An East Texas jury found a former Sunday school teacher and Prohibition agent guilty of murder on Oct. 19, 1923.
Clem Gray was well-respected and much admired in his hometown of Mount Pleasant. When he was not enforcing the unpopular Prohibition laws, he taught Sunday school at a local church. He was the last person the good people of Titus County would have ever suspected of leading a secret life of crime.
But there was just too much money in bootlegging for Gray to stick to the straight and narrow. In time not even the illicit income from peddling forbidden spirits was enough, and he decided to branch out into burglary.
Instead of a business or residential break-in, he chose a small-town bank for an after-hours withdrawal. His target was the one bank in Rosewood, a tiny community eight miles from Gilmer in Upshur County that would be the closest thing to a ghost town within half a century.
The way the lawman saw it, a nighttime bank burglary was not a one-man job. So he recruited some young helpers: a doctor’s son named Otis Ballard and three black youths in their teens. The caper came off without a hitch, and the gang got way with an undisclosed amount of cash without being seen.
But the amateur accomplices must have bragged to their friends about their daring exploit because Ballard and at least two of the young black men were soon apprehended and subjected to an intense interrogation. The teens knew enough to keep their mouths shut, but the doctor’s boy quickly confessed, identified Clem Gray as the ringleader and agreed to testify against him.
Nine days before the disgraced lawman’s trial in September 1923, Otis Ballard foolishly agreed to a clandestine meeting at a Mount Pleasant school. While two of the black youths stayed behind, Gray and Ballard walked into the woods.
Only Gray returned. He had beaten Ballard to death with a heavy piece of pipe, wrapped a second piece around his neck with barbed wire and dumped his dead body in a creek.
Four days later, Burl Kemp, one of the black teenagers, led sheriff deputies to bloated remains of Otis Ballard. His grief-stricken father later said he was only able to make the required identification by the color of his son’s hair.
Even without Ballard’s testimony, the prosecutor had no trouble winning a conviction and a 10-year prison term at Gray’s burglary trial. Within the week, Clem Gray was back in the Titus County jail charged with the killing of Otis Gray. Fearing a lynching attempt from “a vengeful mob,” the sheriff shuttled the prisoner back and forth between jails in New Boston, Paris and Tyler until he was finally brought to trial the next October.
During the initial transfer, according to an article in the East Texas Journal, Gray “wildly demanded that the sheriff fight him like a man then begged to be killed.” Later on that same ride, he tried to strangle the driver before the other deputies in the car succeeded in restraining him.
Due to his violent and unpredictable behavior, security at Gray’s murder trial was extremely strict. The volatile defendant was brought into court in chains by three Texas Rangers, five deputies, several constables, the city marshal and every available officer from miles around. The incriminating testimony from Burl Kemp was enough to convince jurors that the rogue cop was guilty as charged and deserved the death penalty.
Gray spent the better part of a year in the Dallas County lockup waiting for the state appeals court to decide his fate. He was the “guest” of the Dallas sheriff, who afforded him unprecedented special treatment that even included having the run of the six-story jail. To quote the East Texas Journal, “He rose on the tide of celebrity riding a media-fueled barrage of sensational news accounts” that criticized his “conviction by a prejudiced jury at a mob trial on the testimony of a Negro.”
The Dallas sheriff pulled out all the stops in his unstinting support of Gray. He even traveled to Austin to plead in person with Gov. Miriam Ferguson for a commutation of his death sentence. Although soft-hearted “Ma” was famous for passing out pardons to Texans doing time for violations of the state Prohibition laws, she had no sympathy for a lawman turned merciless murderer.
Gray’s appeal was ultimately denied and his execution scheduled for Aug. 7, 1925. As the fateful hour approached, Death Row guards discovered the condemned killer had tried to cut his throat with a straight razor smuggled into the holding cell down the hall from the death chamber.
With blood streaming from his self-inflicted wound, Clem Gray was dragged kicking and screaming to the electric chair, but only after a couple of blows from the warden’s bat. Five minutes after midnight, he became the 19th Texan to die by electrocution in the Lone Star State.
Bartee welcomes your comments and questions at barteehaile@gmail.com or P.O. Box 130011, Spring, TX 77393.
