A mule, a murder, and a deadly dispute over 65 cents

During a recent blazing-hot August late afternoon, my pal Sam Avery and I were knocking off the day’s dust by knocking back some cold ones and shooting the breeze about critical community matters.

Whenever Sam and I are breeze-shooting about community matters over cold ones, you can bet that the names of infamous local legends, like Big Homer Biggers, surface. As it did this time.

Something Sam said about the late Big Homer inspired me to ask him about the living-and-kicking David Connelly, another legendary guy, in his own right.

If you know Morganton, you know Nite Furniture. And if you know Nite Furniture, you know Connelly, who, with his dad, owned the galaxy of furniture retail galleries by the Morganton railroad station.

Connelly is a frequent and colorful visitor to The Paper. He’s always equipped with scratchpads, crinkled letters, cracked photographs, yellowed scrapbooks, and assorted ancient memorabilia about Burke County’s yesteryear.

He has been pushing me for two years to write a story about the Pitts-Hennessee murder in Glen Alpine.

“Best story ever was,” he says, again and again. “Great story. I’m telling you, great story. I want you to run it.”

Running out of patience, two weeks ago Connelly tossed onto my tabletop a 40-page, single-spaced typed dissertation titled, “A Bloody Fight at Glen Alpine.”

“I’m sure it’s a great story, David,” I told him, thumbing through the worn document. “Just give me some time to digest this.”

“Run it starting Saturday,” Connelly said. “This Saturday. You don’t have to print it all at once. Stretch it out over eight weeks.”

Eight weeks? Jeeze.

That hot summertime evening I said to pal Sam, “What’s with David Connelly’s damn obsession over this Hennessee murder deal in Glen Alpine? I never heard of it.”

“Dr. Hennessee and the Pitts Boys?” Sam asked, sitting up. “The shooting at the Glen Alpine train station?”

I replied that, yes, I guess, that is the topic.

“It’s a great story,” Sam said. “You have to tell that story. It’s just too bad Hazel’s dead. She was The Authority on the Hennessee-Pitts murder.”

Something rang a bell. Hazel…. Hazel….. Where’d I see that name recently?

“Are you talking about a Hazel Rector?” I said.

“Hazel Rector, yeah,” Sam said. “Hazel wrote a book about it. Now SHE was a character.”

“Big Homer-level character?” I said.

“Nobody’s up to Big Homer level,” he said.

“Her name is on the packet Connelly gave me,” I said. “Lived on Starrett Lane?”

And Sam flat-out LAUNCHED into a spontaneous 20-minute, down-the-road, no-detail-unturned partake about Hazel and the Glen Alpine murder.

The event is one of those historic cornerstone foundations that make communities memorable, he said.

“You’re not a Burke County local newspaper until you have something about that murder in your archives,” he said.

I read Connelly/Rector’s 40-page account. I proudly summarize it herewith and as such.

Let’s call it a 65-cent dispute, a gunfight and one very dead doctor.

If I got it right:

The cast of characters includes:

• Dr. E. A. “Gus” Hennessee, Glen Alpine physician; fought with the Pitts family in 1913; tried and acquitted in Gorman Pitts' death; murdered at the Glen Alpine station in 1918.
• William Gorman Pitts - Member of the Pitts family, age 24; wounded in the Jan. 18, 1913 fight and later died; Hennessee was tried for his murder.
• W. D. Pitts - Father of Gorman, Garfield and Aaron Pitts; merchant. Several accounts place the origin of the dispute in a billing disagreement between him and Hennessee.
• Garfield Pitts - Son of W. D. Pitts; charged with Aaron Pitts in Hennessee's 1918 murder; acquitted.
• Aaron Pitts - Son of W. D. Pitts; charged with Garfield Pitts in Hennessee's 1918 murder; acquitted.

The story is this:

Hennessee stepped off westbound Train No. 21 on the evening of Jan. 31, 1918.

It was dark. It was foggy. And somebody was waiting.

Gunfire erupted almost immediately. Contemporary accounts said Hennessee was struck by 10 bullets, some fired at such close range that the coroner found powder burns on his body.

This was not, apparently, a subtle assassination.

Nor did authorities have to search far for a motive.

Five years earlier, Hennessee and members of the Pitts family had participated in something that newspapers politely called a “fight.”

The 1913 confrontation involved a Winchester rifle, pistols, knives, buckshot, rocks and enough injured people to keep several doctors busy.

Gorman Pitts was shot and cut and later died. Hennessee himself was badly wounded but survived, went on trial for Pitts' murder and was acquitted after a jury deliberated roughly 36 hours.

So what caused all this?

Money.

According to a 1918 newspaper reconstruction, Hennessee had sent merchant W.D. Pitts a medical bill. Pitts sent Hennessee a store bill in return. Included was $1.25 for the hire of a mule used on a mountain trip.

Hennessee didn't think the mule was his responsibility.

The difference between the accounts came to 65 cents.

Before this was finished, one Pitts was dead, Hennessee was dead, multiple people had been shot, several murder trials had been held and Burke County had acquired enough courtroom drama to last a respectable community for a generation.

After Hennessee's killing, suspicion immediately fell on Gorman's brothers, Garfield and Aaron Pitts.

Both were arrested before daylight. A coroner's jury blamed them, and eyewitness Sam Byrd later testified that two men appeared behind Hennessee, fired repeatedly and ran toward the Pitts store.

There was just one problem.

A jury acquitted them.

Then the case took another turn.

Aaron Wiseman, who had actually testified during the Pitts trial, eventually became the accused. He was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to die.

Gov. Thomas Bickett later commuted the sentence amid serious doubts about the evidence, and Gov. O. Max Gardner paroled Wiseman in 1929.

Which leaves us, more than a century later, with an uncomfortable problem.

Hennessee was unquestionably murdered.

The Pitts brothers were acquitted.

Wiseman was convicted, but two governors subsequently treated his guilt as anything but certain.

And the whole spectacular mess may have begun over 65 cents and a mule.

There is probably a lesson here.

Pay the mule bill.