Shot for a Cigarette – A Sudden Death in Monroe Street

Richmonders have been going at each other with murderous intent throughout the hundreds of years the city has existed. Arrow and ax, sword and dagger, pistols, rifles, shotguns, brickbats, knives, razors, clubs, and bare hands have all been employed over the centuries. Everything from rocks to Glocks have been used to “straighten things out” between citizens of this city whose brief, drunken and enraged encounters often ended with one of the combatants going to a local cemetery. Bars were frequently the setting of these disagreements where somebody was called outside into the street and blood was shed for no good reason. This was the case of 22-year-old John Michael Smith, a Petersburg electrician who, on May 22, 1974, did not return as he anticipated to his home after an afternoon in Richmond. Instead, a photo of his blood-covered dead body appeared in newspapers all over the country the next day and instead of in his car, Smith went back to Petersburg in a box.

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.

 

Associated Press photo by Medford Taylor, May 23, 1974. Note the windowsill behind the woman in the white dress compared with the photo of the scene today.  

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