Whatever Happened to William Zantzinger?Obit1-09

Subject: RE: Whatever Happened to William Zantzinger?
From: Ballyholme
Date: 01 May 02 - 08:28 AM

Amazing stuff. I've always thought "Hattie Carroll" was a great song but Martin Carthy's version renewed my interest several years ago.

I now live in Fairfax, VA and have a friend who has a weekend home in the La Plata area and I've spent quite a few weekends down there, mixing with the locals. I didn't know that Zantzinger came from the area and I've now wondering - have I been in his bar/restaurant; have I unknowingly met the guy? Scarey.

Subject: RE: Whatever Happened to William Zantzinger?
From: GUEST,Frogmore
Date: 01 May 02 - 07:22 AM

Quite a story. Unreported - and under-reported - stuff happens all the time, and everywhere. Here's my contribution: In 1976 I lived in Washington D.C. and was doing a duo folk/country act with a wonderful woman named Arlene (name changed for this story). Somehow, an agent set us up with a one-night gig in La Plata, Md. Used to playing small and jolly rooms in D.C. and Virginia where we were somewhat popular, we found ourselves setting up in a lounge with only a few people drinking, watching T.V., and hardly noticing us. We just assumed that it would be a good night to "rehearse with P.A." After a couple of sets, we had become friendly with the cocktail waitress who was bringing us a beer now and then. Not having much to do that night, she sat down with us and offered, "Do you know who owns this place?" We didn't, but she told us the owner was the notorious William Zantzinger. Well, since I was the driver that night, I didn't mind Arlene suddenly wanting a drink of hard liquor. And another... For our last (again practically unnoticed) set, we sang mostly Bob Dylan songs, even ones we hardly knew. We did not attempt "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carrol." Arlene threw up in the parking lot as I loaded the speakers.

Subject: RE: Whatever Happened to William Zantzinger?
From: Fossil
Date: 01 May 02 - 06:56 AM

A seriously interesting post - no wonder I keep having to check out the Mudcat!

Thanks for the information. It seems that Bob Dylan was right on. While I'm not usually a vindictive man, I really hope the bastard Zantzinger gets his comeuppance, one day.

Subject: RE: Whatever Happened to William Zantzinger?
From: Terry K
Date: 01 May 02 - 05:21 AM

Thanks Peter. I hated this guy as soon as I heard Dylan sing about him and this is such good background material to help our understanding. There must be something similar about Reuben Carter's case?

Cheers, Terry

Subject: RE: Whatever Happened to William Zantzinger?
From: Little Hawk
Date: 30 Apr 02 - 09:33 PM

What a tale of privilege and depravity...

Money serves money. That was the truth then, and it is the truth now. No wonder Dylan sang with such outrage.

- LH

Subject: RE: Whatever Happened to William Zantzinger?
From: ddw
Date: 30 Apr 02 - 08:48 PM

Same shit, different day.

This is the kind of thing that makes me feel like 30 years of journalism has been such a terrible waste of time and effort.

david

Subject: RE: Whatever Happened to William Zantzinger?
From: Dead Horse
Date: 30 Apr 02 - 08:43 PM

Now's the time for your tears.

Subject: Whatever Happened to William Zantzinger?
From: Peter T.
Date: 30 Apr 02 - 07:14 PM

From The Telegraph, 1991. 2002?

The true story of William Zantzinger

The sorry tale of William Zantzinger and poor Hattie Carroll has been told in detail once before, not in the pages of The Telegraph, but in a piece that was specially written for the anthology, All Across The Telegraph. It was only a few months ago, however, that, 28 years after the crime that was commemorated in Bob Dylan's great song, The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll, William Zantzinger was again in trouble with the law. A profile of Zantzinger was published in the Washington Post magazine on August 4, 1991, written by Peter Carlson. What follows is a revised version of the original AATT article, with borrowings from Peter Carlson's work to bring the story up to date.

William Devereux Zantzinger, 24, killed poor Hattie Carroll at 1.40am on February 8, 1963, at the Spinsters' Ball - an annual charity event sponsored by post-debutantes - at the Emerson Hotel in Baltimore. That year's event was to benefit the Baltimore League for Crippled Children and Adults.

