The 1941 Murder of 13-Year-Old Dorthey Elizabeth Godley

 

The 1941 Murder of 13-Year-Old Dorthey Elizabeth Godley (And How Her Murder Did Not Get Swept Out of Sight in Brazoria County)

I probably should not say this on social media, but some stories live in my head so large and so loud that once I am reminded of them, I can’t quite get away from them.

Some people would say that is because this is an important piece of history, and I believe it is too. This is your warning before you continue: This story concerns the death of a thirteen-year-old child in Rosharon, Texas, on November 9, 1941.

When I read the testimony in this case, I could picture Dorthey Godley’s mother walking through those doors and climbing the stairs to that big courtroom.

When I first happened across this story, a movie began unfolding in my head.

A thirteen-year-old girl lay dead in the rain and mud beside an old car, with a pecan orchard behind her on the Rosharon prairie. Her mother was crying. A tall, broad-shouldered blond man stood nearby holding a rifle, ordering the family to pick up their child and get her out of there. He told them he had better never see them again.

Then my cerebral movie moves to the courtroom: a grieving mother giving testimony, doctors offering extraordinary explanations for how her daughter might have died, an old judge who apparently had heard quite enough, and a local man explaining why he stopped his car when he saw what appeared to be a man with a rifle terrorizing a family beside the A.J. Fite Farm Pecan Orchard.

This story will make some people uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable.

But it happened.

As best I can determine, one of the most important reasons Dorthey Godley’s death did not simply disappear from public notice was a man named Tom Lochridge.

Lochridge happened to be traveling along that muddy road on his way to Houston that Sunday when he saw something was wrong. He stopped.

Throughout his life, Tom Lochridge seems to have been a man who responded when duty called. In 1941, he was thirty-eight years old, nearly six feet tall and in business for himself. He worked at Houston Municipal Airport buying and selling small airplanes. Three years later, still a single man and then in his forties, he enlisted in the U.S. Army during World War II.

That Sunday, he saw a dead child in the back seat of a car.

He went to a telephone and called Brazoria County Sheriff L.R. Johnson.

The sheriff and his deputies came.

And Clarence V. Barnes—C.V. Barnes—did not get to send this family away and make what happened disappear.

I believe Barnes expected exactly that. From his reported words at the scene, he apparently thought he could order the family off the property, tell them never to return, and that would be the end of it.

It was not.

I wish I had a photograph of Dorthey Godley. I wish I had photographs of her family.

I don’t.

What I have to represent Dorthey in this historical account is a photograph of her beautiful marble headstone in the Pilgrims, Knights, and Daughters Cemetery in Rosharon. The stone has fallen over, but it is still there, marking the grave of a little girl who died in 1941. I found the photograph on Find a Grave, and the photographer graciously allowed me to use it.

I have also searched historical photographs for images of girls about Dorthey’s age—not to suggest that any of those children are Dorthey and certainly not to replace her, but simply to help us understand the size, dress and appearance of a thirteen-year-old girl in November 1941.

I do not have a photograph of her killer either. Contemporary descriptions tell us Barnes was a large man, about six feet two inches tall, broad, blond and wearing glasses.

There is something else you need to know before we return to November 9.

Dorthey’s father, Rufus Godley, owned at least fifty acres near the pecan orchard. Her grandmother, Ella Lemons Godley, owned additional property in the area. Rufus Godley had a right-of-way to use roads beside and through the orchard to reach his farm. In other words, there was a legitimate reason for members of the Godley family to be using those roads.

The Godleys were established farmers in the Rosharon area. Rufus owned fifty acres by 1941, and by the time he died he had accumulated enough property to leave sizeable parcels to his surviving children.

That matters when you hear what happened next.

WHAT HAPPENED THAT SUNDAY

Dorthey Godley was born in 1928. She was a thirteen-year-old African American schoolgirl when she died.

On Sunday morning, November 9, she was riding in the back seat of a car driven by Major Muse, who was married to Dorthey’s mother, Tea Franks. A younger girl was also riding in the back seat, possibly Dorthey’s younger sister Ruth.

Records indicate that Dorthey and Ruthie were living with their father, Rufus Godley Jr., and his wife, Bertha, in the Rosharon-Sandy Point area, along with Dorthey’s brothers James and Glen.

It is possible that November 9 marked the end of a visit with Tea and Major Muse and that they were taking the girls home while also planning to visit Tea’s sons. That is a reconstruction based on the records I have found; the sources do not tell us precisely why everyone was traveling together that morning.

