Crimes in Madison Parish

(Through 1975)
From August 14, 1975 Centennial Edition Madison Journal

 

Though it has not often been brought out, the criminal element has a significant place in the history of Madison Parish. One should hasten to add that, except during reconstruction, Madison has not been a lawless parish to any noticeable extent. Yet not long ago Madison was a Frontier land, with a background of frontier violence. We can see elements of that background exerting an influence on us even today.

 

Two of Madison's earliest outlaws have had their names immortalized on the parish's bayous. Bayou Macon was probably named after a river pirate, Samuel Mason, who headed a gang of cut-throats. Mason was originally from Kentucky, but was driven out of the state around 1790. He made his home in the river parishes of northeast Louisiana, where he and his gang preyed on river traffic and isolated planters.

 

Mason was particularly hated by the frontiersman who, after descending the river in keelboats, returned to their homes via the Natchez Trace—one of Mason's "stomping grounds." The gang committed so many crimes along the Natchez Trace that a reward of $2,000 was offered for Mason's capture, dead or alive.

 

Two newly-joined members of Mason's gang resolved to collect the reward. They treacherously beheaded him one night in 1803 as he sat by a campfire near Lake Concordia. The two presented Mason's head to officials at Natchez; before they could collect their reward, however, they were identified as former members of the gang, and were themselves decapitated. All three heads were placed on poles to adorn the Natchez Trace.

 

Mason had used Macon Ridge as his base of operations, since it was always above high water. As he controlled that whole area, early settlers began calling the stream Mason's River. The name was later changed to Bayou Macon. We do not know the reason for the change in spelling, but there is evidence that "Macon" continued to be pronounced "Mason" for many years afterward.

 

Just east of Bayou Macon, in the northwest corner of Madison Parish, flows Joe's Bayou, which is also said to have been named after an early bandit. Robber Joe, described by legend as a tall, long-haired, swarthy villain, hid in the cane brakes with his following of cut-throats. They preyed on the stream of im­migrants journeying west from their worn-out lands in the southeastern states in the early 1800's...

 

Robber Joe was probably an archetype of many of the thieves and murders who roamed the area in those years. The parish had a sheriff from its inception, yet he did not have the resources to investigate remote murders out in the wild country of Madison Parish. It was all too easy for someone to kill another in secret out in the swamp and never be caught.

 

Fortunately, Madison residents were not often subjected to these types of incidents. The first secret murder in the parish (so claimed the Richmond Compiler) was the killing of John W. Sims, a prominent planter. Sims left his home on Alligator Bayou on Dec. 6, 1842 for New Carthage. He was found a week later in a thick cane brake less than a mile from his house. He had been shot in the back. Cried Downes, Compiler editor, in the Dec. 20 issue: "Fellow citizens, there is disgrace entailed on us; our garments are dyed, and our hands are clotted with mur­derous bloodflow shall we cleanse them? In the blood of the assassin!—perfidious wretch! Guilt is on his face deceit in his heart, hypocrisy and lies on his lips! Pursue the murderer till detection condemnation and execution!—Then, and then only, will our bloody garments be made white—our gory hands be made clean!"

 

The reason for Downes' agitation was not that murders were so rare, but that the man murdered was a prominent citizen respected and loved by all. He was killed while traveling on a public road not far from civilization. The fact that his money was not taken indicated that the murderer had a grudge against Sims. In that case, he could very well be living in the community—perhaps a permanent resident whom everyone knew.

 

These circumstances in­flamed parish citizens, but they could do little. They called for a coroner, who never showed up. They held a formal inquest themselves, published their verdict and wisely let the matter drop. The only other thing they could do without the aid of officers would be to start taking in people on suspicion, which could very easily have led to the lynching of innocent persons.

