by John C. Tucker
"May God Have Mercy" tells the story of the rape and
murder of 19-year-old Wanda Thompson, and how Roger Coleman was
eventually convicted and executed for the crime, despite grave doubts
of his guilt.
Chapter I: MURDER - Next
Buchanan County, Virginia
The town of Grundy doesn't fit the usual genteel image of Virginia.
Grundy is the county seat of Buchanan County, in the heart of
Appalachia. It is farther south than all but a sliver of Kentucky,
and farther west than most of West Virginia. It is so far west
that the mixture of mud, water and coal dust that flows through
town in the Levisa Fork river runs west to the Mississippi instead
of east to the Atlantic Ocean.
It's nearly a seven hour drive from Grundy to Virginia's capital
in Richmond, but only thirteen miles to West Virginia - due east.
You can't buy a drink of liquor in Grundy, so some of it's less
reputable citizens make the short trip to the Acapulco Club, just
over the state line. Others drink the moonshine made in Buchanan
County's mountain hollows. It's a toss up whether you're more
likely to go blind from drinking the moonshine or getting slashed
by a broken beer bottle at the Acapulco.
 |
| Courthouse of Grundy, Virginia. (Photo Courtesy
John Tucker) |
If you head west from Grundy, it's sixteen miles to Pike County,
Kentucky - site of the feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys,
and some celebrated battles between revenuers and moonshiners.
During prohibition the revenue men rarely ventured into Virginia
- it was too dangerous, and besides, Virginia politicians didn't
care any more for federal intervention in whiskey making than
they did forty years later when the issue was segregation. In
1935 Sherwood Anderson wrote about a moonshining case tried in
federal court in Roanoke. The defendants included the sheriff
of Franklin County and the County Prosecutor, Carter Lee, Robert
E.'s grand nephew. From the evidence, Anderson wrote, it seemed
as if Franklin County, Virginia, was "the wettest spot in
the United States." Up the road in Buchanan County some of
the residents smiled.
Today, the only significant business in Buchanan county is mining
coal. Unless you have a private airplane, you're most likely to
approach Grundy by driving northwest on highway 460. Once you
cross the height of land, the headwaters of Levisa Fork appear
and the highway follows its valley. Soon road and river are joined
by the tracks of the Norfolk & Western Railroad, built to
carry the rich coal deposits of Buchanan County to market.
In 1931, shortly before the railroad announced its plan to extend
its tracks in Buchanan County, a few prominent citizens began
purchasing mineral rights from the families who had settled the
area a century earlier. The depression was on and life was even
harder than usual for families trying to scratch a living from
Buchanan's steep slopes and thin soil. For a man who owned a couple
of hundred acres of mostly untillable mountain side, the dollar
an acre he was offered for whatever was underneath was found money
- money he was too poor to turn down even if he suspected the
buyer knew something he didn't. Thus in early 1931 thousands of
acres of Buchanan County mineral rights changed hands for next
to nothing. A few years later, while most of its citizens remained
dirt poor, Buchanan County boasted some of the wealthiest families
in Virginia - and still does. Among them are the McGlothlins and
the Steeles, founders and owners of United Coal Company, one of
the largest privately owned coal companies in America. Organized
in 1970 by a group of local lawyers and businessmen who decided
to invest in some then depressed coal properties, United grew
rapidly, just in time for the 1973 Arab oil boycott to multiply
the price of coal and the value of United's properties. Two decades
later Jim McGlothlin, United's CEO and largest shareholder, is
one of the richest men in America.
 |
| A statue of a coal miner stands outside the
courthouse where Roger Coleman was tried and convicted. (Photo
Courtesy John Tucker) |
Coal is mined three ways in Buchanan County - strip mining, drift
mining and deep shaft mining. The strip mines use giant earth
movers to chew off the tops of mountains and ridges. Drift mines
tunnel straight into the side of a mountain, removing the narrow
bands of coal which followed its contours when the mountain was
raised up by the massive force of colliding tectonic plates. The
deep shaft mines burrow straight down to where the coal was formed,
and then spread out to capture it.
As you approach Grundy, large industrial compounds appear along
the road, each with its own rail spur and a windowless, square-sided
tower sheathed in corrugated metal. These are the shaft mines
where miners work far below the surface, raised and lowered in
cages attached to a cable. The mine on your left in Vansant, just
east of Grundy, is Consolidated Coal Company's Pocahontas Mine
No.3. Its shaft descends some fifteen hundred feet straight down
to the "Pocahontas" seam which runs beneath much of
Buchanan County. Once the seam is reached tunnels spread out in
many directions, following the rich deposits of coal. Some tunnels
run for many miles with a maze of side tunnels as well. The mountain
whose insides are now being devoured by Pocahontas No. 3 is not
even visible from the mine entrance in Vansant.
