DOUBT
ceramic flatheads painted in different
getups — overalls, fur coats, top hats —
for “Catfish on Parade,” a down-home
take on Chicago’s popular “Bulls on Parade” public art exhibit. There’s also
hope that the new “Delta Blues Trail”
will bring tourists down from the casinos in Tunica. But the residents of the
county, which is 70 percent black, still
continue to struggle economically.
All of Wilson’s children have left the
area and now live in Chicago wit h their
families. She had hoped for better things
for Mabry, too. Mabry graduated from
high school and had started college, but
then began using drugs.
“Kathy came up when things started
to get better around here,” Wilson says.
“We had spent a lot of years chopping
cotton. But I was working [as a maid] in
houses by then. My husband was driving
tractors,” Wilson says. “But she didn’t
last long in college before she got into
the drugs. Wasn’t long before she was
back at home.”
Mabry battled her crack addiction for
the rest of her life. She had some periods of sobriety. She married and had two
sons. But her struggle with addiction
eventually dissolved the marriage and
dashed any hope of going back to school.
She fell into a series of abusive relationships. She and her boys moved in with
her mother in Isola, a tiny town of 900
about 10 miles south of Belzoni.
HUFFINGTON
02.03.13
The last of those abusive relationships
was with James Earl Gates, who was 48
at the time of the murder. “He was no
good,” Wilson says. “Broke her arm once.
They were in some kind of love, but he
had a short, short temper. He would
come in here, into my home, and take
over like he was the man of the house.
I’m just an old lady. Kathy was tiny. The
boys were young. There wasn’t much we
could do about him.”
Mabry didn’t come home that Saturday
night in 1997. When she hadn’t returned
by late Sunday morning, Wilson began
to worry. She knew about her daughter’s
drug problem, but Mabry had managed
to handle her addiction while still taking
care of her boys and working her job at
the Confish catfish plant. She wasn’t one
to disappear without a phone call.
On Monday morning, Gates called
Wilson to ask if she knew where Mabry
was. He’d called her several times over
the weekend, he said, and she hadn’t
picked up. Until then Wilson had worried, but just assumed her daughter had
been with Gates. Now she panicked. She
called Roseman and asked the police
chief to look for Mabry in Belzoni. Roseman checked around town. No one had
seen her.
At 5:30 a.m. the following morning,
a truck driver named Junior Mitchell
pulled his rig up to his house, to fill up
from the diesel pump in the front yard.
Mitchell had moved out several months
earlier to live with his girlfriend, but
still came by from time to time to get gas