THE 1934 SMITH FAMILY MASSACRE IN DEMOPOLIS, ALABAMA: "THEY JUST WEREN'T THE KIND OF PEOPLE FOR THAT"

on "an appalling family tragedy" that turned up again in a 1944 mystery book. 1. The Death of the Smith Family, composed of Frank Clements and Elsie Hildreth, in 1934 Although the investigation revealed that the Smiths frequently left windows and doors unlocked at night, the coroner added that there was no evidence that the house had been forcedly entered.

— The couple were from prominent families. "Alabama Banker and Family Slain," November 26, 1934, New York Times On November 25, 1934, as day broke in Demopolis, a sleepy little Alabama town of just over 4,000 people located in rural Marengo County at the confluence of the Tombigbee and Black Warrior Rivers in the middle of the state's old plantation belt, Gertrude Robertson, the Smith family's cook, entered the Smith home with his wife, Elsie Hildreth Smith, and their two young children, Frank and Sabra. Gertrude invited the family to join her for dinner after preparing the food and setting the table. The cook knocked and went into the Smiths' master bedroom after getting no response from the oddly quiet house.

She encountered unspeakable horror there, which the Demopolis Times described as "undoubtedly the most shocking tragedy that has happened in the city of Demopolis" four days later. The tragedy of a child dying was something that black woman Gertrude Robertson, then twenty-eight years old, knew all too well because her son Nathan had died in July of the previous year. The Smiths' cook, however, could not have anticipated the nightmare tableau that awaited her in that gloomy bedroom.

She saw the occupants for just a few seconds, and they were so horrifying that she panickedly ran from the scene to the house of the widowed Hannah Koch and her bookkeeper son Isidore, who were both part of Demopolis' once-vibrant Jewish community, which at the time numbered about 150 people. Gertrude begged Isidore Koch to enter the Smiths' master bedroom, where he discovered the entire family brutally shot to death, including the husband, wife, toddler son, and infant daughter.

In his pyjamas, 36-year-old Clements Smith lay on the floor next to his and his wife's bed with a bullet wound to his forehead and a hole burned by powder by his right ear. Elsie, age 33, was lying across the foot of the bed, fully dressed, with two gunshot wounds to her chest. Her hands were crossed over her deformed breasts in a passive manner, as if she were a stone sarcophagus effigy dozing off in a mediaeval church. While the couple's infant daughter, Sabra, who was only six weeks old, lay tucked snugly in her netted crib with a shot through her mouth, Frank Alkire, Elsie's three-year-old son from a previous marriage who usually slept in his own room, lay on the bed beside his mother.

Two guns were found by the police in the bedroom. There was a vintage "lemon squeezer" under the bed. The grip safety in the back strap of the 32 short revolver gave it its nickname because it required a firm grip to fire by depressing the safety lever. Three lead bullets were fired from the lemon squeezer. A blood-spattered, pearl-handled automatic pistol that Clements had just recently acquired was also stored on a shelf in the closet. Four steel-jacketed cartridges had been fired from this weapon. Steel-jacketed cartridges had killed Elsie, her son, Sabra, and Clements, while lead bullets had killed the others. Four steel-jacketed cartridges and a single lead bullet were dispersed throughout the space. Soon after, the B. J. Rosenbush Undertaking Company and Furniture Store in Demopolis' coroner, Cedric C. F. Hickman, showed up to take control of the house and bodies. By this point, word of the murders had spread like wildfire throughout the small town, and hundreds of people had flocked to the Smiths' modest but stylish Spanish Revival home instead of attending church services to watch law enforcement arrive and depart and trade thrillingly chilling rumours about the horrors that may have occurred there.

The next person to arrive was Sheriff Sam Drinkard, who appeared to have alternated between the county sheriff's office and his older brother, Dwight Moody Drinkard. Linden is the county seat and a small town with less than a thousand residents that is located seventeen miles south of Demopolis. The Drinkard brothers were shamefully hauled into federal court the previous year on charges of conspiring to break the National Prohibition Act by accepting bribes from Vester Ward, a farmer and moonshiner in the tiny town of Thomaston, located eleven miles east of Linden.

