Oh, dear. A Killer in the Family Tree

ON DISCOVERING, AMONG THE BRANCHES, A FOREBEAR ONE MIGHT NOT HAVE CHOSEN

Great-Uncle Samuel? I figured he was a horse thief. Maybe a train robber or a bank bandit — those being favorite jobs for early-20th-century gangsters.

In truth, I wasn’t sure he was actually real. When I was a child Uncle Samuel (not to be confused with the patriotic Sam) was spoken of only rarely and always in whispers. I heard enough of those whispers to be eternally curious; but no one, not my mother, aunts or cousins, would offer details or even confirm his former existence.

In 1954, as a budding reporter for the Richmond (VA) Times Dispatch, I got my mother, then in failing health, to come clean. She told me Samuel was indeed her uncle and “had died in prison,” adding that he had shown up twice in her childhood and she remembered him as a great storyteller. I made brief, unsuccessful attempts to uncover his own story.

Not a pretty story! It seems my great uncle Samuel Hardy (1869–1929) ambushed and murdered his erstwhile friend and neighbor Tiberius Gracchus (Grac) Jones in Nansemond County, VA on October 26,1908, after learning that Grac was planning to prosecute him for selling liquor without a license, among other things. The dying Gracchus is reported to have gasped, “They killed me for telling the truth.”

It took the internet and, more importantly, my committed-genealogist niece Janie in Atlanta to dig up the court records and concurrent reports of Gracchus’ dying words. Otherwise, this little snippet of family history might have been lost forever — which would have suited more than a few members of the clan now living. But for my part, I wanted the Truth.

C’mon. Anybody can have illustrious landowners or famous generals in her past; how many can boast a bona fide n’er-do-well convicted felon?

Samuel’s brother, my gentle-mannered maternal grandfather Porter Hardy, was a Methodist preacher who shepherded small, rural Virginia flocks. He was often paid in eggs or sacks of corn; he fed his family with the help of several chickens, a cow and whatever vegetables they could raise. Nevertheless, he managed to send all six of his children to college in the early years of the twentieth century. My mother, his second child, studied Latin and the classics with her parents and graduated valedictorian of her class in 1915, after two years in an actual schoolroom. The other member of the Class of ’15 was Salutatorian.

The youngest of those six Hardy (in soul and name alike) children, my greatly beloved Uncle Porter, Jr., left the family farm to enter Congress the same year that John F. Kennedy first went to Washington. These tidbits are offered as explanation for the general agreement to keep the family felon as far in the background as humanly possible.

Uncle Porter (center) & friends, c 1946 (Author family photo)

My mother’s confirmation of Uncle Samuel’s existence came as she was beginning a long descent into stroke-related dementia, so I was never able to dig out further details. It was somewhat of a stinging defeat, though, to have turned up absolutely nothing in Virginia prison records, especially since I saw myself as a mid-century Brenda Starr, Reporter.

Seventy years later I was exonerated by Ancestry.com (and Janie, my niece.) My search had been for a Samuel Mahood, my mother having implied — intentionally? I’ll never know — that the errant uncle was her mother’s brother. Had I searched those musty, pre-internet files for someone with my very own name — my given name being Frances Hardy Moreland — I might have solved at least a part of the puzzle. Oh, well.

Here’s the ignominious truth: Samuel somehow learned of his friend and neighbor Grac’s plans, probably through other friends and neighbors. There were few secrets in those rural, county-newspaper-reports-all days, and selling liquor without a license might have been only one of several shady dealings Samuel had going. The local paper didn’t reveal the back story but its account, alongside the eloquent language of the court records in Hardy v Commonwealth paints a vivid picture:

“It appears that the deceased” (that would be Grac) “in company with his next door neighbor, one J.H. Joyner, returned on the railroad train from a trip to Suffolk . . . and after lingering a short time near the office of a justice of the peace . . . left for their homes, walking together till the pathway to Joyner’s home was reached, and then the deceased proceeded in the direction of his own home nearby.”

Sadly, also nearby was my Uncle Samuel, waiting to ambush him with a shotgun blast to the stomach; and, for good measure, an additional three bullets from a pistol. After which, the court records show, “Joyner, who was not far away, not only heard the shots but heard the victim exclaim, ‘You scoundrel!’” Scoundrel indeed. It’s hard to think kindly of Samuel at all. And as the true friend approached (Samuel having by then fled into the darkness) he heard, further, the famous words, “Joyner, they have killed me for telling the truth.”

About this “they” business: it was pitch dark that night and there were no streetlights in the Virginia countryside. Presumably, the multiple weapons suggested multiple assailants to the dying Grac; as far as the lengthily-detailed trial records show, Bad Samuel did it totally on his own. He seems to have taken his pistol with him, but left a №12 bore Ithaca shotgun “known to have been in the accused’s possession” at the scene of the crime.

The plot thickens. “It further appears,” the court learned, “that the accused and the deceased, who had lived for some years within less than a mile of each other, had been friends until within a few months of the murder, when they became exceedingly unfriendly, in fact, bitterly hostile.” Samuel made little effort to protect himself from prosecution in advance. The records show that he “cherished such intense hostility toward the deceased that he had made repeated and malignant threats against his life.”

By this time, as your faithful reporter studies the records, she is becoming convinced that Uncle Samuel was not only a supremely bad dude but possibly the dumbest criminal around. Another neighbor, Joseph I. Johnson, testified to Samuel’s having recently said, “All right. If things turned out like they looked he was going to kill him, damn him.”

The whole business had to have been hard on all these former friends. Joyner and Johnson “clearly appear to be reluctant witnesses,” the records state; with Johnson adding to the above “that he did not know whom the accused was talking about, ‘whether a man or a snake or a mule or who…’” but it was “within the province of the jury to determine the facts…”

Personally, this reporter thinks there may have been more than meets the eye, or at least met the court records. All these gentlemen appear to have been young bachelors. Was there a lady somewhere in the background?

Early on during the court proceedings much was made of the fact that the jury was allowed, “in company with two officers, to attend a moving picture show wherein two suitors for the hand of a lady quarreled, and one of them lay in wait along a road, attacked his rival with a dagger, and felled him to the ground.” The court officers were declared “highly censurable” for taking the jury to such a moving picture show, but the trial proceeded.

If there was a redeemable quality within Samuel Hardy, it never showed up in the court records or family whispers. Not only did he show no remorse and pay no respects to the neighbor family, but as soon as he heard about bloodhounds being called he “mounted a wagon and rode into the forest and remained there until all fear of being pursued had past.”

So here are the facts: Two generations separate me from a murderer, a faithless friend, a dim-wit criminal and a coward. Good grief.

Convicted and sentenced to the electric chair, Samuel went to prison and stayed there for a very long time. No family records indicate that anyone ever went to visit him (though who knows?) and they are unlikely to have been able to afford lawyers. But the wheels of justice grind slowly onward. Samuel died — under circumstances never recorded but presumably in prison — in 1929.

My only consolation is that rumored storyteller reputation. Perhaps it’s the hidden gene that led me to a perfectly respectable MFA in Short Fiction.

Otherwise, the only hope for family redemption lies in niece Janie’s discovery of an earlier possible ancestor who may have been a delegate to the Continental Congress.

This one lived from 1758 to 1785. He had to have been somebody’s uncle; his name was Samuel Hardy.