Justice in the Midlands: How a Local Sheriff Solved a Thirty-Year Cold Case

By Lou Sahadi

The murder of Ron "Little Red" Beasley is one of the most bizarre homicide cases in Midlands history. This mystery, with a background of macabre events and colorful characters, remained unsolved since 1967. Beasley's murder was originally ruled a suicide, but his family and his friend Herman Young refused to believe that. When Beasley's wife was convicted of murdering her second husband, they grew even more suspicious. Young went on to become sheriff of Fairfield County and made it his mission to find the truth. Join author Lou Sahadi as he details the gruesome details of a murder, two dramatic court trials and the untiring work of a lawman to find justice for his friend.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Jun 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781439672679

Lou Sahadi

A prolific author, Lou Sahadi has written twenty-six major books, among them the official autobiographies of Willie Mays, Don Shula, Len Dawson, Hank Stram and the intimate biography of Johnny Unitas, which has been optioned for a movie. His book The Long Pass was selected for inclusion in the Nixon Presidential Library. He has been a contributor and interviewee of the New York Times, the New York Post, the Miami Herald, The State, the Sun Sentinel, the Greenville Journal, Gear, Us Weekly and others. In addition, he has made appearances on CNN and ESPN, as well as local TV and radio stations. Mr. Sahadi's last book, The Last Triple Crown (St. Martin's Press), received excellent reviews: "One of the greatest racing rivalries of all times deserves an equally world class story teller to make it come alive so many years later. Mr. Sahadi gets you so close to the action, you can almost smell the hay in the stalls of these two equine super stars" (Leonard Shapiro, Washington Post).

Book preview

1

THE PHONE CALL

K.C. Beasley will never forget the phone call. It came on a typical July afternoon in Winnsboro, South Carolina, hot and humid with the mimosas and crepe myrtles in full bloom, vestiges of summer’s last flora to blossom. Only this wasn’t a telephone call that Beasley at all wanted. It came completely unexpected, catching him completely by surprise as he was sitting on the front porch of his modest five-room house on Maple Street wiping the sweat from his forehead that only July’s humidity can deliver.

That one phone call changed everything, changed his life forever. His wife, Eva, answered the phone when it first rang. All she did was listen.

There’s been a terrible accident, said the voice on the other end. You better come quickly.

Red, she called out toward the porch. Hurry. Something’s happened to Ron. Beasley got up and went inside, his handkerchief still in his right hand.

What’s the matter? he asked. They’ve called an ambulance for Ron, Eva replied.

Beasley shot out the back door and ran to his car, which was parked under the carport, fifty feet away. His only son, Ron (also called Red), twenty-nine, had suffered a stroke just three months earlier, a serious one that left him paralyzed. That’s all he could think about, not knowing what was wrong. In less than a minute, he arrived at his son’s tiny house on Forest Hill Drive. He ran up the five concrete steps and pulled open the screen door without any wasted motion.

Ron’s wife, Sandra, her hand on her mouth, pointed to the floor. Red’s eyes followed. He saw his son lying face-down, a rifle by his side. Red immediately looked up.

What happened?

Sandra just shook her head. Then, she began to cry. Finally, she spoke.

Ron just shot himself.

Red really never heard her. He was kneeling over his son looking for any signs of life. He slapped his cheeks. Then he rubbed his hands. There was no response. From that moment on, Red’s mind went blank. He couldn’t remember getting up and walking out of the house. Or even how he drove back to tell his wife that Ron was dead. K.C. Beasley’s world crumbled with that one phone call back in 1967, and he would spend the next thirty years trying to reconcile his only son’s death—one he never once believed was a suicide.

It never occurred for a moment to K.C. that Ron would plan to take his own life. Not ever. How could he? In the first place, he was physically incapable of doing such a thing, holding a shotgun in his mouth and pulling the trigger. For all intents and purposes, Ron’s stroke had left him completely paralyzed. He had use of only 20 percent of his body, and that was restricted to his left side.

How could he have done it? To begin with, his son was right-handed. It would take someone of considerable strength to position a heavy shotgun in his mouth and then reach far down the barrel to discharge the trigger. Ron Beasley, a helpless paraplegic, had nowhere near the strength. No, K.C. thought to himself, my boy couldn’t do a thing like that. Something was wrong.

Beasley left without saying another word. He was too heart stricken to talk, let alone think. He drove back to his house without remembering that he had even left, maybe ten minutes in all. Everything happened too fast.