However, they had been found not guilty, and their reputations as lawmen appeared to have held up, at least within the borders of Marengo County. After reaching Demopolis, Sam Drinkard asked Officer George Burton Porter, a young, ambitious expert in fingerprint identification from the comparable metropolis of Selma, with over 18,000 residents, to transport the pistols back to Selma for testing. Selma is located sixty miles to the east of Demopolis in neighbouring Dallas County. Having worked with then-sheriff Moody Drinkard in 1929 on another brutal Marengo County murder case, Officer Porter was familiar with the Drinkard brothers.

At the time, he had been called in to take fingerprints from the bloody axe used to bludgeon to death James Richmond Moss, age 76, a storekeeper and postmaster in the village of Hugo, situated between the towns of Hugo and Hugo. In order to find the person who killed old Jim Moss, Moody Drinkard had vowed to have Officer Porter "fingerprint every person in the county, if necessary." The truth is that he actually imprisoned a dozen or more black people before getting two Birmingham men to confess while they were visiting some of their relatives in Marengo.

Marengo police initially searched among the county's sizable black population for the perpetrator of the Smith home shooting, just as they had done five years earlier in the Moss murder case. They quickly detained and interrogated John Robertson, the 74-year-old yardman at the Smith residence (it is unknown if he was related to Gertrude), but released him shortly after. When the wristwatch and rings found on Clements and Elsie's bodies, along with other valuables, were discovered unaltered inside the home, the original theory that the Smiths had been robbed and killed by a home intruder was disproved. Gertrude, who lived quietly and guiltlessly with her elderly grandparents, James and Ella Robertson, at their modest home on Arcola Street, a few miles away from the Smiths' opulent home on South Cedar Avenue, was also swiftly cleared. After several days, the case was still unresolved despite horrifying headlines about the incident in newspapers across the nation (Demopolis Shooting Wipes Out Family).

The deceased Frank Clements Smith was the son of Clara Estelle Clements Smith and the late Andrew Reid Smith, who was president of the Demopolis Commercial National Bank and an executive for an electric company in his earlier years. Andrew and Clara were well-to-do citizens of Tuscaloosa, Alabama—60 miles north of Demopolis and home to the University of Alabama—when they got married in 1893. Tuscaloosa is where the University of Alabama is located. Clara Clements, "one of the most brilliant ornaments of Tuscaloosa society," was the granddaughter of Hardy Clements, who is believed to have been the wealthiest planter in Tuscaloosa County prior to the Civil War. Hardy owned 1,000 slaves and 20,000 acres of land, and he declared personal wealth of approximately $9 million in 1860.

(in modern currency) Seven years after settling in Demopolis at the turn of the century, Andrew and Clara bought Bluff Hall, an impressive, white-columned antebellum mansion with a view of the Tombigbee River that had once belonged to planter-politician Francis Strother Lyon and his wife Sarah Serena Glover Lyon. Williamson Allen Glover was the brother of Sarah Serena Glover, who had built Rosemount Plantation in nearby Greene County, one of the great southern architectural wonders The socially ambitious Clara established herself at Bluff Hall as Demopolis' leading hostess, planning festive events like the 1915 fall harvest celebration of the Ye Kanterberry Klan, a "unique and exclusive dinner club" peculiarly native to the town on the Tombigbee.

This group is obviously not to be confused with the Ku Klux Klan, which was coincidentally (or not) revived that same year. The Demopolis Times' society page editor painted this lovely, if priceless, picture of the lavish affair, to which I can only exclaim, "Ye Gods! The meeting and banquet of the Kanterberry Klan, which took place on the evening of November 18 at Bluff Hall, the magnificent residence of Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Reid Smith, was one of the best social events to take place this season.

Ye Klan hosted a good fellowship reception from seven to eight. Announcing the banquet and leading the guests into the banquet hall took place at that time. Andrew Reid Smith was unanimously chosen [by the Konsort] and brought to the throne in pomp by the Klan before being crowned with stately grace by the Kommander right after dinner.

Bluff Hall was well-known for its lovely collection of Japanese curios, which had been given to Clara by her wealthy brother, Julius Morgan Clements, a renowned mining geologist and engineer as well as a well-known Asian traveller who spoke a dozen languages fluently. Frank Clements Smith and his two brothers, Fenton Reid Smith and Charles Singleton Smith, all three of whom were short, slim, blonde, and blue-eyed, matured at lovely Bluff Hall as gilded prospects seemed to glitter alluringly before them.

