Murder in McComb by Trent Brown

Author:Trent Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 2020-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

8

The State of Mississippi v.

Richard McIntosh

The 1972 Trial

Between the November 1971 mistrial of Richard McIntosh and his retrial in the spring of 1972 there were no announced legal developments in the Tina Andrews case. No one came forward to Pike County authorities with new information that would prove consequential. McIntosh’s attorneys worked to hone their strategy, preparing a more elaborate defense for this second round. McIntosh and Fleming, both still free on bond, remained in Pike County. Outgoing district attorney Joe Pigott briefed incoming district attorney Jim Kitchens on the case, one among several pieces of business that Kitchens would inherit. A great advantage that McIntosh enjoyed in his second trial is that both Kitchens and county prosecuting attorney John Gordon Roach, Jr., were new to the case in 1972; both of his attorneys were not. The case and some of its particulars were familiar to many people in Pike County, including the men and women who would form the jury for this next trial.

Given the result of the first trial, one might wonder if the state should have sought a change of venue for the second one. Pike County had all winter to speculate on the case. Many people in the potential jury pool heard details of the case and read or listened to the evidence that both sides had presented in 1971. Some had reached conclusions about McIntosh’s involvement in the murder of Tina Andrews. There is no evidence that the state seriously considered such a motion. Perhaps Kitchens, a district attorney new to his position and eager to get to work on a number of cases, might have hesitated to try to move the case. His task was nevertheless complicated by his having inherited the case in mid-stream. He and John Gordon Roach, Jr. had a vast amount of work to do in a short time, far more than the defense team. The Tina Andrews case did not occur in isolation, but was only one case, albeit a highly visible one, that came to the desk of a busy, underassisted, and new district attorney.

All the principal characters in the story waited through the winter for the second act to begin. The Tina Andrews murder remained a topic of great interest and continued speculation in Pike County, easily the most significant local story of the year, the Enterprise-Journal reported in an end-of-the-year retrospective.1 But by late spring of 1972, that story would be finished, so far as the local newspaper and more important, the legal system of the state of Mississippi were concerned. Richard McIntosh and Ted Fleming would be free men, both of them able to begin putting their lives and reputations back together as best as they could. It was a resolution of which McComb police chief Richard Rowley said he was “real proud.”2

No one else would ever be arrested for the murder of Tina Andrews. Local law enforcement authorities seem never to have carried their work beyond the evidence that they had collected by 1971.

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