'No Glory': Was Black Civil War vet an ax murderer or innocent war hero?
George HunterThis story is part of a look back at 150 years of crime coverage from The Detroit News. Check this page on weekends for periodic new material involving long-lost cases and other interesting tidbits from the News archives.
Detroit — John H. Thomas was a convicted ax-murderer, although until his death, he and his supporters insisted he was a wrongfully incarcerated Civil War veteran who'd been wounded while fighting for the Union Army's 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment of African-American soldiers that was featured in the 1989 movie “Glory."
Thomas was born in Toledo in 1813, 11 years after Ohio became a free state. When he was 50 years old, Thomas volunteered to serve in the 54th Regiment two months after it was formed in March 1863, although online records list his age as "about 37" when he joined the regiment's Company E as a private on May 12, 1863.
After being wounded and discharged in August 1864 from Morris Island, South Carolina — the site of the bloody battle a year earlier that was depicted in "Glory" — Thomas settled in Detroit. He worked in a barbershop in the city's Black Bottom neighborhood until he was arrested for the April 28, 1875 ax killings of his wife Elizabeth Thomas, 50, and her 19-year-old daughter Henrietta "Hattie" Fisher.
Thomas' attorneys were allowed only two weeks to prepare for the trial, and despite the evidence being "entirely circumstantial," according to The News, a jury took less than an hour to convict the defendant amid threats that his neighbors would riot if he was acquitted. The News reporter who covered the trial concluded the case against Thomas was flimsy.
As the defendant prepared to leave the courtroom after the judge handed down a mandatory life sentence, Thomas promised to "dance on the graves" of the people he insisted had lied about him on the witness stand.
Thomas’ sister surfaced 17 years after the conviction insisting her brother was innocent. The woman had thought Thomas was dead until an acquaintance told her he was still serving his sentence in Jackson State Prison.
Adelphia Binga was the matriarch of one of Detroit's most prominent Black families during the 19th Century. She was an inventor and entrepreneur who managed multiple business concerns — but she dropped everything to help her brother after learning he was still alive.
Binga spent years trying to convince elected officials and journalists the murders had been committed by a mentally ill man whose romantic advances were rebuffed by Fisher. Binga said a witness heard the man confess to the killings. She said another witness saw the man at the crime scene the night of the murders, while two others said prior to the slayings, they'd heard him vow to kill Fisher and her family because she had rejected him.
Binga partially funded the effort to free her brother with the monthly $12 pension checks he received from the U.S. government for being a wounded Civil War veteran.
'A fearful crime'
The News’ April 29, 1875 headline screamed: “A Fearful Crime. A Mother and Her Daughter Chopped to Pieces in their Beds.”
Detroit Police Patrolman Frank Newberry was walking in the city’s Black Bottom neighborhood at about 11 p.m. on April 28, 1875, when according to The News, Thomas approached him and said, “You had better come up to my house. My wife is dead.”
The cop followed the 62-year-old barber to his three-room shack at 318 Hastings St.
“Here, by the light of a kerosene oil lamp, (Newberry) beheld a scene of butchery and murder such as seldom meets the eye of even a policeman,” The News reported. “In the kitchen was a bed ... and on that bed was the gory corpse of a (50-year-old woman). The skull was smashed in and, with the bed clothing, was covered with blood ...
“On the bed of the small room was the corpse of her daughter, killed in the same manner, and lying close to the wall. The face, breast and arms were one mass of blood, and on the wall were the marks where she moved her bloody arms in her last struggles.”
News of the horror spread quickly through Black Bottom, and a crowd gathered outside the Thomas house. A telegram was dispatched to Detroit Police Chief Andrew Rogers — the telephone wouldn’t be invented for another year — and the chief arrived at the scene to interrogate the suspect.
Thomas told Rogers he'd visited several saloons that day, "drinking freely" before returning home at 7 p.m. The front door was locked, and Thomas couldn't find his key, so he said he went back to the bar. After returning home at 9:30 p.m. to find the door still locked, he kicked it open.
"When he came in, he lit a lamp and went into the other room, struck his wife, who was in bed, on the hip and said, ‘you have gone to bed pretty early,'" The News reported. "Then he discovered that she was dead.”
Thomas told the chief he ran to a friend's house to report the crime. The man went to Thomas' home, saw the bodies, and advised him to find a cop.
Hours after Thomas provided his alibi to the police chief, he told the same story to a News reporter “who talked with the prisoner through the grated door of his cell this morning," the afternoon paper reported. During the interview, Thomas denied responsibility for the killings. He also answered the reporter’s questions about his background.
