The Waco Horror

Peter Spering 

Texas, May 1916.

A gentle breeze sweeps through the fields of a Texan farm on a spring afternoon. A young man and his teenage sister are crossing the two hundred acre stretch, tired after a day’s cotton cutting. When they get back to the house, they notice that their mother is not there, contrary to the norm. They promptly started searching around the farm.

Just as the young man was going to look elsewhere, he hears a scream.

He follows the sound to the seed house and finds his sister, horror etched onto her face as she stared through the window. He rushes over to her side and quickly shares her terror. Through the window, he sees his mother lying still in a pool of blood. Lucy Fryer is dead.

The police quickly mount an investigation which leads them to a black farm labourer called Jesse Washington. From what they could gather, the teenager had bludgeoned the matriarch with a hammer following an argument about mules, buried the murder weapon and then returned to work. The police arrested Washington who was at first described as frightened, but who later curled up in the back of the police car and fell asleep.

The police took him into custody and kept him there, at least in part to stop ‘unlawful demonstration’. Especially as the press began running with false, inflammatory titbits with the intention of rousing the public.

For the same reason, Washington was fast-tracked through the legal process, facing trial just a couple of days after being taken in. He signed a confession with an ‘X’ and subsequently was brought before a jury, who decided within four minutes that he was guilty.

Jesse Washington was quite severely mentally disabled. So much so that even learning to read or write was beyond his grasp, despite his teachers best efforts.

News of Washington’s trial spread like wildfire. Ford Model Ts and horse-drawn carriages rallied to the courthouse in droves, others spilling out of filled trains. The plan had been to beat the crowds and execute the teenager post-haste, but when he was escorted out of the courthouse, he was met by a thousand eyes, mad with sadistic glee and vengeance.

The crowd snatched the boy from his escort, away from their guard, and planted him firmly in the bosom of his nemesis. The teenager wrestled with his captors, even biting one of them, but it was futile. They put a chain around his neck, stripped him and dragged him through the crowd, letting him scream and struggle as his body was pierced by blades numerous times. Those without knives simply beat him.

By the time they arrived at the predetermined tree, he was already soaked in blood but alive nonetheless. There, they pinned him to the ground whilst a select few crouched over him. Washington could only look at their grinning faces whilst they cut off his fingers, chopped off his genitalia and sliced off his toes. Then, they doused his mutilated body in oil and strung up on the tree, lighting a fire beneath him. They repeatedly raised and lowered him into it, in order to prolong the suffering. Washington tried to climb up the chain but, having no fingers, was unable to do it.

The crowd cheered, laughed and smiled throughout the lynching. Children came to look during their lunch hour. The torturing of Jesse Washington lasted two hours. By the end, there was nothing left:

To round off a day of medieval maleficence, the crowd thought souvenirs were in order. One person took part of his genitals, kids snapped the teeth out of his head to sell and others took his bones. A pioneer of photography, Fred Gildersleeve, took photos of the event and sold them as postcards:

The mayor and chief of police were observers of the lynching and the county sheriff, Samuel Fleming, ordered his deputies not to intervene. Why? Because he feared it would hurt his chances of re-election.

It’s not ancient but it is an old, prime example of everyone behaving at their absolute worst. Disgustingly primal and selfish.