Even though Clara continued to live at Bluff Hall two years after her husband's passing, when her middle son and his family tragically perished less than five minutes away from the mansion, Andrew still lived there until he passed away from heart disease in 1932 at the age of 63. When Clements and Elsie were married at Bluff Hall on that other Sunday morning in October 1933—"very quietly, with only relatives present," according to the Demopolis Times—the event was conducted with far less ostentation than the Qwyte Kolorful celebration of the Ku Klux Klan.

Clara decorated the stately old Southern home for her second son's quiet wedding with "vases of dahlias, roses, and other cut flowers," and the bride "carried pink rose buds and lilies of the valley." After Elsie and her son and grandchildren were brutally murdered a year and seven weeks later, no one was aware of the flowers Clara had laid on their graves. A brief funeral service was held at Bluff Hall on Monday morning following the murders on behalf of the deceased family. For the four members of the family, two caskets were provided: one for Elsie and her son Frank, and the other for Clements and the infant Sabra, who had barely had a chance to live before she passed away. A funeral cortege left Bluff Hall and travelled solemnly sixty miles to Tuscaloosa, where the deceased were laid to rest in the old family plot at Evergreen Cemetery following another service at Trinity Episcopal Church.

The late Frank and Elsie Smith were described as "a very devoted couple by all who knew them," and both of them "seemed to idolise their children," according to the newspapers. In Demopolis, both husband and wife were "great favourites in the circle of the younger married set," with Clements being singled out for having a "gentle and pleasant disposition that makes friends." These tributes bestowed upon the deceased couple only seemed to add to the mystery surrounding their deaths and those of their children. The Curious Inquest and Officer Porter It was revealed at the coroner's hearing a few days after the dead family's bodies were discovered that Clements and Elsie had spent Saturday night at the home of the oddly named Mem Creagh Webb, Jr., and his wife Frances, a young couple with their own two young children who were well-liked in the community, leaving Frank and Sabra in the care of the legendary Gertrude Robertson.

The Demopolis police chief stated that "the couple had quarrelled at a party earlier in the night," presumably referring to the gathering at the Webbs' home. The Smiths left the Webbs' home at around 9:30 p.m. to deliver forty-three-year-old Austin Thomas Ars, a tall, brown-haired, grey-eyed accountant and Great War veteran who had been married for fifteen years but had no children, to the Demopolis Inn (Modern in Every Way), which was only two minutes away on West Washington Street. After that, Clements and Elsie went back to the Webbs' home and stayed there until just after ten in the morning before departing for their own home.

After informing Gertrude that "his wife would be in a few minutes" and that he would be giving Sabra her bottle of formula, Clements arrived at his home at around 10:30. Despite the fact that some people in the community thought this was an odd situation, Police Chief Davis opined that "Mrs. Smith and her husband might have preferred that the cook not see her on her return home and that she might have remained in one of the front rooms of the house as the cook took her departure for the night." Police discovered a bottle of alcohol and two glasses with whisky residue on a table.

The Demopolis Times stated that "What followed is problematical," but perhaps things were not as difficult as the newspaper in Demopolis wanted its readers to believe. Affirming that there was a "slight chance" that "an outsider might have been responsible for all the deaths," Coroner Cedric Hickman had, admittedly, cast doubt on the situation.

Coroner Hickman, who, despite being a mortician by trade, led a Demopolis dance orchestra, was the First Baptist Church's music director, and was revered by the town's white residents for his participation in blackface minstrel shows ("His monologue with a broom will be remembered by all who saw it," his 1961 obituary proclaimed), doubtless did not want to alienate potential future clients in Demopolis society and made sure to keep his participation in these shows But the Selma Times-Journal, which was a little more honest than the Demopolis Times, reported that George Porter, the hearing's chief expert on the Selma fingerprints, chattily admitted to reporters that Clements had shot himself and his family. He clarified that Clements' fingerprints could be found on both of the discharged pistols in the bedroom. Naturally, this made newsmen perk up their ears.

Another nearby newspaper, the Clarke County Democrat, published the blunt first paragraph revelation: "Frank C. Smith, a Demopolis banker, snuffed out the lives of his wife and babies with a fusillade of shots and then turned a gun on himself—that is the theory Fingerprint Expert Porter, of Selma, will substantiate with scientific evidence before a coroner's jury Tuesday." Voluntary Officer Porter vehemently disagreed with Coroner Hickman's assessment of the likelihood that a home invader was responsible for the crimes, completely ruling out the possibility. On the witness stand and in interviews with the media, he conjectured that after killing his wife and children with the automatic rifle, which he had carefully put on a shelf in the closet, Clements had tried to shoot himself with the old revolver but had only managed to graze his forehead and temporarily knock himself out.

