Race in the CourtThe Execution of Willie Francis: Race, Murder
and the Search for Justice in the American South They called the
Louisiana electric chair Gruesome Gertie and in her years of
service to the state, no case was more notorious than that of
long-forgotten Willie Francis. A 16-year-old teen at the time of
his 1945 arrest, Francis was barely literate, the youngest of 13
children in a desperately poor, devoutly Roman Catholic, African
American family. The story begins in November, 1944 with the
murder of 53- year-old Andrew Thomas, the well-liked owner of
Thomas’s Drug Store in the pastoral Cajun town of St.
Martinville, Louisiana. Thomas, who was white, was hit by five
shots fired at close range. Theories of who might have killed
him were abundant. The lifelong bachelor and purported Don Juan
was suspected of numerous romantic liaisons with married women,
but after a nine-month investigation, all leads had run cold.
That changed in August 3, 1945 when police in Port Arthur,
Texas, 150 miles from St. M