 

Not to say that the people of Madison Parish didn't turn to "Judge Lynch" whenever they found him convenient. Lyn­ching was generally abhorred by the more "gentile" members of society, but its occasional necessity was universally acknowledged. Madisonians prided them­selves on the fact that, when their families or properties were threatened by abolitionists or other villains, they never hesitated to string the culprits up on the nearest limb.

 

But by far the majority of the parish violence was out in the open in the middle of town, where citizens met to settle their disagreements with duels. The usual causes of these conflicts were politics, horse racing or a woman.

 

SHERIFFS OF MADISON PARISH THROUGH 1975

 

RACIAL VIOLENCE

 

The Civil War and Federal occupation of Madison Parish ally disrupted the society, resulting in widespread violence which did not subside until every Negro had been driven from the ballot. It is debatable whether the things that were done during this period could properly be called crimes, or were simply "political activities of a violent nature." The Negroes and northern carpetbaggers committed the crime of corrupt and unjust govern­ment, and Madisonians responded with the only means at their disposal—the Ku Klux Klan.

 

From notes and threats, the Klan advanced to the murder of carpetbaggers and the lynching of Negro of­ficeholders. Some of the less easily frightened blacks responded with threats to burn down large landowners' houses and "kill all poor Democrats." Several times mass bloodshed was narrowly averted.

 

A man named Ross passed through Madison on his way to Texas on Dec. 10, 1870. With him were some 30 Negro laborers One of Madison's black officials a constable named Jesse Crosby and another Negro named Charlie King stopped the group at the Tallulah railroad depot. With other armed blacks they forced the laborers to go with them. The Republican judge refused to issue a warrant for the arrest of Crosby and King.

 

A small group of Klan members led by Samuel Sparrow armed themselves to try to arrest the two. The Negroes, who had sent word that they planned to kill Sparrow's whole party, formed a company of more than 100 armed blacks to meet the group. Sparrow's band of 10 whites advanced    to Rothschild's store, about a mile and a half from Tallulah, where they had heard Crosby and King were hiding.

 

Sparrow and his men soon realized what they were up against, and withdrew before blood was shed. A month later they gathered a larger group of whites together at Tallulah, expecting a full scale battle, but the Negroes left.

 

A similar but more tragic incident occurred in Tensas Parish some time later. Robert Snyder raised an armed force of whites in Madison; they succeeded in dispersing a Negro gang in Tensas and hanging the leader.

 

As whites began to regain political power, they only increased their violent ac­tivities. The violence didn't subside until whites were once again in complete control of the government. Then for many years afterward they did not tolerate even the hint of a black rebellion.

 

There was never any wholesale brutality toward blacks. But if the cir­cumstances of a murder or disruption seemed to suggest the work of an organized group of blacks, white citizens usually responded with the hanging of all suspected participants. Being in such a minority, as they were, whites felt that swift action in any emergency was the safety course.

 

Madison Coordinator’s Note: It is not clear why the author left out the 1899 lynching of five Italians in Tallulah. This was by far the worst crime ever committed in Madison Parish. RPS June 2014.

 

As the Madison Journal noted as late as Dec. 19, 1914, "the fellow who gets hot in the collar about a lynching is generally a non-resident." Of course, as always happens when mob action takes the place of law enforcement, many of the people who wound up "pulling hemp" from the gallery of the old Tallulah court house or from the "hanging tree" in front of the jail had done nothing to deserve their fate.

 

These incidents grew less frequent as attitudes became more civilized and people increasingly began to respect the integrity and capability of law enforcement officials. In 1904, District Attorney Jeff Snyder and Sheriff Andrew Sevier entered their offices to begin long, distinguished careers, during which Madison was transformed from a lawless parish still bearing scars of reconstruction to a refined law-abiding community.

