Crime Stories of the Century
The awful acts of the past 100 years forced America to look at itself in the mirror
THE 1950S
The lynching of Emmett Till
In the hot summer of 1955, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy from Chicago, went to visit relatives near the tiny town of Money, Miss. Before he left Chicago, his mother kissed him goodbye and warned him to be careful. The South wasn't Chicago, she said. On the evening of August 24, friends urged him to talk to a white woman in a small grocery store. Carolyn Bryant said the boy grabbed her hand and said, "How about a date, baby?" and gave her a wolf whistle. Others said he sometimes whistled to cope with a speech defect.
Roy Bryant considered it an affront to his wife. A few nights later, he and his half brother, J. W. Milam, kidnapped Till from his relatives' sharecropper home. The two men savagely beat him, shot him behind his ear, and then threw him in the Tallahatchie River. The boy's body was found several days later with his feet and legs sticking out of the water and a 150-pound cotton gin fan tied around his neck with a piece of barbed wire. A Mississippi sheriff said it appeared that Till's head had been struck with an ax because "it went too deep to be anything else." The two men were charged with the slaying.
These were bitter times in the South. There were threats, bombings, and killings to pressure blacks to move north. But it was also a time of important social change. In 1954, the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education, outlawing segregation in public schools. In December 1955, Rosa Parks, a black seamstress, was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Ala., prompting the town's black leaders, including a young preacher named Martin Luther King Jr., to organize a bus boycott.
"The Till case galvanized the country," says Georgia Rep. John Lewis, a civil rights pioneer beaten by state troopers in Selma, Ala., during a 1965 march. "A lot of us young black students in the South later on, we weren't sitting in just for ourselves--we were sitting in for Emmett Till. We went on Freedom Rides for Emmett Till."
After deliberating for only one hour and seven minutes, the all-white, all-male jury acquitted Bryant and Milam, stunning the rest of the world. After their acquittal, the pair sold their story to Look magazine for $4,000. Milam recalled saying: "Chicago boy, I'm tired of 'em sending your kind down here to stir up trouble. Goddamn you, I'm going to make an example of you."
On Chicago's South Side, some 1,700 people filled the church where Till's body was placed on view. Another 15,000 to 50,000 reportedly had filed past his coffin the night before at a funeral home. His mother had overruled undertakers and insisted on an open casket so others could "see what they did to my boy."
THE 1960S
Charles Manson, psycho killer
A decade that began by promising to carry on the calm prosperity of the 1950s instead became a caldron of violence and turmoil. The culture was shattered by gunfire with the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. At the same time, body bags from Vietnam were piling up from a war that was tearing the nation apart. As deadly race riots charred cities across the country and antiwar protests became increasingly violent, people began to worry that America was spinning out of control. Then came a crime that seemed to confirm those fears by bringing together so many of the social pathologies of the moment. In her book about the era, The White Album, Joan Didion wrote, "Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on Aug. 9, 1969 . . . and in a sense that is true." That was the day a housekeeper reported for work at film director Roman Polanski's home in the Hollywood hills and found five bodies, slashed and bloodied. Slain were Polanski's young wife, actress Sharon Tate, 8 1/2 months pregnant; her friends, Abigail Folger, the heiress of the Folger coffee fortune, and her playboy boyfriend, Voytek Frykowski; Jay Sebring, a well-known hairstylist who lived in Hollywood's fast lane; and Steve Parent, a young man in the wrong place at the wrong time. They had been beaten and stabbed dozens of times. The word "PIG" was scrawled in blood on the front door. The next night, Leno LaBianca, the owner of a grocery chain, and his wife, Rosemary, were found beaten and stabbed in their home east of Beverly Hills. Again, mysterious words in blood: "DEATH TO PIGS RISE" and, misspelled, "HEALTER SKELTER."
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