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Book Excerpt
The murder of Albert Patterson
June 8, 2008 — By Warren Trest
John worried about his father, as did the whole family. Albert refused to carry a gun even though the faceless telephone threats had become uglier and more menacing. The day before his murder a caller warned, “You’ve got to change your mind or you won’t be here over the weekend.” This was interpreted as a warning for him “not to appear before the grand jury in Jefferson County with the information he had about the vote fraud in the attorney general’s race.” On Thursday night he had spoken at a Methodist men’s club in Phenix City where he told the audience “the odds were something like 100-1 that he would not be alive to take office in January.” Despite the threats against his life, he had agreed to go to Birmingham the following Monday and tell what he knew...When the rain let up he left the hotel and started home. On the way out of town on Highway 80, he pulled off the road and stopped at the Parkmore Restaurant. He was the only customer at that hour. The waitress, a young English girl who was married to an airman stationed at Maxwell Field, said Albert sat in a booth and ordered a vanilla milkshake. He asked her to mix an egg into the milkshake, a common practice in the fifties. When she later read about his murder, she distinctly remembered another man coming in while Patterson sat in the booth drinking the milkshake. She couldn’t give a description of the man, but had the distinct feeling that he knew Patterson and was following him. ....John had left the office before his father got back. Mary Joe and the children were at their house near Fort Benning, and he drove there from work. The tenants had moved out, and they were moving in. Mary Joe had worked all day getting the house in order. After supper John lay across the bed toread Scottsboro Boy, an expose of the Alabama prison system. Albert, meanwhile, had arrived back in town and gone directly to the office. It had been a long, hot drive from Montgomery. The afternoon rainstorm hadn’t even settled the dust. Instead of cooling things off, the rain had left the air hot and sticky....Roughly an hour later, Albert Patterson turned off the lights and locked up. The lights going out could be seen as far away as the courthouse, and the tap of his cane on the steps would have alerted anyone lurking in the dark alley that he was coming down. When he opened the door to the Olds and sat behind the wheel, the killers were standing outside the car. He knew them. One leaned with his hand on the edge of the window to talk. One of the killers pulled a gun. Three shots rang out. The killers ran from the alley. Their defenseless victim staggered out of the car onto the sidewalk where he fell mortally wounded in a pool of blood.John was still reading in bed when the killers ambushed and murdered his father. No telephone had been hooked up yet, and John had left word that he could be reached at a next-door neighbor’s number in an emergency. The neighbor came over about fifteen or twenty minutes after nine with a message that something had happened at the office, and John needed to get down there as soon as he could. “They didn’t tell me what it was,” he recalled. “So I tore me a piece of paper, and stuck it in that book and laid it down. I ain’t never finished it. Every time I see the book I think about that.” Today, that unread book is locked away in a bottom drawer of the desk in Patterson’s study. He can’t bring himself to resume reading the book, but he can’t bear to part with it either. Keepsakes of his father’s and his family’s sacrifice are always around to remind him of that night of endless sorrow. Among them the book is all that ties him to the moment his father was struck down. The slip of paper he stuck between the pages is still there. Reprinted with permission from NewSouth Books from Nobody But the People: The Life & Times of Alabama's Youngest Governor by Warren Trest. For more information on the book or to order a copy, please visit www.newsouthbooks.com/patterson or call 334-834-3556. |
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