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Ninth Loop: A Cross, a Dummy, a Phone Call - Mobile, March 21, 1981
- The University of Alabama Press
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NINTH LOOP A CROSS, A DUMMY, A PHONE CALL Mobile, March 21, 1981 What appeared to be a dummy hanging in a tree . . . At a little after midnight, Klansmen Frank Cox and Teddy Kyzar drove to the Mobile County Courthouse and lit a burning cross on the courthouse lawn as a so-called diversionary tactic. Yet burning a cross on the courthouse lawn just hours after a racially charged deadlocked trial and brutal murder seems, in retrospection, far less tactical than the Klan may have initially thought. Nevertheless, district attorney investigator Bob Eddy claimed this “tactic” was actually quite common for the Klan. “It was just typical for them to do things like that,” he explained. “Case after case, they did the same thing. Do one thing one place and something a lot worse somewhere else.” While it’s difficult to discern the exact order of events, reports show that at 2:45 a.m., two private security officers were driving their routine patrol near the intersection of Royal and Church Streets when they noticed flames coming from the courthouse lawn. The security guards stopped the car to examine the fire more closely, stumbling across what appeared to be a three-foot-tall, two-foot-wide cross that "$3044 "%6..: "1)0/&$"-- was constructed entirely of burlap and wires. The poorly built fire was already smoldering by the time the security guards arrived. At 2:52 a.m., the report was radioed to a Mobile Police officer, who was called to investigate the supposed cross burning. Upon arriving at the scene, he noticed that the fire had already been extinguished and that if he hadn’t been told a cross had been burning, he would not have known that the fire had taken that shape. All he observed was a small “smoldering pile of what appeared to be burlap material.” Teddy Kyzar recalled preparing for the cross burning soon after Hays and Knowles returned to the Herndon Avenue apartment at a little past midnight. “And we went down to the back of 111 Herndon, the old burned house, went back towards the back of the garage,” Kyzar explained. “Frank reached into the back of the garage and got the cross that was already made . . . Tiger reached in where the cross was and got a gallon of diesel fuel and put it in the back of the pickup truck. Frank went around to the driver’s side and I automatically got in on the passenger side, and we pulled out and started out of the driveway.” Klansmen Frank Cox and Teddy Kyzar circled the Mobile County Courthouse three times before Cox decided it was time to act. “That’s where I want it,” Cox informed Teddy, pointing to a spot on the lawn. “I still never did ask why the cross was going to be burned or where,” Teddy explained. “And when he told me that’s where he wanted it, I got out of the truck, got the gallon of diesel fuel and cross out of the back of the pickup truck, ran up to the—close to the building, laid the cross down, soaked it down and used all the diesel fuel, stuck it up in the ground and made sure it was going to stand up straight.” The pudgy, glasses-wearing Teddy Kyzar lit the match and, grabbing the empty diesel jug, bumbled down Water Street, eventually spotting Frank Cox at a red light and leaping into the truck while the cross began crackling behind him. [3.219.167.163] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 13:55 GMT) 124 NINTH LOOP Later, Teddy described how he and Cox had turned off at the Fairhope exit, where they stopped at a Waffle House to use the pay phone. They were told to inform Henry Hays that the cross had been lit without incident, but upon reaching the phone, both men realized they didn’t have the proper change. While Frank Cox and Teddy Kyzar squealed off into the night, Hays and Knowles had a job of their own. Within two to four hours following the murder, the pair busily hoisted Michael Donald’s body into the camphor tree just across the street from Hays’s apartment on Herndon Avenue, quite near the site of Ralph Hayes’s violent interactions with his girlfriend. It’s difficult to envision the scope of the scene in its entirety: a cross burning on the courthouse lawn, Ralph Hayes chasing his girlfriend into the...