It was a night marked by stupidity, bad choices, infidelity,
cheap thrills, spilled liquor, sadism, brutality, and betrayal. It was infused
with the smell of flat beer, cigarette smoke, cheap perfume, the icy damp wind
of a cold and cheerless night, and in the end, the reek of mud and dread. It
was the sad, sorry death of Mabel Hord, a wife and a 45-year-old employee of a
Richmond shoe company, and it all ended in the dark below Byrd Park on Pump
House Drive.
The home where Mabel and her husband, a cabbie named Roland,
lived with his father at 3405 Grayland Avenue no longer exists as it was one of
an entire block of homes on the south side of Grayland that was demolished in
1976 with the construction of the Downtown Expressway. On the evening of April
3, 1954, Roland came home to his wife and his little brick bungalow on Grayland
for a quick supper about 7 P.M. before climbing back in his taxi to find fares
among Richmonders who were out and about that Saturday night. When he finally
parked the cab in front of the house at dawn the next morning and went inside, Mabel
wasn’t there and Hord’s father said he hadn’t seen her.
Walter and Mary Snowa were mutual friends of both Mabel Hord
and Joseph F. Powell, Jr., a burly house painter. Powell later said he
accompanied the Snowas to the Hord’s house on Saturday afternoon and that he
had never met Mabel before, despite Mabel and Roland living on Grayland Avenue only
a block from where Powell lived with his wife of less than a year. After Roland
had his quick supper that evening and drove off, Mabel and Powell walked back
to the Snowa’s house on Idlewood Avenue, stayed fifteen minutes, then stood up
and announced they were going to supper at a Broad Street restaurant. That was
the last time the Snowas saw Mabel alive.
William Bennett was a City employee who worked at the pump
house at Byrd Park that supplied water to the municipal water works. For
Bennett, the canal that runs beside the pump house was just another
unremarkable part of his work environment. His route to his job that Sunday
morning was a little different in that the canal had been drained overnight for
repairs and instead of the usual full banks, there was only a foot of muddy water
in the bottom. Bennett stopped in mid-stride on the footbridge. Three hundred
feet away was a woman, face-down on the north bank of the canal. Even though
she was smeared with mud, Bennett could see her pale skin and white bra and
panties almost luminescent against the black bank of the canal. Her arms were
above her and her hands buried in the muck, as though her last act was to try
and save herself from the cold water that had, as it drained away, exposed her
body.
Richmond Times-Dispatch, April 5, 1954.
The same scene today, with the canal full.
It isn’t known why Roland Hord did not report his wife
missing when he found she didn’t come home.
It was Sunday night after he picked up a fare who mentioned a dead woman
had been found in the canal that Hord panicked and drove to first to police
headquarters, and then to the morgue where he identified the body of his wife. Mabel
had been beaten, stripped, shot, and then drowned in the dark water of the
pump house canal.
Two days after she died, an autopsy was performed on Mabel’s
body and the evidence described her brutal and violent end. The official cause
of death was drowning, but Mabel had been beat up before she died and had
considerable bruising on her face. In addition, she had one gunshot wound that
went in her right shoulder and exited her back, making it apparent she had been
shot from above, as though from the top of the canal bank as she tried to get
out. Under the entry, “How Did the Injury Occur,” the Medical Examiner typed
the blunt explanation: “Thrown in canal and shot.” Among the other evidence
found scattered on the canal bank were Mabel’s clothes: a jacket, a blouse, and
her ripped skirt.
Mabel Hord’s killer stood at about this spot and shot at her
as she floundered on the muddy bank below.
Leaving aside the whole question of why Mabel was with
Joseph Powell that night, it isn’t hard to imagine what happened in the brutal
scene by the canal. Police noted there were signs of a struggle at the top of
the canal bank. The drunken Powell, perhaps enraged by Mabel resisting him, punched
her and then ripped her clothes off and threw them into the canal. No doubt
crying and pleading, she was knocked down the bank into the water and struggled
to get up the muddy canal wall. To her horror, Powell reappeared at the top of
the bank with a rifle and took pot shots at her in the dark until he heard her
cry out. As Powell reeled back up the path to his car, he may have heard Mabel’s
screams fading in the distance as she clawed wildly at the cold mud around her. Mabel Hord shivered and died a miserable death
in the dark, drowning in the freezing water of the canal before she could bleed
to death from the gunshot wound.
It didn’t take the Richmond police long to develop a suspect
in the brutal murder of Mabel Hord. They
acted on a tip, probably phoned in by the horrified Snowas who realized they
were very much part of any accounting of Mabel Hord’s last hours. Major J.M.
Wright, head of the Richmond Police Detective Section, said they were looking
for “one man in particular” in the case and were questioning others as to Mabel’s
activities that Saturday. The man they sought was, of course, was Joseph Powell,
Jr. If Roland Hord had walked out to the Grayland Avenue sidewalk in front of
his home on Tuesday night, he could have looked down the block and seen the
lights of the police cars in front of Powell’s house and the man who so
brutally killed his wife being taken away.