One account states that Major Muse was headed toward the home of Bud Smith, a neighbor of the Rufus Godley family, so Tea could visit her other children.

The distance involved was considerable. Tea and Major were renting a house in Houston, near the center of what is now the 610 Loop. Their trip to the Rosharon area would have been roughly thirty miles each way.

The closer they came to the Godley home, the worse the country roads became.

It had been raining for days. The ground was soft, slick and muddy.

I have some family knowledge of what those old Brazoria County roads could become after prolonged rain. My dad’s cousin, now in his nineties, once told me that the roads could get so bad that a horse had to be sent down a stable trail pulling a mud sled made from planks and plywood just to get people to the house.

That Sunday, Major Muse drove down the road the family normally used, but eventually reached a muddy stretch he could not get the car across. That road ran alongside, but not through, the A.J. Fite Farm and Pecan Orchard, where Barnes reportedly worked as manager.

Muse tried another road running roughly parallel to the first. This road went through the pecan orchard.

They made it some distance before encountering another impassable mudhole. Muse stopped the car, apparently intending to back out.

Dorthey looked through the rear window.

“Yonder is that man,” she said.

The man was C.V. Barnes.

Barnes approached the stopped car carrying a .22-caliber rifle in his right hand. Something about the way he approached frightened Tea badly enough that she quickly got out of the car, raised her hands to show that she was unarmed and begged him not to shoot.

She tried to explain that they were only attempting to get down the road to visit her children.

Barnes accused them of lying and said they were trying to steal pecans.

The contemporary accounts report that he used other language that I am not going to repeat here.

Tea continued pleading with him.

Then Dorthey climbed out of the back seat, screaming, her hands raised over her head. One account described her arms as flailing.

We do not know why she got out of the car. She may simply have been terrified. Whatever caused her to leave the vehicle, the evidence presented later was that almost immediately after she did so, Barnes’s rifle fired.

Dorthey walked approximately twelve steps.

Then she fell face down in the mud.

Barnes ordered Tea and Major to pick her up and leave, threatening to kill the others if they did not.

He then felt Dorthey’s hand.

“She’s dead,” he said. “Get on out of here, and I don’t ever want to see you again.”

Major and Tea lifted Dorthey’s body from the mud and placed her on the back seat of the car.

That was when Tom Lochridge arrived.

None of the sources I have found state that Lochridge knew the Muse family. Nor have I found anything establishing that he personally knew Barnes. What he did know was that something was very wrong.

He saw a man with a rifle. He saw a distressed family. Then he saw Dorthey lying in the back seat of the car.

Lochridge went to a telephone and called the sheriff.

Barnes already had problems of his own. At the time of Dorthey’s death, he was under indictment in another case involving the shooting of an African American man identified in the records as M. Missouri. Mr. Missouri survived, but a grand jury had already indicted Barnes on a charge related to that shooting.

Now another person had been shot.

This time, the victim was thirteen years old.

THE EXAMINING TRIAL

Within days, Barnes faced what was then called an examining trial. We do not see these very often anymore. In this case, it amounted to a public preliminary proceeding in which the judge determined whether there was sufficient cause to hold the accused for further prosecution.

Once a grand jury took up the case, there could no longer be an examining trial.

Judge M.S. “Stephen” Munson heard the evidence against Barnes and found plenty of reason to hold him.

One of the defense witnesses was Dr. William Holt, a much-loved Angleton physician who would eventually deliver around 3,000 babies during his career in Brazoria County. He was only thirty-eight years old when he testified for Barnes.

Dr. Holt offered an unusual possibility.

At approximately the same moment C.V. Barnes’s .22 rifle discharged toward Dorthey, Holt suggested, the thirteen-year-old girl might coincidentally have suffered a ruptured blood vessel in her brain.

In other words, the defense raised the possibility that Dorthey had suffered what amounted to a stroke.

Another physician, Dr. Henry Sweet of Galveston, agreed that such an event was possible but proposed yet another medical explanation after examining Dorthey’s body. He suggested she might have suffered from a condition then called status thymico-lymphaticus. He cited her sinus cavities and an enlarged heart as supporting observations and testified that the condition could supposedly cause sudden death when aggravated by fright or nervousness.

The defense strategy was becoming clear: create doubt that the rifle shot killed Dorthey.

I can almost hear Judge Munson’s old eyes rolling.

Whatever he thought privately, after hearing the evidence he ordered Barnes held under a $10,000 bond.

