Ghost of the Ozarks: Murder and Memory in the Upland South

GHOST OF THE OZARKS

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Prologue

Sixteen-year-old Tiller Ruminer had spent all of her young life on Cajun Creek, waiting to be swept off her feet. Connie Franklin was just the kind of fellow to do the sweeping. Scruffy and carefree, a knapsack and French harp his only companions, he had drifted into St. James only six weeks earlier, around the end of January. No one knew whence he came, and no one cared. Everyone liked the way he trilled the high notes on the harmonica, how he said "dorg" instead of "dog," how he sang ballads to the old ladies with the least bit of prompting. He worked just enough to justify his room and board, but that mattered little. It was winter in the Ozarks—work was still a right smart off.

Tiller and Connie commenced to sparking before too awful long. She loved to dance the Charleston to the phonograph records at the schoolhouse on Saturday night. He played along with the French harp. June may be the month for marrying, but not among farming folk. There's too much work to be done in June, and so it was that Tiller and Connie, after a whirlwind courtship, decided to get hitched in March instead. On the ninth of the month—daffodils in bloom, peepers serenading—they set off across the hills and hollows to the home of Finis Ford, the justice of the peace in St. James. It was a disappointment, no doubt, when they arrived at the squire's only to find him gone for the day, but there would be other days for marrying. And life's always sunny when you're in love. So the two struck off back toward the Ruminer cabin, laughing, talking, making plans for a life together. Connie, though no big fellow by any stretch of the imagination, even hoisted Tiller in his arms as they forded Cajun Creek.

Connie's tattered brogans still sloshed with the cold, muddy water of the crossing when on the rise ahead appeared five silhouettes. As the figures came into focus, Tiller recognized the men as St. James neighbors; she recognized, as well, apprehension in Connie, a nervousness that puzzled her. What happened next would justify her fiancé's anxiety, though it would never make sense. A couple of the men began arguing with Connie—about what Tiller couldn't be certain—and before the teenage girl could comprehend the gravity of the moment, Connie had received a blow to the back of the head. A rock, a stick of wood, brass knuckles? It was happening too fast. She watched him prostrate on the path, struggling to get to his feet. "They're killing me, Till," he bellowed before taking a silencing blow. As three of the men continued to pummel a seemingly unconscious Connie, the other two dragged Tiller off the path into the forest undergrowth, raped her, and then forced her to watch as the fiends built a roaring fire of logs and limbs and tossed the limp body of Connie Franklin onto it. When the charred corpse tumbled off the pyre moments later, two of the men, drunken, sadistic, began to chop the body into pieces and toss the pieces into the flames, as if a previous century's bear hunters roasting the day's prize. Once the fire had died down, the men scooped up what little was left of the luckless bridegroom, tucked the pieces in a tow sack, and tossed it into Cajun Creek.

Tiller's life was spared, for what it was worth. Taken to the cabin of the ringleader, held in confinement for the next two weeks, forced to obey the putrid whims of her fiancé's murderers, she was eventually released upon the threat of death should she ever divulge the secret that would haunt her day and night.

Eight and a Half Months Later

Near the end of its November 28 edition, on a page filled with odds and ends and toss-off stories, the Arkansas Gazette reported a fiftieth anniversary celebration that had taken place the day before in Little Rock's Hotel Lafayette. The guests of honor, George and Angie Case, hailed from the little town of Mountain View, deep inside the rural Ozarks one hundred miles north of the capital city. The Cases were business leaders in Stone County, probably the wealthiest family around those parts, and their children had decided Mountain View—with no paved streets, no grand pianos and Mendelssohn—playing pianists, no gourmet kitchens, and no Hotel Lafayette—was no place for the kind of highfalutin soiree no one else in town could or would pull off. It was highly unusual for anyone from remote Stone County to make the state's oldest daily newspaper, and thus a supreme oddity that the very same issue, the same page no less, carried a second story involving Stone County. The origination of the central characters was the only thing the two articles shared in common. The second column, an Associated Press story under the headline "Murder Witness Guarded Closely," recounted the recent arrest of five Stone County men for the brutal slaying of a young farmhand named Connie Franklin and the sheriff's role in protecting the key witness, a teenager named Tiller Ruminer, who had been raped and forced to watch the gruesome murder of her fianc. The Cases returned to Mountain View, never to be heard from again, but the murder story came to dominate the news in and around Arkansas for the next four weeks. In covering this story, reporters painted a picture of the citizenry of Stone County, and of the Ozarks region in general, that differed markedly from the Cases' dignified anniversary, one in which harmonica renditions of square dance tunes replaced classical piano and log cabins stood in for swanky hotels. The murder of Connie Franklin may not have made the front page of the Arkansas Gazette on this day, but its headlines soon adorned front pages across the nation.

