Ghost of the Ozarks by Brooks Blevins

Author:Brooks Blevins
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780252094118
Publisher: University of Illinois Press

9

The Identification of a Dead Man

Nothing it seemed could dampen local enthusiasm for the trial, but Mother Nature tried. The rain had finally ceased during the first day of the trial, but the waters winding their courses off the hilltops and through the hollows had so swollen the White River that the ferryboat operator refused to transport the taxi carrying reporters from the Arkansas Gazette and Kansas City Journal-Post across to the telegraph station at Sylamore that night. The two returned to Mountain View, where they telephoned the Sylamore depot office and read their stories to one agent, while the other, E. B. Watts, tapped them out on the telegraph wire, an ordeal that lasted until three o’clock in the morning. By daylight a cold front that had begun sweeping into the hills the night before had plunged the temperature to twenty degrees, freezing a crunchy shell on top of the rutted mud of the court square. A light snow whipped about by a strong north wind worked its magic on little Mountain View, coating the town, so boisterous and bustling the day before, with frosty serenity.1

About sixty spectators spent the night huddled around the stoves in the courtroom. They made up the bulk of the gallery for the second day of the trial, for the blizzardlike conditions kept most locals at home. And the weather had an adverse effect on some entrepreneurs as well. Though one salesman successfully disposed of a truckload of bananas in a few hours’ time, Vick Williams, who had made the thirty-five-mile trip from Batesville to hawk twenty-five gallons of lemonade, sat helplessly as his merchandise turned to sherbet and then to lemon ice. At least the stoves on each end kept temperatures above freezing in the courtroom, though faint clouds of breath materialized and then dissipated from time to time in the middle of the room. Sheriff’s deputies, pulling fireman duty, carried armloads of snow-dusted firewood into the courtroom throughout the day, a ritual so mundane in Stone County that it garnered notice only from reporters and other urban visitors.2

Mundanity was in short supply in the court’s proceedings, however. Tuesday had belonged to the prosecution. Wednesday, the eighteenth, was the defense’s time, and they were loaded for bear. The first order of business for Benny Williamson and his team was to convince the jury that the Connie Franklin sitting in the courtroom was the same Connie Franklin the prosecution claimed was murdered. Even without any new tricks or dramatic, never-before-heard testimony, defense attorneys were convinced that this could be accomplished. As pieces of evidence, Benny Williamson introduced the letters attributed to Connie Franklin and first revealed a week earlier, as well as a letter written in 1925 that was brought to Mountain View by Lillie Baker, mother of Frank Rogers. The drifter admitted authorship of all the letters introduced as evidence, even the one from the previous January in which he had threatened to have the superintendent of the State Hospital prosecuted for torturing inmates through the use of the Vitaphone machine.

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