Episode 7: The Aftermath

of Preston Wheeler's apartment. Preston was home with his girlfriend, Patrice Brandon, and when they saw the two men outside, they invited them in. They weren't expecting trouble. After all. Preston, a small time drug dealer, and Jesse were friendly, but Jesse and Charles were not there as friends. According to Charles, Jesse tie Preston and Patrese up while the two of them ransacked the apartment looking for money and drugs and valuables.

When they didn't find anything worthwhile, Jesse raped and strangled Patrese to death with a hanger before sodomizing and murdering Preston. A neighbor, Ronald Chisholm, having heard a commotion, went to make sure that Preston was okay. Charles later testified that Jesse invited and rattled in and then strangled him in the bathtub. Jesse and Charles went about a year before being caught. Charles was arrested first and agreed to testify against Jesse in exchange for a reduced sentence. Jesse was

ultimately arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. You hear about a crime like this and you think, how could someone do this? What is it about them that would make them do something this brutal, cruel, this evil. The answer requires us to go back fifteen years before that triple murder, back to nineteen sixty four when Jesse James Andrews, aged thirteen, was sent to Mount Meg's. When I first got the email about Mount Megs, I was horrified by

the story and what the kids went through. But there was one particular part that stuck with me that made me feel like I had to tell the story. Not what Mount Megs did to children, but how it changed the trajectory of those children's lives once they became adults. We've told you the stories of some of them. Jenny Knox, Mary Stevens, Johnny Bodley and Lonnie Holly. We've told you about how they came to Mount Megs scared and alone,

how they learned to adopt, how they suffered. So it may sound strange to say this, but in many anyways, Jenny, Mary, Johnny and Lonnie were the lucky ones, lucky despite the fact that they're still haunted by what happened to them, even though they're now in their sixties and seventies. But many people who were incarcerated at Mount Meg's as children ended up spending their entire lives tethered to the criminal legal system. Many were sentenced to life in prison. Many

others were sentenced to death. I'm Josie Duffie Rice and this is Unreformed The Story of the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children, Episode seven, The Aftermath. Jesse James Andrews went to trial and was sentenced to death via gas chamber in nineteen eighty four, but a few years later he appealed, arguing that his attorneys hadn't presented mitigating evidence. When a defendant is facing a possible death sentence, they're allowed to present evidence that could convince the jury that

a life sentence would be more appropriate. The evidence could include many things developmental delays, remorse age, or childhood trauma. Jesse wanted to tell the court about Mount Megs for his appeal. Jesse's lawyers wanted to talk to others who knew Jesse when he was at Mountmegs. In total, thirty two former Mountmegs students sat for depositions. Every single one

of them had spent significant time in adult prison. The day nineteen, Could you say your name again to the record, please, Johnny McNiel, Richard Everley, Junior, Holiver Clifton Weekly, Vernon Madison, Testing rain Row of Young Bolish Founcer and mister Raines. You're presently incarcerated or in custody at the Alabama prison system. That's right. Um. Could you tell me where you were raised or practice in Threal. I've been about twenty seven

twenty year, you know, Mount Megan. Yeah, it's been thirty years since those depositions. We reached out to all the people who were deposed who are still living, most of whom are still in prison. We only heard back from one person. This is a prepaid collect call from an incarcerated individual at Alabama Department of Correction. Miscall is not private. It will be recorded and maybe monitored. You may start the conversation now, OK, my man is Johnny Mack. This

is Johnny Mack Young. Not to be confused with Johnny Bodley, who you've also heard from today. Johnny Mack is seventy three. He's at the Saint Clair Correctional Facility in Springvale, Alabama. Johnny Mack's life parallels Jesse's in many ways. They come from the same part of Alabama. As children, they were both sent to Mount Meg's and as adults both were

sentenced to prison for murder. Well one of the most violent persons that you would ever have met in your life, and those characteristics wols in steel in me when I was a tweer of thirteen year child in my mayor's reformatur Johnny Mack was born in a small town called Pritchard, Alabama. Pritchard was very segregated. Johnny Max says he didn't even

meet a white person until he was seven. Like many of the other survivors we've heard from, Johnny Mack was one of several siblings, but he was closest to his older sister Rose and his brother James. Rose will go to school where she came home. She pulls us learned how to write. She pulls us loud and leave with Rose's help. Johnny Mack was pretty good at school. He liked reading and math, but by age twelve, he was

