It was a normal day like any other. She sent her kids off to the school house. She made her way to work. She'd clocked out and was walking her normal route back to her little piece of heaven. The Bluff. It was the most beautiful piece of property anyone had ever seen in the Gullah Islands. Its only accessible because of a land bridge that was created to let one and a half cars come through at once. Realizing you're driving over a tiny part of the Atlantic Ocean can seem daunting, but that was the normal way of life there. Bridges were everywhere. Some made from sand, some made from wood, some made from steel. This place, while connected, provided enough division to keep the community in peace and harmony. But then Betty never showed up at home that night. In fact, she would never come back.
April, 1978, Betty was stopped by two white men and one white woman. They stopped to ask her some questions. From that moment, her life, the lives of her family, and the lives of an entire community would never be the same again.
20 years later, the New York Times reported:
A white man who strangled a black hitchhiker and carved K.K.K. into her body 20 years ago was executed on Friday by lethal injection.
The man, John Arnold, 43, was convicted of killing Betty Gardner. Ms. Gardner, 33, was picked up by Mr. Arnold, his cousin John Plath and a female companion in 1978 as she made her way home.
The companion, Cindy Sheets, led the police to Ms. Gardner's body and testified against the cousins under a grant of immunity. Ms. Sheets said Mr. Arnold had strangled Ms. Gardner with a garden hose while Mr. Plath stabbed her with a knife and a bottle and stomped on her neck.
Mr. Plath is expected to be executed by early summer. Mr. Arnold is the 14th person to be executed in South Carolina since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.
I was in elementary school in 1998. I remember the adults in my family sending my cousins and I outside to have meetings. While I knew something was happening, they never shared that information with the children. Then one day my mother took off from work and sent me to her aunts house to sleep over on a school night. This was abnormal for her. She'd taken off to be a family witness for the execution of Betty Gardner's murderer. This would be only the third time in historu a white person was put to death by the state of South Carolina for killing someone black.