The Conclusion of  

Barrels of Lightning 

 

Saraland Mayor Oscar Driver was a prominent citizen in a young town surrounded by criminal activity. Driver focused on corruption in city government and was ready to make a move against the police chief along with most of the fire department.

The employees at wife Manie Driver’s loan company also disappeared overnight, having supposedly left their families and skipped town with their boyfriends.

Oscar returns to his rural home having told a colleague something big is about to happen.

 

Oscar switched the motor off and opened the door, unaware of the dark silhouette in the azalea bushes.

A shotgun blast caught Driver in his left side, pellets riddling his upper body, his lungs, his heart. The force wheeled him against the car.

The shooter moved a few steps and fired the 12-gauge again. The car’s rear window exploded. Moved. Fired again.

Driver slumped to the ground and barely crawled toward the home’s back door before stopping for good.

 

Across the road at the hunting club, the boys heard a bang and looked to the Driver home. Casey said the sound seemed to come from Hilltop Avenue. Roy, who worked at the station, said, “I saw the gunfire.”

Oscar’s grandson Buddy left the group, his shoes slapping the asphalt as he loped across the darkened highway.

 

Highway Patrolman J.D. Nance was at the club talking to Buddy and thought the sound came from a pistol, that it was possibly a car of kids heading up Hilltop Avenue with time and gunpowder on their hands. He pulled out of the parking lot and shot across to Hilltop, cruising west past the Driver home.

Nance didn’t see a car to follow but knew Chief Pat Patrick was staked out at Shelton Beach Road. He turned on Cleveland Road on the way to the chief’s location, wanting to warn him about the kids with a gun.

Nance said when he pulled up, Patrick was on the radio and before the patrolman could say anything, Patrick was tearing out of the lot, waving Nance to follow.

 

Mrs. William J. Langley on Live Oak Drive heard a scream, then saw a car driving slowly west on Hilltop Avenue. Just after it passed, she heard someone run north up Live Oak Avenue and her dog chased them for a short bit.

 

When she heard the shots from bed, Manie said they sounded like “two large paper bags filled with air being bursted.” She was nonplussed thinking Buddy was making racket.

Manie told investigators she arose and discovered her grandson wasn’t there. She said she looked out a window and saw him coming across the highway and met him at the front door.

‘Mammy, d’you hear that?” Buddy asked. She said yes.

“Me and Jodie thought they was up on Hilltop. Where’s Pop?” Buddy said. “I saw him pull in and his lights go off.”

Manie told Buddy to run out the back and see why Oscar wasn’t in yet, to check the dog yard. She wanted any new development on the girls from the loan company and the Chattom boys.

Buddy burst back in the door. “Mammy somebody has shot Pop!”

He ran to the phone as Manie flew outside. She collapsed over Oscar, moaning to him in low tones, arms across the lifeless and bloody form.

Buddy headed toward the road. “James, my old man has been shot,” he called and the gang from the club came sprinting while one headed toward city hall. 

 

When Nance and Patrick arrived, Manie was still stretched across Oscar’s corpse, still crying, “They’ve shot Papa! They shot Papa!”

Patrick leaned over, tried to lift Manie from the body.

Manie saw Buddy’s pals poking through the car. ‘You ought not to let them do that, Pat,” Manie claimed to have said. “They’ll mess up evidence.”

She said Patrick gave a terse warning to the boys and nothing else.

A doctor arrived and Manie declined a sedative injection.

 

Officer W. L. Allen said the dispatch on the Driver death was issued at 11:05 p.m. Within minutes, it was broadcast via special bulletin on every radio and television station in the Mobile area.

Allen said when he arrived at 11:30 p.m. that Hilltop Avenue was “covered with automobiles” and close to 75 people were wandering over the Driver yard. He was horrified at crime scene security in the crucial aftermath of a murder.

Allen said the Saraland police car was parked “just three feet to the right of Mr. Driver’s Oldsmobile.” The officer found Oscar Driver between the cars and immediately asked where Chief Patrick was.

When Patrick emerged from the house, Allen told him to clear the grounds, the forensics photographer was on his way.

