The Tragic and Horrifying Case of Lucy Pollard

Added: 2026-05-29

[00:00:00]Pokey Barnes was 23 years old. She lived in Lunenburgg County, Virginia with her mother, Mary, and she made her living washing and ironing other people's clothes. She could not read. That was something she had never been given. She had never been permitted to vote. That was something she had been deliberately denied. In the Virginia of 1895, the legislature had been dismantling black civic life for years, methodically through constitutional amendments and pole taxes and the quiet violence of enforcement. For a young black woman in a rural farming county, these were not exceptional circumstances. They were the water she moved through every day. What Pokey Barnes had was her work, her mother, and a house close enough to a neighboring farm that she was sometimes seen walking the road near it. She would walk out of a courthouse eventually, but not before Virginia tried twice to hang her for a murder she said she did not commit. Lucy Jane Pard was 56 years old, and she had come from a planter family.

[00:01:11]In 1882, when she was 44, she married Edward Pard, a tobacco farmer who had been married twice before. He was 60 at the wedding. By her neighbors reckoning, the match made sense on both sides. He had land and money. She had standing.

[00:01:28]Lucy moved into his household. his disputes, his history. She became the third wife of a man whose relationships with the people around him had grown over the years into something resembling open hostility. By 1895, Edward was 73.

[00:01:45]He lent money at interest, and it was known throughout Lunenburgg County that the Pards kept large sums of cash in the house. He was also in constant conflict with the people around him. Not long before the murder, his own stepson had stood up in public and called him a hog stealer and a land stealer and a thief in every degree. On the afternoon of June 14, Edward came in from the fields, walked through the house, and stepped out the back door. Lucy's body was on the ground just outside. The meatax kept outside the house had been used. More than $800 in cash was gone, along with some of Lucy's dresses and several pieces of bed linen. The afternoon was warm, the fields quiet, and nothing around the house looked disturbed except for what was outside that back door.

[00:02:40]Edward wept over his wife's body. His neighbors stood nearby and watched him.

[00:02:45]Some of them wondered quietly whether the tears were for Lucy or for the money. What do you think? Was Edward guilty? Let us know in the comments.

[00:02:55]Before the day was out, the constable had begun questioning people. He worked alongside the justice of the peace and a private citizen named Cass Gregory, a neighbor of the Pards, who had joined the investigation without official standing, moving through the community, taking names, working until late into the night. In Lunenburgg County in 1895, this was what an investigation looked like. A constable, a magistrate, and a man with local knowledge. None of them trained in evidence or procedure. The investigation did not range widely. From the first hours, it turned toward the black farm hands and neighbors who lived and worked near the pard place. The question of who else might have known about the cash in the house, who else had access to the road behind the farm, who else had reason or opportunity, was not recorded as having been seriously pursued. Mary Abernathy was arrested within 24 hours. She was a black farmand and tenant of the pards, and she had been the last person to see Lucy alive.

[00:04:05]Pokei Barnes was arrested next, seen near the farm that day, a neighbor, a known face. Pokey's mother, Mary Barnes, was in custody by the end of the second day. The authorities were still looking for one more person. Solomon Marble, a young black sawmill hand, had been spotted in Chase City, a few miles away, paying a 50 cent restaurant bill with a $20 bill. The waitress noticed he had a second 20 as well. A $20 bill in Lunenburgg County in 1895 was roughly equivalent to $100 today. Marble was arrested on June 18th. That evening, the situation at the farm had grown dangerous. A crowd gathered, some of them carrying guns and ropes. As darkness fell, the men conducting the investigation inside the pard house made a decision. The constable went out to the front porch and began to speak, holding the crowd's attention. While he talked, the prisoners were moved quietly to the back door. And when the signal came, they ran. Marble, Mary Barnes, Pokey Barnes, and a dozen armed white farmers moved into the woods behind the property and did not stop walking until nearly dawn. Mary Abernathy, still at large, would join the group later. She was pregnant. They covered 16 mi on foot through the dark, pausing when they heard voices or hoofbeats and emerged at Lunenburgg courthouse as the light came up. Those farmers were not reformers or abolitionists.

