Chapter Three

Trials and Tribulation

After months of frustration, failure, and growing public scorn, Sheriff Thomas Tate, ABI lead
investigator Simon Benson, and the district attorney’s investigator, Larry Ikner, decided to
arrest Walter McMillian based primarily on Ralph Myers’s allegation. They hadn’t yet done
much investigation into McMillian, so they decided to arrest him on a pretextual charge while
they built their case. Myers claimed to be terrified of McMillian; one of the officers suggested
to Myers that McMillian might have sexually assaulted him; the idea was so provocative and
inflammatory that Myers immediately recognized its usefulness and somberly acknowledged
that it was true. Alabama law had outlawed nonprocreative sex, so officials planned to arrest
McMillian on sodomy charges.
On June 7 , 1987 , Sheriff Tate led an army of more than a dozen officers to a back-country
road that they knew Walter would use on his return home from work. Officers stopped
Walter’s truck and drew their weapons, then forced Walter from his vehicle and surrounded
him. Tate told him he was under arrest. When Walter frantically asked the sheriff what he
had done, the sheriff told him that he was being charged with sodomy. Confused by the term,
Walter told the sheriff that he did not understand the meaning of the word. When the sheriff
explained the charge in crude terms, Walter was incredulous and couldn’t help but laugh at
the notion. This provoked Tate, who unleashed a torrent of racial slurs and threats. Walter
would report for years that all he heard throughout his arrest, over and over again, was the
word nigger. “Nigger this,” “nigger that,” followed by insults and threats of lynching.
“We’re going to keep all you niggers from running around with these white girls. I ought to
take you off and hang you like we done that nigger in Mobile,” Tate reportedly told Walter.
The sheriff was referring to the lynching of a young African American man named Michael
Donald in Mobile, about sixty miles south. Donald was walking home from the store one
evening, hours after a mistrial was declared in the prosecution of a black man accused of
shooting a white police officer. Many white people were shocked by the verdict and blamed
the mistrial on the African Americans who had been permitted to serve on the jury. After
burning a cross on the courthouse lawn, a group of enraged white men who were members of
the Ku Klux Klan went out searching for someone to victimize. They found Donald as he was