Richmond Times-Dispatch, April 7, 1954.
Powell was hustled off to a police substation in the
basement of The Mosque (today’s Altria Theater) and closely questioned by
detectives. He initially denied knowing anything about Mabel Hord, but then told
them a disjointed, whisky-fueled story. Powell said that his memory was hazy
because of how drunk he was, but he remembered he and Mabel had driven down to
Pump House Drive and walked down to the edge of the canal, where she said she
wanted to go swimming and took off most of her clothes. This was greeted with
understandable skepticism by the police as a cold front had swept the area that
night and the Byrd Field weather station had recorded a “nippy 28.2 degrees,
low enough to mark yesterday as the coldest April 4 ever recorded in Richmond.”
Powell said the details were hazy from drinking so much, but
he remembered returning to his car, having a few more drinks, and producing a
single-shot .22 rifle which he took back to the canal and shot at Mabel a few
times. He left her there in the cold and dark, got back in his car, and drove
to a wooded area near City Stadium and threw the rifle out. He then went to a
store on Cary Street and bought some cigarettes to “cool his nerves,” went home,
and went to bed.
The hulking, 6’3”, 200-lb. house painter was returned to
jail after a preliminary hearing on Wednesday, April 7, unable to meet the
$10,000 bond set by Police Court Judge Harold Maurice. On May 26, he pleaded
guilty to murder, and on July 14 was sentenced by the Richmond Hustings Court
to 40 years in prison for the death of Mabel Hord. Powell made no statement at
his sentencing and no further explanation of what happened that cold, dreadful
night at the canal was forthcoming.
It seems Powell served no more than fifteen years of the
sentence that should have kept him in prison until 1994. Unfortunately, he was back
in the Fan District when he and a man named Richard Trent got into a fight with
Howard Lee Parrish in Parrish’s apartment at 3310-A Ellwood Avenue on the night
of August 1, 1970. Parrish’s wife was asleep when she heard her husband cry for
help and rushing into the dining room, found Trent holding her husband down
with his foot and Powell beating Parrish with a stick. She saw at a glance Parrish
was “beaten to a pulp,” when Powell grabbed her and told her to sit down and
shut up before the two assailants left. Parrish was dead on arrival at a local hospital,
having suffocated from injuries to his face. Police later found Powell and
Trent sitting in front of Powell’s apartment in the same block of Ellwood
Avenue and beside them was a bag containing two heavy sticks. The pair were immediately arrested for the
murder of Howard Lee Parrish.
Richmond Times-Dispatch, September 20, 1970
It will take more research in the Hustings Court records to
determine under what circumstances the charges against Powell and Trent were finally
dismissed. The only witness to the
crime, Ruth Parrish, may have been threatened as to her identification of the
two men she saw beating her husband and the memory of his bloody, bashed-in
face may have been enough for her to change her story. Joseph Powell testified
that a fight started when Parrish hit Trent and a “scuffle” ensued, and the
52-year-old Parrish simply died as the result. For whatever reason, Powell was again
a free man on the streets of Richmond and one with a seriously bad reputation.
Roland Hord placed a handsome tombstone over his wife’s
grave in 1954 and the epitaph, “IN GOD WE TRUST,” seems to reflect a belief
that even the most inexplicable events like the brutal death of Mable Hord have
an explanation, if not in this world, then surely, they must in the next. Roland
never remarried, died in 1961, and is buried beside Mabel under a GI-issue
stone that reflects his service in World War II. Mabel Hord had been in her
grave in Oakwood Cemetery for forty-four years when Joseph Powell, Jr. finally
died in 1998 at the age of 84.
Mabel Hord’s gravestone in Oakwood Cemetery (from
Findagrave.com)
In fact, almost everyone in the story of the murder of Mabel
Hord found their way to Oakwood Cemetery in the end. Richard Trent, who held Howard
Parrish down with his foot while Joseph Powell beat him to death with a stick,
is buried there. Their victim, Parrish, after drowning in his own blood on his
dining room floor, was also buried in Oakwood. So were Walter and Mary Snowa,
who looked at each other and realized with growing horror the murderer and his
victim had been in their house only hours before Mabel Hord was killed. Joseph
Powell, Jr. is buried, along with his victims, his contemporaries, and his
co-defendants in Oakwood Cemetery under a perfectly innocuous-looking
gravestone that marks the remains of a brutal killer.
The gravestone of Joseph F. Powell, Jr. (from
Findagrave.com)
In the Bible, First Corinthians, 15:52 tells us when the
last trumpet sounds, the dead will rise up and live again. If that’s true, then
out in Oakwood Cemetery among the people whose lives were often harmed and sometimes
ended by Joseph Powell, Jr., there is going to be a lot of serious accounting
to do on that Judgement Day.
-Selden
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