Porter theorised that he missed a crucial spot because of the weapon he was using, a small-caliber revolver with a "lemon squeeze" handle that had to be pressed firmly in order to fire the pistol. He thought that after being unconscious on the floor for an hour and a half, Clements awoke and finished the gruesome task he had begun by fatally firing a bullet from the revolver that had fallen under the bed into his brain. Porter continued, adding with ominous implication that after Elsie had been shot, most likely by Clements, her body had at some point been "tampered with.

" The cop continued, "[Mrs. Smith's] hands had been placed over each wound and her elbows pushed neatly down beside her.

"There were two bullet wounds, one in each breast." Despite Officer Porter's observations—which were supported at the hearing by Dr. Claude Nicholson Lacey, the Demopolis doctor who had examined the bodies—the six-member coroner's jury baulked at putting Clements Smith directly to blame for the murders, seemingly influenced by or simply sharing Coroner Hickman's desire to blame the crime on a home invader. The Smiths "just weren't the kind of people for that," police chief Davis insisted dogmatically.

Instead, the jury allowed what seemed to be the bare, bald facts at this point: that Elsie, her son Frank, and her daughter Sabra had been murdered around three a.m., and that Clements had committed suicide an hour and a half later, around four thirty. This was after listening to more than four hours of testimony from Officer Porter, Dr. Lacey, Sheriff Drinkard, Chief Davis, Gertrude Robertson, the Creaghs, and others.

Who did it, and why do we know? Since the jury declined to name a suspect in Elsie and her children's murders out of deference to the residents of Bluff Hall, they were obviously unable to respond to or even raise the issue of why they had been killed. If it is assumed that Clements committed the murders, which is the obvious conclusion, then we must decide for ourselves why such a loving husband and father, who adored his wife and children, would so heinously murder them before turning the gun on himself.

Embezzlement has been ruled out because Clements' bank books were examined by Demopolis police and found to be, in the words of Police Chief Davis, "in good shape." A year after the tragedy, Clement Eaton, a renowned American South historian who was then the head of the history department at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania (apparently not related to the Smith family), paid a visit to Demopolis. He took a tour of the town's renown old antebellum mansions, Gaineswood and Bluff Hall, and was told gory details about the recent gruesome killings. Eaton wrote that night in his diary,

"I was told that the inheritor of Bluff Hall married a divorcee—one night he and she returned from a wild party, and later he found her untrue to him and shot her, her two children, and himself," concluding sentimentally, "In this beautiful home, an unlovely home life must have existed." Despite Eaton's errors in detail—presumably none of the murders had taken place at Bluff Hall, where Clara still resided with her youngest son, Singleton Smith, and his wife and son—the whispers the professor overheard of a "wild party" and amorous infidelity give us an explanation for Clements' seemingly irrational act, which in this horrifying light is one of the most extreme manifestations of fury and despair.

According to the Linden Democrat-Reporter, "[I]t is believed that jealousy drove Mr. Smith to the breaking point," in their blunt words. Why did Clements and Elsie fight on that crucial Saturday night in 1934? What had happened between them? Had the Webbs and a few of their friends had a "bottle party"? What had happened during the Smiths' brief trip to and from the Demopolis Inn with Austin Ars? Why did it take the Smiths almost thirty minutes to travel from the Webbs' residence on Capitol Street to their home? (This shouldn't have taken more than four or five minutes to get there.) And when Clements confronted Gertrude at their house, where was Elsie?

