Town note
After the Civil War Greenwood was overrun with violence, with many Confederate veterans angry at the free black people now in the area.
about 0:08:14The story
Greenwood, Florida, is a small town in Jackson County, in the middle of the panhandle, about an hour and fifteen minutes from Tallahassee and ten minutes from Two Egg. He ran the gas station in Greenwood and owned a bar nearby, and he lived with his wife Georgia and their two children in a double-wide trailer behind the gas station. Georgia was born in 1944. Their daughter Angela was eighteen in 1989 and their son Chris was fifteen.
Georgia began a relationship with Gerald Boysfort, a man who lived nearby. He had gone there because his wife was there, and Georgia told the police she was frightened to go home.
He woke about nine the next morning and asked where his wife was. Nobody knew. Georgia came home at noon that day and told the same story, adding that she had left the truck stop with another woman, presumably a lorry driver.
He began telling people around town that Boysfort had raped his wife, even though Georgia insisted the relationship was consensual and did not report a rape. A few days after she came home he noticed scratches on her shoulders and that she did not want to have sex with him; she said she was hurting. He took this as proof that Boysfort had raped her again. He took Georgia to the sheriff's office to file a complaint, but he dominated the conversation so much that the officers made him leave the room, and Georgia told them there had been no rape.
He beat Boysfort up somewhere in town, and on another occasion he lured him to his own house on the pretext of making peace and attacked him in the yard. Georgia became depressed and told several people over the summer that she wished she were dead.
He was in the living room of the trailer with Georgia. He got his .38-calibre pistol from its hiding place and began cleaning it, saying that her depression was Boysfort's fault. Georgia asked him to sit beside her on the couch. As he got up, he said, his ankle gave way, the gun went off, and the bullet struck her in the chest. She died quickly on the living-room floor, the bullet passing through her heart.
Chris was in another room watching a football game. He had passed his parents on the way to the bathroom, his mother on the couch and his father at the dining table with the gun. He heard the shot and came out to find his mother bleeding on the floor.
On the way he said he was going to kill Gerald Boysfort, and at a stop sign he loaded the gun. When they arrived at Boysfort's house, Boysfort was in the front yard with another man, Russell Dunaway, and Dunaway's two children. Boysfort took one to the truck. He emptied the revolver, reloaded it, stood over Boysfort and shot him again. Boysfort was hit seven times, mostly in the head, and died slowly from bleeding in the brain over about ten minutes. Dunaway later said he had heard Boysfort begging for his life.
He asked for a beer; Russ said he had none. Russ got away.
A police car spotted them in town and followed at a distance.
His defence was that the shooting of Georgia was an accident and that he was too drunk to form intent when he killed Boysfort. A firearms expert, Dave Willens, testified that the .38 Smith & Wesson was in perfect working order and could not have fired by accident. He said he did not remember shooting Boysfort. Several witnesses testified that he was a drinker; a cellmate, Billy Blizzard, said he had looked drunk in his cell; a defence psychiatrist, Dr Macaluso, argued that intoxication had destroyed his mental intent while leaving his physical performance intact, and claimed he had brain atrophy, although scans were normal. Steve Russ put his drunkenness at five or six on a scale of ten.
Angela and Chris survived him.