 

  

                                                                     District Attorney Jefferson B. Snyder                        Sheriff Andrew Jackson Sevier

One type of crime which Sheriff Sevier may have had to contend with was unique to the river parishes of Louisiana. We do not know that it ever happened in Madison, but Mrs. Jeanette Coltharp, a native of the parish, described it through the words of a character in her novel, Burrill Coleman, Colored;

 

"Just s'posin somebody had a weak levee in front of their house, fifteen or twenty miles above here, and they'd take a notion to come down here and make a little hole in our levee to let the water spread in here, and ease up the strain up their way, don't you reckon it would be a help to him? Or, s'posin somebody had two or three hundred fine cypress logs back there in the swamp that they'd like to float down to New Orleans, don't you reckon it would be money in their pocket if the levee would break somewhere close about, so that water would come and lift they raft and help 'em get it out into the river? (pp. 18­-19.)

 

As we said, there is no record of this ever happening in Madison Parish, but it did happen in other parishes, resulting in widespread destruction to the whole countryside. It was just one of the dangers that law en­forcement officials had to guard against.

 

With the coming of prohibition, parish officials had a breed of bootleggers from both ends of the social spectrum to contend with. The more undesirable types hid out on DeSoto Island opposite Vicksburg.

 

DeSoto had originally been an extension of Delta Point until the Mississippi River cut it off in 1876. Still a part of Madison though on the op­posite side of the river, DeSoto Island's "willow wilderness" was a favorite retreat of criminals and a bane to parish law officers.

 

Certainly a great number of respected parish citizens participated in the legal deception of buying and selling liquor during prohibition, In January, 1931 a booze runner was unfortunate enough to wreck his car near Lake Providence. To avoid being arrested, he abandoned his car and cargo to local citizens and fled the scene.

 

Passersby quickly took what was in the car and combed the area for any bottles which might have been thrown clear of the wreck. By the time officers arrived, there was not a bottle or a drop to be found.

 

Editor Rountree of the Madison Journal noted this incident in a Jan. 16, 1931 editorial. He predicted the prohibition law would be a failure for some time to come. "We have come to the con­clusion that there will always be plenty of liquor to be had. As long as such a great number buy and drink liquor, it is going to be sold, no matter what the penalty might be."

 

MURDERS AND OTHER MAYHEM

 

Of course, Madison had its share of murders, robberies and other crimes which seemed to adorn the depression and prohibition era. Jeff Snyder told Judge Alwine Smith, then a young attorney, the story of one which occurred during the construction of the old Vicksburg bridge.

 

A foreman on the Mississippi side was watching the workmen through a telescope when he happened to see two women chasing a man on the sandbar near Delta. One of them shot the man, then the two put the body in a small boat and headed downstream. The foreman phoned Sheriff Sevier, who began pursuing the women in a motorboat.

 

Sevier found the women in the process of burying the man and arrested them. They had argued over his affections and decided to settle the matter by killing the man. The women pled guilty to man­slaughter and served time in prison.

 

In another case, Snyder secured a conviction by presenting a blind Negro as "eye witness" to a murder. The man had a reputation for never forgetting a voice. He was lying on a levee one day taking in the sun, when he heard a horse coming toward him along the road.

 

The old black man bade the horseman good day, to which the rider replied "good evening folks." He rode on the few remaining yards to the store operated by the man who was murdered. The rider was later picked up as a suspect to the murder.

 

D. A. Snyder got the judge to accept the blind man as a witness. The Negro was told that he would hear several people speak and to try to identify the man who had ridden by on the horse, whose tracks had been found leading to the store and hurriedly leading away. After several people had spoken, the suspect was made to speak. The old black held up his hand and said, "yes, boss, dat's him, dat's him."

 

Several Tallulah establish­ments were robbed during the early 1930's by desperate men unable to find work. One of the most daring escapades was the hold-up of the Madison National Bank on Feb. 9, 1932. The now-defunct bank was housed in what is now City Hall.

 

The late E.A. Buckner, the cashier, was alone in the bank during lunch hour working on the hooks. A few minutes after noon, two men entered the bank and stuck pistols in Buckner's face. They ordered him into the vault and locked the grill iron door, but were unable to close the outer door.

