YORK, Pa. - She was gunned down at dusk at a railroad crossing. The street teemed with more than 100 armed white young men as this blue-collar town throbbed with racial hatred and violence. Lillie Belle Allen and her family were driving to buy groceries when the mob on the street opened fire at 9 p.m. on July 21, 1969.
Whispered theories about who shot her circulated for years, but police were never able to find witnesses willing to back up investigators' suspicions that members of the Newberry Street Boys gang were involved.
For three decades, no one was arrested, and no one went to trial in the death of the 27-year-old black woman, the daughter of a Baptist minister from Aiken, S.C., who was visiting relatives.
That could change as early as tomorrow.
Twelve white men and women have been picked to weigh murder charges against former Mayor Charlie Robertson, 68, Robert N. Messersmith, 53, and Gregory H. Neff, 54. Opening statements will begin after the last alternate juror is selected and pretrial legal arguments are resolved. Five alternates were chosen last week.
Messersmith, former leader of the Newberry Street Boys, is accused of firing the shotgun slug that knocked Allen out of her sneakers and killed her. Robertson, a police officer at the time, is accused of supplying ammunition to gang members and egging them on.
"The fear and the trauma, you can't re-create that for someone who didn't live through it," said Peter Solymos, an attorney for Messersmith. "The town was gripped in terror, blacks and whites alike. The local police were outmanned and outgunned. The Pennsylvania State Police were brought in, and that wasn't enough."
By the time the National Guard rolled its tanks out of town after 10 days of rioting, Allen and a white rookie police officer had been fatally shot, entire blocks had burned, police had barricaded black neighborhoods and enforced curfews, 60 people had been injured and 100 had been arrested. Authorities charged two black men last year in the killing of Officer Henry C. Schaad.
Reopening the long-dormant cases in York came on the heels of the successful prosecutions in Mississippi and Alabama of other revisited crimes from the tumultuous 1960s. Within the past 18 months, two former Ku Klux Klansmen were sentenced to life in prison for the 1963 church bombing in Birmingham, Ala., that killed four black girls.
Historical significance
The consequence and historical significance of bringing such a case to trial in York - and north of the Mason-Dixon Line, at that - is not lost on county prosecutors, who have buried themselves in thousands of pages of dusty documents and spent the past two years coaxing fading memories from dozens of unwilling witnesses to make their case.
"Without a doubt, historically for Pennsylvania, this would be a significant trial. It is following along the lines of the civil rights prosecutions that have been resurrected 20 or 30 years after the fact," said Ed Paskey, who left the York County district attorney's office and the Allen case in November and works in civil and commercial litigation for a private firm in York.
"But this is even more significant for York County than on a national level because it may give the community the opportunity to heal that it's been looking for for many years," he said.
Of calling Allen's sister, Hattie Mosley Dickson, to testify during a preliminary hearing in June 2001, Paskey said, "There were ghosts and spirits in that courtroom not speaking, yet everyone felt their presence."
Dickson is again expected to provide some of the most emotional testimony in the trial, recounting how her family had just returned from an afternoon of fishing when they decided to go out for groceries. Unaware that the city was in the midst of its second summer of race riots, Dickson chose a route that took her husband, parents and older sister through a hostile white neighborhood.
There, members of the all-white Newberry Street Boys were on the lookout for a group of black men who had threatened gang leader Messersmith. They feared the men would return to cause trouble and were on alert for the big white car they drove - a vehicle similar to Dickson's white Cadillac.
As Dickson drove through a gully and crossed a set of railroad tracks just inside the Newberry Street Boys' neighborhood, the Cadillac's headlights raked a house in front of her. There, she saw a man leaning out a window with a long-barreled gun getting ready to shoot and brought the car to a halt.
As Allen opened the back-seat door and prepared to take the wheel to turn the Cadillac around and help her sister get out of a bad situation, the young men lining the street opened fire. Witnesses said the blast that struck Allen in the chest was forceful enough to knock her out of her sneakers.
Attorneys for Messersmith and for Neff, whose plea agreement was withdrawn last year after he testified at a preliminary hearing that Allen got out of the car with a "bluish handgun," are expected to argue that the men opened fire in self-defense and in fear for their lives.
They are also likely to "hammer home that it was a different time and different circumstances, and people reacted as they felt appropriate given the circumstances," Paskey said. "They'll also harp on the lack of physical evidence, the loss of physical evidence, and the loss of memory and perceptions."
Prosecution's approach
Prosecutors will paint the opposite picture. In addition to providing eyewitness accounts, "they'll emphasize that what may have been acceptable socially back in 1969 is not acceptable," Paskey said, "and hammer home that murder is never acceptable, no matter what time period it is."
Robertson, who was a 35-year-old patrolman and acknowledged racist in 1969, is the only defendant not accused of firing a gun at Allen. Rather, he is accused of offering ammunition and encouragement.
Former Newberry Street Boy Rick L. Knouse testified for the prosecution at the preliminary hearing in the summer that the gang thought it had "a license to kill" after Robertson tossed him a box of bullets hours before Allen's death and told him to "kill as many niggers as you can."
Knouse - one of six defendants who have pleaded guilty to lesser charges in exchange for testifying at trial - said he used the .30-06 bullets to fire two shots at Allen's car.
Dennis McMaster, a former York police officer who is the police chief in East Pennsboro Township, is expected to repeat testimony from the grand jury hearing that he also saw Robertson give ammunition to one of the defendants.
Lawyers for the former mayor are expected to draw from an impressive list of potential character witnesses, defense attorney William C. Costopoulos said - from "salt of the earth" factory workers, secretaries and police officers to the political and business elite of York, including a former congressman and the president of Susquehanna Pfaltzgraff, a longtime pottery and dishware maker.
"Charlie Robertson was born and raised in this community, he was a police officer in this community for 29 years and he was a well-liked mayor for eight years," he said.
"These people will testify that they've known Charlie Robertson, they know people in the community in which he lived and worked, and that his reputation for being a truthful, law-abiding citizen is excellent. It's hard to gain such a reputation in a small town if there isn't some merit to it."
Costopoulos is also expected to call the neighbor who lent Robertson a rifle during the riots and a police officer who saw him carrying the rifle after their colleague was shot. That the gun takes .300 bullets is proof, defense attorneys say, that Robertson did not have the type of ammunition that Knouse and McMaster allege he distributed.
Expected to last three to four weeks, the trial will be a painful ordeal for Allen's siblings and children but a necessary one, they say. Many of them have traveled from South Carolina to be in the courtroom for testimony.
"We're relieved to finally get to this point - a point we never thought we'd get to," said Debra Taylor, who was 11 years old in July 1969 when she and her mother, little brother and youngest aunt piled into a car with her grandparents and set out from the lower midlands of South Carolina on the more than 600-mile trip to visit Dickson's family.
"This has been a long time coming," Taylor said. "You hear about this event, and you hear about ... them not being able to do anything about it, over and over. So for it to finally come to trial will allow me some closure where there's been an empty void in my life."