[00:05:43]They were men from the same community that had just gathered in that front yard with ropes. Whatever moved them to spend that night in the woods instead is not recorded. That afternoon, a horsedrawn wagon carried the prisoners 60 mi to Petersburg to a more secure jail, escorted by the same armed men who had decided, for their own reasons, that these women deserve to reach a courtroom alive. No physical evidence connected any of the women to the crime. What the investigation had produced after 4 days was four arrests and Solomon Marble's money. Marble had a story. He told it soon after his arrest and it went like this. On the day of the murder, he had come across Mary Barnes, Pokey Barnes, and Mary Abernathy, and they told him they had something good in store. Later, he saw Pokey and Mary Abernathy with blood on their hands and clothes. Mary Abernathy gave him $20 and told him to say nothing. He had not learned about the murder until the following day. This account explained the money in his pocket. It named three specific women.

[00:06:56]It required no physical evidence, no forensic examination, no corroboration beyond his word. Marble was described in the press of the time as a young mulatto sawmill hand, a man whose racial position in the rigidly sorted world of 1895 Virginia placed him in a kind of suspended uncertainty. He had no attorney. Like the three women, he would stand before a jury and speak for himself in a proceeding whose outcome was already halfdecided before he opened his mouth. By the time Marabel took the stand at his own trial, the story had changed. Now he said he had been present at the killing. He had held Lucy Pard's hands while Pokey Barnes struck her with a stick and Mary Abernathy struck her with the axe. Three days earlier, he had told investigators he learned of the murder the following day. Now he was pissing himself at the center of it as both witness and participant. The jury retired 9 minutes later. They returned a verdict of guilty of murder in the first degree. Virginia in 1895 had no formal system of public defenders. The judge made an attempt to secure counsel for Marble before his trial. No attorney volunteered. The same was true for the three women. All four went to trial representing themselves in separate proceedings that together lasted nine days. Pokey Barnes had an alibi for the afternoon of the murder. What exactly that alibi consisted of, who could place her elsewhere, and where is not preserved in the sources that survive.

[00:08:38]What is preserved is this. She presented it and the jury convicted her anyway.

[00:08:43]Mary Abernathy and Pokey Barnes were sentenced to hang. Mary Barnes, Pokey's mother, was convicted of seconddegree murder and sentenced to 10 years. The prosecutor was reportedly dissatisfied with the lesser charge. A diurist in Lunenburgg County noted the outcome of each trial in his journal with the same four words and all the people say, "Ae, nobody in those courtrooms across those nine days appears to have raised a formal objection." 4 days after the final guilty verdict, Marble spoke to reporters. What he said bore no resemblance to anything he had said before. A white man, Marble now claimed, had come to him with a pistol and forced him to take part. This man had committed the robbery and the murder. The three women had nothing to do with it.

[00:09:36]Afterward, the white man asked Marble if he knew anyone nearby who could be blamed. Marble had given him three names. At Pokey Barnes's trial, under cross-examination, Marble repeated the story. Then the prosecutor pushed him on it. Marble went silent. The courtroom waited. According to accounts of those present, nearly 10 minutes passed before he spoke again.

[00:10:02]The afternoon light would have moved across the floorboards in that time.

[00:10:06]When he finally spoke, he said that Mary Abernathy had gotten possession of the money. He had returned after 10 minutes of silence to the virgin that had already sent three women to death row.

[00:10:20]The first story, the one that had convicted them, had been told at least eight times. It was different every time. The second story, the one about the white man with the pistol, would be told nine more times after this. It would not change. In Richmond, editorial opinion divided. The Richmond Times wrote that the women had had no trial and that if this was Virginia's justice, no one in the state could consider themselves safe. The Richmond Dispatch moved in the opposite direction, coming close enough to advocating for the prisoners to be dealt with outside the law that the distinction barely held.

