Touring “Murder in Coweta” Country

Written and Photographed by JACKIE KENNEDY Historical Photographs courtesy of MARK PUCKETT

Long before Margaret Anne Barnes wrote “Murder in Coweta County,” I’d heard the story.

I was 14 when the book came out in 1976 and, while it filled in some gaps, I already knew the basics of west Georgia’s infamous mid-century crime: Meriwether County businessman John Wallace killed a farmhand in Coweta County in 1948 and went to the electric chair for it two years later. Coweta County Sheriff Lamar Potts led the investigation, and Heard County fortune-teller Mayhayley Lancaster testified at the trial.

The whole thing started over a cow. The story had, and 75 years later still has, all the components of a Southern Gothic novel: a rural landscape, odd characters, flawed individuals, heroes, poverty, violence and, perhaps most notably, villains who portray themselves as innocent victims.

John Wallace was the villain, but he wasn’t an easy villain. While many, then and now, viewed him as hard and cruel, others recognized the prominent landowner as a generous man who donated to churches and neighbors in need. He lived as an oxymoron, saintly and sinister, a compelling character if ever there was one, and with a flair for drama. Indeed, once charged with murder, he played the victim with aplomb.

Lamar Potts was the hero lawman. Like a hungry bloodhound, he stayed on the heels of Wallace, sniffing out the truth, and ultimately arrested the man deemed responsible for the April 20, 1948 death of William Turner.

My daddy was 19 at the time, living on a farm near LaGrange and, like others across west Georgia, was riveted by the story of the farmer down the road charged with killing the help. Daddy worked for Chipley’s Dry Cleaners, in what’s now Pine Mountain, and knew folks who were kin to or worked for Wallace.

I grew up hearing Daddy’s recollections of the crime and the characters involved. Bar none, my favorite of those stories was the one Daddy told about getting stopped by Sheriff Potts after trying to outrun him; during the conversation that ensued, Potts let Daddy go after learning he worked at the Troup County Shop for a mutual friend.

Mama had tales related to west Georgia’s most famous heinous crime, too. She had met Mayhayley Lancaster, the odd character in this Gothic tale. Years before Lancaster testified at Wallace’s trial, my mom accompanied her mother to visit the Heard County psychic. My grandmother had lost her wedding rings, and Lancaster told her in what room, what dresser, what drawer, and what corner of the drawer she would find them. And that’s exactly where they were.

I loved hearing Mama talk of how she and her mother maneuvered through Mayhayley’s pack of scraggly dogs to get to the shack where the visionary lived. “A dollar and a dime,” Mama heard the oneeyed oracle charge her mother for the vision. “That’s a dollar for me, a dime for my dogs.”

Decades later, my sensitive and compassionate mother still worried over Mayhayley’s bony hounds: “As scrawny as those poor dogs were, it should’ve been a dime for her and a dollar for the dogs.”

After the trial of John Wallace, Lancaster raised her price for a reading to $2.75. The notoriety had brought even more fame to west Georgia’s best-known woman.

Through the years, I’ve lost count of how many stories I’ve heard from folks born or raised here who were related to John Wallace, or were helped by Lamar Potts, or visited Mayhayley for a reading of their fortune or future. Like attending church on Sunday or frying chicken in a pan, growing up with some link to west Georgia’s most-talked-about murder was practically a given.

The Book

A native of Newnan, Margaret Anne Barnes was in her early 20s when the murder took place. After studying journalism at the

University of Georgia, she came home to Coweta County to practice her craft. She was working as a reporter for The Newnan TimesHerald in 1948 as the story she would later chronicle unfolded yards away at the Coweta County Courthouse.

Barnes’ book was published in 1976 and has been reprinted at least twice since then. It’s currently out of print but still in circulation as copies turn up frequently in used bookstores and online. For her effort, Barnes won the Edgar Allan Poe Society Award for outstanding fact-crime study from the Mystery Writers of America. Her book has been used to teach college-level criminal law and sociology.

Barnes’s account of the murder, abbreviated, went like this: John Wallace fired William Turner after a dispute over payment and kicked the tenant off his property. To even the score, the farmhand stole one of the farmer’s registered Guernsey cows. Wallace found his cow where Turner had pastured it in Carrollton, and the farmhand was arrested in Carroll County and transferred to the Meriwether County Jail in Greenville. Wallace conspired with Meriwether County Sheriff Hardy Collier for Turner’s release from jail at a prescribed time; when the time came, Wallace and his cronies were waiting at the courthouse in Greenville. When they saw the just-set-free Turner pull up in his truck, Herring Sivell, driving John Wallace, took off in hot pursuit, followed by Henry Mobley and Tom Strickland in another vehicle.

