1923 Waco hanging of Roy Mitchell’s complex racial legacy

Even more dangerous, for a while, was to be a Black man in Waco with a gold tooth.

Waco and McLennan County authorities rounded up five men of that description after the murder of Harrell Bolton and rape of his date, Margaret Harris Hays, near Bellmead on May 25, 1922. They were kept under guard at the county jail while a bloodthirsty mob waited outside to lynch whoever seemed guiltiest.

One by one the men were marched from the county jail to the downtown home of Hays, who provided the description. One by one, she eliminated them as suspects.

One of the gold-toothed inmates was Roy Mitchell, 30, who had seen the inside of a jail cell a few times before.

On May 26, Mitchell was on his way to Hays’ home on Cleveland Avenue near the current location of In-N-Out Burger for his turn when shots rang out in the direction of the home. Soon word came that Hays had identified a Black service car driver named Jesse Thomas, 20, as the culprit, and the young woman’s father had killed him on sight.

Mitchell was suddenly free to go, and made himself scarce. Soon a mob grabbed Thomas’ body and publicly mutilated it near City Hall in a replay of the infamous Jesse Washington lynching a few years before.

Thomas was never an official suspect in any crime, and his innocence soon became clear, but no one would be held accountable for his killing or the public display that followed. Over the next seven months, the rapes and killings would continue before authorities finally zeroed in on Mitchell, who eventually was convicted in six separate murder trials.

Sunday marks exactly 100 years since Roy Mitchell stood on the gallows built outside the McLennan County Jail, looked out on the crowd of thousands and said his laconic parting words: “Goodbye, everybody.”

It was the last legal hanging in McLennan County. For decades it was reported to be the last legal hanging in Texas, taking place on the eve of a new law limiting execution to the electric chair in Huntsville.

Former Dallas Morning News journalist Thomas E. Turner debunked that claim in a column in the Tribune-Herald on Feb. 14, 1995, calling it a “left-handed brag” Waco could do without. He pointed to Nathan Lee, who was hanged in Brazoria County on Aug. 31, 1923.

Memory of the Mitchell saga has receded over the years, even as the community has come to terms with a heinous public lynching of a Black man that preceded it and cast its shadow over Mitchell’s case. In February, community leaders dedicated a state historical marker at City Hall marking the 43 documented cases of lynching in the county between 1860 and 1922, and detailing the 1916 lynching and public torture of Jesse Washington, a Robinson teenager.

In that case, a mob seized Washington from the courthouse moments after a jury rapidly convicted him of raping and killing his employer, then burned and hanged him outside City Hall in front of a crowd estimated at more than 10,000. The incident drew international attention to Waco and blighted its reputation as an up-and-coming city.

The Mitchell case serves as a sequel to the Washington debacle, demonstrating how Waco had changed in the intervening years, and how it had not.

On the one hand, some historians say it proved public authorities in McLennan County were finally serious about shutting down lynch mobs and allowing the justice system to take its course. Deputies and Texas Rangers stationed around the jail and courthouse ensured Mitchell’s protection between his arrest in February 1923 and his execution July 30.

On the other hand, Waco remained a Jim Crow city, a stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan. The circumstances of the murder investigations, including the dragnet approach that resulted in Thomas’ murder, raise questions about whether any Black suspect could get justice in Waco.

“Absolutely not, not here,” said Don Wright, president of the Central Texas African American Heritage Foundation. “There were very few places in the U.S. where that was the case. We were living in a time when there wasn’t any way out of any accusation, especially somebody white against a Black person.”

John Kamenec, a retired surveyor who serves on the McLennan County Historical Commission, found himself so engrossed in the Mitchell story that he spent two years researching it and has written an unpublished 427-page manuscript on it.

Kamenec loaned the Tribune-Herald a copy his manuscript, which is based on hundreds of news articles, genealogical records and court documents.

Kamenec said most of the published histories of the Mitchell case are incomplete or inaccurate, and he thought the case was important in understanding the justice system of the 1920s.

“No. 1, I was just wanting to have a true narrative out there,” he said. “No. 2, there’s a lot about police and people of that time. I just wanted to let people know what life was like back then.”

