KENTUCKY: New Grave in Harlan County

Soft-voiced, hard-eyed men in Kentucky’s “Bloody” Harlan County began saying Ambrose Metcalfe was a “candidate” (meaning, for the graveyard) almost as soon as he pinned on a policeman’s badge in 1946. It took him just two years and eight months to get there. Last week, when his kinfolk took his bullet-riddled body up the dusty Poor Fork road and buried it in a little family cemetery, many a hillman thought Ambrose had actually outlived his life expectancy.

In a sense, Ambrose Metcalfe had courted death; he was a black-haired, buck-toothed gunman with insolent eyes and heavy fists and he had recklessly made enemies. Violent life and violent death had been a part of-Harlan County since clannish men with Anglo-Saxon names had settled in its isolated creeks and hollers after the Revolution.

Red Likker. The quarrels which killed him began after Harlan County voted dry in 1942, and moonshiners, “red likker” men and gamblers began scheming and fighting for its coal miners’ pay.

Jug-eared, tobacco-chewing County Judge Willie Bob Howard set the stage for Metcalfe’s brief career as a cop. The judge took drastic steps to enforce the law. The ancient Cawood clan, which dominated the county, was cool to his kind of law enforcement. Sheriff Jim Cawood couldn’t seem to find many bootleggers, and most of those got off. County Attorney Bert Howard and Commonwealth Attorney Daniel Boone Smith were Cawood adherents. So was Circuit Judge Jim Forester: Judge Willie Bob’s convictions were regularly reversed in Jim Forester’s court.

Judge Willie Bob took a daring step: he organized a county police force to compete with the sheriff’s office. Big, mean, 29-year-old Ambrose Metcalfe, who had served as a sergeant in an armored division during World War II, became its captain. He swaggered out to “throw the fear of God” into Harlan County.

He roamed the mining settlements of the hill country like a hunter; he raided bootleggers (often without benefit of a search warrant), impounded slot machines and took a brutal delight in pistol-whipping lawbreakers and cursing their wives and womenfolk. One day his automobile blew up as he stepped on the starter—somebody had inserted dynamite caps in the engine. Somehow Ambrose Metcalfe walked away unhurt.* Once a moonshiner blasted at him with a shotgun; he was only grazed.

Sneering, he went on scourging the lawless, demonstrated his contempt for Harlan County’s rulers by roughing up Sheriff Jim Cawood’s son, throwing him in jail and accusing him of being drunk during a football game. One of his deputies quit, became chief of police at Evarts (TIME, Dec. 27), was promptly killed. Five other Evarts police chiefs quit or were arrested. Metcalfe paid no mind.

Peacefully Chatting. But on Easter Sunday—a brooding day in which fog and bituminous smoke pressed down on Clover Fork, Yokum, Catron’s Creek and all the hills and hollers—history caught up with Ambrose Metcalfe. He drove into the shabby settlement of Lejunior with his wife and baby, stopped and climbed out, belligerently intent on investigating a parked automobile in which he had seen a bootlegger named Ford Sizemore and a café operator, Art Jackson.

A second or so later he was lying on the street, bleeding from five bullet wounds. He died on the way to Harlan Hospital. Sizemore and Jackson were politely arrested by the state police, jailed, and released last week on $15,000 bail; though Metcalfe’s wife cried that she had seen them shoot her husband, they produced witnesses who vowed they were chatting indoors when the shooting occurred, Harlan County did not think things would go hard with them. Although killings in Harlan County (pop. 75,000) average 40 a year, only four men have been executed for murder since the Civil War.

* This week Elihu H. Bailey, mayor of Evarts, announced that he had found 24 sticks of dynamite beneath his bedroom window; attached was a fuse which had burned out a few inches short of a percussion cap.