Zantzinger attended the function with his 24-year-old wife, the former Jane Elson Duvall. The couple had met at school - Sidwell Friends School, Washington DC - and William Zantzinger had gone on to the University of Maryland. His father, Richard C. Zantzinger, was prominent in the Washington real estate business and a Maryland socialite; he'd also served a term in the Maryland legislature and been a former member of the state Planning Commission.

The Spinsters' Ball had begun at about 10 o'clock on the Friday night and was due to run until about 2am on the Saturday. Two hundred people had invitations to attend. The Zantzingers drove there from West Hatton, the 630-acre family farm at Mount Victoria in Charles County, which produced tobacco, corn and grain. When Billy Zantzinger, a high spirited young man who loved partying and, especially, horse-riding and fox-hunting with the Wimoco Hunt Club, turned up at the Ball, he was pretty drunk. "I just flew in from Texas! Gimme a drink!" a laughing Billy shouted, by way of announcing his arrival. At well over six feet tall, in white tie and tails, a carnation in his lapel and a top hat on his head, he cut a striking figure. He carried a cheap wooden cane with which he pretended to be Fred Astaire; when he wanted a drink, he used the cane to tap smartly on the silver punch bowl; when a pretty woman whom he knew waltzed by, he'd tap her playfully, all in fun, no offence, of course.

By about 1.30am Billy had had more than enough to drink; his initial high spirits had darkened and his behaviour, particularly towards the hotel staff, began to degenerate. Ethel Hill, a 30-year-old black waitress of Belkthune Avenue, Baltimore, was clearing a table near the Zantzingers when she was approached by Zantzinger himself. He asked her something about a firemen's fund, then, as the police reported it later, she was struck across the buttocks "with a cane of the carnival prize kind". She tried to move away, but Zantzinger followed her, striking her several times across the arm, thighs and buttocks. Mrs Hill wasn't seriously hurt, but her arm hurt, and she ran, in tears, back to the kitchen. In the next few minutes, the cane would be used again, first against a bellhop, then to yank the chain around the wine waiter's neck; as Billy's wife, Jane, tried to calm him down, he collapsed on top of her in the middle of the dancefloor and began hitting her over the head with his shoe; when another guest tried to pull him off, Zantzinger thumped him. Then, apparently retrieving some of his dignity, he dusted himself down, and decided he needed a drink.

Working behind the bar was Hattie Carroll, a 51-year-old black woman who had worked at the Emerson Hotel for six years as an extra employee for special functions and "ballroom events". She was a member of the Gillis Memorial Church and was active with both the church and in local social work. The mother of 11 children, Hattie Carroll lived with two of her daughters, a 14-year-old and an 18-year-old, her other nine children all being older and married. She suffered from an enlarged heart and had a history of hypertension.

Zantzinger went up to the bar at just before a quarter to two and ordered a bourbon and ginger ale. Hattie Carroll was busy when he barked out his order. "Just a minute, sir," she said. As she did come to serve him, she fumbled with the glass, and Zantzinger shouted at her, "When I order a drink, I want it now, you black bitch!" Hattie said she was hurrying as best she could, but Zantzinger struck her across the head and shoulders with his cane. She shouted for help and slumped against the bar, looking dazed. "That man has upset me so," she told a fellow worker who came to help her. "I feel deathly ill." Her speech was slurred and she collapsed. A hotel official called for an ambulance, and for the police. When the wooden cane was found later, it was broken in three places.

The ambulance took the unconscious Hattie Carroll to the Baltimore Mercy Hospital. The police arrested Zantzinger and charged him with assault. As they escorted him out through the hotel lobby, the policemen were attacked by Zantzinger and by his wife. Patrolman Warren Todd received multiple bruises on his legs; Zantzinger received a black eye.

Zantzinger and his wife were taken to the Pine Street police station, where Jane Elson Duvall Zantzinger was charged with disorderly conduct and her husband with the same offence, plus two charges of assault "by striking with a wooden cane" Ethel Hill and Hattie Carroll. Mrs Zantzinger was released on providing a $28 collateral.

