Eppie’s Restaurant at 318 West Grace Street, was demolished years
ago. This image was found in the City of Richmond real estate records.
Eppie’s Restaurant was a scruffy beer joint, catering to the locals who lived in the older apartment
buildings in the neighborhood between downtown and Monroe Park and the staff
from Grace Hospital, located diagonally across Grace Street. May 22 was a warm
day, in the low 80s, with a slight chance of showers. Ducking into Eppie’s for
a quick beer before heading back to their house in Petersburg seemed like a
good idea for Smith and his wife, Ginette.
The site of Eppie’s Restaurant at 318 West Grace Street
today. The building last appears in City records in 1984.
Also in Eppie’s that afternoon was
33-year-old Kenny Lee Fuller, who lived in Mechanicsville and who later told
the police he had drunk between 22 and 26 beers that day. Smith made the fatal
mistake of inviting Fuller to sit down with him, his wife, and a waitress who
had already joined them. Fuller’s account of the story had him wanting a light
from Smith, “And the next thing I know,” Fuller said later, “…he's [Smith] real
angry about something.”
Fuller claimed he left the
restaurant to get away from Smith, who followed him outside and slapped him in
the face, which Fuller said painfully chipped a tooth. Fuller said Smith
produced a knife and lunged at him, and Fuller pulled out a .45 caliber pistol
and fired a warning shot into the Grace Street sidewalk. He claimed Smith kept
advancing on him until they got to the corner of Monroe and Grace Streets. There,
Fuller admitted, “I guess I shot him.”
Later, at trial, a more coherent
account revealed what started this study in abject drunken stupidity: a
cigarette. Ginette Smith later testified that she and her husband and a
waitress were sitting in a booth in Eppie’s when Fuller joined them and asked Smith
to light his cigarette. Instead of a match, Smith offered him his own burning cigarette,
telling Fuller not to put his fingers on the filter where Smith would have to
put his lips. Fuller apparently took exception to what he regarded as an insult,
and looking Smith in the eye, Fuller lit his own cigarette and then ground out
Smith’s cigarette in the ashtray. Smith asked Fuller, “What’s wrong with you? Why
did you do that?” Fuller got mad and things escalated until Fuller “invited”
Smith to come outside, pulling back his shirt to display a chrome-plated .45
automatic pistol stuck in his belt. Once they reached the sidewalk, Fuller
fired a shot into the ground and the two men stepped into Monroe Street, just
around the corner from the restaurant. What was said between the two is
unknown, but the result was Fuller raised the pistol and shot Smith in the
chest. Smith reeled around and started to run from Fuller, who fired two more bullets
into Smith’s back. Smith got to the far side of Monroe Street and collapsed
against the side wall of 400 West Grace Street.
Witnesses were uncertain exactly
how many shots were fired, and Smith’s death certificate states the cause of
death was simply “Gunshot wounds to the chest.” One resident of the Berkshire
Apartments at 300 West Franklin Street, a block away from the shooting,
reported to the police a bullet had gone through the window of his second-floor
apartment that afternoon. Nevertheless, everybody who saw the shooting itself agreed
Fuller was the man with the gun.
The Monroe Street sidewalk beside 400 West Grace Street
where John Michael Smith died.
Fuller was spotted by a Richmond police
officer as he drove off and the description of the car and the license plate
number was broadcast across the city. Patrolman K. G. Rutherford saw Fuller on Interstate
64 and began chasing him, finally pursuing him to Mechanicsville Turnpike and
stopping him at Watts Lane in Henrico. Rutherford later said Fuller asked him
as they put him in the police car, “Do they still have the electric chair in
this town?” and later moaned in the back seat, “Oh, God, I’m gonna burn for
this.”
Back at the scene of the shooting, Medford
Taylor, a freelance photographer, was standing outside an office two blocks
away from Eppie’s when he heard the shots, grabbed his camera, and ran down
West Grace Street. Richmond Police Patrolman Earl Patterson also heard gunfire
and ran toward the sound, arriving within two minutes. Everyone in Eppie’s had
emptied into the street, but Taylor ran past the people milling around on the
sidewalk and toward another group he saw in Monroe Street. Smith lay on the
herringbone red brick sidewalk on his back, his shirt soaked in blood. Beside
him, her face contorted into absolute anguish, Smith’s wife Ginette knelt and held
the dying man’s hands in hers.
Readers as far away as California saw the photo of the anguished
Ginette Smith and her bloody, dying husband in their newspapers on the day
after the shooting in Monroe Street.