starting to get into trouble. He'd rather life would have been a whole lot too, But instead of listening to his sister, Johnny Max says, he started running in the streets. He kept running away from home and playing hooky from school until eventually he was declared incorrigible and sent to Mount Meg's. He got there around the same time as Lonnie, and his stories about his time there echoed the ones we heard from everyone else. Like the physical violence right

then there was a sexual violence. They will out of being forced to work in the fields from dawn to dusk were so long curved and the earth that the role was dropping out Barry mister Glover's beating stick, which Glover named John Henry think John John even attempting to run away multiple times. After attempting to escape six times, Johnny Mac stopped running away once he discovered the consequences. Johnny Mack was an ike that was slang for the tough guys. He says that at Mount Meg's you had

to be on guard all of the time. You can trust you hey, a friend better. On April fifth, nineteen sixty eight, the day after Martin Luther King was killed, Robert Kennedy gave a speech called on the Mindless Menace of Violence, where he talked about the cowardice of the bullet like the one that had ended King's life and would end his own just two months later. But he mentioned another kind of violence too, which he called quote slower but just as deadly destructive as the shot or

the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions, in difference and in action and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. It was the institutional violence at Mount Meg's that led to the harm

that many of its former residents would later commit. And this is part of the legacy of Mount Meg's too, what the institution did to those children even when they weren't children anymore, people like Johnny mack Young and Jesse James Andrews. In nineteen sixty four, a new student arrived at Mount Meg's, a kid named Jesse James Andrews, the same Jesse who twenty years later would be sentenced to

death for triple homicide. Johnny Mack took notice of him since the two boys were from the same area in Alabama. The first thing that stood out about Jesse is that he was small. Johnny Mack described him as passive, soft week new arrivals were always subject to some hazing, but it was worse for the ones they called scrubs, kids like Jesse, the guys who were easily preyed upon. The ones Johnny Body described as suckers, guys like that, the

vulnerable ones. They stood out like sore thumbs at Mount Meg's vulnerability put a target on your back, and right away Jesse caught their attention. Even years later, the other kids remembered how much more abuse he endured than most From what you observed during the time when you and Jesse were both at Mount may With Jesse treated any better than any of the other kids there, And my old thing, I would say he was treating a little

bit worse because of his side, you know. Like for me knowing Jesse and looking at him, I had to say, you know, he has a great feminine look about himself. So I said, hey, you're going to have a hard time. You remember actually seeing mister Blobard hit Jesse with the Bullwin? Yes? Did you ever see Jesse hit at the morning Ben? Yes, I've seen me. Jesse was assaulted and tortured, not just by the staff but by other kids. He was a laughing stock, a frequent punching bag, and an even more

frequent rape victim. Johnny Max says that he and some others taught Jesse how to fight, but the way they did that was by beating him themselves. Well, one of the things that we did was we like passed on the rules and you know, like a code of conduct, teach them how to survive. Okay, what was the code of conduct? But you don't let nobody or do nothing you to get away? And you didn't. I will show funds of Weaknessess. Johnny Mack and Jesse were released from

Mount Meg's in the mid nineteen sixties. They'd crossed paths many years later under very different circumstances, but as kids leaving Mount Megs thrown out to fend for themselves, they'd had a certain mentality instilled in them. Hurt them before they hurt. You, trust nobody, and never show weakness. At age fifteen, Johnny Mack was released from Mount Meg's. He found himself with no money and no help, and he ended up in a small town where he broke into

a grocery store. That's how wind up going to jail. Just a month after he left Mount Meg's, Johnny Mack was locked up once again. This time he was sent to the adult jail. I'm fifteen years old. For me, godja would be grown ay. They all big and swoll up because he's pushing up. And back then there were often kids in adult correctional facilities, and that's still the case today. This is one of the many unimaginable elements of our criminal justice system, shoving children into adult prisons

and jails to fend for themselves. Given his years at Mount Meg's, some of the most brutal parts of jail were familiar to Johnny Mack. He told us a story about time when he beat an older inmate with a metal lunch tray. I need him wait to knocked him down. Johnny Mack went to trial for this assault. He was convicted and sentenced to three years and at Moore prison, a notoriously terrible adult penitentiary in Alabama. Jesse James Andrews

was also sent to Atmore. That triple homicide that Jesse committed. It turns out it wasn't his first time being charged with murder. Just three months after he left Mount Meg's, in the wake of the abuse and torture, he was implicated in another killing, though he didn't pull the trigger. He was only fifteen years old. Johnny Mack got out of Atmore at eighteen and moved up North. Over the next several years, he was in and out of various

