Police find something fishy about dead man’s legs
On a Thursday, October 28, 1948, police arrested a 68-year-old plantation straw boss for falsely reporting the death of his son, a Tallulah Bend fisherman. Authorities jailed George E. Dowdy under a 5,000 dollar bond after arresting his “dead” son, 23-year-old James D. Dowdy, at the Louisiana-Texas border.
In his possession, the younger Dowdy had a thirty-six thousand dollar life insurance policy, listing his father as the sole beneficiary. Police arrested the elder Dowdy with an additional twenty-four thousand dollar policy in his home.
However, police suspected James Dowdy had committed a crime far more severe than insurance fraud. Madison Parish after a dynamite blast destroyed Dowdy’s Tallulah Bend home. Sheriff C. E. Hester had in his possession a pair of legs allegedly belonging to James Dowdy. If the limbs did not belong to Dowdy, the sheriff had a murder to investigate.
One week earlier, at nine-thirty in the evening on a Friday night, a taxicab driver dropped James Dowdy within walking distance of his home, a two-room fishing shack near Tallulah Bend. Walter Dorman, 42, a house painter and electrician from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, accompanied Dowdy.
Dorman’s wife, Ada, would later tell authorities her husband planned to spend the night with Dowdy, preparing for a before-sunrise fishing trip the following day.
Two hours after the cab driver drove away, a case of dynamite inside the shack exploded, leveling the building. Harvey Tippin, a nearby farmer, phoned the sheriff’s office, and Sheriff Hester’s deputies found the two legs within the rubble.
Ada Dorman identified the legs as those of her husband after George Dowdy told investigators they belonged to his son. Sheriff Hester sent one of the legs to the FBI crime lab in Washington, D. C., hoping to determine the victim’s age. However, that effort became unnecessary with James Dowdy’s arrest.
Sheriff Hester had earlier alerted immigration authorities to suspect foul play that Dowdy could be alive and planning to leave the country.
At trial in May of 1949, the prosecution suggested James Dowdy lured Walter Dorman on the fishing trip with intent to murder him and explode the shack to eliminate the evidence. Sam Stover, a local merchant, testified to selling Dowdy a fifty-pound case of dynamite two days before the blast.
In addition to the legs, investigators found skull and teeth fragments days later. Judge Frank Voelker ruled this evidence inadmissible without any scientific way to confirm the items belonged to the victim.
Louisiana State Trooper Louis Cowart testified to arresting Dowdy in Vivian, Louisiana, where the fugitive insisted his name was “Jack Allen.” The trooper said Dowdy bought camping equipment in town and had set up camp on a river bottom near Tyler, Texas.
Bartender Virgil Curry, Barber Carl Smith, and three fishermen testified to seeing Dowdy and Dorman drinking together from six-thirty until nine, the night of the explosion.
On September 6, 1948, in a New Orleans court, Judge Voelker sentenced George Dowdy to life in prison, and his son, James, to the electric chair.
James Dowdy appealed to the Louisiana Supreme Court, which granted no clemency. Judge Voelker, with the prosecution team, New Orleans District Attorney Thompson L. Clark, and his staff, testified against Dowdy at the hearing.