Monday Mystery: What happened to a missing Fort Gordon soldier in 1962?
On a Friday afternoon in April 1962, two men entered the Webbers Falls State Bank in rural Oklahoma and robbed it.
Cashier S.L. Weathersly, 62, who had been robbed four times before, did as he was told by one of the men who was holding a handgun. The bandits took mostly hundred-dollar bills – $2,700 worth, marched the two bank employees and a customer into a vault, shut its door, then fled the scene.
The vault door, however, had never clicked shut, and after waiting briefly, the bank employees got out to spread the alarm. An Oklahoma state trooper and a local police chief soon stopped a 1959 Buick convertible, took its occupants into custody and found all the bank's money hidden under clothing.
It was a pretty quick conclusion to a small-town holdup, but it was just the beginning of a 60-year-old mystery surrounding the death of a Fort Gordon soldier – Army Pvt. Joseph Jacob Poye Jr., of Louisiana.
The owner of the Buick, Poye had enlisted in December 1961 and was stationed at the base outside Augusta when he disappeared in early April 1962. The Army said he was absent without leave. Also said to be AWOL at the same time was Pvt. Willie J. King, sometimes called Billie J. King, of Galveston, Texas.
He had been the Oklahoma bank robber wielding the pistol. His accomplice had been a 15 year old from Birmingham, who would not be charged as an adult. King not only had Poye's car, but a class ring. He also had several stories about what happened to Poye.
King said they both had arrived at Fort Gordon in March 1962 after basic training in Arkansas. They played cards in the barracks and slept in nearby bunks. They began to talk about going AWOL and heading to Cuba, he said. At first, King said he and Poye left Augusta for Birmingham where two sailors "abducted Poye and dissolved his body in acid."
Next, King would claim they went to New Orleans where Poye escaped to Cuba with the help of a Marxist supporter named Lee Harvey Oswald. This was more than year before the Kennedy assassination, but Oswald's pro-Cuba activities were well known in New Orleans.
Despite King's elaborate confessions, there were no remains of Poye and it was possible that he had actually escaped to Cuba.
A discovery by Poye's family would change things.
A new discovery
When their son's Buick was returned to Louisiana, they found a quarter-inch of caked blood beneath the floor mat – a clue the FBI had missed.
The Army began a murder investigation and King soon admitted he had accidentally killed Poye. Just how, kept changing.
In one account, King said he and Poye were passing a .22-caliber pistol back and forth, when it accidentally fired, striking Poye in the head. Another time, King said, he was trying to shoot a stray cat and accidentally shot Poye.
After the shooting, King said, he had panicked and fled, disposing of Poye's body somewhere on the rural roads between Augusta and Macon. During one interview, King – a butcher in civilian life – said he had dismembered Poye's body and scattered parts along the back roads.
Finally, King settled on a simpler story: He had stopped in the night on a rural Georgia bridge and dumped Poye's 6-foot-4 inch body into the water below. He just didn't remember where.
A search for the body
Chief Warrant Officer Felix Garrett, the fort's lead investigator, would later tell The Chronicle that King wanted to help them find the body because he thought its remains would confirm his story of an accident. Garrett said King even passed a polygraph indicating he was telling the truth about the body dumping.
Garrett and Sgt. Cecil Moore drove King along highways around Fort Gordon, Grovetown, Harlem and even Sparta, Ga., looking for the bridge. King would remember some landmarks, but nothing was found.
Heading back, they stopped in a Warrenton restaurant for supper. While eating, Garrett said he noticed a car pulling into the restaurant parking lot, its headlights illuminating their table.
"A little bulb went off in my head," Garrett told The Chronicle 50 years later. "I thought, 'Damn, that's it. He did this at night.' "
The investigator said he realized things look different in the dark. When they returned to searching, King quickly led them to a small Warren County bridge, certain it was the one.
Garrett returned at daylight on the morning of Sept. 9, 1962 – five months since Poye's disappearance – and climbed down the creek bank.
He and his assistant found exposed rib bones and penny loafers with bones in them. They went back to the car and radioed for Warren County investigators and the coroner.
When they arrived, Garrett said, they went back down to the bones. Garrett said he stuck his hand into the creek sand where he thought a head might be and felt his hands touch metal.
He pulled out the dog tags of Pvt. Joseph Poye Jr.
They found a skull with a bullet hole in it, but they found something else. A bullet hole in the ribs, indicating Poye had been shot twice. The coroner ruled the death a homicide.
When King went on trial in 1964, testimony maintained he had shot Poye in the back and then the head, taking his car and money. He was convicted by a six-man court martial board and sentenced to death in the electric chair.
That, however, did not happen. King's lawyers filed appeals and his sentence was reduced to a life of hard labor. His fate over the past six decades is a mystery.
On the 50th anniversary of the crime, a spokeswoman at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, told The Chronicle it had no records of King. She suggested he had been transferred to the federal prison system. A check of federal prisoner records, however, had no information on him.
That is not the case of Pvt. Poye.
AWOL no longer, he is buried in Myrtle Memorial Cemetery in Winnsboro, La., with his U.S. Army military designation on his gravestone..
Bill Kirby has reported, photographed and commented on life in Augusta and Georgia for 45 years.
This article originally appeared on Augusta Chronicle: Monday Mystery: Missing in 1962, where is Fort Gordon soldier now?
