The letter that caught him had the wrong street address. Around November 8, 1934, a woman in Indianapolis opened an obscene letter postmarked Merigold, Mississippi, and saw that her address was wrong in exactly the way an Indianapolis newspaper had gotten it wrong when it printed her name a short time before. Whoever wrote the letter was reading that paper. A check of the mailing list turned up a single copy of the Indianapolis Times going to that corner of the Delta, to a post office box in Cleveland, Mississippi, under the name James H. Coyner. By the time a postal inspector came south to wait for him, Coyner had killed two people on the edge of town.
Aurelius Turner and his wife, Eunice Louella Turner, who had been born Sherrill, came from Cascilla in Tallahatchie County and lived in a small house just outside Cleveland's northern city limit with their three children. On the night of Saturday, December 8, 1934, near midnight by the physicians' later estimate, someone came into that house. Turner was struck on the back of the head with a hammer and shot through the head with a .38; he was found dressed, lying across a bed. His wife, who was pregnant, was beaten to death with the same hammer, and her body was mutilated, large pieces of flesh cut away and carried off. Four-year-old Aurelius Jr. was struck on the head and left for dead. He came to, and he lived. The youngest child was not touched, and the eldest, a daughter, was spending the night with relatives. A maid found the bodies early Sunday morning. The hammer, lying under Mrs. Turner's body, is the weapon the Cleveland Enterprise reported that week; some later accounts say an axe.
Sheriff E. R. McLean called Memphis, and Inspector Will Griffin sent two detectives by airplane. A fingerprint man came from Clarksdale and found nothing, because the killer seems to have worn gloves. Bloodhounds brought from the state penitentiary at Parchman could not pick up a trail. Governor Sennett Conner put up $250 on top of the $100 reward the statute already offered, and the Turners were buried at Cascilla on the Tuesday. The one thing missing from the house that anyone could name was Turner's watch, and the sheriff's office had its serial number on file.
Postal Inspector R. T. Rock of Chattanooga spent about a week in Cleveland watching that box, which belonged to a local woman. On Friday, January 11, 1935, Deputy Sheriff Charles D. Maddox of Shaw joined him. At about nine the next morning the Indianapolis paper sticking out of the box began to move. Maddox went through the double doors into the lobby with Rock behind him. The man at the box put up his left hand and kept his right at his waist, and he argued with them for a long minute; only when Maddox squared off with the pistol leveled at his head did he raise both. He was carrying a .38 and a watch. The serial number matched Turner's. Officers got him out of Cleveland before the town knew what had happened, first to the jail at Greenwood and that same day to Jackson.
His mother told them his real name: Alonzo Robinson. At her house, where he had been living since he came home, officers found obscene letters, knives, clothing that had belonged to Mrs. Turner and human flesh that had been salted down and cured, which they believed had been cut from her body. More letters were in his pockets, along with a packet of hair close to the shade of hers. Chancellor R. E. Jackson ordered Mrs. Turner's body exhumed at Cascilla so the flesh could be compared. A Clarion-Ledger retelling of the case in 1950 adds a salted piece of flesh in an envelope in his pocket, and at the house fifty-two letters, bloodstained boots and a piece of flesh that bore teeth marks.
Cleveland had known him before. About seventeen years earlier, the Bolivar Commercial recalled, he had been arrested at Earl Smith's place for sending obscene letters and had slipped away from Milton Smith when Smith climbed down from the buggy to open a gate. Smith fired after him and said he hit him in the shoulder. Robinson told officers only that he had served about seven years in an Indiana prison for robbing graves and trying to sell the bodies, and had been paroled the previous July. A dispatch out of Pontiac, Michigan, filled in more. Under the name Coyner he had once lived in a house in Ferndale, Michigan, and in 1926 the family that moved in after him found the heads of four white women there. Michigan officers questioned him in prison and got nothing. George W. Boozer, a former mayor of Boyle, Mississippi, remembered a wire from Michigan City around that time warning him to watch for two trunks addressed to Robinson's sister and to look for skulls, because bodies had been found up north. He and Jack Smith opened the trunks when they came. They held women's clothing and nothing else.
