Images courtesy The History Press
Selden Richardson likes his dead good and dead — and his children do, too. What he finds galling and disturbing are unmarked graves. “My daughter can tell you of a wretched summer spent loping around Oakwood Cemetery trying to find some of these final resting places,” he explains. “You know that they’re there, but you can’t find them. I like my dead extra dead, with their gravestones visible, their names spelled correctly and with the correct dates, engraved in stone.”
Not all the subjects were so accommodating for his latest effort, an anthology called “Richmond Murder & Mayhem.” The evocative and deftly researched volume about bad people committing awful acts and assorted terrible happenstances is available June 26 from The History Press.
Selden Richardson (Photo by Adam Ewing)
Richardson’s previous titles include the invaluable “Built by Blacks: African American Architecture and Neighborhoods in Richmond” and a vivid study of career criminals Robert Mais and Walter Legenza and their Depression-era spree of crime, murder and escapes, “The Tri-State Gang in Richmond: Murder and Robbery in the Great Depression.” He’s also a frequent contributor to the online Shockoe Examiner, which peers into the nooks and crannies of Richmond’s history. Some of Richardson’s recountings of dirty deeds first appeared there.
His latest grim bouquet of true crime came in part from photographs found on eBay. “Most of these things are so obscure, nobody knew what they were looking at, much less how to bid on them,” he says. Among Richardson’s stories are the strange 1894 death of Greensboro, North Carolina, businessman James Winstead, involving the observation balcony on the clock tower of what we today call Old City Hall, and the tale of Imperial Airlines Flight 201/8, which in November 1961 was supposed to carry 74 U.S. Army recruits to Columbia, South Carolina, but instead ended in the woods near the present-day Richmond International Airport. Due in part to Richardson’s research, the men’s family and friends, following considerable effort, in 2017 placed a historic marker about the event at Second and Spring streets.
Some of the people in these stories, both assailants and victims, seem devised by a writer who savors juxtapositions. Take the 1918 case of young Alice Knight, whose smile reveals a gap between her front buck teeth and who unfortunately married North Carolina dentist Lemuel Johnson. The intertwined tales of working class, walleyed Violet Merryman and redheaded, freckled Emma Dooms involve murder, robbery and confinement and require two sections of their own in the book.
And then there’s John Wesley Faison, married to Martha and parent of five, who became obsessed with a Hanover Avenue music teacher, Elsie Snipes. Snipes regards the reader from her picture, mouth in a slight smile and wearing an arm-baring flapper dress. (Her former husband was raising their two children in North Carolina.) The story from 1927 raises the question of whether there is such a thing as a femme fatale or merely weak men. Whatever the answer, it doesn’t end well. But Richardson shows that every mug shot tells a story.