 

The men then visited the teller's cage and took $6,000 in currency and some American Express traveler's checks. When Buckner heard them leave, he opened the grill door of the vault with an extra key he had in his pocket. He saw that the bandits had not taken a bag of gold or silver money and concluded that they were traveling on foot.

 

Buckner grabbed a gun and went to the door. He saw three men walking down the street whom he believed were the thieves, but he hesitated to shoot, fearing he might be mistaken. Instead, he sounded a general alarm. Within minutes, the Vicksburg radio station was announcing the hold-up.

 

Posses from Newellton, St. Joseph, Waterproof, Delhi, Lake Providence, Vicksburg and of course Tallulah searched the countryside for the bandits. Cecil Smith of Tallulah took off in his air­plane in an effort to locate the men. Three hours after the robbery, the three bandits were arrested three miles north of Tallulah by T.H. Montgomery, town night marshal, and Sam Plant.

 

The bank robbers were found to be Jack Doud, age 32, Benny Caphone, age 34, and John Kolich, age 19, all from Chicago. Much was made of the similarity between "Caphone" and "Capone," in the belief that these were major Chicago gangsters.

 

They were probably just unemployed men who had first come to Tallulah looking for work. At a special session of the district court two days after the hold-up, the robbers were sentenced to 14 years in the penitentiary at Baton Rouge.

 

INVESTIGATIVE EXPERTISE

 

Sheriff Sevier died in 1941 and his wife served the rest of his term. C. E. Hester, Madison Parish County Agent, was approached by friends in 1943 and urged to run for the office of sheriff. Hester was surprised, as he had no legal or law enforcement ex­perience and had never given any thought to running for an elective office.

 

Sheriff C. E. Hester (Sheriff’s Office)

 

Hester feels that he was urged to run partly in op­position to the "old reign" of D. A. Snyder and the Seviers. He accepted the draft because he figured that working for local government would give him more financial security than remaining as county agent.

 

Upon winning the first primary, Hester entered the sheriff's office as a deputy to familiarize himself with the department before he had to take it over. He was surprised at the complete lack of records of any kind. "There was bond money in the safe that we didn't know who it belonged to. We finally worked it out—all but $100 which we gave to the parish."

 

Hester resolved to turn the Sheriff's office into a modern law enforcement department. He set up an identification bureau with full fingerprint equipment and photography facilities. Files on finger­prints, names and aliases, first offenders, traffic violations, and firearms registrations were established and maintained.

Hester developed a com­munications system, with a radio station and teletypewriter, which was the hub of communications ser­ving Richland, East and West Carroll and Tensas Parishes, and much of the traffic bet­ween State Police Troop F at Monroe and the Mississippi authorities at Vicksburg and Warren County.

 

Though entirely new to the business of enforcing the law, Sheriff Hester soon realized that the key to solving difficult cases lay in persistence and organization. As we have seen, he quickly got the "organization" in setting up a matchless system of files. His own personal qualities of persistence and brilliant in­vestigation were soon revealed in a case that received wide publicity.

 

Only a year after he took office as sheriff, Hester received a call from men working on the Vicksburg Bridge. Hester and his deputies went out there and found the body of a fat man: a letter in his pocket identified him as William Liddell, manager of the Adams County (Natchez) Poor Farm.

 

The coroner's report in­dicated that the man had been beaten and thrown off the bridge at its highest point before it reached the river— a height of some 55 feet. He had died sometime about two or three o'clock that morning. Papers on his person indicated he had been driving a 1940 Ford truck.