correctional facilities in different states across the country. In New Jersey, he was charged with multiple counts of assault and robbery. He also has a record in Ohio. But Johnny Mack even said in those depositions from the nineties that Mount Meg's was worse than any prison he went to as an adult. What would you say the level of violence was The man made to Fanny at the prodeo time Aunt made was rougher than the prison Instachusetts. He had

to be tough, you know. The event that brought him back home to Alabama was a theft gone wrong in the nineteen eighties, Johnny Mack was living in New Jersey and started robbing local drug dealers with a woman named Candy. One night, the people Candy and Johnny Mack planned to rob had been tipped off that they were coming. A shootout ensued. My girl Candy, Yeah, the hardback shotgune. Johnny Mack hid behind a couch and Candy came in the

back door with her automatic shotgun. She gave cover for Johnny Mac to grab the drugs in cash and run out the back. He was grazed with a bullet on his way out. Candy ran out the front and straight into the police, who arrested her and hauled her off to jail, but Johnny Mack escaped and he fled back home to Alabama. When Johnny Matt got to Alabama, he ended up back near Pritchard in Mobile County, where he was born. After a failing drove a lot of the

still right. He had a whole drug operation run out of two buildings hidden away outside Mobile. He was making good money and in a way he was settling down. He started dating a woman who had kids and they all moved in together in a house up on a hill in a community called eight Mile, Johnny Mack was stepping in as a father figure. Were warm fall that it treats me. He loved them as if they were his own, he said, especially the youngest daughter, who he'd

take a round with him everywhere. He started boxing when he lived in New Jersey, so he'd take her to the gym with him or out whenever he was running errands for the home. But Johnny Mack was still hustling selling drugs, still had that Mount Meg's mentality instilled in him. Then he met another woman, one much younger than him. She was in an altercation with a guy who worked with Johnny Mack's operation. She ended up shooting at the guy, and when he tried to retaliate, Johnny Mack stepped in

and knocked him out. Johnny Mack was impressed by this woman's zeal. He described her as a gangster. So even though he had his family on the hill, he started seeing this new woman too. But soon after Johnny Mack discovered she was stealing money from him, money that he says he needed to support his family. You can't take him out by you're taking money on my baby's mouth. He was furious. According to Johnny Mack. He told her she'd better not come around him anymore, but he says

she stole from him one more time. Flash, Jane, Babe stole my money. I killed him. The Alabama Department of Corrections classification summary for Johnny Mac reads Sean and killed female victim who was two months pregnant. Johnny Mack was in his thirties when he was convicted. He's been in prison for thirty six years. He is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole, which means he will die in a place where he has spent most of

his life. In Alabama prison. Johnny Mack Young was sentenced to life without parole in nineteen eighty six. By the mid nineteen nineties, he had escaped from prisons in Alabama several times and had racked up dozens of serious disciplinarian fractions. When I came to Bridge, that's the ad that moms vititude. That's when Johnny Mack heard that Jesse had committed three murders in California. The story he heard was slightly different

than what's in the legal documents. He heard that Jesse was with two other guys, not just Charles I Elina lomeboy was that MoMA the California killed somebody. The kinner was so henious molded to homeboy running out of the building and left him in there. And he had told him and he wounded up getting no give room. Johnny Mack remembered just how much violence Jesse had been forced to endure, so he and another prisoner who knew Jesse

wrote to Jesse's lawyers. You write the lawyers to Gil the Voynu everything on the belief, and then we told him about Mamay. Now, Johnny Mack wasn't writing the lawyers solely out of the goodness of his heart. He told us that he was hoping that Jesse's lawyers would bring him out to California for an official statement. He thought they'd give him plenty of opportunities to escape to secure

his runaway plan. Johnny Mack was trying to be as helpful as possible to Jesse's lawyers, even finding more inmates for them to talk to. We gave him too many a day. But unfortunately for Johnny Mack, Jesse's lawyers found so many former Mountmeg students incarcerated in the Alabama prison system alone that instead of bringing everyone to California, the

lawyers decided to come south. They talked to those thirty two in mates and prisons around Alabama, at facilities like Kilby, Saint Clair, Donaldson, Elmore, and Holman where people on death row are imprisoned. How would you describe the effect that Mountain Max had our youth? But I tell you one that was a lot of fear, but a lot of

hit me man with the wold. They've had me messed up as a chip on my shoulder and put so much anger and hate inside of you until when giving a chance, it's like saying, all of a sudden you run through the woods and you was the rabbit. The next thing you knew, you come up in your warf So you want to hunt you some rabbits too, you know?