His manuscript weaves a complicated but intriguing tapestry of interconnected crimes between February 1922 and January 1923. Kamenec concludes Mitchell was likely guilty of those crimes and suggests he may have been involved in other unsolved murders. Kamenec said he does not know what motivated Mitchell, but a comment he made to his defense attorney in an early case suggested a motive: He said Black men would stop violating white women only after white men stopped violating Black women.

Based on signed confessions and other evidence, Mitchell was indicted in eight murders, four rapes, two assaults with intent to murder and one assault with intent to rape. Six murder cases went to trial and ended in guilty verdicts.

Mitchell’s yearlong reign of terror not only took its toll on the victims and their families but also on scapegoated suspects and on race relations throughout the community.

Jesse Thomas was among the collateral victims. A service car driver who did odd jobs around town, he was never an official suspect in the killing of Harrell Bolton and rape of Margaret Harris Hays and perhaps never understood why he was summarily executed on May 26, 1923.

By then, a massive manhunt was underway across the county with an estimated 2,000 men, and mobs had formed around the county jail.

Bolton had taken Hays, a neighbor, out driving in the country the night before on a date in his Ford coupe. She was 26 and recently divorced, living with her father, Sam Harris.

Around 9 p.m., they were six miles northeast of Waco on the Old Corsicana Road when a Black man emerged from the brush with a pistol, according to newspaper accounts from the time. The man shot Bolton three times, killing him, then took his watch and chain and some money.

The gunman then raped Hays and took her walking through the countryside in the dark, telling her he planned to kill her. He then escaped on a freight train after 11 p.m., according to news accounts.

In a May 27 Waco News-Tribune article, Hays described the assailant as “well-educated.”

“He asked me the name of the man he shot and where he worked,” she was quoted as saying. “He then added that he was certainly sorry he had committed the crimes and made this expression several times during our journey through the woods.”

By the next afternoon, volunteers were sweeping the countryside looking for the killer. County authorities stood outside the jail at Sixth Street and Columbus Avenue, warning the mob to let justice take its course. They asked the Texas Rangers to drive up from Austin to help defuse the situation.

Just a few blocks away, a telegraph operator named Emmitt McClure, who had been deputized in the search for the killer, was driving around with his wife, looking for a suspect.

Hays had described her assailant as a light-colored Black man with a gold tooth. At the city square, the McClures saw Thomas sitting on the running board of a car.

McClure lured him to the home of Sam Harris and Margaret Hays, saying he wanted to show Thomas a lawn that needed to be mowed. At the porch of the Harris home, Thomas took off his cap as McClure announced to Harris that he had a suspect.

Thomas was led into the bedroom of of Margaret Hays, who screamed, and by some accounts exclaimed, “That’s him, Papa.” Harris reached for a pistol and shot Thomas several times. Thomas fell outside the back door and died in a pool of blood.

His body was taken to a funeral home on Franklin Avenue, where it sat in a hearse. When the jailhouse mob heard about the shooting, it rushed to the funeral home and seized the body. The rioters tied the body to a truck, dragged it to City Hall, near where Jesse Washington had been lynched. A crowd now estimated at 6,000 to 7,000 watched as rioters gathered wood and burned the body while taking souvenirs.

Texas Ranger Frank Hamer and four other Rangers arrived soon after the burning with a Thompson submachine gun to keep the peace around the jailhouse.

Harris would surrender the next day to Constable Leslie Stegall, who would soon be elected sheriff, but no charges were filed.

Stegall continued to believe another gold-toothed inmate, named Sank Johnson, was the true culprit. In the next few days, he discovered the bullets found in Bolton’s body matched those used in a nonfatal attack on a couple in Cameron Park on May 8.

Stegall took Sank Johnson before the couple, William Cottrell and Marjorie Sheffield, who denied he was the attacker. Mitchell would later be indicted in the attack.

Sank Johnson was quietly released and lost no time pulling his gold tooth, Kamenec wrote.

