Free Bloody Williamson by Paul M. Angle

shot?”
    ANSWER : “There he is.” [Cairns pointed to Peter Hiller.]
    Jones testified that Clark was the man who, at Crenshaw Crossing, urged that the scabs be killed, and that he was one of the two men who led McDowell away at Moake Crossing.
    At 2.10 p.m. on Thursday, December 21, after having called thirty-nine witnesses, the state rested. Court was then dismissed until the following morning. Chief counsel Kerr took advantage of the recess to outline for the press the tactics of the defense. He and his associates would prove that the guards and gunmen were the aggressors, and that they brought the fatal attack upon themselves. The defense would prove that Ewing’s account of the water incident at the cemetery was fictitious, and that several of the other state’s witnesses testified falsely. And they would prove, by many of the most reliable citizens of the county, that the men now on trial could have had no connection with the killings.
    The defense followed Kerr’s forecast without deviation. As soon as court convened on the morning of December 22 two witnesseswere called to testify to the closing of the road, one of the original causes of community resentment. A third described the provocative acts of Lester’s guards. That afternoon four members of the Conroy family—father, mother, son, and daughter—related what had happened on the afternoon before the massacre. According to John, the son, whose story was most explicit, the crowd gathered outside the mine between 1.30 and 2.00 p.m., were fired upon by the guards, and returned the fire. The witness saw a white flag raised on a pile of overburden between 5.30 and 6.00 p.m., but insisted that the guards continued their firing. He saw no one whom he knew with a gun. After the Conroys had finished, Ed Crenshaw, who also lived near the mine, described the killing of Jordie Henderson. According to his story, Henderson was lying on the ground about a hundred yards from the Crenshaw house, his head raised so that he could watch the shooting from the mine. Suddenly he slumped, rolled on his side, and lay still. He was unarmed, Crenshaw said, when he was shot.
    The next morning the judge announced that court would recess until January 2, 1923.
    For three days after the trial was resumed witnesses told of the provocations of the guards—their interference with berry pickers, their roughness, their abusive language. Others described the firearms and ammunition which they had seen in the mine before the attack. Still others swore that on the afternoon of June 21 the first shots were fired from the mine, and that the shooting continued after the strikebreakers had hoisted their white flag.
    By January 5 the defense had completed the testimony by which it sought to show that the striking miners were justified in attacking the mine. Now it turned to alibis. On that day alone fifteen witnesses took the stand to swear that they had watched the “death march” on the morning of the 22nd, that they knew all the defendants, and that they saw none of them in the mob. Similar testimony took up the next several days. Then the defensebecame specific. Kerr and his associates started with Joe Carnaghi. A Herrin woman who ran a small dairy testified that she had sold him milk between 7.00 and 7.30 on the morning of June 22; three others corroborated her story. According to the next two witnesses, Carnaghi was working in his garden between 7.45 and 8.15. Two people saw him pulling a cake of ice along the street in a child’s wagon before 9.00; five others placed him in downtown Herrin not later than 9.00. One of these, F. L. Baucher, picked up Carnaghi and a companion and drove them to the Herrin cemetery. By the time of their arrival the Lester men were lying in the road, dead. From there the three drove to the powerhouse where, of course, only dead bodies were to be found.
    Carnaghi’s alibi was the most elaborate, but an ample number of witnesses testified on behalf of the other