Anatomy of Injustice Read Online Free PDF Page A

forensic investigators found none on the needle-nosepliers lying on the kitchen floor or on the tongs, which were sticking out of the drawer, or on the bloody cake spatula found on the bureau.
    Some ten hours after the first policeman had arrived at 209 Melrose Terrace, Sergeant Owen, and Herman Tooley Jr. of the Blyth Funeral Home, took possession of Mrs. Edwards’s body from DeFreese and Parnell and took it to Self Memorial Hospital, nine minutes away. Owen recorded this in his report. It was placed in a cooler, at a temperature of thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. The cooler was sealed with evidence tape; Owen signed it. The next morning, at 6:00, Owen was back at the hospital. The body was removed from the cooler, and he and Tom McHaney, another Blyth employee, drove it across the state to the Medical University of South Carolina, in Charleston, for an autopsy by Dr. Sandra E. Conradi. They arrived at 10:15.
    Six hours later, Owen left the medical school and drove Mrs. Edwards’s body to SLED headquarters in Columbia. This was unusual. After an autopsy, a body would normally go to the funeral home. At SLED, Owen and agent Parnell took fingerprints and palm prints from Mrs. Edwards. That explained why the body had been brought to SLED but raised the question of why her fingerprints were needed.
    Back in Greenwood, Captain Coursey went to a judge and sought a warrant for the arrest of Edward Lee Elmore. “Probable cause is based on the following facts,” Coursey said in his affidavit to the judge. “The deceased body of Dorothy E. Edwards was found at her home at 209 Melrose Terrace, Greenwood, South Carolina, on January 18, 1982, with multiple stab wounds and idencia of her being the victim of rape. A fingerprint of Edward Lee Elmore was found at this residence.”
    This was shaky. Under the Fourth Amendment, the police may not arrest someone without “probable cause.” Basically, that means there has to be enough evidence to convince a reasonable person of the substantial likelihood that the person being arrested committed the crime. Since Elmore had been at Mrs. Edwards’s house in December, washing windows for her, it was reasonable that the print was left then. In fact, it might havebeen there several weeks, or possibly even months. “I can say whose print it was; I can’t say when it was put there,” SLED agent DeFreese would later testify. Curiously, the police had found only one Elmore fingerprint at the scene.
    In his request for a warrant, Coursey did not mention the check that Mrs. Edwards had given to Elmore. Even the check plus the fingerprint would not seem to amount to probable cause. Magistrate Charles E. Henderson Jr. issued the warrant.
THE SUSPECT—EDWARD LEE ELMORE
    E DWARD L EE E LMORE had grown up in the abject sort of environment that led President Lyndon Johnson to declare a war on poverty. Home was Abbeville, a historic small town fourteen miles west of Greenwood on tree-lined Route 72. John C. Calhoun practiced law there from 1807 to 1817 before becoming vice president, secretary of state, senator, and secretary of war. The first Confederate Assembly adopted the Ordinance of Secession here in 1860. A granite plinth rises in the town square, erected by the Daughters of the Confederacy of Abbeville. The inscription on one side: “The world shall yet decide in truth’s clear, far-off light, that the soldiers who wore the gray and died with Lee, were in the right.” The monument was erected in 1906, destroyed by a fire in 1991, and repaired and put up again by the town in 1996, more than 130 years after the end of the Civil War.
    When Elmore was growing up, the “niggers” had their part of town and entered the white areas only to work in the textile mills or as maids or yardmen. They were paid so little that even a middle-class family could afford to employ them. For blacks and whites alike, Greenwood was “the big city,” the place to go to the cinema and, in the days before malls