Even the short ride to the hospital was a blur. He vaguely remembered seeing the coroner, Earl Boulware, walking out of the emergency room of Fairfield Memorial Hospital. At that moment, he was convinced his son was dead because Boulware never looked at him. No one had to tell him Ron was dead. The coroner and a police officer walking alongside, told him all he had to know. They were convinced it was simply a suicide. The paperwork would be easy. Beasley had other thoughts.

This time, he walked slowly as he got out of his car. Eva was at the back door waiting.

What happened, Red?

Ron’s dead.

Oh, no, not that. Don’t tell me that. Did he have another stroke?

She began to sob. Red held her close. He knew it wouldn’t be easy to tell her he was shot.

No. The word came out hard. Then how? asked Eva.

He’s been shot. I couldn’t believe it, seeing him lying on the floor like that.

Who did it?

Sandra claimed that Ron shot himself. Took a rifle and pulled the trigger all by himself. What bothers me is that no one tried to stop him. There wasn’t anybody around except Sandra. It doesn’t add up.

It wasn’t until late in the afternoon that Red came out of his stupor, realizing that indeed his only son was gone. For most of that afternoon he just sat in his chair, looking at the floor without saying anything, listening to his wife sobbing in the next room. He finally got up and walked over to her sitting at the edge of the bed and held her hand. She just kept shaking her head, sobbing, Oh, no, until Red stopped her ever so gently.

I’m going back over to see Sandra and get an explanation to what happened to Ron. There’s no need for you to come. There’s nothing you can do now. And, besides, I don’t want you to think of Ron in that house. It’ll only cause you pain.

The house where Ron died was now alive with people when Red walked in. Besides Sandra, Mattie Caldwell, the maid, was there and so was Betty McGinnis, who helped look after Ron. Both were teenagers, and being so young, they couldn’t understand what had taken place only hours before. Neither could Red.

Now tell me how this all happened, ordered Red, looking straight at Sandra.

Where’s Eva?

She’s back at the house.

Let me come down and talk to both of you. She should know what happened.

Sandra followed Red in her car and within two minutes was standing in front of Eva, who was with Margie Perry, a nurse. Sandra began to explain what had taken place earlier in the day. She said that Ron had gotten out of his wheelchair, went into the kitchen and took some bullets out of a box, returned to his wheelchair and fired at her first when she walked into the room to check on him. The bullet, she continued, grazed her scalp. Ron then turned the gun on himself and pulled the trigger. It all happened so quickly that she couldn’t do anything.

Margie looked at Sandra’s scalp and couldn’t find any signs of a wound. She glanced at Red and Eva and shook her head without saying a word. Sandra made it known that the coroner ruled it a suicide and turned to leave without saying goodbye. She left without remorse, on a positive note, an official one that was marked suicide, and felt she didn’t have to say anything else.

Like everything else that happened, the funeral was quick, too. Ron was buried the next day. Barely twenty-four hours after he was pronounced dead. There wasn’t any time for mourning. Sandra had other plans. She wouldn’t be a widow long. She would become Frances Ann Truesdale twenty-nine days later.

Herman Young, one of the pallbearers, who was a close friend of Ron, went to the house that night, just five hours after the funeral. He never went in. Loud noise broke into laughter, and he knew a party when he heard one. He couldn’t believe what was taking place and didn’t want any part of it.

Less than a week after the funeral, Red Beasley headed to the Pope Funeral Home on Congress Street, which was across the street from the country club, a two-minute drive from his home on Maple Street. An honorable man, Beasley was concerned about the funeral bill. Since the burial was quick and there wasn’t any time for a wake, let alone flowers for that matter, he at least decided that his son should have the dignity of his bill being resolved so nothing could be said to smear his name.

I told you to go ahead and bury Ron and I would see that you got paid, he reminded Julius Cameron.

I’m sure his wife will pay it, replied Cameron.

Well, I know for a fact that the insurance check is in, continued Beasley. It’s about $10,000. The reason I know was that I was keeping in contact with a person where Ron had worked. When the check came in, she called me and told me that Sandra picked it up.

About noon, Beasley received a phone call from Cameron. He revealed that Sandra had stopped by and gave him a couple of hundred dollars toward the bill. Red’s voice got loud.

What do you mean only a couple of hundred dollars?

She told me that she still hadn’t received the insurance check and she wanted to pay a little bit on the bill.

Sandra isn’t telling you the truth. I know the check came in and that she’s got it. Don’t worry, I’ll make sure that you get what’s owed.