Turner led the chase up Highway 27 and into Coweta County with Wallace and company fast behind. Just past the county line, Turner’s truck started sputtering as it ran out of gas, and the frightened cattle rustler swerved into the parking lot at the Sunset Tourist Camp outside Moreland. Eight witnesses saw a scuffle, and most attested that Wallace cracked Turner over the back of his head with the barrel of a sawed-off shotgun. Before sunset, Turner was dead. A week later, Wallace was charged with murder and behind bars at the Coweta County jail.

Barnes’ book retells the story told in newspaper accounts throughout Georgia and the South – about how Wallace threw the body down a well, then retrieved and burned it; about the search for Turner that ended when bone chips were found on Wallace’s property; about the trial that was covered by Atlanta newspapers; and how Wallace was found guilty and sentenced to death on the testimony of two black men, a rarity in the mid-1900s.

A major linchpin to the story, and hence its title: Had Turner’s truck run out of gas a mile or two sooner, the murder would have taken place in Meriwether County, where Wallace was a prominent businessman and friends with local lawmen who, it is surmised, would not have made a case against him.

But the incident occurred in Coweta, where legend and lore catapulted Lamar Potts to hero status as the sheriff who sought truth and justice.

The Movie

When we heard the moviemakers had hired Andy Griffith to portray John Wallace and Johnny Cash to play the part of Sheriff Potts in the movie reenactment of the crime, my family was certain the casting directors had lost their minds. Why, in the name of Hollywood, would you hire the good sheriff of Mayberry – Opie’s daddy, for God’s sake – to play the part of west Georgia’s meanest-ever man?

And why, in the name of Nashville, would you choose one of the original outlaws of outlaw country music to play Potts? Johnny

Cash spent a few nights in jail and swore in “Folsom Prison Blues” that he’d killed a man just to watch him die. How could The Man in Black pull off the role of the saintly Sheriff Potts?

While we had our doubts about the leading men, there was one casting that seemed to make perfect sense: June Carter Cash as Mayhayley Lancaster. Like Mayhayley, June had a particular weirdness about her. I’d gone with Mama and Daddy to see her perform with Johnny at Franklin Country Music Park in the early '80s. Her herky-jerky movements on stage were hard to watch; her voice, at least for me, equally difficult to hear. Her long, black, straw-like hair reminded me of Lily Munster, which made it easy to imagine her capturing the witchy aura of the Heard County soothsayer.

Because the Coweta County Courthouse had been modernized with its interior walls painted Pepto-Bismol pink in 1982, the trial scenes in “Murder in Coweta County” were filmed at the courthouse in Zebulon. For days, onlookers got as close as they could to the courthouse to watch Griffith and the Cashs come and go. Locals from all around played bit parts as Cowetans in the courthouse audience.

The made-for-TV movie was among the first important productions filmed primarily in Georgia. There’s certainly irony in the fact that a Coweta County story was west Georgia’s first major flirtation with Hollywood, to which we are now wed, with moviemaking

The Heard County Old Jail, in Franklin, is home to the Heard County Historical Center and Museum and features numerous items on the county's legendary Mayhayley Lancaster. BELOW in our region so commonplace it’s sometimes considered a nuisance more than novelty.

The refurbished Coweta County Courthouse appears today much like it did in 1948 when John Wallace was found guilty of murder at his trial there.

The Follow-Ups

For a quarter century, Barnes’ volume was the only book about the murder. In the past two decades, at least three books and a play have been penned about the story or its characters.

In 2001, Dot Moore, who grew up in Heard County and met Mayhayley when she was a child, published “Oracle of the Ages: Reflections on the Curious Life of Fortune Teller Mayhayley Lancaster.” The work of creative nonfiction added flesh to the bones of the psychic by telling of her work as a teacher, lawyer, political activist and numbers runner. A quick and captivating read, the volume earned Moore the 2002 Lilla M. Hawes

Award for best book in Georgia county or local history.

Ten years later, Moore released her second book, this time delving into the life of the story’s protagonist. In “No Remorse: The Rise and Fall of John Wallace,” Moore fleshes out the killer by introducing him as a child exposed early to crime. Her biography follows Wallace into adulthood and, ultimately, to the electric chair.

In April 2016, Jeff Bishop, a Newnan author and historian, brought the story to the live stage. His play, “Flies at the Well: The Trial of the Killer John Wallace,” was performed three times at the Wadsworth Auditorium in Newnan. The musical drama was a retelling of the popular story and included sacred harp music from 19th century Coweta County.