[00:11:01]William Haj's man, a young attorney who would one day serve as governor of Virginia, was hired by Lunenburgg County to ensure that the death sentences of three women were carried out. He was good at his work. The county had chosen well. John R. Mitchell Jr. was the editor of the Richmond Planet, a weekly newspaper that served Virginia's black community, and he had been following the Lunberg case from the beginning. His readers sent money. Civic groups across Virginia, black and white both, sent more. The fund grew large enough to hire a serious legal team led by former Congressman George Douglas Weise. For a white attorney in Virginia in 1896, taking this case meant making enemies in places that had long memories. Wise took it anyway. What Weise found in the trial records was not a question of guilt or innocence. It was a procedural failure.

[00:12:00]When a Virginia court adjourned in the middle of a trial, the judge was required by law to charge a sworn officer to keep the jury together and away from outside contact, and that charge had to be entered into the written record. It had not been done in any of the four cases. Man tried to add the missing language retroactively, a motion known as nunk pro tunk, meaning now for then. The appeals court denied it. All four defendants were granted new trials. While the legal argument unfolded in Richmond, the three women were returned to Lunenburgg under the escort of two companies of state militia. Soldiers deployed because the county could not otherwise guarantee that the prisoners would survive long enough to be retrieded.

[00:12:50]Then they were moved again for the retriils to Farmville in Prince Edward County, 50 m to the northeast. Mary Abernathy made these journeys with a child. In October 1896, the Richmond Planet published a photograph. Mary Abernathy holding her daughter Bessie Mitchell Abernathy. Bessie was 9 months old. She had been born during the period of her mother's imprisonment, conceived before or during the first arrest, carried through the verdict, the death sentence, the appeal, and the preparation for retrial. The photograph was taken in Richmond while the legal proceedings were still unresolved, published to make an argument to a public that had spent more than a year being told these women were killers.

[00:13:41]Mary Abernathy could not read the caption beneath her own face. When the appeals court ordered new trials for all four defendants, Mary Barnes made a calculation. She had watched the machinery operate for 18 months. She had seen what happened to people who went back before a Virginia jury, and she understood that a second trial was not necessarily an improvement over the sentence she already had. 10 years in prison was survivable. A first-degree murder conviction on retrial was not. A pardon was different from an acquitt. It was a request directed at a governor she had never met with no guaranteed outcome and no timeline. She had no attorney to advise her, no political connection to call upon. She was staking her freedom on the judgment of a man who owed her nothing. Mary Barnes declined the new trial. Her daughter Pokey and Mary Abernathy would return to the Farmville courthouse. Mary Barnes would remain in prison while the proceedings continued without her, waiting on a decision she could not influence.

[00:14:51]The Prince Edward County Courthouse in Farmville had an outdoor staircase that led up to the courtroom on the second floor. Pokey Barnes climbed it for her retrial in 1896.

[00:15:03]She had no attorney. She had, as before, only what she carried in her own memory.

[00:15:10]Solomon Marble was called again as a witness for the prosecution.

[00:15:14]He took the stand. He was still telling his second story, the one about the white man with the pistol, the one he had told nine times without variation.

[00:15:24]He was, as he had been at the first trial, the only evidence the Commonwealth had against Pokey Barnes.

[00:15:32]Pokei had been listening to Solomon Marble testify for months. She had listened in courtrooms through the walls of the Petersburg jail through every retelling of every version of his account. She could not write down what she heard. She held it in her memory instead, and at some point she had found the seam, a discrepancy between what Marble had told the Petersburg jailer during the months they had been held in the same facility, and what he was saying now under oath. She stood. The courtroom went quiet. A woman with no legal training, no representation, and no notes had just indicated she intended to cross-examine the prosecution's witness. The proceedings continued. She asked him about a road near Fort Mitchell and a conversation he had reported to the jailer. His account at this trial did not match what he had said then. Did you or did you not tell the jailer at Petersburg that you saw me on Friday on the road near Fort Mitchell? Marble tried to avoid the question. She pressed. Then you tell this jury whether you when you kissed that Bible to tell the truth told the grand jury and jailer a lie or are you telling the lie now. The courtroom waited. What I said the first time was false. Marble said, "I'm telling the truth now. It was the only unambiguous statement he appears to have made in any of the proceedings."

