“We’re going to keep all you niggers from running around with these white girls. I ought to take you off and hang you like we done that nigger in Mobile,” Tate reportedly told Walter.
The sheriff was referring to the lynching of a young African American man named Michael Donald in Mobile, about sixty miles south. Donald was walking home from the store one evening, hours after a mistrial was declared in the prosecution of a black man accused of shooting a white police officer. Many white people were shocked by the verdict and blamed the mistrial on the African Americans who had been permitted to serve on the jury. After burning a cross on the courthouse lawn, a group of enraged white men who were members of the Ku Klux Klan went out searching for someone to victimize. They found Donald as he was walking home and descended on him. After severely beating the young black man, they hanged him from a nearby tree, where his lifeless body was discovered several hours later.
Local police ignored the obvious evidence that the death was a hate crime and hypothesized that Donald must have been involved in drug dealing, which his mother adamantly denied. Outraged by the lack of local law enforcement interest in the case, the black community and civil rights activists persuaded the United States Department of Justice to get involved. Three white men were arrested two years later and details of the lynching were finally made public.
It had been more than three years since the arrests, but when Tate and the other officers started making threats of lynching, Walter was terrified. He was also confused. They said he was being arrested for raping another man, but they were throwing questions at him about the murder of Ronda Morrison. Walter vehemently denied both allegations. When it became clear that the officers would get no help from Walter in making a case against him, they locked him up and proceeded with their investigation.
When Monroe County District Attorney Ted Pearson first heard his investigators’ evidence against Walter McMillian, he must have been disappointed. Ralph Myers’s story of the crime was pretty far-fetched; his knack for dramatic embellishment made even the most basic allegations unnecessarily complicated.
Here’s Myers’s account of the murder of Ronda Morrison: On the day of the murder, Myers was getting gas when Walter McMillian saw him at the gas station and forced him at gunpoint to get in Walter’s truck and drive to Monroeville. Myers didn’t really know Walter before that day. Once in the truck, Walter told Myers he needed him to drive because Walter’s arm was hurt. Myers protested but had no choice. Walter directed Myers to drive him to Jackson Cleaners in downtown Monroeville and instructed him to wait in the truck while McMillian went inside alone. After waiting a long time, Myers drove down the street to a grocery store to buy cigarettes. He returned ten minutes later. After another long wait, Myers finally saw McMillian emerge from the store and return to the truck. Upon entering the truck, he admitted that he had killed the store clerk. Myers then drove McMillian back to the gas station so that Myers could retrieve his vehicle. Before Myers left, Walter threatened to kill him if he ever told anyone what he had seen or done.
In summary, an African American man planning a robbery-murder in the heart of Monroeville in the middle of the day stops at a gas station and randomly selects a white man to become his accomplice by asking him to drive him to and from the crime scene because his arm is injured, even though he had been able to drive himself to the gas station where he encountered Myers and to drive his truck home after returning Myers to the gas station.
Law enforcement officers knew that Myers’s story would be very difficult to prove, so they arrested Walter for sodomy, which served to shock the community and further demonize McMillian; it also gave police an opportunity to bring Walter’s truck to the jail for Bill Hooks, a jailhouse informant, to see.
Bill Hooks was a young black man with a reputation as a jailhouse snitch. He had been in the county jail for several days on burglary charges when McMillian was arrested. Hooks was promised release from jail and reward money if he could connect McMillian’s truck to the Morrison murder. Hooks eagerly told investigators that he had driven by Jackson Cleaners near the time of the crime and had seen a truck tear away from the cleaners with two men inside. At the jail, Hooks positively identified Walter’s truck as the one he’d seen at the cleaners nearly six months earlier.
This second witness gave law enforcement officials what they needed to charge Walter McMillian with capital murder in the shooting death of Ronda Morrison.
When the indictment was announced, there was joy and relief in the community that someone had been charged. Sheriff Tate, the district attorney, and other law enforcement officers who had become targets of criticism were cheered. The absence of an arrest had disrupted life in Monroeville, and now things could settle down.
People who knew Walter found it difficult to believe he could be responsible for a sensational murder. He had no history of crime or violence, and for most folks who knew him, robbery just didn’t make sense for a man who worked as hard as Walter.
Black residents told Sheriff Tate that he had arrested the wrong man. Tate still had not investigated McMillian himself, his life or background, or even his whereabouts on the day of the murder. He knew about the affair with Karen Kelly and had heard the suspicion and rumors that Walter’s independence must mean he was dealing drugs. Given his eagerness to make an arrest, this seemed to be enough for Tate to accept Myers’s accusations. As it turned out, on the day of the murder, a fish fry was held at Walter’s house. Members of Walter’s family spent the day out in front of the house, selling food to passersby. Evelyn Smith, Walter’s sister, was a local minister, and she and her family occasionally raised money for the church by selling food on the roadside. Because Walter’s house was closer to the main road, they often sold from his front yard. There were at least a dozen church parishioners at the house all morning with Walter and his family on the day Ronda Morrison was murdered.
Walter didn’t have a tree job that day. He had decided to replace the transmission in his truck and called over his mechanic friend, Jimmy Hunter, to help. By 9:30 in the morning, the two men had dismantled Walter’s truck, completely removing the transmission. By 11 o’clock, relatives had arrived and had started frying fish and other food to sell. Some church members didn’t get there until later.
“Sister, we would have been here long ago, but the traffic in Monroeville was completely backed up. Cop cars and fire trucks, looked like something bad happened up at that cleaners,” Evelyn Smith recalled one of the members saying.
Police reported that the Morrison murder took place around 10:15 A.M., eleven miles or so from McMillian’s home, at the same time that a dozen church members were at Walter’s home selling food while Walter and Jimmy worked on his truck. In the early afternoon, Ernest Welch, a white man whom black residents called “the furniture man” because he worked for a local furniture store, arrived to collect money from Walter’s mother for a purchase she had made on credit. Welch told the folks gathered at the house that his niece had been murdered at Jackson Cleaners that morning. They discussed the shocking news with Welch for some time.
Taking into account the church members, Walter’s family, and the people who were constantly stopping at the house to buy sandwiches, dozens of people were able to confirm that Walter could not have committed the murder. That group included a police officer who stopped by the house to buy a sandwich and noted in his police log that he had bought food at McMillian’s house with Walter and a crowd of church folks present.