William Zantzinger was held overnight in police custody. He appeared in the Central Municipal Court the following morning, still wearing tails and a carnation, though without his white bow-tie. He pleaded not guilty to the charges. Judge Albert H. Blum had left instructions that he was to be notified if Hattie Carroll's condition worsened, but at 9.15 that same morning, while the hearing was in progress, Hattie died, never having regained consciousness. The suspected cause of death was a brain haemorrhage caused by a blow to the head. News of her death didn't reach the court, however, and in the meantime, Zantzinger had been released on $600 bail. When the police were told of Hattie Carroll's death, a warrant for his re-arrest was issued, this time on charges of homicide. When the police from Charles County went to the Mount Victoria farm, some 70 miles south of Baltimore, neither of the Zantzingers was at home. The police therefore put out an APB, and Zantzinger was soon apprehended and charged with first and second degree homicide. It was the first time in the history of the state of Maryland that a white man had been accused of murdering a black woman. Charles County in Maryland was first settled in the 1600s and the white landowners set about making fortunes for themselves by setting up huge tobacco plantations and working them with black slaves. Despite emancipation, conditions changed little over the next 350 years: "In Southern Maryland," it was written in the Maryland Writers Project guide to the state, published in 1940, "the Negro lives under much the same conditions his ancestors knew . . . " Segregation was strictly enforced well into the 1960s - indeed the schools weren't fully integrated until 1967. At the time of Hattie Carroll's murder, which Bob Dylan read about on his way home from the Martin Luther King March On Washington, feelings of righteousness and indignation were running high. On trial in Maryland was 350 years' worth of history, tradition, no matter how bloody or obscene. It was a case of white against black, rich against poor, master against servant. Zantzinger's defence requested that the trial should not take place in Baltimore, where anti-segregationists had been active for some time, but in the more "neutral" territory of Hagerstown. And so it was. Zantzinger's defence was a simple one - he was drunk at the time, so drunk that he didn't even remember hitting anyone, his wife, a policeman, let alone a black barmaid. Furthermore, the defence contended, Hattie Carroll was, after all, a large woman, an overweight woman, who had a history of high blood pressure. She could have suffered a fatal stroke at any time. The fact that she did so after being beaten about the head by William Zantzinger's cane was just one of those unfortunate coincidences. He was just a victim of circumstances.

The three judges weren't impressed. Zantzinger was guilty, they concluded, but not of first-degree, nor indeed, second-degree murder; they found him guilty of manslaughter and deferred sentence until August, when Zantzinger was sent to prison with a six-month sentence. With time off for good behaviour, he was home in time for Christmas, and though the sentence outraged the black activists in the area, and moved Bob Dylan to write his song, most of Zantzinger's friends in Charles County thought that the whole thing had been blown out of all proportion, that Billy had got a bum rap. He didn't have any difficulty at all settling back into Charles County society.

He ran the tobacco farm for awhile, then went into real estate. He moved up-county, to Waldorf, then to a two-acre property in Port Tobacco where he lives today. He had three children, divorced his first wife and married a second time. For a while he ran a nightclub in La Plata; he also opened a small weekends-only antiques shop and, as W & Z Realty of White Plains, Maryland, set himself up as a valuer and auctioneer. He was active with the Chamber of Commerce and in 1983 was elected Chairman of the board of trustees of the Realtors Political Action Committee of Maryland. Billy Zantzinger was a popular local personality - everybody liked him, liked his open sociability. When reporter Peter Carlson asked after him in Charles County, he found that Zantzinger still had a whole bunch of friends:

"He's a very likable person; Billy is Billy . . . he's a free spirit type of person," said Senator Jim Simpson, a friend for 15 years. "He'd give you the shirt off his back. He's always smiling," said Mike Sprague, who told Carlson that he thought the Hattie Carroll case had been distorted by the media, and by Bob Dylan's song: "They made it sound like he was Rhett Butler, riding around on a white horse with a whip. He was just an unfortunate victim of his times, because in the '60s, with integration going on, that played well." One other thing caused Sprague to laugh - the fact that Carlson pointed out to him that William Zantzinger's name was frequently to be found in the local newspapers, in the lists of local residents who didn't pay their property taxes. "Billy has been toasted for delinquent property taxes just about every year," Sprague told Carlson, "but there are five pages of people who do that - Billy just happens to be one of them."