That number can sound surprisingly low to us today, but I wanted to know what $10,000 meant in a Texas murder case in 1941. While researching other cases from the same year, I found the April 1941 killing of Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo official Frank Y. Dew by Lucyle Richards, a performing cowgirl, trick rider and aviatrix. Dew was wealthy and well connected.

Richards’s bond was also $10,000.

So Barnes was not handed some token bond. It was substantial enough that he remained in jail through Thanksgiving.

Two weeks after Dorthey’s death, the case had attracted the attention of Houston businessman John C. Weston, president and CEO of Suniland Furniture.

Weston had read about the shooting in the newspaper and wrote to the NAACP asking the organization to investigate.

In his letter, he described Dorthey as a small girl with a sweet nature. He also mentioned a newspaper correspondent who had been so disturbed by the case that he traveled to Angleton to attend the examining trial himself. That reporter was Albert Nibling.

The examining trial had already taken place before the NAACP became involved, and the local legal machinery was already moving.

The grand jury indicted Barnes.

During the examining proceedings, Barnes’s attorneys, Sam Lee and John Henderson, had apparently begun laying the groundwork for a self-defense argument. Henderson questioned Tea about Dorthey’s size and attempted to establish that the child might have been carrying a razor.

That line of questioning was among the things that angered Weston enough to write his letter.

There was other testimony as well.

Tom Lochridge testified for the state that he arrived shortly after the shooting, saw Dorthey lying on the back seat bleeding from her nose and called the sheriff’s department.

Deputy Sheriff Jack Marshall also testified.

Marshall—who would later become Brazoria County sheriff—was asked about Barnes’s reputation.

Was it good or bad?

“Bad,” Marshall answered.

He testified that he, Sheriff L.R. Johnson and Justice of the Peace F.B. Cannon went to the scene after the shooting. Near the place where Dorthey’s head had lain in the mud, they found a .22-caliber lead bullet approximately six inches away. A puddle of blood marked the place where she had fallen.

No bullet was found inside Dorthey’s body.

Marshall also testified that investigators found nothing at the scene to support another defense suggestion: that Dorthey might have received her fatal injury by falling when she got out of the car.

“There were only two marks by the car tracks where the girl could have stepped from the vehicle,” he testified, “and there were no other markings which could have been made by a fall when she got out of the car.”

Justice of the Peace Cannon testified that during the inquest Dorthey’s head had been probed and a wound discovered in her right nostril.

Piece by piece, the case moved forward.

THE TRIAL

Barnes went before a jury in the spring of 1942.

The medical theory came with him.

Dr. Holt again testified about the possibility that Dorthey had died from a ruptured blood vessel rather than from the gunshot. The defense continued trying to create a reasonable alternative explanation for the child’s death.

The jury did not accept it.

Barnes testified in his own defense. He said he never intended to shoot anyone. According to him, he had been walking with his rifle because he was going to the rifle club.

The gun fired, he said.

He did not fire it.

The jury heard the testimony of Dorthey’s mother. They heard about the mud, the rifle, the bullet found near the place where Dorthey fell, the wound in her nostril and the threats made immediately afterward. They heard Tom Lochridge explain what he encountered when he stopped along that country road.

They also heard Barnes.

He was found guilty of murder.

For Texas in 1942, that verdict mattered.

A white man had been convicted and sentenced to prison for killing a Black child.

Unfortunately, the conviction did not stand.

It was later overturned because Judge Munson had included language in his charge to the jury that was ruled too prejudicial against Barnes. I have not found a record showing that Barnes was tried again.

That does not erase what happened in the first courtroom.

Nor did Barnes simply walk back into the life he had before.

During the period surrounding the case, property Barnes had inherited from his mother passed first into the hands of his brother-in-law and then into his wife’s name. Based on the deeds and other paperwork I have found, my interpretation is that the arrangement may have been connected to money advanced for Barnes’s bond or legal expenses. I cannot prove that was the agreement, but it stands to reason.

What the records do show is that the property did not return to Barnes’s name.

For the remainder of his life, I have found no land titled to C.V. Barnes personally.

His family line ended with him.

Dorthey Godley’s did not.

Her family remained part of the Rosharon community and are a respected family in Brazoria County to this day.

The  killing of Dorthey Godley was not simply swept out of sight and buried in the deep mud on a rutted out Brazoria County road.

I’m Brenda with Vintage Texas Crimes, and thank you for staying with me through Dorthey’s story. If you appreciate this kind of Texas history, a like, comment or share helps more people find my work here on Facebook.

I also have a short book about Dorthey’s case in draft form, with much more of the history and documentation behind this story. I hope to have it out next year.

Thank you for following Vintage Texas Crimes.