"Man Tortured, Mutilated, Burned Alive" read the banner headline of the San Antonio Express. On the front page of Montana's Helena Independent Tiller Ruminer, wearing white stockings and a fur-trimmed coat, and other Stone Countians stared out at readers as "Figures in Heinous Crime." The Chillicothe (Mo.) Constitution-Tribune bookended its cover page with stories of the funeral of French statesman Georges Clemenceau and a sensational story out of Mountain View, Arkansas, "Five Held for Killing Boy and Attacking Girl." The Oakland Tribune proclaimed, "Woman Bares Feudal Rule in Ozarks," while the readers of the Connellsville (Pa.) Daily Courier found the story under the headline "Vivid Melodrama Features Case of Connie Franklin." Wire services carried the horrible tale across the nation to papers large and small, from Syracuse, New York, to Reno, Nevada, from Sheboygan, Wisconsin, to Dothan, Alabama. Whether courtesy of Time and the Chicago Sun or the Coshocton Tribune and the Ironwood Daily Globe, readers in November and December 1929 encountered the story of the young drifter killed on his way to get married in the backwoods of Arkansas. It jockeyed for space and attention with the plane crashes, deadly fires, suicides, and other murders that littered the pages of even the smallest newspapers of the age. At times, even amid the clutter of sensationalism, the Connie Franklin murder received top billing. There was no denying that the Connie Franklin case had become a regional sensation and national news. And one little neck of the rural Ozarks, heretofore wholly ordinary and practically invisible, would live beneath the spotlight for one cold and miserable month.

The matter-of-fact Associated Press release that hit papers on Monday, November 25, recounted a scene of "torture, mutilation and burning alive," elements bound to grab the most casual reader's attention. But murders happen with disturbing regularity. They may not be as gruesome as the Connie Franklin slaying, but whatever the level of inhumanity and beastliness, they keep coming relentlessly, each one eventually pushed from the headlines by new ones waiting to be analyzed. Ultimately, it was not the murder story itself that rendered the Connie Franklin case the phenomenon of Ozarks history it remains today. It was the cultural commentary that came pouring forth from the pens of reporters in the days following the murder story's breaking that transformed the Connie Franklin case from a sensational murder tale into something bigger-an indictment of a community and a region, a condemnation whose origins sprang from a nation's simultaneous fascination with and revulsion against a southern highland folk perceived to be trapped inside a stagnant tradition of feuding, moonshining, backwardness, and disregard for law and order.

The Cases' anniversary banquet and the backwoods murder story delivered widely divergent perspectives on life in the Ozarks. The Cases were exceptional by the standards of their time and place, yet so were the impoverished, ignorant, and brutal characters who would emerge from media coverage of the slaying. As usual, the truth of the situation, the Ozarkers whose lives most accurately exemplified life and society in the region, lay somewhere between the two extremes.

This book deals with the briefer and obviously more intriguing of the two Stone County stories published in the Arkansas Gazette that November day in 1929—the alleged murder of a young drifter named Connie Franklin. Chances are you had never heard of Connie Franklin before picking up this book. It wasn't too many years ago that the name had no meaning for me. I grew up in the rural Ozarks, not twenty-five miles as the crow flies from the place that Connie Franklin put on the map in 1929, yet had never heard the story until 2007. For practically all of my adult life I had studied the history of this region I call home, but it was only while looking through an old issue of Time that I happened upon this strange story of death and degradation in the White River hills. I was unaware of the saga for the same reason you were—Connie Franklin is not a name that became a part of our folk cultural idiom.

Unlike Tom Dula, Casey Jones, and John Henry, Connie Franklin never had his story immortalized in widely recognized folk songs. Had the saga taken place a few generations earlier, perhaps that is just what would have happened, for the story of Connie Franklin and the trial for his murder did not lack for drama and suspense. But by 1929 the age of the creation of rural folk legend had largely passed. In spite of the mountains of newspaper copy the story generated over a four-week span in the earliest days of the Great Depression and the sensationalized versions of the story that occasionally appeared in "true crime" serials in the years that followed, only in the remote hills of the White River valley would the names of Connie Franklin, his sweetheart Tiller Ruminer, and their assailants be remembered into the next century. Yet the Connie Franklin saga is worth another look. Not only is it a fascinating story, but it tells us a thing or two about the rural upland South on the cusp of the Great Depression, about the challenges of understanding and interpreting history, and about humanity.