In 2018, Carla Cook Smith

(now deceased) released her book, “Parakeets in Whitesburg,” as an epilogue to the “Murder in Coweta County” story. Her book focuses primarily on William Turner, the man whose murder gave life to this 71-year-old phenomenon.

The Memories

In the summer of 2018, people connected to the case gathered at the historic Coweta County Courthouse for a screening of the movie at the location of the trial.

“Seventy years ago this room was filled up like this,” said Dick Atkins, the movie’s producer.

The 70-year anniversary commemoration featured a panel that included John William Turner, son of the murder victim. During the weekend’s event, he watched, for the first time, the movie that portrayed his father’s death. Like several others on the panel, it was the first time he’d spoken publicly about the murder.

Also on the panel was Sam Collier, grand-nephew of Meriwether County Sheriff Hardy Collier, who was portrayed in the book and movie as being duplicitous to the crime.

“I didn’t like the way he was portrayed because I knew he was a different type of person,” the nephew said.

Al Brooks also attended the anniversary event. He is grandson of the field hand Albert Brooks, one of two Wallace workers who helped their employer dispose of Turner’s body and then testified against him at trial.

“He didn’t like to talk about what happened,” Brooks said of his grandfather. “He would get mad if you talked about it.”

Albert Brooks and Robert Lee Gates were black men whose testimony played a role in Wallace receiving a death sentence. Wallace’s was one of the first cases in Georgia where a white man got the electric chair on the testimony of black men. Smith firmly believed it was less the words of Brooks and Gates and more Wallace’s own testimony that did him in.

“He didn’t look good on the stand,” said Smith. “If his testimony was anything like Andy Griffith played it in the movie, it’s no wonder he got the death penalty.”

The Tour

Based in Senoia, Georgia Tour Company hosted its first driving tour devoted to “Murder in Coweta County” in 2019. “A Deadly Run to Coweta County” may take guests through five counties crucial to the story: Coweta, Meriwether, Harris, Troup and Heard.

Smith wrote the script for the tour, which begins in Senoia with the movie playing as the bus driver steers through “Murder in Coweta County” country. As we pass red dirt banks and pine tree forests, the movie shows the scene at Sunset Tourist Court when Wallace beats Turner as an onlooker implores: “Why don’t you just handcuff him?” A crazed-looking Andy Griffith, as Wallace, barks back: “Why don’t you mind your own damn business?”

Smith said she talked with dozens of people who knew or were related to principal players in the drama. Her research led her to make several conclusions, one being that perhaps the line between hero and villain, while penned in permanent ink by Barnes, is not so black-and-white after all.

“If you ask people in Coweta County today what they think of Lamar Potts, 98 percent will say he was great,” Smith said in 2019. “But if you ask the people in Meriwether County the same question, 100 percent of them will say he had a vendetta against John Wallace.”

Smith tends to agree with Sam Collier that his Uncle Hardy actually may not have participated in Wallace’s scheme to undo Turner.

“Hardy Collier was not a sniveling man,” says Smith. “He was a very strong man, and no one pushed him around, not even John Wallace.”

In Greenville, the bus stops at the former Meriwether County Jail where Turner was imprisoned in a second-story cell before he was killed. We step inside the cell believed to be where Turner spent his last night alive. Later in the tour, we visit the Coweta County jail cell where Wallace spent his last days. Again, we step inside to inspect crusty steel and peeling paint.

In between the cell stops, we see the church in Pine Mountain where prominent mid-century Methodist pastor Dr. Charles Allen preached Wallace’s funeral. We visit Wallace’s grave in a nearby Pine Mountain cemetery. Buried in the same cemetery are Mobley, Strickland and Sivell, the jokers with Wallace on the day Turner died.

At Wallace’s grave, one of the unsung characters in the drama is recalled. His widow, Josephine, stood by her man even though by most accounts he was, at worst, abusive to her and at best, indifferent. While he left land and mementoes to other family members and various friends, he left nothing to Josephine. When a friend who read his will brought it to his attention, he crassly replied: “She can get a job.”

And she did. For years, she worked at Mansour’s, a popular department store in LaGrange. She assisted my mother in many transactions, and Mama remembered her as soft-spoken, reserved and sweet.

For the most part, Josephine appears as an afterthought in the “Murder in Coweta County” book and movie. Her life, before and after her husband’s execution, was difficult. Before, he was not kind to her; after, history was not.