[00:17:03]Marble had sat in the same institutional trap as Pokey Barnes for 18 months. He had produced eight different stories under pressure and a 10-minute silence when that pressure peaked. Pokey Barnes, with no resources, no legal training, and no record of what she had heard except what she had memorized, walked into that same room and made her accuser confess to perjury. The contrast is not a verdict on either of them. It is a record of what sustained pressure over a long time does to two different people standing in the same place. Mary Abernathy's second trial was the longest of all the proceedings, longer than all four original trials combined. When it ended, the jury deliberated for 5 minutes and found her guilty of first-degree murder again. The system had been given every opportunity to reconsider and it had declined. Her attorneys appealed. The appeal succeeded. The Commonwealth dropped the charges. Mary Abernathy was free. Bessie Mitchell Abernathy was by then passed her first birthday. She had spent that year as the child of a woman twice condemned to death at Pokey Barnes's retrial. Prince Edward County's own prosecutor, Assa Watkins, had sat through the proceedings while the Lunberg team led the case. He had listened to witnesses who had already testified in multiple prior proceedings.

[00:18:34]He had heard Marble's testimony, which now included a courtroom confession of perjury in an adjacent case. When the Commonwealth rested, Watkins took back control. he told the court. And now that all the evidence in the possession of the Commonwealth has been given in, I cannot believe that it is sufficient to justify the jury bringing in a verdict of guilty. I have reached this conclusion without consultation with anyone. He filed a null proquoke Barnes was released. Governor Charles Topol granted Mary Barnes a pardon shortly afterward. His written language was exact. The life or liberty of a citizen, however humble, is too sacred in the eyes of civilized man to be taken upon the testimony alone of a self-convicted perjurer and murderer every mandate of justice and dictate conscience require that the prisoner be restored to her liberty. The Richmond Planet's photograph of Mary Abernathy shows a woman holding a 9-month-old child. Bessie Mitchell Abernathy is awake. Her mother is looking at the camera. Bessie had been conceived before or during the first arrest in the summer of 1895.

[00:19:53]She had been carried through the initial verdict, the death sentence, the transfer to Petersburg, the return to Lunenburgg, the legal campaign, and the preparation for retrial. Her father is not identified in any of the available records. In Virginia in 1895, an unmarried black woman in a jail cell with a newborn had no institutional recourse, no category in which the law recognized her situation as requiring remedy. Mary Abernathy raised Bessie through all of it in whatever space was available. The photograph was published while the appeals were still active as part of a public argument that these women were human beings. Mary Abernathy could not read the words printed beside her own image. There is no record of what she said when she saw it. Solomon Marble was hanged on the morning of July 3rd, 1896 inside the Prince Edward County Jail. He had spent the preceding months in the company of Father Webblers, a white Catholic priest who led Richmond's only black Catholic congregation. Father Wblers visited regularly. He had listened to Marble's story, the one about the white man with the pistol, and he did not believe it. He pressed Marble to confess. Marble would not. He asked to be returned to the Baptist faith, and the request was granted. Whether that decision was about theology or about ending the pressure of those visits, the record does not say. On the morning of his execution, he was still telling the same story. The white man Marble named was David Thompson, a storekeeper in the village of Fineywood. Thompson had an alibi confirmed by four business associates. His brother Herbert carried debts and a history of violence and had never been formally examined in connection with the case. That line of inquiry was never pursued.

[00:21:56]The more than $800 taken from the pard house was never recovered. The stepson who had called Edward Pard a thief and a hog stealer in the days before the murder does not appear again in the available record. Lucy Pard's murder was never officially solved. She was buried in Lunenburgg County and the question of who killed her was buried with no one.

[00:22:21]Mary Barnes received her pardon and was released from prison. What became of her afterward is not documented in the sources. The same is true of Mary Abernathy and Bessie. The same is true of Pokey Barnes. Four people passed through 18 months of Virginia Justice, and when it was over, three of them walked back into lives that left no further trail in the records that survive. The diarist of Lunenburgg County had written his aean after every verdict in the summer of 1895.

[00:22:55]There is no entry for the day. Pokey Barnes walked down the outdoor staircase of the Prince Edward County Courthouse and into the street below.