Murder in New Orleans by Jeffrey S. Adler

Author:Jeffrey S. Adler [Adler, Jeffrey S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, United States, 20th Century, State & Local, South (AL; AR; FL; GA; KY; LA; MS; NC; SC; TN; VA; WV), Social Science, Ethnic Studies, African American Studies, Criminology
ISBN: 9780226643311
Google: bx2jDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2019-08-02T00:47:22+00:00

CHAPTER 6

“Cheaper than a Dime Sandwich”

Bernice Roy’s 1945 murder confirmed white New Orleanians’ worst fears of urban life, street violence, and African American residents. A year earlier, the twenty-three-year-old, unmarried white woman had left her Port Arthur, Texas, home, migrated to New Orleans, and secured lodging in a rooming house and work at an Armour meat-packing plant. After her shift on Friday, November 30, Roy ventured to the French Quarter with two friends. At the Hawaiian Club, she met twenty-three-year-old William F. Mears, a staff sergeant at the nearby Gulfport, Mississippi, Army Air Airfield. A native of Anderson, Indiana, Mears had taken a train to New Orleans that day with two army buddies, arriving at 7:20 p.m. Like many other soldiers, they headed directly to the French Quarter and imbibed at five different bars over the next four hours. In the Hawaiian Club, Mears and “Bernie” Roy danced, and then they visited the Cow Shed, another nightspot. Just before midnight, the young woman explained that she “had to be to work at 6:00 in the morning” and hence needed to return to her boardinghouse. The soldier volunteered “to walk part of the way home with her.” The couple strolled north on Tulane Avenue but soon noticed two African American men following them.1

Roy became anxious and insisted that they cross the street to avoid the strangers, confiding to her escort that “she was afraid of the negroes.” Suddenly, the two men caught up with Mears and Roy. The taller, leaner one, eighteen-year-old Wilbert Powell, jabbed a gun in the soldier’s back and barked, “If you want to keep living, keep walking.” Powell and his roommate, nineteen-year-old Joseph Besser, both day laborers, marched the couple to a vacant lot behind Dalier’s Drug Store, where Powell snatched Mears’s wallet, wedding ring, and wristwatch, then said with a scowl, “You m——f, if you want to live, stay back against the wall.” Standing a few feet in front of them, Besser pushed Roy to the ground, instructed the 95-pound woman to turn over onto her back, but then slugged her in the face. Roy screamed, attracting the attention of an older African American woman in a bright red coat walking a short distance away. The robbers ordered the woman to “keep on moving,” but she remained, her eyes fixed on them. Powell panicked and screeched to Besser, “Let’s go,” and the men fled.2 When they were approximately thirty feet from the vacant lot, Wilbert Powell wheeled around and fired one shot with a .38 caliber US Army revolver he had stolen a few days earlier.3 The bullet struck Roy between the eyebrows, piercing her ethmoid bone and penetrating the frontal lobe of her brain.4 She lost consciousness and at 4:20 p.m. on December 3, 1945, died from her injuries, without regaining consciousness.

Newspaper accounts of the murder included horrifying details, revealing that Besser had attempted to rape Roy before being frightened away by the woman in the red coat.5 William Mears’s initial statement to the police,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.