 

At some point, Otto Davis was said to have walked up, put his arm around Buddy and asked where the dog was. The terrified canine was hiding under Buddy’s motor scooter.

Casey said they found Oscar’s glasses three or four feet from the car and five or six feet from the body. They were broken, “looked like someone had stepped on them.”

Buddy claimed Jodie Casey stumbled on the first shotgun shell about 20 minutes after they arrived. Casey said it looked like it had been stepped on. Patrick told Lt. R. W. Goodwin about the evidence, “Folks was thick as bees out there where it was found.”

“They underestimated how many people were there,” Buddy said referring to the reports. “There were hundreds.”

Some investigators later believed the shells were planted to obscure the trail. Chief Deputy Chambers said, “The spot where that thing was found, we searched in completely for a half-hour and couldn’t find anything. Then all of a sudden this shell turns up.”

Sheriff Ray Bridges and others consistently cited Patrick’s failure to secure the site as grievous. Some felt it intentional. When Manie chastised Patrick for it, the chief blithely pronounced the responsibility for the scene to the sheriff’s department, that it was their shortcoming.

 

The offense report by Norman W. (Pat) Patrick read as follows:

I received a call about 10:45 p.m. August 6, 1958 to a shooting at Mr. Driver’s home.

I arrived about 3 minutes later. Mrs. Driver was on her knees beside him and he was dead. Mr. Driver had been shot with a shotgun, he was lying beside his car and the rear window was shot out. There were about 25 or 30 people there when I arrived. I called on the radio for the coroner and the Sheriff Department for help.

Signed- Pat Patrick Date- 8-6-58

Patrick rode with Driver’s body to Higgins Mortuary.

 

The auditor Oscar hired arrived at the loan office at 8:30 a.m. on Aug. 7. The cops were waiting on him. 

Later in the day, Sheriff Ray Bridges interviewed a forlorn Manie Driver as she sat on the edge of her bed. Manie “emphatically insisted” the girls at the loan company were uninvolved in the death.

 

An empty bottle of Smirnoff vodka was found in the Driver yard. By Hilltop Avenue was a nest of trampled brush and cigarette butts where it appeared someone had waited for a while.

 

Prodigals

On Aug. 8, Doris Barnett and Billy Chattom stepped off a bus and into a mess. It was two days after they disappeared with Betty Richardson and Bud Chattom and both were hoping to gently slip back into the Port City.

However, the town was abuzz with the bloody end of her boss and the newspaper had revealed the girls’ disappearance. The text of their note to the Drivers plus descriptions of each person and their auto were everywhere.

So was false information. Pat Patrick told reporters Oscar made over 30 calls the day before when researching the girls’ absence. Driver’s colleagues confirmed he had been on the phone only five times.

But on that Friday, Doris and Billy left the downtown Greyhound terminal and hailed a taxi.

When they left the cab at Barnett’s Saraland home on Bobolink Drive, a neighbor told them of the Driver murder, while another spied them and called law enforcement. After Barnett and Chattom climbed in her car and left, roadblocks began to organize in town.

Billy told Barnett to drop him at Five Points, where Ann Street met Springhill Avenue and St. Stephens Road.  Barnett wondered en route whether she should call Manie Driver.

On her way back to Saraland, Barnett was spotted by Chickasaw policemen James Bowdoin and James Hobbie, detained and then questioned for four hours. She was unabashed with authorities but they tightened their grip on her and booked her on vagrancy charges while the search for Chattom began.

Billy Chattom heard of his “wanted” status and walked downtown to surrender for questioning but not before trying in vain to phone Richardson and Bud Chattom in Houston. 

Billy told the police everything, that the idea to leave town was Richardson’s, that they learned of the murder on their return, that they had been in New Orleans and Houston when it all took place. The construction worker also confessed that his desire to return home was fueled by a desire to look in on his pregnant wife.

Later statements to the sheriff by Betty Richardson clarified the picture.

The Chattoms were in and out of the loan office on Aug. 5. Hardly unusual as both were previous customers with small loans, less than $200.

Eventually, Bud and Betty, Billy and Doris met at Barnett’s home after work. Idle conversation stoked a departure from town.