"I was in the war," he said. "I was in the 54th Massachusetts colored regiment, commanded by Colonel (Edward Hallowell).”
An inquest was held the day after the killings. Neighbors told authorities Thomas was a drunkard who regularly beat his wife, although The News would later report that many of the statements made about Thomas at the hearing didn't hold up under cross-examination during the trial.
Rain, tears and rage
On the rainy afternoon of April 30, 1975, the bodies of Elizabeth Thomas and Fisher lay in open caskets in the Thomas’ front room, while mourners and curious gawkers filed in and out of the tiny house.
“The face of the mother was disfigured with livid bruises and cuts, but the flesh was not badly broken,” The News reported. “The countenance of Hattie, however, was so badly mangled that the gaping wounds on cheek and brow had to be closed with ... plaster.”
The area outside the house “was crowded with curious and horror-stricken individuals, who swarmed on the stoop, peeped through the blinds, and obstructed the sidewalks,” The News reported. “The rain ... had no effect in lessening their numbers. They lingered around the house ... eagerly discussing the morbid particulars."
At about 2:30 p.m., the funeral procession began down Hastings Street toward Second Baptist Church on Croghan Street, now Monroe, which a few years earlier had served as the last stop on the Underground Railroad for fugitive slaves as they made their way to Canada. A crowd of about 1,000 people lined Hastings as the cortege headed toward the church, which still stands near Greektown.
The mourning was tinged with anger for Thomas. One man said citizens should “take him out and hang him from a tree,” while another man suggested the suspect be "drawn and quartered by wild horses."
Second Baptist Church was packed. The Rev. Thomas Scott told the congregation: “The murderer may escape the hand of man, but the eye of God is on his track. He must die and meet his God.”
Following the service, two horse-drawn hearses transported the bodies to Elmwood Cemetery.
'Embers of animosity'
During Thomas’ May 4, 1875 arraignment on murder charges, prosecutors pushed for the trial to start in two weeks. Thomas’ court-appointed attorneys insisted that wasn’t enough time to prepare a murder defense, but Recorder’s Court Judge George Swift ignored the defense's pleas and the proceedings moved forward.
Every seat in the courtroom was filled when the trial began May 18, 1875, with many of those present demanding Thomas pay for the killings — or else.
“Should (Thomas) be acquitted there is much reason to fear that a very little would fan the now still embers of animosity and indignation into an open riot,” The News prophesized.
The prosecution called Thomas' neighbors and coworkers to the stand. Some witnesses said they saw a drunken Thomas passed out at a barbershop the night of the killings. Others said Thomas had bickered with his wife that morning, screaming as he left their house.
The trial lasted three days. The News reporter who covered the case concluded the evidence against Thomas “was entirely circumstantial.”
“All the witnesses for the prosecution showed in their testimony … an animus against Thomas, and this frequently hurried them into statements, all of which they could not substantiate on cross-examination,” The News said. “ ... the impression is fast gaining ground that there will not be sufficient evidence available to make his guilt appear certain, and that if the jury does convict it will be upon general principles, not upon the evidence.”
Thomas' attorneys focused on witnesses' conflicting accounts about the defendant's whereabouts the night of the killings. His lawyers added that the crime scene was soaked in blood, but Thomas had none on his clothes. While a small amount of blood had been found under Thomas' fingernails, his attorneys said it could've gotten there from butchering an animal, which was a common practice in the 19th Century. Also, the defense argued, Thomas hadn't tried to escape after discovering the bodies, but had instead alerted a policeman.
As the crowd filed out of the courthouse following the proceedings on May 20, 1875, things got hairy. A mob surrounded the horse-drawn wagon that was waiting to take Thomas to jail, as cops tried to protect the prisoner.
A woman who had testified earlier in the day, “sprang upon (Thomas) with the fury of a tigress, and would have left the imprint of her nails and fists upon his face, had not the officers lifted him bodily and pitched him into the wagon,” The News said. “She ... chased the wagon all the way up Griswold street to State."
The trial picked up the following morning with the judge giving instructions to the jury. Deliberations began shortly after 11 a.m. — and concluded before noon. Following the reading of the guilty verdict, Judge Swift asked the defendant if he had anything to say.
“If the prosecution and their witnesses had not lied all through, this case would have ended differently," Thomas replied. "They all lied.”
When the judge sentenced Thomas to life in prison, the defendant snarled back: “I’ll hold out to the last; and I tell you, I’ll live to dance on the graves of some of those fellows who have lied about me.”
Angry sendoff
A mob of about 300 people gathered outside the Wayne County Jail after Thomas' conviction.
“Threats of lynching him were … freely indulged in, and everybody seemed to be worked up to a high pitch of exasperation,” The News said.