 

Hester spoke with the bridge tender who had been on duty at the time Liddell might have been on the bridge. The man remembered the truck and its two occupants. One of them had said they were short on money and offered a leather jacket in lieu of toll fare. The jacket turned out to be Liddell's. Hester wired a
description of the truck and the driver to the Louisiana and Mississippi State Police, the Vicksburg Police Department and the F. B. I. agents discovered a man who had hitch-hiked a ride from Jackson to Meridian with the two men the day after the murder. The hitch-hiker remembered them discussing army life and wearing regulation army issue shoes. They also mentioned Bir­mingham Ala. and Knoxville, Tenn.

 

From this account Hester concluded that the murderers were soldiers AWOL from one of the camps near Alexandria.

 

The sheriff packed his bag and left for for Alexandria. At Camp Livingston, he asked the Provost Marshall for a list of all AWOL men for a couple of days prior to the murder. Remembering the mention of Alabama and Tennessee in the killer's conversation, Hester asked especially to see those whose home addresses were in the two states.

 

The list included the names of three men from Alabama and none from Tennessee. One man, Doris Waldrep of Selma, Ala., perfectly fitted the description of one of the murderers. Waldrep's hut mates agreed that he had a bad reputation. Hester was almost sure that Waldrep was one of the men seen in the truck, but he couldn’t figure out who his partner could be.

 

After touring the grounds, Hester and the Provost Marshall came back to eat dinner. "While we were eating dinner, the captain of the command came storming in and said, 'Where in the hell is John Nicely?' The Provost Marshall asked, 'Why?' The captain replied, 'He's just been spotted in the dead man's truck in Knoxville, Tenn.' But John Nicely didn't show up on the AWOL list.

 

"They began to check and they found out that Nicely had been under arrest and was in the stockade, supposedly. He had escaped from the stockade and they didn't even know it"

 

The next day, F.B.I. agents and posses of local men were sent in to search the area. One of the agents was Don Lash of Olympic track fame. Lash was holding the leashes of the bloodhounds and trying to keep up with them in their mad rush. When he came up on the two men, Lash found that they had already been caught. An old farmer had heard about the chase and captured the men before the agents did. Lash found him pointing a big shotgun at the two cowering men sitting on a log.

 

The two men were returned to Madison Parish and placed on trial Jan. 31 for the murder of William Liddell. This trial resulted in a mistrial—one man held up the guilty verdict. Later Hester heard that the jury member had said that he'd "never vote to convict anybody in that courthouse as long as Jeff Snyder was District Attorney." It was another case of antagonism between the "laymen" and the "old reign."

 

Doris Waldrep and John Nicely (Sheriff’s Office)

 

Nicely and Waldrep finally pled guilty to manslaughter and were sentenced by Judge Frank Voelker to serve 21 years in the state prison at Angola.

 

The Mississippi River Bridge murder, as the Waldrop and Nicely case come to be called, generated a great deal of publicity for Sheriff Hester and his office. The Louisiana Peace Officer magazine published the story of the case in two in­stallments.

 

The Madison Parish Sheriff's Department soon became involved in yet another murder investigation which attracted national attention.

 

The investigation of the Mississippi painter's murder, or the Dowdy case, which began on Oct. 23, 1948, established the reputation of the Madison Parish Sheriff's Department for its ability to solve the perfect crime. The Dowdy case is still used as a textbook example of building an air—tight prosecution solely on the basis of cir­cumstantial evidence.

 

It began at 11:30 Friday night, Oct. 22, 1948, when an explosion at Talla Bena rocked houses and shattered windows for 10 miles around. Sheriff Hester went im­mediately to the site of the explosion, which had been a cabin on the Sun Oil Company property occupied by George Dowdy and his 23-year-old son J. D.

There was nothing left of the cabin except scattered clumps of debris. Hester and Deputy R. R. Holt began examining the site, and soon found two human legs lying about eight or nine feet apart within the confines of what was originally the bedroom The legs, intact from the knees down but badly mangled above the knees, seemed from their shriveled and deformed condition to be those of the old man, George Dowdy.

