Murder, She Rewrote

Life, as they knew it, ended for three Natchez women in the fall of 1932. Jane Surget “Jennie” Merrill, an unmarried former belle just shy of 69, was killed with two bullets during a botched robbery. Emily Burns, a black laundress already widowed at age 37, was sent to the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman for Merrill’s murder. And Octavia Dockery, Merrill’s peer, neighbor, and nemesis, left her squalid home and went on tour.

In 2010, Dr. Karen L. Cox, professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, had settled into the Mississippi State Archives in Jackson to learn all she could about the Natchez Pilgrimage, the tour of antebellum homes which was celebrating its eightieth anniversary that year. Archivist Clinton Bagley had another recommendation for her research, Cox recalled in a recent interview: “‘If you really want to understand Natchez,’ he told me, ‘You should look into Goat Castle.’”

“Goat Castle” refers to Glenwood, the family home of Richard Dana and a residence shared by Octavia Dockery, caretaker for the unstable Dana, and their pet goats, who enjoyed free rein of both the Glenwood grounds and the dilapidated Greek Revival mansion. Jennie Merrill was not murdered at Glenwood, but at nearby Glenburnie, her own home. Yet it was Goat Castle that everyone wanted to see in the aftermath. It’s the hoof-dented hovel that people remember.

More ink than blood has been spilled from the death of Jennie Merrill, and she’s often not even the central figure in retellings—that honor goes to her former neighbors and their crumbling castle. Michael Llewellyn’s novelization of the events, The Goat Castle Murder, hit shelves in 2016. Two Country Roads articles, in 1986 and 2001, rehash the murder; and The Goat Castle Murder: The True Natchez Story that Shocked the World (1985), considered in recent years to be the seminal version, collects historic photographs with detailed descriptions by co-authors Sim C. Callon and Carolyn Vance Smith. (Smith also wrote the 2001 Country Roads article.) 

In 1932, as the scandal unfolded, the Natchez Democrat and the Times-Picayune furiously covered developments; the bizarre story tempted papers farther north, too. “Rich Woman Recluse Slain in Mississippi,” wrote the New York Times. “Eccentric Recluse, Aged Sweetheart Held in ‘Goat Feud’ Murder” read a caption in the Coshocton (Ohio) Tribune beneath a photo of Dana and Dockery, who drew quick suspicion from law enforcement for their ongoing disputes with Merrill. Murderers or not, readers couldn’t get enough of the twitchy pair dubbed “Wild Man” and “Goat Woman.” The two traveled the region as an act that fall, with life stories told on stage, an exhibit of Dockery’s writings, and a piano recital by Dana.

But before the articles, before the theatre bookings, before the trials, before the body surfaced in a thicket, before her cousin found Merrill’s house empty but violently spattered, before the rose-eating goats and feuding neighbors, before a belle grew into a spinster, and before the despair and resentment of Reconstruction, there was the Civil War and a little girl born to Ayres Phillips Merrill and Jane Surget Merrill in August 1863. Named for her mother, Jennie Merrill left Natchez with her family as a baby. 

The Merrills’ Union sympathies and Ayres’ friendship with General Grant helped save their wealth after the war but put a damper on their local popularity in the interim. The family relocated to New York City and later moved abroad when Grant appointed Ayres Merrill ambassador to Belgium.

Jennie Merrill moved back to Natchez for good at the turn of the century, then in her mid-thirties. She never married but received frequent love letters from her second cousin, Duncan Minor, until she moved home, upon which the letters evolved into nightly visits to her estate from his, Oakland Plantation. She does not appear to have returned his affection; only his letters to her are left, but they speak of frustrating unrequital. (Though following her death, one relative alleged the two eventually wed but hid it from Minor’s mother, in particular.)

She purchased Glenburnie in 1904. And in 1916, Dick Dana and Octavia Dockery became her neighbors. 

“Of course what originally drew me to Goat Castle is what everyone was drawn to from the get-go—the quirky nature of the people involved,” said Cox, whose rising fascination with the whole affair culminated in her own book, Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South, published by University of North Carolina Press in October 2017. “But it’s much more nuanced than that.”

To understand Natchez, she needed Goat Castle—and vice versa. “Landscape and geography play a part in the way it unfolded historically,” said Cox, who cites her historian’s approach to evaluating all angles. She made her first trip to the city in 2012, and subsequent visits took her to Glenburnie, the scene of the crime; to the warehouse to thumb through Adams County Courthouse ledgers that show Dockery and Dana skirting eviction notices and murder charges alike; and to the Adams County jail cell where Emily Burns and her mother Nellie Black were held for three months awaiting trial. Cox knew what the moon looked like the night a search party fanned out to look for Merrill’s body—that the headlights of the sheriff’s car offered more illumination. She could see the jail cell was “stark and miserable” and learned that “frigid air swept through the Deep South” as Burns and her mother sat in jail without so much as a formal charge.

The case itself is cut and dried in most accounts, with Dockery and Dana deemed guilty of nothing more sinister than poor housekeeping. Fingerprints and ballistics evidence convicted George Pearls, a black man originally from Natchez who’d returned to town looking for work. He took a room in Burns’ house, and the two—said to be romantically linked—traveled to Glenburnie to rob the wealthy Jennie Merrill on the night of August 4. Pearls was killed days later in Arkansas, during an unrelated confrontation with a police officer. Burns confessed and went to jail.