The crowd eventually dispersed, and Thomas was transported to prison the next morning. By May 22, 1875 — just 24 days after the murders — Thomas had been arrested, tried and convicted by a jury that had deliberated for less than an hour, and was serving a life sentence in Jackson State Prison.
Media interest in the case quickly waned, and there was no mention of Thomas by local newspapers until a Dec. 3, 1892 News story about the inmate's unsuccessful attempt to get his conviction overturned. Coverage again languished until May 30, 1896, when The News reported that Thomas' request for a commutation was rejected by the Michigan Board of Pardons.
The story added: “A Mrs. (Binga), of Jackson, who claims to be Thomas’ sister, has long been working for his pardon … suspicion was thrown on a half-witted fellow named Flowers, who had shown attention to the step-daughter. One woman swore that she saw Flowers at the house the night of the murder, while another heard him remark: ‘I have killed that … family and got my revenge.’ Flowers was sent to an asylum.”
Binga told The News she'd mistakenly thought her brother had died shortly after his conviction. She said she learned he was alive in 1893 when she ran into an old acquaintance on a train who said he'd visited Thomas in prison weeks earlier.
"Well, I wrote at once to the superintendent and to John," she told The News. "Answers came back, and the one from my brother was pitiful, asking me why everyone had deserted him in such a manner, when he was innocent of any crime.
"I tell you the grass has not grown under my feet since that hour," she said. "I have walked hundreds of miles to get that man pardoned.”
Black Bottom's matriarch
Binga was one of Black Bottom’s most famous citizens during the 19th Century. She managed her husband William Binga’s tenement on Hastings Street and Mack that was known as “Binga Row.” The property was built in 1882 to serve as transitory housing for the large numbers of emancipated slaves who were migrating from the south. Most of the tenants were impoverished, and Adelphia Binga was known for never evicting anyone for their inability to pay rent.
Binga worked for years as an unlicensed physician, and she manufactured and sold an elixir called the "Balm of Gilead” that was advertised in The News and other papers during the 1870s. She also invented a device to feed multiple cows simultaneously.
In an Oct. 10, 1897 News story headlined “A Sister’s Devotion,” Binga said she dropped everything in her busy life four years earlier when she learned her brother was alive.
“Today, Mrs. Binga, although 70 years in age, walks the streets of Detroit from morning until night, seeking the means by which to liberate her brother," The News said. “Mrs. Binga tells her story wherever she goes."
Binga insisted the killings had been committed by a man named "Flowers."
"(He) had wanted to marry Hattie Fisher," she told The News. "My brother and his wife both objected, and John drove him away from the house at two different times and forbade his coming again. Flowers was heard to say later, by two persons, that he would have the girl if he had to kill the whole lot of them.”
The News wrote: "The faithful old lady feels she cannot die and leave John in prison to die. ‘My brother,’ she says, ‘is a Christian suffering unjustly, but as a prisoner and with wounds received in the service of his country.”'
On Dec. 23, 1897, less than three months after the interview, Binga died in Saginaw.
Innocent or guilty?
As the 19th Century waned, so did Thomas’ chances of getting out of prison alive, although there were a few close calls.
The News reported on Feb. 6, 1897 that Thomas had barely missed the chance to present his case to Michigan Gov. Hazen Pingree.
"One of the arguments that is being made to Gov. Pingree is the old age of Thomas,” The News said. “The governor had intended to have a talk with him when he called at the prison to see (another inmate), but he didn’t have time ... Thomas is said to have been an exemplary prisoner ... he draws $12 a month pension for wounds received as a soldier."
Pingree never heard Thomas' case.
On May 31, 1899, Thomas died in the prison hospital after suffering a stroke a month earlier. He was 85.
Did Thomas commit a crime that was, according to The News in 1895, “one of the most brutal murders in the criminal annals of Detroit?" Was he innocent as he and his supporters claimed?
Was the circumstantial evidence enough to prove Thomas' guilt? Were his attorneys given enough time to prepare a defense? Was the jury influenced by the angry mobs that threatened to riot if Thomas was acquitted?
The answers can't be found in The Detroit News archives.
But independent of the Toledo native's guilt or innocence, on Dec. 12, 2012, Thomas was formally acknowledged for his Civil War service, when the Ohio General Assembly voted to posthumously venerate the 511 African American Ohioans who had volunteered for the 54th and 55th “Colored” Regiments of Massachusetts.
“The soldiers of the 54th Regiment of the Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry served with honor,” the resolution said. “These 511 Ohio soldiers have not been recognized for their contribution to the Union cause.”
ghunter@detroitnews.com
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