 

This theory was disproved when George Dowdy was found playing poker at Schrader's Barber Shop in Tallulah. Police Officer Marvin Ingram told the old

man that his house had been blown up and a pair of legs found, possibly belonging to his son. He did not seem especially disturbed then or later when he positively identified the legs as being J. D.'s.

 

James Young, undertaker at Young's Funeral Home in Tallulah, asked Dowdy to look at some caskets and select the one that he wanted J. D.'s remains buried in. "It doesn't make any difference to me," said the 65-year-old Dowdy. "Just bury him in any old thing."

 

George Dowdy told Sheriff Hester that he had last seen his son at 8:30 when J. D. had left Schrader's Barber Shop to go home and fix some dynamite to kill fish with.  Hester's first impression of the incident was that J. D. Dowdy had been sitting on his cot preparing dynamite charges when one ac­cidentally exploded and killed him.

 

Hester's attention was drawn to the possibility of another death when he learned that a man by the name of Walter N. Dorman had been seen with Dowdy the night of the blast and was still missing. Dorman had told his landlady at the Danbert Hotel that he was going out to spend the night with J. D. Dowdy. Clarence Brown, a taxi-driver, reported that he had taken two young men to Stockland road near the Dowdy home about 9:30 that night. One of them appeared to be drunk, he said.

 

Dorman's relatives, hearing that he was missing, came to Tallulah from Mississippi and examined the legs. They were positive that the legs were Walter Dorman's. Yet Hester could not find any evidence that more than one person was killed in the explosion. True, all that was left besides the legs were pieces of bone and flesh: but these were all beneath where the army cot had stood where the dead man had been sitting or lying when the dynamite exploded.

 

Then Hester spoke with the undertaker, James Young, and pieces of the case began to fall in place. Young told him that tie type of fracture on the legs indicated that the ex­plosive had been placed on top of the body. Two burns on the left leg appeared to have been caused by a dynamite fuse that might have been wrapped around the leg.

 

All evidence pointed to foul play, and Hester was certain the victim wasn't J. D. Dowdy. But why would George or J. D. Dowdy or anyone else want to murder

Dorman? Acting on a hunch, Hester phoned a local life insurance agent and asked him if he had ever written any insurance for Dowdy. He learned that only a few months before J. D. Dowdy had taken out two insurance policies, naming his father as beneficiary.

 

The two policies, in the amounts of $6,000 and $7,000 each, had double indemnity benefits in the case of ac­cidental death. Along with J. D.'s $10,000 G.I. insurance policy, the benefit George Dowdy would accrue if his son was killed amounted to $36,000. This was a tidy sum for a couple of impoverished fishermen, who really couldn't afford the premiums on their expensive insurance policies.

 

Hester had enough evidence to arrest the elder Dowdy, which he promptly did. He found the man with his bags packed, ready to leave town. He claimed that his sister in Oklahoma was sick and he had to visit her. Sheriff Hester told him that was impossible and escorted him to his new home, the Madison Parish jail.

 

If any more evidence was needed for an indictment Hester got it from the testimony of three Negroes who lived near the Dowdys. Robert Page Jr. and Sr. and Henry Page. They revealed that, for several days before the explosion, the Dowdys had been moving their personal belongings from the cabin.

 

Furthermore, the two younger Pages told Hester that J. D. Dowdy had asked them several times to help him in his insurance fraud schemes. These schemes

involved pretending that J. D. had drowned so his father could collect the insurance for his accidental death. Robert Page, Sr. had advised his sons that "they should never think of doing anything like that."

 

The morning after the ex­plosion at the Dowdy place, the Pages were visited by George Dowdy. Dowdy told them to keep their mouths shut about the other insurance fraud plots, as he would soon be a rich man.

 

Apparently J.D. Dowdy had asked several local people to “spend the night" with him. Finally Walter Dorman, a house painter from Mississippi who had been in Tallulah only a few weeks, agreed to go. At his cabin, J.D. killed Dorman and laid him on an army cot. He stacked dynamite on his chest— letting his legs hang over the edge of the cot—and wrapped the fuse around Dorman's leg.

