Roy Exum
Johnnie Daniel Beecher, a 75-year-old black man who has been in prison for nearly two-thirds of his life, is up for parole in Montgomery, Ala., tomorrow. It is the seventh time he’s come before the board and, for what it matters, things don’t look good.
For most people the sands of time have covered up most of the memories of the rape and murder that occurred in 1964 on Alabama’s Sand Mountain near the tiny town of Stevenson. That was when Martha Jane Chisenhall, a 21-year old white bride of seven months who had just learned she was pregnant, was brutally murdered one morning after her husband had left for work.
Right before then, Johnnie Beecher, who was doing a 10-year stretch for a previous rape, had “turned rabbit” while working on a chain gang nearby. The belief was that while he was on the loose he entered the house through an open window and committed the heinous act. The body was found near some uprooted trees.
Well, the posse that was gathered would leave a racial scar on Sand Mountain that would last for years. When I was a kid I remember a huge sign that forbade blacks on the mountain after dark because, it was said, there was such a curse on a chain-ganger named Johnnie Daniel Beecher.
The posse had the whole mountain – quite literally - up in arms and soon caught up with the escaped convict as he ran across a field just across the Tennessee state line. Naturally, he wouldn’t stop so one of the boys shot him in the leg, bringing him down.
Then, according to a federal appeals court document that was brought into play about eight years later, “He fell, and the local chief of police pressed a loaded gun to his face while another officer pointed a rifle against the side of his head. The police chief asked him whether he had raped and killed a white woman.
“When he said that he had not, the chief called him a liar and said, ‘If you don’t tell me the truth I am going to kill you.’ The other officer then fired his rifle next to the petitioner’s ear, and the petitioner immediately confessed.’”
That appeals document helped reverse Beecher’s death sentence and there is substantial proof the justice system was flawed at the time, which is why three convictions and another death sentence have now been overturned, but there is also cause to believe the gist of the story may well be true.
There are those who say the confession Beecher signed, while in a prison hospital right after his injured leg was amputated for gangrene, was influenced by morphine while others point to the fact he was already in jail for rape when the Chisenhall woman was abducted and killed, and the similarities were overwhelming.
There are still others who claim when he admitted guilt at a later hearing Johnnie Beecher was not influenced by any drugs. The reverse claim is that had he continued to deny the charges, he would have gotten the electric chair without such plea bargaining.
Members of the Chisenhall family are expected to be at tomorrow’s parole hearing, and one sister, Katherine Humphrey Hurd, has told the Associated Press she still has nightmares over the tragedy.
Mrs. Hurd, now 68, lives in Jacksonville and said while she has written a letter to the parole board, she and other family members will be in Montgomery tomorrow to attend the hearing. “It is so unfair to think he could get out on the streets and have a life.”
Charlie Rhodes, the current district
attorney in Jackson County, agrees. He told the Associated Press, “From my perspective as a prosecutor and a citizen, there are certain crimes so horrendous and heinous that a life sentence ought to mean just that.”
Once again, things don’t look good tomorrow for Sand Mountain escapee Johnnie Beecher, age 75.
royexum@aol.com