75 to more than 200 -- trudged through the house. Even the gun, which Hill later said he had pried from Brown's cold, dead fingers -- a claim that was later rejected -- was passed around the crowd. By the time Sheriff Bob Smith arrived, it has been said, the gun had already been wrapped in paper and placed under Powder Brown's body.

"He was probably a couple of hours getting there," Lynch said of the sheriff, "and you had 10,000 people walking through the house and the gun had been wrapped in paper and shoved back under the body."

Despite the obvious contamination of the crime scene, Smith concluded almost immediately that what he had on his hands was a murder-suicide. Almost as immediately, the sheriff's conclusion assumed the power of myth.

All over town, people discussed Powder Brown's motives for the killing. It was simple. According to the myth, Powder Brown had been so outraged that the Richard sisters had given another boy who sometimes worked for them a suit for Christmas that he vowed revenge. Witnesses quoted him as saying that he was "going to get them," Lynch recalled. Though it was later disputed, others said that Powder Brown had carried firewood into the bedroom of a prominent local banker that very day and had, while there, stolen the distinctive, antique .38-caliber revolver that authorities claimed though it was never proved had been used in the slayings.

It didn't matter that the alleged motive was laughably prosaic compared with the savagery of the crime. Nor did it matter, in Lynch's words, that the crime was unimaginably out of character for Powder Brown, who was by all accounts so timid that he couldn't bear to even touch a gun.

Sharp Burnette Funeral Home

It didn't matter that he was reported to be so fearful of anything having to with death that he turned down a job offer cleaning hearses for Sharp Burnette Funeral Home because "he just didn't want to touch anything that had anything to do with a dead body," Lynch said. It didn't matter that there were witnesses who had seen Powder Brown at a nearby grocery store about 1 p.m. that day, after the Richards sisters were already dead according to most accounts.

It didn't even matter that a little more than a week after the slayings, an Anderson County coroner's jury, meeting in the living room of the Richards home with Mary Richards and her brother in attendance, concluded after hearing from 28 witnesses that the Richards sisters had been slain by an unknown killer and that in all probability Powder Brown had shown up at the house and been killed by the same murderer.

All that mattered was that the accusations against Powder Brown had the ring of plausibility and that, to some degree, they resonated with a thousand ugly little myths, the myths that in those days, and even today, form the chorus of bigotry.

Beverly Majors, a staff writer for the Oak Ridger newspaper in Tennessee who has perhaps spent as much time studying the Richards case as anyone, believes that the Powder Browns was more than simply the patsy for an unsolved murder. To some degree, he was a sacrifice to racism. "His race made him the fall guy. I would almost say that with certainty."