Was she intoxicated and unfit to be seen by the help, as Chief Davis seemed to imply? Was she even at home in the first place? According to the coroner's jury's findings, there is no reliable information about Elsie's whereabouts between the time she left the Webbs' home with Clements at around 10:00 p.m. and the time she died, most likely in her own bedroom at around 1:30 in the morning. It might have been revealed in the shocking conclusion of a Golden Age detective novel—the kind of book so beloved by Thirties fiction readers—that Elsie had actually been killed by her mother-in-law Clara at Bluff Hall, which was located just a few minutes' drive from the Webbs' home, with Clements acting as Clara's scapegoat. In fact, Elsie Smith had gone through two divorces, as Clement Eaton had noted. Whether or not one agrees with Clement Eaton and his Demopolis gossips that the dreaded word "divorcee" deserves a connotation of moral dubiety,

I believe this to be a point of interest. Newspapers at the time must have thought this was important because many of them—the Demopolis Times excepted—damningly used the dreadful words "she had been divorced" in their banner headlines when referring to Elsie. The questionable double divorce case of Elsie, however, came from a respectable social background, as even those newspapers acknowledged. The Demopolis Times praised Clements' bride, saying, "Her large family connections are of the very best, and she was quite a favourite among them.

" Elsie, the youngest of four children with three older brothers, was a descendant of the Hildreth family of Jefferson, a planter village 12 miles southwest of Demopolis, despite the fact that she was born in St. Augustine, Florida, where her father worked as a railroad conductor. When Elsie was only nine years old, her mother Willie Jefferies Alston passed away in 1910, leaving her father Levin Hildreth to care for the children. After the First World War, Levin moved to Prescott, a mining town in central Arizona, with his youngest son, Elsie, and himself.

There, he worked as a railroad brakeman. It appears that his beautiful and nimble daughter ran amok and fancy free after that. Elsie Hildreth was living apart from her father in Prescott in 1920, staying with a pharmacist and his family. Elsie, then nineteen, married George Battles Finch, a 24-year-old native of Riverside, California, on December 15 of the same year at her brother's home in Prescott. George Battles Finch was 6'2" and 170 pounds, with blond hair and blue eyes. Elsie was dressed in a "beautiful brown satin gown, with hat and shoes to match," according to a notice about the wedding in the Prescott Weekly Journal-Miner, which called her "a well-known and popular member of Prescott's younger set." Nevertheless, "only a few intimate friends were present" at the ceremony despite Elsie's alleged popularity. Can one detect a pattern of avoidance here, recalling her and Clements' later wedding, which was "very quietly, with only relatives present to witness the ceremony"? George Finch oversaw the Arizona Bus Company in Prescott, but the newlyweds relocated to Riverside, California, where George had accepted a position with the J. W. Kemp Cadillac dealership.

However, it appears that Elsie left her husband and Riverside only a few weeks later. The Prescott Weekly Journal-Miner stated succinctly that "Mrs. Elsie Hildreth Finch... left [Prescott] to return to her former home in Alabama, where she will remain with relatives," ten months after the wedding. For the majority of the remainder of the Roaring Twenties, Elsie's romantic life—by this point divorced and using her maiden name—disappears, though she occasionally makes appearances in Arizona's Prescott and Phoenix, and in 1925, she spent the winter at her brother Kent Hildreth's house in Palm Beach, Florida. After spending the previous winter in Florida, Elsie returned to Arizona four years later, at the age of twenty-eight. On December 2, 1929, she married the chiselled 6'1", 190-pound, black-haired Josiah Franklin Alkire, a trader on the Navajo Nation reservation and the 38-year-old son of the renowned pioneer Phoenix rancher and businessman Franklin Tomlin Alkire. Jay, as he was known, had previously been married and divorced, like Elsie.

The couple's son, Frank, was born in 1931, and Elsie named him after his paternal grandfather. However, by 1932—the same year that Elsie's father passed away—the marriage had broken down. Elsie visited her family in Marengo County once more, where she met and charmed Clements Smith, a small but dashing University of Alabama graduate who worked as a cashier in his late father's bank and was in his thirties but still resided with his parents at opulent Bluff Hall. Elsie briefly visited Phoenix to file for a divorce from Jay before she tragically married Clements.

The handsome young Clements, a member of the fraternity Alpha Tau Omega, was depicted in the 1920 UA yearbook as a dirty-blond, blue-eyed heartbreaker: "How so much good-heartedness and pep can be combined in five feet four inches, has long been a wonder to us." a "top" sergeant in the SATC (Student Army Training Corps) days who broke many people's hearts and made them look back with regret. However, it appears that in 1934, UA's heartbreaker, Clements Smith, was the one who lost himself and his wayward wife, along with their young children, to his passion for her. Several faded photos from family albums The so-called "last Jew in Marengo County," Bert Julius Rosenbush, Jr., was interviewed in 2011 by the Southern Jewish Historical Society. His father, Bert Julius Rosenbush, Sr., owned a funeral home and furniture store in Demopolis that employed none other than coroner Cedric Hickman at the time the Clements Smith family was extinguished. Bert, Jr., recalled with palpable and poignant sadness that the terrible violent deaths of this attractive young family had caused his sensitive father, who was given the humiliating task of preparing the victims for burial, to give up the funeral business for good.