Errands were run. Doris’ laundry was retrieved. Bud’s car was taken to his father’s house. Betty packed in her Midtown home. Sometime around midnight, they pulled onto Highway 90 and headed west with no plan.

As they reached Pascagoula, Bud suggested Houston as a destination.

The quartet slept in New Orleans and arrived in Texas the next night. First stop, a lounge owned by a friend of Bud’s. They gather themselves and ask about accommodations, possible rentals.

After finding an apartment, Doris and Billy decided to return to Mobile. Their Greyhound pulled out of Houston at 9:35 p.m. on Aug. 7.

Law enforcement quickly verified their story but they still had to deal with the exposure from local media.

Betty Richardson and Bud Chattom finally returned to Mobile on Aug. 12. They went to Doris’ home first. Bud went to Eight Mile while Betty made a call.

“I remained there until my husband got off from work at Brookley Field and got home and then I called him by phone,” she told investigators.

Betty and Carl drove to Houston at the end of the month to fetch her clothes.

 

Councilman Henry Dukes was made mayor upon Oscar’s death. He recommended the town hire a new police officer to help Patrick with the increased load. The council found its own man, someone not of Patrick’s choosing.

 

The trail

Spouses are normally suspected early. Manie was known to exhibit jealousy and Oscar could be a ladies’ man. Rumors ran through the community that he was fooling around with town clerk Dorothy Sanders. State forensics expert Nelson Grubbs said Buddy told him he had seen Oscar slap Mrs. Richardson and Mrs. Barnett on the rump, fondle their breasts and go to the back room with Richardson.

Manie’s stories about what she did once she heard the shots, which room she visited and which lights were on, were inconsistent.

There was also Pat Patrick and his gang.

Patrick certainly had motivation for Oscar’s death. Henry Dukes admitted the council wanted to get rid of the chief and the next council meeting was the night after Driver’s murder. Dukes wondered if the murderers thought something was bound to occur.

Members of the fire and police departments had been heard making cloaked threats about Driver dying in gunfire.

But Patrick also had a solid alibi. However, two of his most common companions were conspicuously absent that night.

 

Most nights, Dudley Mann could be found with Chief Patrick but Mann told investigators he was at home the night Oscar was killed. Mann said he first went to the club to find Patrick but then returned to the house around 7:30 or 8 p.m.

Dudley said he watched a television show on embezzlement that started at 10 p.m. but couldn’t tell investigators about anything that followed it. He said he learned of Driver’s murder the following day.

When questioned by law enforcement, Dudley said he didn’t have a shotgun. Patrolman Nance told Grubbs and some deputies Mann lied, that Dudley bragged about his shotgun to Nance during a hunting discussion just one month before the murder.

Eventually, Dudley admitted to having access to a shotgun, but it was at his father’s house.  On Aug. 16, Nelson Grubbs received a 97 Model Winchester Pump, serial no. 1005357 from Dudley Mann.

Grubbs said the shells found at the scene were fired from that gun, though he noted the pellets found in Oscar’s body seemed different than those found in the car.

Later analysis led Grubbs to determine the person who fired on Oscar was about 6 feet tall. Dudley was far too short so Mann’s shame became his savior. The matter of height also ruled out Manie Driver who stood 2 inches shorter than Mann.

At some point after Oscar’s murder, Dudley Mann was questioned by law enforcement then told to go straight home afterward. Instead, he stopped and talked to Patrick. The police followed Mann then and later asked about his activities. He lied about his meeting with Patrick.

Mann didn’t assist in the Driver investigation as he did with other police matters.

Dudley Mann passed a polygraph test as did Henry Dukes, Manie and Buddy Driver and other councilmembers.

It was more than Chief Patrick could say, since he refused to submit to one.

 

On the afternoon of Aug. 11, the phone rang at city hall. Clerk Dorothy Sanders answered. 

“He said, ‘Mrs. Sanders?’ I said, ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘Mrs. Sanders, you and Mr. Duke and the Marshall had better quit that crooked stuff if you want to live. I’ve already shown you what I can do.’ Then he hung up. Sanders said he had a deep voice, sounded middle aged, with Southern speech.