At about two o’clock that afternoon, Sandra unexpectedly arrived at Red’s house, and she wasn’t alone. Jerry Truesdale had driven her. Beasley didn’t think much about it because Truesdale had been a frequent visitor to Ron’s home when he was alive. What occupied his mind now was the unpaid bill at the Pope Funeral Home.

Did you take care of the bill with Julius?

I stopped by and gave him a little bit of money on it.

Why didn’t you pay it in full?

I’m still waiting for the insurance check.

Sandra, you’re lying. You have the check, and you already cashed it. If Julius isn’t paid off in full by this afternoon, you’re fixing to create a lot of problems.

Sandra began to hedge but didn’t get anywhere and suspected that Red knew she had the money. She wouldn’t get anywhere if she kept lying. She figured it was time to leave, returned to the car and drove off with Truesdale.

The funeral bill couldn’t have been more than $3,000, and the insurance check amounted to $10,000. Red thought about that, and it perturbed him until about four o’clock, when Cameron called.

Red, the bill’s been paid in full. Sandra stopped by and paid the rest of it. Don’t worry about it anymore.

Red found peace—at least for the rest of the day anyway. It didn’t last. Betty McGinnis, who was still assisting Sandra around the house on Forest Hill Drive, called several days later and told Red that Jerry was making threats about him and that she didn’t like the things he was saying. Red decided he had to do something, even if it meant a face-to-face confrontation with the younger Truesdale. Red was angry. He was angry enough to buy a gun.

He was aware that Jerry, as big and strong as he was, could destroy him if they ever came to blows. The gun he carried in his back pocket when he went to see Jerry gave him a feeling of security. He hoped that he wouldn’t have to use it, but if he was forced to, it was there.

If you have any problems with me, let’s settle them right here and now, challenged Red.

I’ve got no problems, answered Truesdale.

I’m just sick and tired of all the talk I’ve been hearing, and I’m not afraid to do something about it, Red retorted

Jerry didn’t say a word. Red left with the satisfaction that he told Jerry off. He never had any problems or contact with Jerry after that. What did irritate him was when Betty informed him that Sandra and Jerry had become lovers, and pretty hot ones at that, even while Ron was alive. His son had been dead about a week, and it was as if Sandra was dancing on his grave by throwing parties practically every night and making passionate love with Jerry afterward in Ron’s own bed.

Red couldn’t take any more. He was wired. He had to do something, and he called his son-in-law Dick Bane, a city detective in Columbia. Maybe he had a solution.

Dick, I have to know once and for all, could Ron have possibly killed himself?

It isn’t likely. What are you thinking about?

I’m thinking my son has been murdered and no one is doing anything about it and those that could have been involved are having a good time about it partying every night.

I told you before there’s not much you can do unless you want to get a warrant and risk not seeing your grandson Jody ever again.

You’re right, I suppose. But isn’t there something that you can do? You’re a detective, what would you do if it was your case and you had to conduct an investigation?

I never looked at it that way. Let me think about it and I’ll get back to you.

Bane did more than think. In the week ahead, he decided to conduct an experiment. But first he had to recover the gun that supposedly Ron used to shoot himself. When he asked Fairfield County sheriff S.L. Montgomery for it, he refused to give it to him. Bane pressed him. He told Montgomery that it was Red Beasley’s gun and he had no business keeping it without filing a charge of suspected murder. Montgomery didn’t argue, and Bane had his rifle.

When he returned home to Columbia, Bane tied one of his hands behind his back with a belt and tried to load the rifle with the other one. He couldn’t. He kept at it. He labored for an hour, sweat pouring down his face, and still failed. He couldn’t put the bullets in the gun or cock the barrel. How could Ron possibly do such a thing with only about 20 percent use of his left arm? He concluded it was impossible, but he didn’t go any further except to telephone Red.

Bane told his father-in-law about his experiment, which only made Red feel despondent and wonder even further why the police didn’t push for an investigation. What were they thinking? This was no ordinary suicide. His son was paralyzed and helpless.

My son was supposed to have gotten up out of his chair, which he couldn’t because he couldn’t walk, and went into the kitchen, reviewed Red for at least the tenth time. "Then he supposedly reached up on a shelf, brought down a handful of bullets, walked back into the living room, opened the gun case, took out the rifle and loaded it. The next thing he supposedly did was take a shot at Sandra and then put the rifle in his mouth and pulled the trigger to kill himself.

What was Sandra doing all this time, watching? If someone aimed a rifle at me, and how in heaven’s name could Ron lift and aim it, I’d certainly get out of the way and grab the rifle, from an invalid, no less. I don’t understand the whole set of circumstances. I don’t understand why the police just took Sandra’s word for it.