For several days Robinson said nothing. On the evening of Wednesday, January 16, he sent for Sheriff McLean, and near midnight, before a room of officers and newspapermen, he confessed to the Turner killings. He said he had been alone. He told them where to find the rest of Mrs. Turner's remains, and they were found where he said the next morning. He admitted tying up the family of Will Davis near Merigold on another night and running off when it went wrong. He claimed the heads in Ferndale but said they came from graves, insisted he had never killed anyone before the Turners, and gave no reason. The 1950 retelling tells it differently: District Attorney Greek Rice, out of patience, suggested in his cell that Robinson's mother could hang beside him, and a few hours later Robinson confessed to Hinds County Sheriff J. W. Roberts, saying he had felt a sudden impulse to murder and had cut the flesh to see how it would feel.
In the Hinds County jail he charged the curious a nickel a look, and by late January more than a thousand people had paid. Outside, the talk ran the other way. From other counties came open promises to come to Cleveland on the day of the trial and burn him, and Sheriff McLean, Circuit Judge W. A. Alcorn Jr. and H. H. McGowen of the board of supervisors asked the governor for troops. Five hundred National Guardsmen from eastern Mississippi were promised. The supervisors had already agreed to pay for a special term of court, on the theory that a quick trial was the surest way to keep a mob from holding its own.
The Guard rolled into Cleveland on Sunday afternoon, February 3. By dusk about two hundred soldiers had strung barbed wire around the courthouse, built sandbag walls and put machine guns in the windows and on the roofs. Robinson came in under cover of darkness on a special train, with two hundred more troops around him. On Monday a grand jury returned two indictments, one for each killing, and he was tried only for the murder of Louella Turner. Counsel was drawn by lot, and C. H. Crump and Hugh F. Causey got the job; Robinson told the court he didn't think it was necessary. He pleaded not guilty in a voice that barely reached the bench. The state called nine witnesses, among them Turner's brother Walter, a watch mechanic, Inspector Rock and Sheriff Roberts. The jury went out at 7:55 that evening and came back inside ten minutes with a verdict of guilty as charged, which carried death. Judge Alcorn set the hanging for March 5, and Robinson was back on the train to Jackson that night. The Commercial's reporter came away with a portrait of a man who said he had killed because he just wanted to, who expressed no regret, and who talked easily about Buddhism, fatalism and predestination.
He was hanged at Cleveland on March 5, 1935; the 1950 account, citing county records, puts it at 3:50 in the morning. The Turner killings are the only murders he confessed to and the only ones he was tried for, and he was convicted of one of them. He was never charged over the heads in Ferndale and always said they came out of graves. The figure of six victims that older summaries carry counts the Turners and the four Michigan women. Cleveland's tourism office has since claimed that the case influenced Thomas Harris's novel The Silence of the Lambs.
1926: the family that moves into a Ferndale, Michigan, house he once lived in under the name Coyner finds the heads of four women; he is never charged.
Around November 8, 1934: a woman in Indianapolis receives an obscene letter postmarked Merigold, Mississippi, which is traced to a box in the name of James H. Coyner.
December 8, 1934: Aurelius Turner and his pregnant wife, Eunice Louella Turner, are killed in their home outside Cleveland, Mississippi; their son Aurelius Jr., four, survives.
January 11, 1935: a deputy joins the postal inspector watching the box; the next morning they arrest Robinson, who is carrying a .38 and Turner's watch.
January 16, 1935: near midnight, he confesses to the Turner killings.
February 3, 1935: National Guard troops fortify the Cleveland courthouse; the next day he is indicted, tried for the murder of Louella Turner, convicted and sentenced to death.
March 5, 1935: he is hanged at Cleveland.