Hear me with a lot of hate. Couldn't help them, but they hate Wait the way they treat you, and we were we was being treated worth the dull man and everybody, the most most of y'all that I was, Yeah, I made him me brially most everybody you knew a Mountain Matthew later, so PRIs yesself? Would you say that you're experiencing had anything to do with your convictions for

blas later in mine. Yeah, gave me the foundation for everything that I am, all that I am proud of me, all that I would always be a proud of tomou me. There's no question that Jesse did something unspeakably horrible when he killed Preston Wheeler, Patrice Brandon, and Ronald Chisholm. And yet if there was ever legitimate mitigating evidence, his time

at Mount Meg's would seem to qualify. And if his experience wasn't enough, thirty two other people testified under oath about what they had gone through, how it changed them, and what they had seen Jesse indoor, but the court wasn't convinced. In two thousand and two, the Supreme Court of California upheld Jesse's death row sentence. It wasn't until a subsequent appeal into thousand and nine that the court

recognized the traumatic impact of what Jesse had endured. His death sentence was overturned and he was resentenced to life without parole. Jesse James Andrews is still alive today after years in the infamous San Quentin Prison in California. He is now at the California healthcare facility, which houses many elderly incarcerated people with chronic health conditions. We reached out to him and as lawyers, but we didn't hear back. Jesse and Johnny Mack aren't the only former Mount Meg's

kids to be convicted of murder. There's Sam Howard, Kevin Hawker, who's Roosevelt young Blood, once the longest serving prisoner in Alabama. There are men who left Mount Meg's and committed murder within months when they were still just kids. There are people whose names were keeping private because they're still appealing their sentences. And there are hundreds more people who endured so much cruelty at Mount Meg's as children and then inflicted serious violent harm on others once they got out.

They went to an institution where violence was a constant eat or be eaten, where they were being abused, being forced to abuse others, or both. And Mount meg they teach you how to be a better thief, a better killer, or better rapists. Mount means turn gas into murderers. That's the other Johnny, Johnny body. When I get out of Mount Meg, I had a killing mentality. If someone did

anything to me, I would have killed you. That's attitude I left me, And if things had gone just a little differently, he too could have easily ended up on death row or serving a life sentence. He told us about one moment when he was living in Boston where he could see just how much the violence and abuse at Mountain Meg's had affected him. I was in Boston,

you know, and I went into this store. So I went into the dress room with this big baggy pair of pans on and I put about three or four pay onto the baggy pair and thee and I attempted to walk out. So when I walked out the door and alarm went off. And so when the alarm went off, I started winning, and this white guys started chasing me. The white guy had to call me. I would have killed him. Johnny told us that almost all of his friends for Mountain Meg's are now either dead or in prison.

Jenny's former crush, the Boy on the Tractor, is currently on death row in Alabama. In the almost forty years he's been locked up, Johnny Mack has encountered dozens of former Mount Meg's kids within the prison walls. Everybody that was in Mountain Bay's with me. Yeah, the kid death Row is filmot state. When the old guy in COMMANI didn't rape somebody and didn't accute the least one you

fet the behavior came home weird. I keep thinking about something, Superintendent EB Holloway said in nineteen seventy, right before he retired. This was three months after a federal court ordered Mount Meg's to implement reforms, and just one day after US Attorney Ira Dement told a local paper that he was considering prosecuting Holloway for child abuse. Holloway said that when he came to work at Mount Meg's twenty three years before, they didn't send him to teachers, of therapists or social

workers to learn about child welfare. Instead, he said, they sent me to Kilby. Kilby, by the Way, is one of the worst adult prisons in Alabama. Holloway continued, I had to do what they wanted done. If I hadn't, I wouldn't have been here twenty three years. The question they always asked was how many bales of cotton have you made? And never how many children have you helped. It's tempting to think of Mount Meg's as the failure

of cruel individuals. Holloway Fiddy Matthews and countless others. But the truth is that the failure was much bigger than that. It's the thing Robert Kennedy was talking about the violence of institutions, institutions that not only inflicted violence, but instilled it. Why would the conditions of these institutions make a first

class criminal because one is influenced by his environment. That second voice is Ira Dement, the lawyer turned prosecutor turned judge who represented Denny and the kids from Mount Meg's in the nineteen sixty nine lawsuit. Ira died in two thousand and eight, but he was also deposed in the mid nineteen nineties for Jesse James Andrews appeal. Do you think, based on your knowledge of the superio institutions, that someone subjected to those conditions can be influenced in absolutely? Totally.

