Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South by Karen L. Cox (review)

Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South provides a captivating exploration of a once-sensational murder case in Natchez, Mississippi, in August 1932. The robbery and murder of Jennie Merrill, an aging, wealthy spinster descended from the town's antebellum planter elite, a longstanding neighborly feud over marauding livestock, and an interracial group of conspirators—who included Richard "Dick" Dana and Octavia Dockery, white squatters and residents of a neighboring filthy and dilapidated mansion, and Lawrence Williams, a local African American man—enticed many observers. The primary motivation for the murder was old-fashioned greed. Yet this aspect and the treatment of African American suspects and innocent residents were soon overshadowed by prurient interest in Dana and Dockery, the "'Wild Man' and the 'Goat Woman'" (p. 14). Amid popular fascination with antebellum slave mansions, Old South nostalgia, and burgeoning Depression-era plantation tourism, locals and newspaper readers across the United States were riveted by the details of the crime and the personalities at its center.

Drawing on extant personal papers, correspondence, legal case files, prison reports, extensive contemporary newspaper coverage, and recently recovered photographs and oral accounts, author Karen L. Cox makes evident her diligence and resourcefulness. She meticulously reconstructs the details of the botched robbery and the opportunistic shooting of Merrill, and by using genealogical information, Cox examines the life stories of the victim, the offenders, and the police. The book's chapters proceed through the various stages of the crime, community reactions, national interest, criminal and police investigations, and court proceedings, often retelling different aspects of the story from the perspectives of contemporary black and white residents, police, and others.

Two less-developed aspects of the story relate to crime rates in early 1930s Natchez and the wider significance of the forensic investigations. Cox notes the growth of the state prison population in the early 1930s and mentions other offenders, but general information on crime in early 1930s Natchez and surrounding counties is sparse. While the unusual and esoteric features of the Merrill murder are clear, it would nonetheless be useful to know how common robbery, breaking and entering, murder, and manslaughter were in these years, the more mundane circumstances of domestic murders and lethal brawls perhaps, and the race, class, age, and gender of so-called typical suspects and offenders in this section of Mississippi. The case also provides an intriguing window into local southern policing during transitional periods, when county sheriffs continued to rely on older methods (bloodhounds, intimidation, physical and psychological coercion) to obtain confessions while embracing, albeit rather selectively, forensic science, criminalistics, and technological innovations. Sheriff Clarence Powell Roberts willingly used fingerprint and ballistics expertise in the Merrill investigation, and there was considerable cross-jurisdictional cooperation, but how frequent or unusual were his methods? Much has been written on federal advocacy of scientific policing, but scholarly examinations of local decisions, changing tactics, and quasi-professionalizing personnel are limited, and high-profile cases can offer important insights.

These small complaints aside, Goat Castle is clearly a story of wealthy white privilege, class advantage, and racial injustice with very real and depressing outcomes for the conspirators' unwilling lookout, Emily Burns. A widowed African American laundress in her mid-thirties, Burns was the only person held accountable for Merrill's murder. Convicted as an accessory to murder, Burns joined the predominantly African American population at Parchman prison in December 1932, where she remained for eight long years. Cox deftly moves Burns from a footnote in previous accounts of the case to the center of this important exposé of Jim Crow double standards.