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was around, he felt alive and believed things would be all right. She had saved his life. When
she moved back home to Alabama, Herbert followed.
He tried to date her and even told her he wanted to marry her. At first she resisted because
she knew that Herbert was still suffering the effects of his time in combat, but ultimately she
gave in. They had a brief intimate relationship, and Herbert had never been happier. He
became intensely protective of his girlfriend. But she began to see his desperate and relentless
focus on her as something closer to obsessive need than love. She tried to end the
relationship. After months of unsuccessfully trying to create distance from Herbert, she finally
insisted that he stay away.
Instead, Herbert moved even closer to her home in Dothan, which elevated her anxieties. It
got to the point where she refused to allow him to see her, talk to her, or get anywhere near
her. Herbert was convinced that she was just confused and would eventually come back to
him. He was deluded by obsession; his logic and reasoning became corrupted, irrational, and
increasingly dangerous.
Herbert was not unintelligent—in fact, he was quite smart, with a particular aptitude for
electronics and mechanics. And he had a big heart. But he was still recovering from the
trauma of the war as well as some serious traumas that preceded his military experience. His
mother had died when he was just three years old, and he had struggled with drugs and
alcohol before he decided to enlist. The horrors of war had added a new level of distress to an
already damaged psyche.
He came up with an idea to win back his girlfriend. He decided that if she felt threatened,
she would come to him for protection. He concocted a tragically misguided plan: He would
construct a small bomb and place it on her front porch. He would detonate the bomb and
then run to her aid to save her and then they would live happily ever after. It was the kind of
reckless use of explosives that wouldn’t have been sensible in a combat zone, much less in a
poor black neighborhood in Dothan, Alabama. One morning, Herbert completed his assembly
of the bomb and placed it on his former girlfriend’s porch. The woman’s niece and another
little girl came out instead and saw the peculiar package.
The ten-year-old niece was drawn to the odd bag with a clock on it and picked up the
device. She shook the clock to see if it would tick, which triggered a violent explosion. The
child was killed instantly, and her twelve-year-old friend, who was standing next to her, was
traumatized. Herbert knew both children. In this community, children were always roaming
the streets looking for something to do. Herbert loved kids and would invite them into his
yard, pay them to do errands, and talk to them. He started making cereal and cooking for the
kids who would wander by. The two girls had come by his house for breakfast.
Herbert, watching the house from across the street, was devastated. He had planned to run
to his girlfriend’s aid when the bomb exploded to reinforce his readiness to protect her and to
keep her safe. When the child picked up the bomb and it detonated, Herbert ran across the
street and found himself in a circle of grieving neighbors.
It didn’t take long for police to make an arrest. They found pipes and other bomb-making
materials in Herbert’s car and front yard. Because the victims were black and poor, this
wasn’t the kind of case that would usually be prosecuted as a capital crime, but Herbert
wasn’t local. His identity as an outsider, a Northerner, and the nature of the crime seemed to
generate heightened contempt from law enforcement officials. Placing a bomb anywhere in