Trials: To Find His Father’s Killer

For 20 years, a resolute Tennessean named Welby Lee has searched for the hit-run driver who hurtled out of the gloom on a rural road and killed his father on New Year’s Eve, 1944. With only a broken bumper guard as solid evidence, Lumber Merchant Lee, now 51, traced scores of cars, braced dozens of suspects and traveled 100,000 miles before he caught up last summer with Grover Jones, 55, now an Indianapolis handyman. Lee amassed 153 pages of circumstantial evidence, and Jones was indicted for second-degree murder.

Last week Jones went on trial in Celina, Tenn. (pop. 1,228). Outside the tiny Clay County courthouse, where Judge Cordell Hull once sat, a bearded evangelist stood on the lawn shouting for sinners to repent. Inside, sweating from the heat of two potbellied stoves, a crowd of wide-eyed youngsters and tobacco-chewing old men listened intently as the D.A. thundered: “When you hit him, did he scream?” Said Jones: “I guess he did, but I wouldn’t know because I didn’t hit him.”

Jones doggedly insisted that he was not even in Tennessee when Lee’s father was killed. But as it turned out, both hunter and prey had bad legal luck. With the all-male jury reportedly ready to acquit Jones, the prosecution suddenly requested and won a mistrial on the ground that two jurors were relatives of two defense character witnesses. “It ain’t fair to me,” complained Jones, who may be retried in June. Vowed Lee: “This is not the end.”