Bert, Jr., was only five years old at the time of the slayings; his sister was only two. In the nearby Sumter County town of Cuba, where there was no synagogue at the time, Bert Sr. himself had been married to Miriam Stein just five years earlier in a large-scale ceremony conducted at the Baptist Church. Their marriage had brought great joy to both of their lives, as well as the lives of their infant son and daughter. Two years prior to the Smith killings, Bert, Sr., on his way back to Demopolis from Birmingham, had removed the lifeless body of 18-year-old farmer Lawrence Daniel Garris, who had died when his truck overturned east of Demopolis, and had prepared him for burial at his mortuary with the help of his two trained nurses.

According to the words Lawrence's grieving parents carved on his gravestone, "To forget is a vain endeavor." Bert Sr. discovered that he was unable to forget the horrifying images of the Smith family members who had been shot to death: Clements, Elsie, Frank, and Sabra. Rosenbush: When my father started his business, he travelled to Cincinnati and obtained his embalmer's licence. Up until a tragic accident occurred here in Demopolis, he practised embalming while also managing the furniture shop with my grandmother. After that mishap, my father decided to give up because it was such a sad situation. Questioner: What happened in the accident? Rosenbush:

It was a man who killed his family, and they were roughly my dad's family's age. As a result, he made the simple decision to abandon the venture aspect and concentrate solely on the furniture business. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, the Smith family felt like death was stalking and engulfing them with greed. Fenton Reid Smith, Clements' older brother, and his sister-in-law also experienced unexpected outcomes. Fenton wed Alice Portman Bright in 1923, and they later settled in the Panama Canal Zone, where Fenton worked as a plant manager for General Electric.

In the Canal Zone, at the Gorgas Hospital (named after the famed native Alabamian disease fighter William Crawford Gorgas), Andrew Reid Smith's daughter-in-law Alice died from Spanish Influenza about eight months before Andrew Reid Smith's own death in 1932. Fenton died in the Canal Zone in 1943 at the age of 48 while tarpon fishing in the turbulent waters of the Gatun Spillway, nine years after the untimely death of his wife. The matriarch of the Smith family could have been excused for finding it all to be too much to bear, but she must have known there was danger when Clements married Elsie back in 1933 because she was well aware of the danger mesalliances posed from her own family history. A beautiful brunette double divorcee named Mrs. Josephine Burley,

a stenographer from Butte, Montana, had made an ill-advised marriage to J. Morgan Clements fifteen years earlier. J. Morgan Clements was the giver of her famed collection of Japanese curios. Four years earlier, when the couple first met, Josephine won the mining expert's sympathy by tearfully telling him that she was considering suicide due to some poor mining investments she had made. The Butte Miner used words that, at least in my opinion, raise several red flags: "The bride was well known among a select circle of friends who felt for her the warmest friendship, as her splendid womanly nature appealed to all who knew her," adding reassuringly, if vaguely, "She is a woman of superior mental attainment and belongs to an old southern family of revolutionary fame.

" Unfortunately, Morgan found life with this most feminine of women utterly intolerable. Morgan, who made a seductive matrimonial mark for a sharp-eyed adventurer by earning an annual income of around half a million dollars from his copper mines and other holdings, Within a year of their nuptials, he abandoned Josephine and moved back to New York, giving her the equivalent of what she had been making as a stenographer prior to her marriage ($125 monthly, or $3500 today).

Over the course of the following year, Josephine racked up $6000 ($170,000 in today's dollars) in personal expenses and sent a flurry of importunate and recriminatory letters to Morgan's friends and family, including his sister Clara, in which she detailed numerous acts of insanity and immorality committed by her estranged husband.

She added that Morgan had sent her to Bluff Hall in Alabama so that Clara could get her an abortion. Josephine warned Morgan after he refused to come back to her: "Someone is going to kick that log and expose it, just like a bug seeks shelter under a rotten log." Josephine filed for divorce from Morgan in New York in 1910, asking for $400 per month in alimony (equivalent to $11,000 today). Her irate husband responded through his attorneys that the extravagant "termagant," whom he had so foolishly married, deserved not a dime more from him.