You know. I'll give you a perfect example. I have one hundred and ten pound rott Willer. He's a gentle job. You could take the same dog being a puppy and turn him into a ferocious, vicious dog. So I am totally sold on the proposition how you trade someone greatly influences his or her behavior. My friend Rachel said something similar that people who go on to inflict some of the worst harms almost always had serious trauma in their childhoods.

You may remember her from episode one. She and I went to law school together, and now she lives in Montgomery, where she's worked with both people serving life sentences for crimes they committed as juveniles and people on death Row. Early on, I called her to talk about Mount Meg's I asked her about her clients, many of whom have been accused of committing serious violent harm. How often is that they experienced childhood trauma? Would you say in your experience?

I mean, it sounds too neat, but every single time, absolutely, one for one. I sort of end up looking at people the arc of people's lives retrospectively and kind of studying and coming to understand how they ended up on a place like death Row, how they ended up sort of being the most cast off of all people in our society. And so, you know, I noticed a lot of patterns, and one of them is this contact with

the juvenile justice system. And Rachel said something I hadn't really thought about, that many of the kids at Mount Meg must have felt betrayed. I think every single one of my clients was arrested as a juvenile, has some deep wound that they're nursing about the way that they feel misled or they felt attacked, where they felt abandoned by the law and by fingers of authority, And that is just something that I can't imagine them ever really

forgetting or recovering from. But I also just see how that level of the trail could just sort of completely realign your understanding the world. I now know in my heart that nobody does something violent or abusive unless it is something that has been shown to them or that they've been subjected to. Whatever they've been accused of or whatever they've perpetuated is an expression of something that they've made through. Some of the tragedy of Mount Meg's is scientific.

We know a lot more now about how abuse affects the brain and the harmful effect of trauma on children. We know that our brains aren't fully developed until our mid twenties. We know about the negative impact exposure to violence can have on young kids. The kids who were sent to Mount Megs were victimized by the institution, but they weren't the only victims. Preston and Patrese and Ronald were also victims of Mount Megs. The pregnant woman Johnny

mac Shot was a victim of Mount Megs. And it's not just them, but their families and their loved ones who paid the price for the harm that the school inflicted. In other words, Mount Meg's harmed more than just the kids. It harmed those who those kids went on to hurt. So much lost time, so much grief, so much unrealized love and joy. When I started researching Mount Megs, I told an acquaintance about the institution and what it did to children. He shrugged, looked, unfhazed. It's hard to control

violent kids. He told me. They were violent kids, weren't they? Why else would they have been there to begin with. His argument was that Mount Meg's didn't shape these kids, They shaped Mount Meg's. I thought about that conversation when I found this document from the nineteen fifties about a report that J. R. Wingfield, the former superintendent, sent to the governor. In it, he said that lots of the kids at Mount Meg's were there for laziness and loitering.

The people we've talked to went in for similar things, things like truancy or being out past curfew or petty theft or running away. Many went in for the crime of having no parents and nowhere else to go. Jesse James Andrews went in for joy riding. Look, even if these kids had shown some inclination for violence, even if they had committed very serious crimes, Mount Meg's would still have been a terrible place to send them. What all

kids need is guidance, safety and help. No child or person is rehabilitated by being stuck in a factory of abuse. These kids weren't monsters. They were shaped by what they endured, what they were forced to see, and that's what makes the history of this institution even more devastating. In the next episode, the last of this series, we're going to look at how former students like Johnny mac still cope

with their experience and what's become of Mount Meg's today. Unreformed, The Story of the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children is a production of School of Humans and iHeartMedia. This episode was written by me Josie Deffie, Rice and Taylor von Laslie. Our scoop supervisors Florence Burrow Adams, and our producer is Gabby Watts, who had additional writing and production support from Sherry Scott. Executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Elsie Crowley,

Brandon Barr, Mett Arnette, and me. Sound design and mix is by Jesse Niswanger. Music is by Ben Soli. Additional recordings are courtesy of the Alabama Center for Traditional Culture. Special things to the Alabama Department of Archives and History, Michael Harriet, Floyd Hall, Kevin Nutt, Van Newkirk, and all of the survivors of Mount Meg's willing to share their stories. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating

and review wherever you get your podcasts. If you are someone you know attended Mount Megs and would like to be in contact, please email mountmes podcast at gmail dot com. That's mt M e i g S Podcast at gmail dot com. School of Humans