What's That In Your Pocket?

Mount Ida sits in Montgomery County in western Arkansas, about an hour and a half from Little Rock. In 1986 it was a small, poor town of roughly a thousand people, and the local economy was in decline; the population fell from 1,023 in 1980 to 775 by 1990, and the county's remaining work was cattle, swine and poultry. Essie May Black was 62 and lived a mile or so outside town. She had been the Montgomery County clerk from 1975 to 1982, the first woman to hold elected office in the county, and she had raised six sons with her husband, William Black. One of those sons, Charles 'Chuck' Black, was a young attorney working as a county prosecutor.

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About 2.45 p.m. he stopped at the home of Clara Stanley, who lived up the road from Essie May Black, and asked at her fence about rental property. Mrs Stanley telephoned Essie May, who had a place to rent, and sent him a mile down the road. Essie May invited him in, made telephone calls on his behalf to other people with property, and gave him milk and cookies. this part of the story is covered for now He claimed that he had been sexually abused as a child by his mother and by his aunt, whom he called Aunt Kiki, and that the resemblance triggered a flashback. He said he remembered his hand moving up and down, shouting 'don't, mom, don't', and then coming to himself in the car covered in blood.

Essie May Black was found stabbed repeatedly, with at least six wounds to the torso and chest, three to the back and several to the throat, some nine and a half inches deep, and her throat had been cut. An X had been carved into her right cheek. A total of $226 was missing, $150 from her purse and $126 from a kitchen drawer; because there was no blood on the purse or the drawer, investigators concluded that the money was taken first and the killing was done to cover the robbery. A neighbour saw an old green Chevrolet truck leaving in the direction of Hot Springs at about 3.35 p.m. Chuck Black was at work when a friend in the sheriff's department telephoned to say an ambulance had been sent to his parents' house. He assumed his father had had a heart attack. When he arrived he found a state trooper in the driveway, and an officer told him his mother appeared to have been murdered. He went inside anyway. His mother had telephoned him a few hours earlier to invite him over for potato soup.

The investigation was largely conducted by the family. Chuck and a friend, a game warden, drove towards Hot Springs looking for the truck. When the game warden was called away, Chuck's cousins took over, and on a logging road they found a clothing label, and thirty feet away, behind a pine tree, a pile of bloody clothes including a man's suit. Chuck himself found a salmon deboning knife under a nearby bush. The label came from Azar's, a small men's clothing shop in Montgomery, Alabama, which kept records of its made-to-measure suits. The suit had been bought by a woman for her husband, who had died some years earlier, and she had donated it to a charity. details of the account remain covered until revealed

the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it He then bought a fancy card for his wife and a carton of cigarettes, paying with one of the stolen hundred-dollar bills, bought petrol with another, went home, dyed his hair and shaved his beard, and told his wife they were moving. They drove to Roundup, Montana.

Nearly six weeks passed. this part of the story is covered for now details of the account remain covered until revealed Three Arkansas investigators drove to Montana. the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now He gave an incriminating statement in the car on the drive back on 26 September, and further statements on 27 and 28 September. At his arraignment he said he could not afford a lawyer; his only income was a $336 monthly disability benefit.

details of the account remain covered until revealed the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now Other relatives described him as 'sneaky evil' after the beatings began; one cousin, Darrell, said he had ripped the head off a kitten and laughed about it. The defence prepared 50 or 60 potential witnesses and called 29.

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the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it He argued that the death penalty was unconstitutional, that his counsel was ineffective, that the statements from the car should have been excluded, and that he was mentally incompetent. The court rejected all of it, holding that counsel's decisions were tactical and reasonable and that much of the evidence he said should have been presented would not have helped him. A last-minute stay was denied. this part of the story is covered for now details of the account remain covered until revealed the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it

William Black, Essie May's husband, remarried on 3 July 1988 to Leota Fay Petit and lived until 3 December 2016, when he died aged 98. Essie May is buried at the Stanley-Standridge cemetery in Mount Ida.