William Carrigan, a Rowan University history professor and Waco-area native, wrote about Mitchell in his 2004 book, “The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836-1916.”

Based on oral history and personal interviews with Black residents, Carrigan wrote that the Thomas killing and public mutilation was “insufferable” to the Black community, “a wound that could not be healed.”

Carrigan wrote that unlike Jesse Washington, Jesse Thomas was well-known and liked in the Waco community.

“His murder left Black Wacoans feeling that their community itself had been personally attacked,” Carrigan wrote.

Local pastors and American Legion officials condemned the mob violence, but no one was prosecuted.

Soon enough, the killings continued, with a definite pattern emerging.

On the evening of Nov. 20, 1922, Grady Skipworth, 19, and Naomi Boucher, 21, drove up to Lovers Leap in Cameron Park in a Ford coupe. Newspaper accounts say a Black man with a shotgun stepped out from behind a pavilion and forced them out of the car.

He shot Skipworth, seized his watch, and threw him off the cliff. He ordered Boucher into the car and drove her to Circle Point, where he raped her. When it became clear the attacker’s shotgun was jammed, Boucher either jumped or was thrown over the cliff, according to various accounts. She survived and walked to a house in North Waco for help.

The Texas Rangers, Waco police and McLennan County Sheriff’s Department each rounded up suspects, but none seemed promising. Rangers and guardsmen joined city and county officers in guarding the jail and prohibited loitering on the square.

Authorities received an anonymous note that led to the arrest of a Black man, Ivory Clay, who soon became the chief suspect. Boucher identified Clay as the killer, and her brother allegedly tried to organize a lynch mob to kill him.

On Jan. 12, the case took a strange turn. Texas Ranger Rudolph Daniel Shumate became convinced while talking to Skipworth’s father that the young man’s murder was a setup by Boucher’s brothers in revenge for her perceived mistreatment.

He arrested Boucher, still frail and on crutches, along with her two brothers, and spirited them to Dallas. Judge James Alexander of Waco’s 19th State District Court, ordered the arrest of Shumate for illegal confinement and ordered all parties back to Waco. Shumate held out and shuffled the trio around various jails to elude capture before returning with them Jan. 16 to Waco, where they were released.

A habeas corpus hearing was scheduled for Clay on Jan. 24.

On Jan. 20, with Clay still in jail, another couple was attacked and killed. Edwin Holt, 42, and a married woman named Ethel Denecamp, 21, went missing while on a drive on Jan. 19. Their bodies were found side by side off Springfield Road, shot dead. Holt’s body had been dragged with a rope.

Waco Police Chief Lee Jenkins arrested two white men, suspecting illegal liquor was involved.

The Waco chapter of the Ku Klux Klan offered rewards for the Skipworth and Holt-Denecamp murders. The Klan had just held a massive parade down Austin Avenue on Jan. 18 and was on the rise in local and state politics, though it claimed to be opposed to mob violence.

Former Sheriff Bob Buchanan, who had opposed a Klan march in October 1921 in Lorena, was ousted by voters and replaced with Stegall, who took office in January.

But the Skipworth case seemed to be on thin ice. On Jan. 25, Judge Richard Munroe of Waco’s 54th State District Court conducted a hearing for Clay. Munroe, who had overseen the Washington trial several years earlier, concluded the evidence against Clay was insufficient.

Clay walked free and quickly boarded a train for Chicago, never to return, Kamenec wrote in his manuscript.

On Feb. 1, charges were dismissed against the Bouchers, just as new evidence emerged that appeared to tie several cases together.

There had been another attack on a couple on Jan. 9, this time on a road near Rosemound Cemetery. The couple had escaped after a struggle, but the assailant, described again as Black, had left his cap in the car.

Stegall’s team was able to find witnesses to identify the cap as belonging to Roy Mitchell.

On Jan. 29, a deputy arrested Mitchell at Fourth Street and Austin Avenue on the pretense that he was wanted for his part in an illegal dice game. Stegall and his men proceeded to Mitchell’s home at 608 Jefferson Ave. and reportedly found a trove of evidence in several murders.