But the enduring intrigue lies in how Dockery and Dana (and even the haughty spinster, Merrill, and her lovelorn cousin, Minor) seemed to sink to the battered, eccentric condition in which the Old South entered the new century. Credited with high-society lineage, Wild Man and Goat Woman spent decades squatting in Goat Castle, a place Dana inherited but could not pay taxes on. “Ill prepared for poverty,” writes Carolyn Vance Smith in the October 2001 Country Roads story, “they were unable to keep up the once magnificent Glenwood. The mansion disintegrated into a shambles with rotten porch floors, windows and doors permanently ajar, banisters hanging at crazy angles.”

Pity spared Dockery and Dana the indignity of a trial. Fingerprint evidence placed the pair at the scene of Merrill’s death but Adams County could not manage to seat the required twelve male jurors to hear the case, and the fingerprint expert, James Chancellor, was not called by the prosecution; the defense attorneys attempted a subpoena but could not remember his first name. 

Those dismissed potential jurors cited “fixed opinions” or an opposition to the death penalty. With Pearls dead and Burns in jail, the city seemed eager for the whole case to go away. But Dockery and Dana would not leave the public eye for years; along with the piano recitals, tours of Goat Castle continued to piggyback on the publicity of Natchez Pilgrimage, offering walks of the Glenwood grounds for twenty-five cents; another quarter granted admission inside the house.

“The story was always about Dick Dana and Octavia Dockery and the conditions they lived in,” said Cox. “It didn’t matter who went away. That was the story.”

What could this North Carolina historian contribute to a decades-old drama, as fascinating as it is? “The story I had to tell was of Emily Burns,” she said, “and that was so much harder.”

Emily Burns went by “Sister” among family and friends and was described thus in the Convict Register at the Mississippi State Penitentiary: “Age: 37. Height and weight: 5’1” and 105 lbs. Hair: Black. Eyes: Black. Complexion: Brown. Face: Oval. Mouth: Large. Teeth: Good. Nose: Small. Eyebrows: Medium. Education in years: 5th grade.” “Her closest living relative was her mother, Nellie Black,” writes Cox in Goat Castle. “Her most recent occupation was listed as ‘maid.’ [Prison registrar Ola Mae Spickard] also recorded her religion—Baptist. Sister and her family were longtime members of Antioch Baptist Church, but on this day she joined a different kind of congregation, becoming Convict 7290.”

Though they fawned over Dockery and Dana, reporters did not once interview Burns in the months she awaited trial, but the sheriff and his deputies did. Through frequent interrogations over ten days, Burns maintained that Pearls was simply a lodger at her house. On the eleventh day, Special Deputy John Junkin placed a bullwhip before Burns. Her confession came soon after. The Natchez Democrat published an edited version of the signed confession, which left out Burns’ insistence that Dockery and Dana had joined Pearls inside the home, that the odd couple had planned the robbery and enlisted Pearls, while she remained outside. It ends:

While I’ve been jail I couldn’t have been treated no better if I’d been a white lady. They’ve been very kind to me. Nobody has promised me anything and nobody has threatened me since I’ve been in jail. I’ve told this because I’ve wanted to and wanted to tell the truth. I’m doing this of my own free will.

“Someone had to pay the price for Jennie Merrill’s murder,” said Cox. “No one wanted to send two older white people who lived in a derelict house to prison. Someone had to pay. It’s 1932, it’s the era of Jim Crow. There’s just this assumption that black people are nefarious characters.”

On November 26, 1932, the jury deliberated for no more than half an hour before finding Burns guilty as charged—accessory to murder, carrying the same punishment “as though she had actually fired the shot which killed and murdered the said Jane Surget Merrill,” read the jury instructions—but they hesitated over the death penalty.

“Even at the trial they found it troublesome. I don’t think they thought she was guilty,” said Cox. 

In December 1940, a “mercy court” held by Mississippi governor Paul B. Johnson Jr. led to Emily Burns’ release from the notorious Parchman penitentiary, where overcrowding was rampant and prisoners worked twelve hours a day in cotton fields, six days a week. She returned to Natchez; down the road, Dick Dana and Octavia Dockery continued to charge admission for tours of their home—never putting that money toward taxes or promised restorations—until they passed away in 1948 and 1949, respectively. Burns remarried and lived until 1969. The New York Times ran obituaries for Dockery and Dana; not even the local paper carried a note for Burns.

“I think one of [Cox’s] greatest contributions is giving Emily Burns back her life,” said Mimi Miller, executive director of the Historic Natchez Foundation. “Nobody knew her.”

At least, nobody writing books about Goat Castle did. Duncan Morgan, past HNF president (and “walking encyclopedia,” according to Miller), offered his own memories as well an invaluable introduction to the Antioch Baptist Church, where Burns remained an active member until her death. “I knew Miss Burns,” Morgan told Cox. “She lived across from me.”

In October 2015, Cox met with members of the Burns’ church and visited with her remaining relatives, second cousins who let the author hold the family bible and showed her a lone photograph, reproduced in Goat Castle (and on page 48).

“It took me four or five years to finally make that connection with her family. It paid off,” said Cox. 

“Writers can have a great influence,” said Miller, who credits Cox’s work as well as recent books by Greg Iles and Richard Grant for introducing Natchez to a new audience. “She took the topic and made it something other than a salacious tale.”

“Emily Burns got justice in the end,” added Cox. “Her story was told.”  

Learn more about Dr. Karen L. Cox and Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South at karenlcoxauthor.com. Cox’s next book will be about the Rhythm Club Fire, the 1940 disaster which claimed the lives of over two hundred people in Natchez.