Beasley was still trying to sort out Ron’s death the rest of the week. He was completely convinced that Ron couldn’t have shot himself and beginning to worry about his eleven-month-old grandson, Jody. He and his wife had babysat for him time and time again, and just the thought of not seeing him again troubled Red. He made one more call to Bane.

There’s no way we can get any kind of a warrant? asked Red hopefully.

It’s no use. I did all I could. I met with Montgomery in Winnsboro and got no help, no encouragement. He told me point blank that the case was closed. He repeated in no uncertain terms that the coroner ruled it a suicide and that it was official and there was no use in trying to stir up anything.

And so Red Beasley was left with a painful memory: on July 6, 1967, his only son died. The pain was that he knew in his heart that Ron didn’t kill himself, and what made it worse was that nobody wanted to do anything about it. What else could he do by himself ? Nothing, he realized. Legally, he didn’t have a chance. Bane’s words were a reminder.

If you want to see Jody anymore, you better not take out a warrant, advised Bane. Let it ride a little while longer, something will come up.

Little did Red know it would take thirty years.

2

COTTON IS KING

At least eight times a day, maybe as many as ten, and all through the night, the shrill whistle of the Norfolk Southern engine pierces the quiet of the tiny southern hamlet. It appears as an intruder as it noisily rambles through Winnsboro on a winding track pulling nothing but freight cars, often a hundred at a time. It most certainly didn’t rival the Orient Express on any of its memorable journeys from Paris to Istanbul. The old single track lies a block east of Congress, the town’s busiest thoroughfare with a width of ninety feet, making it easier for the logging trucks to pass through the center of town. The railway has been there since before the Civil War, linking Winnsboro to Columbia. Cotton fields supplied the staple to the mills in South Carolina’s capital. At the time, Columbia was the center of commerce filtered through the port of Charleston some eighty miles to the east.

The region and cotton were synonymous. In the antebellum South, cotton was king. England, with its endless textile mills, took every ounce of cotton it could as the most industrialized country in the world. Southern farmers could hardly maintain the demand. Even with an increase in growers, cotton remained a prize until diminished by the Civil War.

The cotton fields have long gone, with hardly a reminder that Fairfield County was once one of the leading regions for the crop in the South. John Porter, a tall, handsome stud with movie star looks, determinedly planted a field of cotton in the early months of 1996. It was a noble effort. However, an unusually dry and hot spring seriously threatened to dry up his crop before it ever had a chance to sprout. Still, he had plowed some 100 acres of field, some 125 acres of Silver Queen corn, along with another 100 acres of wheat, two sturdy crops he has done nicely with for a number of years.

John was a Trojan all right, putting in seven days of work, splitting time at the Porter Gas, owned by his father, Bill, and his crops. He would awaken at five o’clock every morning, drive his pickup truck to his fields some five miles outside the city limits and look up at the sky in the early morning light for a sign of rain. He was just about desperate enough to seek a Native American to perform a rain dance when rain finally fell the following day.

The Indians have been the most mistreated people in our history, he remarked one Sunday afternoon before getting ready to repair his combine. His big red machine was a sight. It was over thirty years old, with wooden slats, a relic that nobody manufactured any parts for anymore.

His hope was Keith Peterson, a welder by profession, and he arranged to meet him at three o’clock that afternoon on the land that contained his cotton. He now had another worry as he examined the cotton. John discovered that the young leaves showed signs of thrips, and he would have to spray them within the next few days.

Keith being late only added to John’s worries. He just shook his head as he looked at his watch. Keith was now a half an hour late, and John called his house to see if his wife had heard from him.

Lenore hadn’t heard a word, sighed John.

As he spoke, a pickup truck pulled off the road, which brought a smile to John’s face. That’s him, he exclaimed.

Keith brought his Ram truck to a halt. A smile crossed his full bearded face. Along with his buddy George Hollis, who was sitting alongside, the two looked like they could appear on the box cover of Smith Brothers cough drops.

Didn’t think you was going to show, greeted John. Told you I’d be here, answered Keith.

You’re a half hour late.

That machine ain’t going nowhere.

That’s the trouble. I got to make me a million dollars with it.

You’re liable to put a million into it, laughed Keith.

In a couple of hours, Keith made the necessary repairs. John climbed into the cockpit of the old geezer, turned on the motor and damned if the red monster didn’t clackity clack with Keith’s homemade