Anisa Khalifa: If you walk through a cemetery, you’ll see some common phrases on the gravestones. Many of them are used so often, we tend to take these very public remembrances for granted. Rest in Peace. Here Lies so-and-so. Beloved father, mother, daughter, son… But for nearly 50 years, the gravestone of a preacher’s son in a tiny western North Carolina town had a very unusual inscription.
Margaret Martine: The minister had put on the gravestone who had killed his son.
Anisa Khalifa: But what happens when such a bold accusation, literally written in stone, turns out to be a lie? I’m Anisa Khalifa. This is the Broadside, where we tell stories from our home at the crossroads of the South. This week, my colleague Charlie Shelton-Ormond visits the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains and finds out how a grudge and a gravestone changed criminal justice in North Carolina forever.
Margaret Martine: It's called Whippoorwill because it was so far back in the woods even the whippoorwills couldn't find it.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Margaret Martine’s roots in Ferguson, North Carolina run deep.
Margaret Martine: My family has been on this land since the 1700s, and I don't feel like I'm the owner. I feel like I'm a steward taking care of it.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Her family’s been a part of the small Appalachian town from its start. In fact, Margaret’s full name is Margaret Ferguson Carter Martine.
Margaret Martine: And I grew up in Ferguson and thought that I was named after the post office. Um, which, I should have been in therapy for a long time over that one, but it's named after my great-grandfather.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Today Margaret’s the director and co-owner of Whippoorwill Academy and Village. It’s a family farm, open to the public, with about a dozen old wooden buildings. Each building has been restored and is full of local historical artifacts. Margaret often hosts events on the farm for anybody interested in Ferguson’s history. She says ever since she was a kid, she’s loved stories about her hometown.
Margaret Martine: I grew up around both sets of grandparents. And my grandmother Carter was a great storyteller, told us family history all the time.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Including one particularly morbid story that always piqued Margaret’s interest.
Margaret Martine: And so, Grandmother was the one who told me the story about Hamp Kendall, and I didn't hesitate to ask 'em, tell me a story again. Repeat that story, tell me again.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: The story starts in 1906. With a murder.
Margaret Martine: There was a young man, he was a son of a minister who was found shot to death.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: The dead man was named Lawrence Nelson. He’d been missing for a few months when his body was discovered with a gunshot wound in the back of his neck. So who killed him? There were two immediate suspects.
Margaret Martine: Hamp Kendall and, and Vickers were roomates in Caldwell County and they were held responsible, uh, for the death. And Nelson had been robbed of some silver coins that he had.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Hamp Kendall and John Vickers were roommates of the victim. The two men said they were innocent, but were put on trial for the murder anyway. In the courtroom, a key witness was a 14-year-old girl named Omah Grier.
Margaret Martine: That’s right. Omah Grier, uh, and her friend said that they were paid to lure Nelson, the guy that was the victim, into the woods for them to kill. That was not a good thing for the guys that were accused.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Omah Grier’s account sealed their fate. The men were convicted of second-degree murder. Hamp Kendall received a 30-year prison sentence. Vickers got a similar sentence. But incarceration wasn’t their only punishment. The victim — Lawrence Nelson — was the son of a prominent reverend in the area. And Reverend Nelson, who owned the cemetery where his son was buried, wasn’t the forgiving type.
Margaret Martine: Reverend Nelson, uh, had put on the gravestone that, who had killed his son.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Underneath his name, Lawrence Nelson’s gravestone read “Murdered and robbed by Hamp Kendall and John Vickers, Sept. 25, 1906.”
Max Longley: Nowadays, uh, you don't really see that.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: That’s Max Longley. He’s a writer based in Durham, North Carolina. He recently wrote a piece about the Hamp Kendall case for the online magazine Atlas Obscura. So, about that gravestone…
Max Longley: I found a few experts on cemetery law who thought it was unusual to put it mildly.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Now cemetery law might sound like it’s something straight out of Beetlejuice, but it’s a real thing. And just think about this headstone, it’s pretty wild to consider. A murder accusation carved into stone for eternity. After the conviction, Hamp Kendall and John Vickers were imprisoned. But, over time, doubts about the guilty verdict started to seep into the community.
Max Longley: The other woman witness later testified a flat contradiction of the state's witness, the teenager in the trial of Kendall and Vickers, uh, her testimony being that neither Kendall nor Vickers were implicated in the murder.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: This second witness testimony sowed some serious doubt. And it came to head when Omah Grier’s mother eventually came forward and told state authorities that her daughter had admitted to making it all up.
Max Longley: It was on file in the governor's office, an affidavit by her mother in which it is asserted that the witness after the trial avowed that her testimony was false. These men were not guilty and that another was.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Although it took a while, in 1917, the governor pardoned the two men.
Max Longley: What he said is, I've issued pardons to them on the ground that evidence brought out after their conviction raises grave doubt of their guilt.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: And 10 years after their conviction, Kendall and Vickers were released from prison. So who did commit the murder? Shortly after the pardon, Margaret Martine says a man plagued with guilt named Sam Green confessed to the crime.
Margaret Martine: The guy who did it uh, was apparently feeling really I mean, it took a long time for it to get to this point, but he went to a local sawmill and told them he wanted a coffin made to fit him. And he went home and shot himself.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: As for the two men wrongfully convicted, John Vickers died shortly after he was released from prison. Hamp Kendall, on the other hand, went back home to Ferguson, North Carolina. But there was a problem…
Max Longley: For several decades later, the gravestone was up there.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: That gravestone, now with a confirmed lie on it, was still in the ground. Coming up, why it wasn’t so easy to change the headstone — and how Hamp Kendall became a catalyst for criminal justice reform not once, but twice in his home state.