“ He called back the next day and said, ‘I meant what I said yesterday. You’re next on the list,’” Sanders told authorities.

 

Patrick had ears everywhere. Bill Skidmore recalled how the city council arranged a clandestine meeting with federal agents to talk about Patrick. By the time they returned to town, everyone knew.

When Manie and a funeral director first discussed the problem of moving truckloads of flowers from the mortuary to the funeral in Aliceville, unexpected aid arrived promptly. Patrick called and told Manie he planned to take the city police car to Aliceville to escort Oscar’s body and that he would send an old ambulance to take the flowers.

“How Mr. Patrick knew we were trying to get transportation for flowers to Aliceville is unknown to me,” Manie said.

 

Patrick wasn’t the only person to refuse a polygraph test. Percy Green did the same.

Suspected Klansman Green was another Patrick cohort unusually absent that night. He claimed the first he heard of the death was from a television bulletin.

Percy had a visitor that week. According to investigators, Percy Green’s brother Jesse W. Green “made his appearance on the scene the day Driver was killed and has not been seen since in Saraland.” Jesse moved through low-level jobs in Mississippi and was rumored to be in the moonshine business like Percy.

A labor foreman at Cortaulds, saw Percy Green on Aug. 6 and asked about his brother Jesse. Percy said Jesse was at Percy’s home in Saraland. Later, the foreman called and talked to Jesse over the phone. He invited Jesse to his home, but Jesse declined saying he would be leaving town soon, bound for Florida.

A wiretap was placed on Percy Green’s phone. Jesse was later picked up in New Orleans and interrogated. Upon release, he phoned Percy to inform him of the incident. Within 24 hours, Jesse showed up in Mobile to talk to Percy and Pat Patrick. In phone conversations with Patrick, the Greens were careful to avoid discussing the Driver murder.

Some time later in Laurel, Miss., African-American Joe Taylor accidentally ran over young, white John Lewis. The highway patrol ruled the death accidental. Taylor was later shot and killed July 29, 1960 in a similar manner as Driver.

The scene of Taylor’s death was near the boiler room where Jesse Green worked.

 

Another Saraland man who refused a polygraph was William Stewart, an appliance repairman seen with Patrick. His shop was a front for Klan activity as he claimed over 25 crosses were made there.

The city council had their fill of Patrick and in late September, he, Stewart and nine others were charged with Klan activity and arrested. The cases were eventually dismissed but it hardly mattered.

Patrick was terminated by unanimous council decision.

A year after Driver was murdered, the search was still crawling. Bill Skidmore told the sheriff’s office he and others felt Circuit Solicitor Carl Booth had hamstrung the investigation into Oscar’s death. A request was made to the state for assistance.

 

A 1961 grand jury heard testimony relating to the Driver murder, but indictments were never issued.

 

Resurrection 

July 16, 1961, Saraland City Councilman Calvin C. Davenport was found dead beside Tanner-Williams Road near Big Creek spillway. The 37-year-old building contractor and father of three was shot in the back before being dumped near the reservoir. He had no identification, just a pair of cigarettes and some change in his pockets.

Davenport had recent financial problems and made a round of taverns that day. He was also seen with some of the Patrick gang, including William Stewart.

Stewart left town and wound up in a Texas hospital in 1962 with a nervous breakdown.

On Dec. 22 of that year, Stewart was killed by a shotgun blast to the chest, stripped of identification and dumped in Hog Bayou near Saraland, his body discovered by a trio of target-shooting teenagers.

The man prosecuted for that murder, Prichard construction worker Pete Cornelison, spun wild yarns to authorities. He told of Patrick, Bernard and Percy Green’s moonshine ventures. Cornelison said Green tried to coerce him to kill Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. when the civil rights leader was at Mobile’s famed Battle House hotel. He said Green bragged of protection from Circuit Solicitor Carl Booth and claimed to have seen Green use that weight to intimidate car dealer Joe Treadwell.

Cornelison alleged that a place called the Eagles Club was a spot to score pills, that Assistant State Solicitor Don Brutkiewicz hung out there and took payoffs from Carl Booth. He also said William Stewart killed Oscar Driver to protect the moonshine and narcotics business.

