A jury turned in the fastest murder verdict in Sangamon County history on June 18, 1930. It took jurors only five minutes to rule that Ulysses Brazier, accused of murdering three men and then burning their bodies, was not guilty.
The verdict probably came as no surprise to anyone, maybe not even police and prosecutors. The evidence against Brazier was all circumstantial, some of the state’s witnesses contradicted each other, and the prosecution never came up with a possible motive for Brazier to kill the victims. The state’s case was so weak that Brazier’s attorney, John G. Friedmeyer, saw no need to present a defense, and both sides agreed to skip closing arguments.
Brazier, who had spent two months in jail awaiting trial, walked free … but not, as it turns out, for long. He was arrested again in September for shooting to death an acquaintance, LeRoy Woodson. This time, Brazier (1899-1982) was convicted. He ultimately spent 20 years in prison.
The fire took place March 10, 1930, at a shack in an undeveloped area a half-mile west of Camp Lincoln. The three victims all seem to have been down on their luck. Their bodies were burned beyond recognition.
With the help of a few recognizable remnants found on the bodies – a patched pair of pants, a knife, and part of a fire-blackened watch – authorities identified two of the dead men as 47-year-old William Graham and 41-year-old Claude McPherson.
The third man probably was McPherson’s brother Clyde, 43, although that was never fully confirmed. The Illinois Deaths and Stillbirths Index, 1916-1947, leaves the question open, saying the man may have been named either Clyde McPherson or Clyde Stevenson. However, a farmer who was leasing the property told the Illinois State Journal he rented the shack to the McPherson brothers about a month earlier “and as far as he knew they were occupying it.”
Census and city directory listings say all three worked as “laborers.”
Authorities almost immediately suspected the three men had been killed and the shack burned to cover the crime. The main reason for the theory, however, was that some witnesses said they had seen four men, not three, enter the shack before the fire. Police thought Brazier was the fourth man because two of the bystanders said they saw him leaving the area of the blazing hut and because of comments he supposedly made to the witnesses.
One nearby resident, William Langfield, told police he saw Brazier jump a fence in front of the burning shack. According to the Journal’s story:
Brazier appeared to be very drunk, Langfield said. When Langfield questioned the colored man (see note below – ed.), he hurried on saying, ‘Let the old shack burn down, there is nobody in it,” according to Langfield.
When the case came to trial, however, authorities could produce no witness who saw Brazier enter or leave the shack, only that he had been near it. (Brazier lived close by on North Lincoln Avenue.)
The state’s theory that Brazier started the fire to hide a triple murder also was weakened because the positions of the three bodies suggested they were alive when the fire began. “The partly burned bodies were lying in a heap together near where the door had been, indicating that they had attempted to escape,” the Journal reported.
The jury’s ruling, the Illinois State Register reported, “is believed to be the speediest murder trial verdict in the history of the Sangamon county circuit court. … The jury, retiring at about 4:10 p.m., was ready with its verdict in about five minutes.”
An outburst of applause from Brazier’s friends in the court room followed the reading of the verdict by Clerk Herman C. Goering. The applause was cut short by Judge Charles G. Briggle, who told the spectators that they were not attending a vaudeville show.
In Brazier’s second murder trial, which took place in January 1931, there was never any doubt that he had fired the shot that killed Leroy Woodson (1888-1930). The question was whether he acted in self-defense.
Woodson was shot at Eighth and Washington Streets on Sept. 24, 1930, apparently as the outgrowth of an argument two days earlier between Brazier and Woodson’s wife Willa. Brazier testified in court that he fired the fatal shot after Woodson, who Brazier said was carrying a knife, threatened to kill him.
“The state produced evidence to refute much of the defense testimony,” the Journal reported. This time, jurors took three hours, not counting lunch, to convict Brazier and sentence him to 40 years in state prison (sentencing was a jury prerogative at the time).
Brazier was paroled in 1950. He is buried in Mansfield, Ohio.
Woodson’s grave is in Oak Ridge Cemetery, as is that of Clyde Stevenson/McPherson. According to ancestry.com, Claude McPherson is buried in the Rosamond Cemetery in Christian County. George William Graham is buried in the Virden Cemetery.
Note: Brazier was Black. Newspapers at the time routinely identified African-Americans as “colored” or “Negro” in news stories, especially stories involving crime. Virtually every article about the fire and the three deaths uses one of those adjectives to refer to Brazier.
By contrast, none of the fire victims were listed as “colored” or “Negro,” meaning all three were white.
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Fascinating, and thanks for your stellar research, as always.
I do genealogy indexing as a hobby and both “colored” and “negro” are all over old documents. City Directories, stories that say “Mike Jones, a negro…”, naturalization records. You name it, those words were there. It’s boggling to think that they were not only used, but were widely accepted at one time.