 

Dowdy lit the fuse and left, figuring that, though some pieces of flesh would remain to indicate someone had been killed, there would not be enough substantial evidence to prove the dead man was not J. D. It was supposed to be the "perfect crime", but J. D. proved to be a pathetic amateur. He fled to the house of his sister, who lived in Vivian, La., and asked to be hidden.

 

She told him to surrender, but Dowdy refused and left. She immediately called the police, who arrested Dowdy shortly afterward. Sheriff Hester came and brought him back to the Madison Parish jail.

 

The Dowdys were convicted in May 1949. Old George Dowdy was given life im­prisonment at Angola; he was eventually paroled and went to live with his daughter in Vivien. But J. D. stayed on in the Madison jail for another 15 months, for he had been sentenced to death. Finally, in 1950, the portable electric chair from Angola was moved in. and Dowdy became the last person to receive capital punishment in Madison Parish.

 

Sheriff Hester justly got the credit for his brilliant in­vestigation of the Dowdy case. Today he highly praises the F. B. I. and law enforcement agencies throughout the area for their prompt and intensive help in every investigation the Madison Sheriff's Department was involved in. "The cooperation we got was just marvelous," said Hester, and it remained so until he retired in 1968, at the age of 79.

 

Of course, the Tallulah and Madison law enforcement agencies have done much more throughout the years than solve sensational mur­ders. By far most of its in­vestigations have concerned the typical parish crimes: aggravated battery cases, taking in everything from marital violence to bar-room brawls, bad checks, and petty thefts and vandalism.

 

In the mid-fifties, the Sheriff's Department was faced with growing violence and vandalism by people who couldn't understand why they couldn't hunt wherever and whenever they pleased.

 

Hester says they were known to cut off a leg or other part of someone's cow to cook and eat. In retaliation against farmers and hunting clubs who would not let them hunt on their land these hunters burned down barns and club houses early in 1954. Hall Allen and John Olvey received threatening letters: "We are writing this letter as a warning to you so you will know what to expect if you don't let us hunt in Tensas and Madison Parishes. We are taxpayers of this state and we are going to hunt the game we pay our money to be protec­ted. 'We have burned a few clubs and killed a few cows to give you a sample of our work. If we don't get to hunt we'll burn every club house and barn and kill every cow you have and if any man tries to stop us, we will kill him and burn his home if we have to shoot him through his window or in his car. (Madison Journal, April 30, 1954)"

 

This activity was finally stopped when Judge Voelker began handing down prison sentences for hunting violations. Another kind of violence had to be dealt with in the mid—sixties when the Ku Klux Klan was revived in Madison Parish.

 

For the most part, the Klan fought a war of intimidation rather than bloodshed. They marched down Green St. in their robes, shot into the doorways of churches, knocked groceries out of people's hands and in general tried to frighten the black community. They also burned a cross in the yard of a local white minister and sent him a threatening note.

 

The Klan once held a meeting at Lake One. Sheriff Hester said: "Someone told me that there were a lot of men out there with guns on directing traffic. I had the
boys go out there and bring them in; we charged them with unlawful use of firearms and they were convicted and fined."

 

The Tallulah Police Department under Chief J. E. Rogan received riot training to help cope with any violence that might have occurred with the increased racial tensions of the sixties. On the whole, the village and the parish emerged from this troublesome period unhar­med.

 

The Klan was made up mostly of local laborers and farmers who were disorganized and mistrusted each other. They had a dispute over Klan finances once and started shooting at one another: one of their most radical leaders was killed. After this the KKK died out in Madison Parish.

 

In virtually every case they have been involved in, Madison Parish and Tallulah peace officers have shown themselves to be of out­standing merit and genuine credit to the community. We know they will continue their outstanding performance record in the years to come.