RADLEY BALKO
DOUBT
Mabry was murdered here in 1997 at
the age of 39. This part of America once
produced murder ballads about brutal
crimes like this one — blues greats like
Pinetop Perkins, Elmore James and Sonny Boy Williamson have all called Humphreys County home. Kathy Mabry’s killer raped her, then slashed her face, head
and throat with a rusty razor blade. She
was left to bleed to death on the floor of
a vacant house.
“I think about that case every day,”
Roseman says. “I told Kathy’s momma I
wouldn’t get an honest’s night’s rest until we got the man who did this.”
Roseman was the Belzoni police chief
back then, the first black man elected to
that position as well, a sign of how much
the region has changed over the past half
century. The Rev. George Lee was murdered here in 1955, in what may have been
the first assassination of the civil rights
era. In those years, white citizen councils
regularly beat volunteers attempting to
register blacks to vote, earning the town
the nickname “Bloody Belzoni.”
Today, Humphreys (population: about
9,000) is the seventh-poorest county in
America’s poorest state. The poverty rate
here approaches 40 percent. But it’s also
a close-knit community, where families
can go back several generations or more.
Violent crime is rare. The county saw all
of one murder in 2012. “It just doesn’t
happen that often here,” Roseman says.
HUFFINGTON
02.03.13
Sheriff J.D. “Bubba” Roseman of Humphreys County, Miss.
Mabry’s murder stunned people here
in part because it was so unexpected,
but also because it was so unspeakably
vicious. “She came from a quiet, respected family,” Roseman says. “They’re
well-liked. Most folks around here
hadn’t ever experienced that kind of
murder. So it shook the town. It’s still
shaking the town.”
The case went unsolved for 15 years,
until December, after a casual courtroom conversation led lawyers from the
Mississippi Innocence Project to investigate it. That two attorneys for an organization better known for getting the
wrongly convicted out of prison would
take it upon themselves to solve a cold
case is remarkable enough. Their search
spread from Columbus in the northeastern part of the state, to Oxford in the
northwest, to the crime lab in Jackson,
to a dusty attic in the Humphreys Coun-