Like any historical event, the saga of Connie Franklin can be viewed and interpreted through a number of lenses—as an investigation into the phenomenon of the hobo or tramp, as a discourse on violence and lawlessness in the rural South, as a study of the intersection of gender, masculinity, and society in the rural Ozarks. While these perspectives and many others are legitimate lines of inquiry—and shall all receive attention to one degree or another—they do not provide the interpretive frameworks for this study. This book, instead, rests on four pillars, four separate paradigms of interpretation.

From a regional perspective, the story is situated, both physically and historiographically, within the South, and more specifically within the upland South of the Ozarks and greater Appalachia. Beyond the immediacy of the allegations of murder, there is the broader context within which the Connie Franklin case played out in 1929. Although murders happen everywhere and thus have, unfortunately, a universal quality to them, the Connie Franklin case unfolded in the Ozarks at the tail end of the decade of the 1920s, at the inception of the Great Depression. Thus, what follows is more than an attempt to shed light on a baffling murder mystery. It is also an exercise in revealing the dynamics of life (and death) in the Ozarks, in the rural South, in the upland South on the eve of the Great Depression. The region and its people stood at the threshold of the New Deal and World War II, a one-two punch that would forever alter not only the rural hills but all of America. The portrait of Ozarks society that emerges from the Connie Franklin saga is really quite unexceptional. Beyond the bizarre developments and the press's colorful commentary, this is fundamentally an American story. It does not argue that the Ozarks and upland South were in any way monolithic and homogenous but is informed by an understanding that the geographic boundaries of this story are confined to one small place in the Ozarks, and for the most part to one specific moment in time. Ghost of the Ozarks does not suggest that the Ozarks, or the upland South in general, was in any sense a place uniquely and fundamentally different from other American regions, or that its inhabitants were a people divorced from the mainstreams of American social and economic existence—in 1929 or for decades before. At the same time, though, it recognizes the survival of tradition and primitive qualities in the remote hills of the White River valley. What we find—what Connie Franklin found in 1929—is a region in transition, a territory where the new mingled with the old, a place and time in which tradition and modernity overlapped and entwined inextricably.

In the remote Ozarks, the specter of the past could seem more real than the flesh of the present. This ghostly vision of a timeless and forgotten region was at least more enticing to an American public yearning for the exotic. The people of the Ozarks, this far western appendage of the upland South, functioned in a society whose mirage of simplicity and traditionalism cloaked a complexity and dynamism that could, and did, confound reporters who came armed with popular assumptions about life in the hills, the same assumptions that have misled many a writer over the years. The reporters whose accounts stand as the primary sources for this narrative brought with them preconceived notions of the lifestyle of the Ozarks and of the people they would encounter in Stone County, Arkansas, perceptions largely shaped by the portrayal of Arkansans, Ozarkers, and other highland southerners in the press and in the sphere of popular entertainment. For some of these newspapermen, everything they witnessed and heard would be filtered through this prism, every action of every local character attributable in some way to the presumed pathology of the mountaineer. Regardless of the preconceptions of the media and the American public, the Ozarks, like other largely rural American regions and the upland South in general, was neither as progressive as the small-town chambers of commerce would have it nor as divorced from the currents of modernity as the local colorists and folklorists liked to believe. As with most of our widely divergent perspectives, the truth—in this case the typical—lay somewhere in between.

The region's ambiguity reflected the spirit of the age, an ambivalence in the face of modernizing, rationalizing forces transforming American society into something exhilarating yet troubling, liberating yet confining. This spirit lay at the heart of the nation's fascination with stories such as the Connie Franklin murder. Embedded within Americans' embrace of modernity was a "deep disquiet," a "vague fear" that something elemental was being obliterated by the inexorable march of "progress." "They were willing to accept the new world completely," observed historian Warren I. Susman, "and unwilling to surrender the old world completely." In the face of dizzying technological advancement and disorienting social change, many Americans sought out lost worlds and clung to dying traditions and the people whose seemingly simpler and unfettered existences preserved them, people who had not yet succumbed to the overcivilization that threatened urban-industrial society, people such as those who must inhabit a place like the Ozarks. The 1920s may have been the decade of transatlantic flights, national radio networks, cross-country highways, and international telephone connections, but all these developments coexisted with, contributed to, "a nostalgia quite out of keeping with the dominant reputation of the twenties," a collective yearning manifested in the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg, Henry Ford's creation of Greenfield Village, and countless other efforts to memorialize or preserve the material culture and character of an innocent and heroic past.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from GHOST OF THE OZARKS by BROOKS BLEVINS Copyright © 2012 by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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