Stuffed in a chimney flue was a rope later determined to match that used to drag Holt, along with a pistol identified as Holt’s. A later search of the home would reportedly uncover a watch chain belonging to Skipworth as well as an overcoat thought to belong to William Driskell, a cotton trader who had been murdered at his Barnard Street home in May 1922.

At the farm where Holt and Denecamp’s bodies were found, a relative of Mitchell was found with a shotgun that belonged to Driskell. Soon, a half-brother of Mitchell’s would surrender a watch that belonged to Skipworth, saying he won it in a bet with Mitchell. Stegall’s team would track down another man in Detroit who had received a watch belonging to Bolton.

Stegall took Mitchell to a jail in Hillsboro to keep him away from the mob, and he and County Attorney C.S. Farmer attempted to interrogate him for days, accusing him of the murders of Driskell, Bolton, Holt and Denecamp.

On Feb. 9, a few days after Mitchell’s return to the McLennan County Jail, Stegall announced a detailed confession, signed and corrected by Mitchell, who was highly literate and known for writing poetry in his cell.

Mitchell would later repudiate the confession, saying he made it under duress and false promises of leniency. At each of the six trials, he insisted he had not killed anyone.

Yet it is notable that Mitchell confessed to a triple murder that Stegall and other county officials had already declared solved.

In that case, authorities arrested two young Black men near the small community of Concord near present-day Texas State Technical College. They were accused of robbing the home and store of William and Lula Barker at night, using an ax and a gun to kill them and a visiting boy, Homer Turk, 13.

A young attorney, John Sheehy, vigorously defended the suspects, Benny Young and Cooper Johnson. In a 1976 memoir, Sheehy recalls working hard on the case, producing witnesses who said they were with the men the night of the shooting, and showing that the revolver found on Young was rusty and incapable of being fired.

Still, prosecutor Frank Tirey persuaded the jury to find the men guilty, with Young given a life sentence and Johnson sentenced to hang. By the time Mitchell was found guilty in the case, Johnson had died on a county poor farm, leaving Sheehy to successfully seek a pardon for Young from Gov. Pat Neff.

Sheehy, who also defended Ivory Clay, declined to defend Roy Mitchell after the confession.

Judge Munroe appointed a seasoned team of defense attorneys to represent him in the six trials in March 1923 and on appeals before his hanging on July 30.

In her 2005 book, “The First Waco Horror: The Lynching of Jesse Washington and the Rise of NAACP,” author Patricia Bernstein suggests the Mitchell trials were rushed but concludes local officials were serious about preventing mob violence.

Sheriff Stegall and Police Chief Jenkins “had every detail of security under control” and publicly warned that officers would shoot to kill anyone who tried to seize Mitchell, Bernstein wrote. They brought in a small army of law enforcement officers as well as Frank Hamer and other Texas Rangers during the trial.

In an interview this week, Carrigan, the Rowan University historian, said the Mitchell affair represented a mixed legacy for law enforcement.

“From a historian’s perspective, I believe he was probably guilty,” Carrigan said. “From a legal perspective, all those kinds of things would get thrown out today. It doesn’t meet with modern legal standards and maybe didn’t meet with legal standards then. It does muddy the water. It’s hard to argue with people who want to question what happened.”

He said local leaders were keen on protecting Waco from the bad publicity it suffered during the Washington affair, and that might have pushed them to do the right thing.

“The Waco elite decided, ‘We can’t have this anymore,’ and decided there would be consequences if it was allowed to happen,” he said.

“They wanted no lynchings in Waco to be splashed in the papers in Paris, London and New York. There’s no contradiction there with the racist rounding up of Black people on slim evidence.”

Yet Carrigan said he believes the case represents an incremental step in a Texas city “heading more toward due process” for all.

Don Wright, the Waco Black history leader, said the Mitchell case came up when he and other community leaders were discussing how to commemorate the lynching of Jesse Washington.

“What came up was that maybe Mitchell really did commit some murders,” he said. “It was said he confessed to it, but was the confession under duress? Those clouds are hanging over it. From the times when it happened, it’s hard to know what happened. We all have our doubts.”