Taylor closed in on the scene with
his camera and took several photos which were rushed to wire services such as United
Press International and the Associated Press, meaning Ginette Smith’s terrible moment
of agony on the Monroe Street sidewalk was seen by thousands of people all over
the country. Subsequent photos taken by Taylor that also went out on the news
wires show a barefooted man leaning over Smith and trying to render aid while
his wife continues to hold his hand, sobbing. A third shows Smith’s
blood-soaked shirt mercifully covered with a sheet as his wife holds his head
in her hands and Patrolman Patterson stands nearby, waiting for an ambulance. Such
are the abject pathos in Ginette Smith’s expression the photo has an almost Pietà quality as the kneeling, wretched
woman conveys the depths of human misery. The emotion contained in the
image strikes at the heart of the viewer now, just as it did across America fifty
years ago.
The eye-catching photo of the
grieving Mrs. Smith was used as a front-page copy in dozens of newspapers, large
and small. The caption was always the same, but local editors composed their
own headlines, resulting in interesting interpretations. In the Charlotte
Observer, the scene was described as a “Death in the Street,” while the Raleigh
Register identified Smith a “Shootout Victim.” The Miami Herald pronounced
the scene a “Virginia Tragedy,” while The Morning Pioneer in
Mandan, North Dakota labeled the photo of Smith as simply, “Altercation Leads
to Death.” No matter what the headline or where the reader was, the photo of the
kneeling, distraught woman with the body on the sidewalk beside her was sure to
sell newspapers.
Michael John Smith was buried in Blandford Cemetery in
Petersburg. Photo by “Dean” from Findagrave.com.
The trial of Kenny Lee Fuller for
the murder of Michael John Smith began October 22, 1974, in Richmond Circuit
Court. Fuller’s defense attorneys made no attempt to deny their client shot
Smith, but crafted a tale of self-defense as the explanation. “I never hurt
anybody in my life,” Fuller told the jury, “I thought he was trying to kill
me.” There was debate over the distance between the two men when Smith was
shot, and one witness testified they saw Smith lunge at Fuller. The defense
produced witnesses who testified they had seen Smith in public fights before,
and a lawyer who lived in a nearby apartment said he saw Smith moving toward
Fuller “like a wrestler would go after an opponent.” Fuller said Smith came at
him with a knife, but the only wound Fuller seems to have suffered in the
entire encounter was his “chipped tooth.”
The three-day trial ended October
24, 1974, when the jury, after deliberating for two hours, convicted Kenny Lee
Fuller of second-degree murder and sentenced him to 10 years in prison. The
policeman who arrested him fifteen minutes after the shooting testified Fuller
didn’t appear to have been drinking, while another witness said that contrary
to Smith trying to grapple with Fuller, the two men were never closer than
fifteen feet apart. Ginette Smith described Fuller shooting her husband in the
back as he ran across Monroe Street and each witness for the prosecution
further discredited the claim of self-defense. After the jury returned to the
courtroom, Fuller remained expressionless while the verdict was read.
It isn’t known how many years Kenny
Lee Fuller served for the murder of Michael Smith. An undated photo of him as a
man in his late 40s at a family reunion can be found on a genealogy website. He
died in 1993 in Florida, almost twenty years after killing Michael Smith, with
his obituary describing Fuller as self-employed and in the auto cleaning
business. Fuller’s body was taken back to his hometown of Haysi, in Southwest
Virginia, and buried in the family cemetery outside town. His gravestone is decorated
with a photo of the smiling, pompadoured murderer, and no doubt Michael Smith
would find Fuller’s epitaph grimly ironic: “ALWAYS HAD LOVE FOR OTHERS.”
The grave marker for Kenny Lee Fuller in Heysi, Virginia.
Photo by Keith Deel on Findagrave.com.
In the long history of Richmond,
Virginia, the violent end of Michael Smith in Monroe Street hardly registers at
all. His demise took place in a breathtakingly brief matter of minutes as Smith
went from drinking a cold beer with his wife to dead on a city sidewalk, shot
by an assailant he barely knew over something so trivial as a cigarette. If
anything besides incredible stupidity distinguished this crime it was that the
image of the sudden death of Smith, his suffering and that of his wife was
immediately spread to all corners of the United States – a harbinger of the
speed of information today. An otherwise ordinary little stretch of the Monroe
Street sidewalk where Smith collapsed was famous across the country for a day and then subsided back into the implacable Richmond cityscape.
-Selden
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