The twenty-two-year-old Cobb was arrested in Anniston in May 1925 for the "strong-arm" robbery of T. T. Bagley, a local grocer. On the night of May 8, while awaiting trial in the Calhoun County jail, Cobb and four other inmates sawed through the bars of their cell window, scaled the tall fence surrounding the jail, and crawled through a large drain pipe to the rear of the Manhattan Hotel where they stole an automobile and made good their escape. The Anniston Star reported that "the minutest details of the escape had been carefully worked out. Care was taken to cut the telephone cord leading to the jail before their departure." Authorities later discovered that a second car had been stolen and determined that the men had separated, some headed for Birmingham and the others toward Atlanta.
When Guy Cobb died at the Tuberculosis Prison Hospital at Wetumpka, Alabama, in 1932, few marked his passing except perhaps the clerk who made the citation in volume nine, Record of State Convicts. Cobb's prison career, however, which included at least seven escapes, was anything but unremarkable, and the details of that career, along with those of hundreds of other convicts, are part of the Alabama Department of Corrections and Institutions records which have recently been made available to researchers at the Department of Archives and History.
The twenty-two-year-old Cobb was arrested in Anniston in May 1925 for the "strong-arm" robbery of T. T. Bagley, a local grocer. On the night of May 8, while awaiting trial in the Calhoun County jail, Cobb and four other inmates sawed through the bars of their cell window, scaled the tall fence surrounding the jail, and crawled through a large drain pipe to the rear of the Manhattan Hotel where they stole an automobile and made good their escape. The Anniston Star reported that "the minutest details of the escape had been carefully worked out. Care was taken to cut the telephone cord leading to the jail before their departure." Authorities later discovered that a second car had been stolen and determined that the men had separated, some headed for Birmingham and the others toward Atlanta. "Another chapter has been added to Conecuh’s already unenviable criminal record, and another good citizen’s life has gone out at the hands of a heartless assassin,” mourned a front-page article in the Evergreen Courier on July 13, 1910. The story detailed the search for the murderers of seventy-two-year-old farmer and Civil War veteran "Captain" Jesse Baldwin. On the morning of July 8, the dying planter's beaten and bloody body had been discovered lying under the branches of a peach tree located just steps from his back porch. Employee and former slave Handy McKenzie discovered Baldwin and immediately ran to Wilcox, the nearest community, for assistance. But by the time help arrived at the plantation, it was too late. The captain was dead. His skull was crushed, and his face was pocked with deep cuts. Two decades after the double murder of St. Clair farmer Jacob Lutes and his second wife, Marcella, rocked northeast Alabama, the case again became front-page news with an alleged deathbed confession. John McLemore, the state's star witness against the three men charged with and later convicted of the horrific crime, admitted in his final hours that he and his father-in-law, Thomas Knight, actually killed the elderly couple, according to several affidavits. Whether three innocent men spent decades in prison for a crime they did not commit and whether McLemore actually confessed on his deathbed are still debated in the hills and hollows of Chandler Mountain.
Some reporters dubbed her “The Giggling Granny.” Others in the media gave her the nickname “The Jolly Widow.” Her given name was Nancy Hazle, and she was probably Alabama's most prolific female serial killer. History knows her as Nannie Doss. Hazle's parents were hard-scrabble farmers that eked out an existence from the rural countryside of Blue Mountain, just north of Anniston. James Hazle, the hot-tempered, allegedly abusive man that helped rear her, most probably was not Nancy's biological father. Born in 1906, she was going by "Nannie" by the time she was five, according to her CourtTV Crime Library profile. She and her younger siblings received only sporadic schooling, as James frequently used them to work the fields. At seven, Nannie suffered a head injury that plagued her for life and, she said, eventually contributed to her murderous impulses. To find Bangor Cave today, you must know where to look in the deep piney woods of Central Alabama. That was not always the case. For a short but exciting time in the late 1930s, Bangor Cave was one of America's most exotic nightspots. A special spur to the cave, built by the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, brought thousands of elegantly dressed southerners to the cave's bungalow entrance. There, they waited outside for the chance to enter an underground Shangri-La. And a lucky few, usually with bulging wallets, were allowed into the private casino hidden behind a heavily bolted door. |
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