The Johnny Depp-Amber Heard defamation case recently made headlines, but Clements v. Clements garnered more national attention and was presided over by renowned judge John W. Goff, who was once called "the cruellest, most sadistic judge we have had in New York this century." Morgan's attorneys presented evidence of Josephine's fabrications regarding her social background, instability, and generally "vain, conceited, coarse, and vulgar" behavior.

They even plausibly argued that Josephine had secretly carried out an affair with her then-attorney Julius McLain Jamison while she was staying at a ranch in Phoenix, Arizona, where male visitors affectionately referred to her as "The Rose of the Rancho." This last point was made through the "honeybun love notes" that Josephine and Julius, who shared a room at the ranch, exchanged. These notes were intercepted by a "negro maid," Zoe Burney, who forwarded them to Morgan. To the amusement of the press, Julius, who was then fifty-five, pleaded tearfully in one of the notes, "Can't I love my baby?" "I simply can't stay away from my pet baby," I said.

In order to let him know when he could call Josephine, Julius urged Josephine to rap on the wall in accordance with their prearranged signal. Judge Goff, an Irish Catholic native who took a strict stance on a husband's obligations to his wife, nonetheless granted Josephine alimony, albeit at a reduced rate of $72 per month (equivalent to $2000 today).

With this particular Josephine, Morgan may not have met his Waterloo, but the affair had undoubtedly taught him a costly lesson—both emotionally and financially—about choosing a spouse carefully or not at all. Unfortunately, his nephew, Clements Smith, failed to draw a lesson from his uncle's error, which had tragic results for four people. Josephine Clements testified during the trial that her irate husband once referred to her as a "goddamn bitch" and threatened to throw her out of a seven-story hotel window if she didn't stop. Whatever the precise truth of the matter, disputes between the two never escalated to actual physical violence, much less multiple murders and suicide.

Morgan denied the accusation and responded with his own claims about his wife's unruly behaviour. As the beneficiary of Clements' will from 1923, Clara continued to live at Bluff Hall in the 1940s with her lone surviving son, Clements' younger brother Singleton Smith, a bookkeeper at the Commercial National Bank, and Charles's wife Eleanor and their son, Andrew Reid Smith II. However, in order to make ends meet, Clara turned the upper floor of the expansive twenty-room mansion into rental apartments. In her elegant double parlours and dining room, she occasionally hosted meetings of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), but nothing was ever the same again. The remaining Smiths lived at Bluff Hall for just a few more years after Andrew Reid II married Jule Barnes of Prattville, Alabama, in 1946 at Demopolis' First United Methodist Church, before selling the house and relocating to Long Beach on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where Clara passed away in 1955 at the age of 82. This was five years after her brother Morgan passed away on his coconut plantation on the island of Mo'orea in French Polynesia, where he had moved in 1925, finally putting, one assumes, literally thousands of miles between himself and Josephine.

Morgan had lost a great deal of his copper mining fortune in border raids carried out during the 1910s Mexican Border War. Twelve years after Clara's passing, Bluff Hall was turned into a house museum run by the city of Demopolis, and that is how it is still today: a stunning white-pillared southern mansion that is a well-liked tourist destination with a horrifying family tragedy subtly hidden in its past. On South Cedar Avenue, a newer home that was built and where the Clements Smith family violently perished no longer exists. I believe Demopolis Hardwood Floors has taken its place.

When I visited Bluff Hall in the late 1980s or early 1990s, not a single person mentioned the horrific Smith family murders, not even in passing. Perceptive Selma police officer Porter retired from the force in 1963 with a collection of more than 35,000 cards in his fingerprint file. By this time, he had been dead for ten years. His career high point came in 1957 when he recognised "Reco Glover" as Mississippi native Lemuel Taylor, who was charged with killing Walter Hart, an off-duty police detective who was fatally shot in Cincinnati, Ohio, while valiantly attempting to stop a robbery at the Grey Eagle Café. He received a reward of $3800 ($35,000 today) and a personal letter of commendation from FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover for his identification (Where Good People Meet).

Taylor was executed the following year after being found guilty of Hart's murder. Highlights Topics/Keywords  (“‘They Just Weren’t the Kind of People for That’: The 1934 Smith Family Massacre in Demopolis, Alabama”)