None of the allegations were proven.

 

Circuit Solicitor Booth’s name emerged often in the investigation.

Chief Cryer said he nabbed over 500 gallons of whiskey while in Saraland and was told by Sheriff Bridges that Carl Booth would do little to nothing about it.

Mobile Police Chief James Robinson and Sheriff Bridges thought Booth was protecting Patrick and others. Robinson had to break up near fisticuffs between Booth and Bridges in the courthouse one day.

Robinson also claimed Booth hampered grand jury testimony in the Cornelison case.

ABC Agent and Prichard resident Richard Nixon stated he believed Booth to have ties to leaders of the drug and whiskey rings.

Of course, Nixon also told investigators there was prostitution operating out of the many downtown hotels including the La Clede and the Battle House, tapped West Mobile’s Marvin Broadus as the county’s bootlegging kingpin and claimed state solicitor Don Brutkiewicz told him Sheriff’s Chief Investigator Dudley McFadden’s wife was running a brothel on Royal Street.

Lula Mae McCurly and Mary Ann Brunner filed a report with the governor’s office that Green and others were threatening them following statements the women made about the Driver murder.

McCurly talked to state agents with attorney Bubba Marsal present. She said Booth was protecting Green, that Sheriff Ray Bridges wanted to go to a grand jury and Booth stymied him.

Bridges and law enforcement on all levels long felt the Driver, Davenport and Stewart slayings to be related, they just never found the key.

 

Pat Patrick delved into the car battery business and ended up with an ambulance service in Mobile County.

Retired state investigator Ed Odom said Percy Green died in Mobile County Jail in the late 1960s.

Pete Cornelison was convicted and paroled in 1975. He is now deceased.

Manie Driver managed just fine financially but never recovered emotionally from the murder. Family stories tell of her spending thousands of dollars on private investigators over the years with no real results.

“”Frank Chottagan was the investigator she hired,” Buddy later recalled. “He never turned anything up.” Driver said the P.I. later became Saraland Police Chief.

Buddy lives outside Birmingham now with only relics and memories of Saraland summers.

 

In 1999, new information came to then-Saraland Police Chief Trey Oliver. An older man sat at the station and gave hours of testimony on possible leads. None of it panned out.

“There was a lot of reluctance from the locals at first,” Oliver said. “They didn’t want to bring all of that up again.”

The new chief found the case intriguing and when Ed Odom filled him in with more information, his curiosity grew. “How many other little towns can say that their first mayor was killed like that?” Oliver asked.

His foray into the case was slowed when the sheriff’s department couldn’t find their files on that case or any before 1972. Hurricanes and relocations have taken their toll.

Oliver is now Chief Deputy of Support Services for the Mobile County Sheriff and hasn’t forgotten those files.

“I think we might be close to finding them,” he smiled. 

 

Of all the survivors, the City of Saraland recovered best.

“Well, of course they started calling us ‘Little Phenix City,’ Took Skidmore said in reference to a reputed cauldron of vice near the Georgia border. “It was pretty scary there for a while until we started to realize it was an isolated incident. But Bill got elected mayor after that. We got rid of some those that was causing the trouble and got it cleaned up.”

The small town grew and became the kind of place some of those pioneers wanted.

“We added the rest of it about 8 – 10 years later,” Took Skidmore said. “Now Saraland’s about the nicest little town where you could ever want to live.”

“I think the Driver murder was the nail in the coffin in Saraland,” Ed Odom said. “They seemed to clean it up pretty well after that.”

In true Southern fashion, they found their redemption in blood spilled.  

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If you liked this installment, make sure to check out the previous stories in the series:

Queens, A Pair- A powerful man's unhinged mistress has her ultimate revenge 

New Blood, Old Power- Blackmail and peccadilloes undo a crusading journalist 

Arch Enemies- The murder of a newspaper man revolves the Dixie Mafia, Pt. 1 & Pt. 2 

Animal Parts and Broken Hearts- An abusive and wealthy husband seeks an ultimate rebuke of his long-suffering wife, Pt. 1 & Pt. 2