Magnolias, muck and murder in the Old South

It was a story straight out of Faulkner or Tennessee Williams -- although neither writer would have tried something so cliched.

On Aug. 5, 1932, 69-year-old Jennie Merrill was found dead not far from her ransacked home outside Natchez, Miss.

The daughter of one of Natchez's richest planters (and a former U.S. envoy to Belgium), Merrill had moved in high society as a young woman. In her younger days, she had worked with New York social reformer Jacob Riis and had fended off a number of beaux, but in later years, she returned to Natchez, unmarried, and lived in relative seclusion.

Her only regular visitor was a cousin, Duncan Minor, also unmarried, who rode over to visit her each night around 8:30 p.m.

Suspicion immediately fell on a neighboring couple, R.H.C. "Dick" Dana, and his nurse, Olivia Dockery, who lived in Glenwood, a decaying Southern manor, with a large herd of goats. The trio had feuded for years; Merrill claimed her neighbors' hogs and goats wandered onto her property and ate her prized lespedeza.

As the story developed, hordes of reporters (including a young Bruce Catton) flooded to Nashville to glory in the details of the case. It was widely rumored that Dick Dana was "not right." With unkempt hair, scraggly beard and an outfit made of old burlap sacks, he was known to spend hours perched in nearby trees.

He had lost the title to Glenwood -- nicknamed "Goat Castle" -- years ago, but he and Dockery hung on there without paying rent or taxes, cooking meals in the library's fireplace. Goats wandered in and out, gnawing at the wallpaper and at old books.

The New York Times and other papers followed the story with glee, giving readers a relief from news of the Depression.

Now, Karen L. Cox, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, revisits the case in "Goat Castle," a short but fascinating read.

As a cultural historian, Cox is interested less in the true crime yarn and more about what the Goat Castle case tells us about Jim Crow society in the Deep South.

Dana and Dockery were locked up in the county jail. Dana, who tended to ramble, was given to incriminating statements, declaring "I know nothing of the murder" before Merrill's body was found. Fingerprints matching Dana's had been found in Merrill's House, and blood spatters were found in Glenwood. The duo were broke, and Merrill, who still owned several large plantations, was thought to have money in the house.

The two attracted sympathy from locals, however, in part because of lineage. Dana may have been a wild man who never worked a day in his life, but his father had been the rector at Robert E. Lee's home church in Arlington, Va. Dockery's father had been a Confederate general who fell on hard times.

Thus, the probe quickly shifted to African Americans. Lawrence "Pink" Williams, an unemployed Natchez native who had fled town after the murder, was suspected of the shooting; conveniently, he was gunned down by a police officer in Pine Bluff, Ark., for being a "suspicious character."

A local laundress, Emily Burns, was eventually convicted as an "accessory" to the crime, even though most reliable accounts pictured her more as a hostage than as a co-conspirator. She was sentenced to life in Mississippi's Parchman prison, although, through a rare act of mercy, she was released after eight years.

As for Dana and Dockery, they returned to Goat Castle where they charged hordes of visitors 25 cents for admission.

Cox sees the Goat Castle saga as reflecting the period's obsession of the Old South: with visions of moonlight, magnolia and gentility on one hand, and decadence and depravity on the other. The Goat Castle case, as it turned out, coincided with the first of the "Natchez Pilgrimage" tours of better-restored plantation mansions, and the notoriety of one, it seemed, helped feed the acclaim of the latter.

Reporter Ben Steelman can be reached at 910-343-2208 or Ben.Steelman@StarNewsOnline.com

Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race and the Gothic South

By Karen L. Cox

University of North Carolina Press, $26.