The shaft mines of Buchanan County are among the deepest, gassiest,
and most dangerous coal mines in America. Because they release
so much deadly and explosive methane gas, these mines require
exceptionally strong air circulation, so that working in them
is like working in a wind tunnel. In a place that is always damp
and cold, a wind blowing a steady twenty five miles an hour may
keep the mine from exploding, but after an eight hour shift some
miners think favorably of the fiery cremation chosen by Dan McGrew
in the Robert Service poem.
Even so, the miners who work the deep shafts have two advantages
over those who work the drift mines that tunnel into the mountainsides
of nearly every "hollow" in Buchanan County. One is
that the deep shaft mines are unionized, while United Coal and
most companies that own drift mines are not. The other is that
a shaft miner can usually stand up while he works. The Pocahontas
seam is nearly five feet thick, and the tunnels which work it
are at least as high as the seam, but the drift mine seams and
the tunnels which follow them are typically 36 inches high or
less. A drift miner works on his hands and knees. For a miner
who avoids being crippled, burned or buried alive, the usual question
is which will give out first - his lungs, his back or his knees.
As U.S. 460 enters Grundy from the east it becomes the main street
of the business district. Although Grundy's population is less
than 2,000, it is the only incorporated town in Buchanan County
and the main commercial center for the surrounding area. The left
side of the road is lined with a variety of businesses. In the
center of town, on the right, is the Buchanan County Courthouse,
an ugly 88 year old structure of grey stone. More recently a wing
has been added, with an entrance of concrete blocks molded to
imitate the stone. At the corner of the building, where a short
side street runs off to the right, a striking bronze sculpture
of a coal miner stands on a black marble base. He is dressed in
work boots and coveralls, his pant legs taped over his boot tops
to keep out the coal dust. His miner's helmet and headlamp are
tilted back at a jaunty angle, revealing longish hair which is
surely blonde in real life. He stands erect, holding a miner's
pick waist high, and seems to gaze off to a distant horizon -
a pose suggesting either that the sculptor had never been in a
coal mine or that the mine owners who contributed to his commission
were disinclined to show their workers crawling on hands and knees
in a tunnel barely three feet high.
Beyond the court house and another side street Slate Creek approaches
the highway from the right, passes beneath it and empties into
Levisa Fork, which there makes a sharp bend to the west, leaving
the highway to fetch up against a sheer cliff of grey stone. On
the face of the stone members of the latest graduating class of
Grundy Senior High School have painted their class numerals and
a pictorial tribute to the incongruous school mascot, a golden
wave.
To avoid the cliff, Route 460 pauses at a stoplight and turns
ninety degrees left to follow the river to Kentucky, while another
road heads off to the right, following Slate Creek upstream to
West Virginia.
Until recently, Tuffy's barbershop occupied the building on the
corner where the highway turns. In the basement of the shop was
a shower room where, for a small fee, coal miners coming from
work could remove their work clothes and wash some of the black
coal dust off their skin and out of their hair before returning
home. The barbershop and bathhouse are closed now, so unless he
works at one of the big mines with its own shower room, a miner
takes his coating of coal dust home.
If the coal miner's statute next to the Courthouse pays tribute
to the economic heartbeat of Buchanan county, the Courthouse itself
plays a central role in one of the region's principle recreational
activities - violence, especially murder, rape, and wife beating,
with an occasional dose of labor strife thrown in.
While Grundy can't boast a strike as bloody as the one which brought
nearby Harlan, Kentucky the nickname Bloody Harlan, a few years
ago the most violent coal strike in decades was centered next
door in Dickenson County. Before it was over hundreds of miners
had been jailed, and a judge named McGlothlin had fined the United
Mine Workers millions of dollars. In the next election, Buchanan
County's incumbent state representative, also a McGlothlin, lost
his seat to the President of the Mineworkers local.
As for casual violence, Grundy's recent generation of young layabouts
and drug dealers can hold their own in any league. In February,
1981, under the headline "Murder No Longer Safe in Buchanan,"
Grundy's newspaper, the Mountaineer, profiles a young
lawyer who was the county's Commonwealth's Attorney, or prosecutor
- Jim McGlothlin's younger brother Michael. The article reports
that since taking office a year earlier, Mickey McGlothlin had
successfully prosecuted seven murder cases. It doesn't mention
that the murder rate in Buchanan County in 1981 was higher than
New York City's.
A month after the article praising Mickey McGlothlin appeared
in the Mountaineer, Grundy's young Commonwealth's Attorney had
another murder to prosecute.
Continue : Read Chapter II
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