Nick Davies

Grundy is a small colourless town in the bleak backwoods of Virginia down by the border with Tennessee, a poor town where most of the men have black lung from working down the coal mine and almost everybody is just about everybody else’s cousin. There was a murder here, nine years ago.

Wanda McCoy, who was only 19, was raped in the shabby little house where she lived on the outskirts of town. The rapist cut her throat right back to the spine and she was dead long before her husband, Brad, came back from the mine. When the news got around the town, the mood turned ugly and someone hung out a sign that said: “Time for a new hanging tree in Grundy”. Then the police arrested Wanda’s brotherinlaw, Roger Coleman, a miner, and charged him with the crime, and Grundy calmed down again.

Now, Roger Coleman sits in a silent cell 500 miles away in Mecklenberg on Virginia’s death row, waiting for the state to electrocute him. Back in Grundy, however, the peace has been broken again by the intrusion of a stranger, poking around and asking a lot of questions about the murder. The stranger says that Coleman is innocent. He says he is going to find out who really killed Wanda. He is not welcome.

Conroe looked like a nice little town. I had cruised up the freeway from Houston for half an hour, through the forest that blankets this part of east Texas, turned off by the Holiday Inn and a couple of minutes later, I was in the courthouse square with its clean streets and its neat shops and the Stars and Stripes up high on the courthouse roof like a feather in Conroe’s cap.

Clarence Brandley always knew the truth. Long before his own trouble started – before the white girl was killed, before he was blamed, before he was condemned to death – he knew how dangerous it was to be a black man in a town like Conroe.

Just after sunrise on a bleak November morning seventy five years ago, five men in uniform stood in line in the exercise yard of Utah State Penitentiary near Salt Lake City, raised rifles to their shoulders, took aim at a solitary figure tied up against the wall and shot him to death.