With Malice Aforethought

ALABAMA With Malice Aforethought

Four or five men in a 1941 maroon Chevrolet pulled up at Charlie Hurst's house in Pell City, Ala. (pop. 900) just as Charlie, a former storekeeper, was shucking off his shoes for the night. One of the visitors knocked on the door and shouted for Charlie. "It looks like the Ku Kluxers are after me," he muttered to his son. He went out to see, and his son followed with a .22 rifle in his hands. When the men tried to drag Charlie into the car, he grabbed the rifle from the son and blazed away, shattering one car window. From the car someone fired back; two pistol bullets hit Charlie Hurst, another hit his son in the hip.

Hurst was bleeding in the Pell City infirmary when police reached him. He didn't know why anyone should be after him, he said, but he was sure that his assailants were Klansmen. Then Charlie Hurst died.

Four days later, 22 miles southeast of Pell City in Talladega, a molder and sometime Methodist minister named Roy Heath tore up his Klan membership papers, said to his wife, "Maude, pray for me," kissed her, and then, after she left for church took down his shotgun and killed himself. His three sons and his two nephews told state investigators a bizarre and helpful story. One of the nephews, at Heath's urging, had replaced a broken glass window in a maroon Chevrolet the night of the Hurst murder. Heath had confessed to his sons that he took part in the raid, warned them to keep it quiet for their own protection. The sons said that the Rev. Alvin C. Horn, a tall, slouched Kleagle in the Association of Georgia Klans, had called on them, told them, "Boys, your daddy would say, 'Let everything be as it is.' Don't tell anyone about this."

Alabama cops arrested their first suspects next day. One was Horn, 39-year-old pastor of three Baptist churches. The other was Claude Luker, an owner of a Talladega furniture store--and of the maroon Chevrolet. The charge: murder "with malice aforethought." Police later picked up Louis Harrison, Cyclops of the Pell City Klan and athletic director of the big Avondale textile mills. He gave cops a list of members in his Klavern. This time it looked as if the Klan might not get away with its reign of terror.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.