Life after prison for Hamp Kendall wasn’t easy.
Margaret Martine: Hamp carried the scars his whole life around his ankles where he had the shackles that he wore.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Again, this is Margaret Martine.
Margaret Martine: His scars were just so horrible, he didn't hesitate to show them to people about what had happened to him.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Those scars weren’t just physical. After his release, Kendall built a cabin in the woods outside of Ferguson and lived life as a hermit.
Margaret Martine: He didn't want anything to do with people, you know, except for those who managed to make the trek up to his cabin.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: But, as time went on, people became more and more sympathetic to Kendall’s difficult situation. And a push to compensate him gained support.
Max Longley: They persuaded the General Assembly to pass a compensation law that, uh, if you're pardoned by the governor because you didn't commit a crime or there was no crime to commit, then you could then apply for compensation.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Writer Max Longley says that law passed in 1947. As Max sifted through old newspapers from the time, he found reports crediting the law as a direct response to Kendall’s experience.
Max Longley: It took three decades. It was 1917 when he was pardoned. 1947, the compensation law was passed. So that took a bit of time.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: And he has to live with it throughout that time.
Max Longley: Yes.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: And it’s still on the books. It’s a law that’s paved the way for dozens of people in North Carolina to receive compensation for wrongful convictions. Today, people can receive 50,000 dollars per year of incarceration. The maximum someone can get is 750,000. But in the 1940s, Kendall received just under 5,000 dollars for his compensation.
Margaret Martine: He didn't receive enough money is what I say.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: And unfortunately, Margaret says that money didn’t last long.
Margaret Martine: This radio station wanted to do an interview with him in New York City. And so that was a big deal and they were going to pay him money for it and everything. And so he goes up to do the interview and he gets drunk the night before and he doesn't show up for the interview. And he's just so — I can't even imagine how he felt. But he went out on the street and held a cab, and the cab driver said, Where do you want to go? And he said, Take me to North Carolina. And he spent all of his money. So he spent his money to get back to North Carolina, and didn't leave again.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: When Kendall returned from New York, hungover and broke, a bitter reminder of his incarceration was still planted in the ground. That gravestone accusing him of murder hadn’t been changed after his pardon.
Margaret Martine: People would ask after Hamp Kendall was released from prison why don't you just knock that stone down and drag it off somewhere. And he said, I ain't never committed a crime and I ain't about to now. So, you know, I mean, he wasn't about to get himself back in the, you know, behind bars.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: The person who originally put the gravestone in the ground — Reverend Nelson — died just before Kendall was pardoned.
Max Longley: But after that, whoever was running the cemetery, just didn't want to deface a gravestone because that's a crime.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Max says the new owner of the cemetery said their hands were tied. Because of existing grave desecration laws, he couldn’t legally correct Nelson’s false accusation. So once again, Hamp Kendall became a rallying cry for reform in North Carolina. And another campaign started up to change the state’s cemetery laws.
Max Longley: Finally, the legislature in 1949 said, you can't accuse somebody of a crime on a gravestone.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: And with the new law, if a gravestone has an accusation already on it, then it’s gotta go.
Max Longley: So a few years later, that gravestone disappeared.
Margaret Martine: My sister and I went to a funeral at that church a few years ago and found the tombstone of Nelson, but it has been changed.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Despite all of this attention after his pardon, Hamp Kendall lived a quiet life as a recluse. Growing up, Margaret Martine heard stories about the old man living alone up on the mountain, occasionally coming into town to get supplies. She says people in Ferguson would hike to Kendall’s cabin every now and then to make sure he was alright. That included her father. One time Margaret even tagged along.
Margaret Martine: And when we got up there, he was so happy to see my dad. And the dogs were howling, you know, and he had his liquor still over on the side of the yard. So, he comes and goes in his cabin, he comes out, and he has two pieces of chocolate candy that were completely green with mold. And he gave us the candy as a gift. And we looked at dad and he shot us the, You better thank him look, which we did, but we held the candy until we got away from the cabin, which we could throw it away, but, but that was his gift to us was to give us each a piece of chocolate.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Hamp Kendall died in the late 1960s. His gravestone is in a cemetery behind a local Baptist church. It’s a small concrete rectangle with a simple etching of his name, date of birth and death. But Kendall’s gravestone isn’t the only monument to his life. Back on the farm at Whippoorwill, Margaret Martine showed me around.
Margaret Martine: Judge Hamp Kendall, law south of the <indistinct>. Let me close it so you can see.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: There’s an old schoolhouse, a chapel, a little general store, and… a jail house with a familiar name.
Margaret Martine: So it's the Hemp Kendall, you know, Law of the Land Jailhouse that we have here… made it so that Hamp Kendall was the one who dispensed justice. When we have church groups here, we always ask the minister, who's the most straightlaced person you got, and we have them arrested for making moonshine. And they just go, ahhh! I love to see old people's reaction to stuff like that.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Even if this justice is in jest, Margaret says it feels right to paint Hamp Kendall’s name in a new light.
Margaret Martine: And I thought that was a great thing that, you know, Hamp needed to be in charge for once.
Anisa Khalifa: If you'd like to know more about the unusual story of Hamp Kendall, we’ve linked to articles written by Margaret and Max in the show notes. This episode of the Broadside was produced by Charlie Shelton-Ormond and edited by Jerad Walker. Wilson Sayre is our executive producer.
The Broadside is a production of WUNC–North Carolina Public Radio and is part of the NPR network. You can email us at broadside@wunc.org. If you enjoyed the show, leave us a rating, a review, or share it with a friend! I’m Anisa Khalifa. Thanks for listening y'all. We'll be back next week.