However, on April 24, 1991, a front-page story in the Maryland Independent written by reporter Kristi Hempel, revealed that though Zantzinger had been regularly collecting rents on some beat-up old wooden shacks in Patuxent Woods which were homes to several negro families, he hadn't actually owned them since 1986, when the county had foreclosed on him because of his failure to pay his property taxes. Indeed, not only had Zantzinger continued to collect rents for the next five years, he'd actually raised the rents to $200 per month, despite the fact that the hovels had no running water, no toilets and no heating; Zantzinger had even, in the Spring of 1991, taken one tenant, John Savoy, a 61-year-old negro who lived on welfare, to court for non-payment of his rents. And Zantzinger had won the case, the court ordering the hapless Savoy to pay his supposed landlord $240. But Kristi Hempel's story stirred things up for Zantzinger, and re-opened a lot of old wounds.

The dreadful living conditions of the tenants in Patuxent Woods were widely held to be shameful, not only to Zantzinger, but to all of Maryland; Zantzinger was denounced as an exploitative villain, who should be called to account at the earliest possible opportunity; but there were those who knew the way things worked who predicted that Billy, who still had plenty of friends and high office relations in the politics of Maryland, was likely to go unpunished. One person, however, who was determined that Zantzinger wouldn't get away with it, was 40-year-old Connie Dunbar, who'd worked with a church-based group called SMASH, Southern Maryland Area Self-Help, set up to try to help improve housing conditions for the under-privileged. When weeks went by with no apparent action against William Zantzinger, Connie Dunbar organised a protest demonstration to demand immediate action. "If Zantzinger gets away with this," she said, "we may as well pack up and move out, because that means that everybody else will get away with it."

Some time later, when Zantzinger still hadn't been arrested despite continuing protests from Connie Dunbar and SMASH, Washington Post reporter Peter Carlson went to see Mac Middleton, president of the county commissioners. "There's this eagerness to bring this man to justice," Middleton told Carlson, "and I can understand it. To the people in the housing advocates community, the guy is like a mass murderer walking around loose . . . They see him as somebody who abused people even before he lost the units in Patuxent Woods. He created that slum situation out there and then he lost it, and he continued to profit from it. They see him as someone who has lived off poor people, particularly poor black people . . ." Is that perception accurate? Carlson asked. "I think it's accurate," Mac Middleton replied.

On June 5, 1991, Zantzinger was finally served with a summons, charging him with "deceptive trade practice" - one count of making a "false and misleading oral and written statement", a misdemeanour rap which carried a maximum penalty of a year in jail and a $1,000 fine. The trial had been set for September 20, though the case didn't actually come to court until November 18, by which time Zantzinger was facing 50 misdemeanor counts of unfair and deceptive trade practises. He pleaded guilty, and in return the prosecutors agreed to drop one misdemeanor count and two counts of felony theft. As is the custom with American courts, sentencing was deferred. Under state sentencing guidelines, Zantzinger was facing a possible jail sentence of 25 to 50 years for the offences. On January 3, 1992, William Zantzinger was sentenced to 18 months in the county jail and fined $50,000. The fine was no problem, of course, and Circuit Court Judge Steven I. Platt recommended that corrections officials allow Zantzinger to serve his sentence in a work-release programme, working outside during the day, but spending his nights in jail. Platt also sentenced Zantzinger to 2,400 hours of community service, spread over 300 days during the five years following his release (probably in nine months' time) for local groups that advocate low-cost housing.

"I never intended to hurt anyone, ever, ever," Zantzinger said, pleading for leniency; "it's not my nature."

"Mr Zantzinger, I wish you the best of luck," said the judge, as Zantzinger was led away in handcuffs.