ATHENS, Ga. — James and Jeannette Thomas and their five children were fast asleep in their two-story home in rural Walton County, Georgia, unaware of a vehicle, loaded with cans of gasoline and ill intentions[1], that eased up to the house.
The night air was cool on Oct. 11, 1976. The people in the vehicle began spreading the fuel over the family car and around the house.
A lamp near the window in the living room gave a soft glow through the curtains. One of the trespassers tossed a full 5-gallon gas can into the window around 1 a.m.
The glass shattered loudly. An explosion erupted. A monstrous fire surged through the room.
The sounds awoke 42-year-old Jeannette Thomas in the adjoining bedroom.
“I heard the crash and then I heard a whish sound and everything lit up,” she said. She awakened her husband, James Thomas, 46, a former New York bus driver.
The explosion occurred in the room where their 18-year-old daughter, Jeannette Carlotta Thomas, fell asleep watching a rerun of “The Name of the Game” on television.
Jeannette tried to open the door to the living room, but encountered a “mass of flames.”
“So much smoke. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t reach the front door, couldn’t see it,” she said. Needing air, she punched through a window. The glass cut a deep gash in her arm and her nightgown caught fire.
The frightened couple finally made it outside. Helpless, they shouted frantically for their children. The gasoline’s incendiary nature had created a death trap in the wood-frame house.
“Our son was in a room off from the garage and we were trying to get him out and when we finally got the door open, the flames were just – we couldn’t get in there,” James Thomas recalled.
As James Thomas moved through the garage, he saw a gas can on the ground.
“Someone is burning us out,” he shouted.
Jeannette recalled the alarm in her husband’s voice. “From then on, he was delirious. He didn’t know where he was. I had to take him by the hand and pull him out of there.”
Far out in the country with no close homes, James Thomas kept screaming, “Someone help us!”
“I was screaming and hollering the kids’ names,” Jeannette said.
At one point a car drove up to the house.
“Please come and help me – my children are burning up in the house,” James Thomas pleaded.
The car left, its driver presumably going to get help.
The Monroe Fire Department was alerted to the fire.
Walton County sheriff’s deputies and firefighters were soon on the scene tending to the Thomas couple and their burns. By this time, the house was destroyed.
The Thomases were transported to a hospital in nearby Athens. Fire investigators would recover the bodies of the children. The four gas cans told the story: arson.
“Five Youths Perish in Fire,” read the headline in the Athens Banner-Herald, which like USA TODAY is a part of the USA TODAY Network.
Jeannette Thomas was burned so badly that she was unable to attend the funeral service for her children. They were buried in Monroe, Georgia.
It would be six years before law enforcement would announce who they believed were responsible the fire.
The landlord, Ruth Chancey, 67; her son, Harold Chancey, 42; and Bobby Gene Goswick, 40; were all indicted for murder in 1982 by a Walton County grand jury.
Harold Chancey and Goswick went on trial in March 1983. The trial ended with a hung jury on the murder charges. They were never retried.
To this day nobody has been convicted for the murders of the Thomas children: Jeannette Carlotta, 18; Cynthia Kathleen, 15; Steven Jeffrey, 12; Karen Leslie, 9; and 5-year-old Allison Lynell.
Watch: 'I was even afraid to walk around': Thomas family recalls 1976 tragedy
Athens Banner-Herald
The Thomas family felt it was making the right decision by relocating from their inner-city home in New York City to a rural community in Georgia in June 1976.
They were looking for a safe place to raise their family and Jeannette Thomas needed a warmer climate for her health to escape the harsh New York winters.
Losing five children would forever impact the family, including the three surviving older children, James T. Thomas Jr., Helene Royster and Valerie Ann Sanders, who were still living in New York at the time. Sanders recently passed away.
“We were the type of family that did everything together. We went everywhere together. We weren’t people who had a lot of means, but we did the things we could,” Jeanette Thomas recalled during a 2019 interview with the Athens Banner-Herald in the courtroom of the historic Walton County Courthouse in downtown Monroe. She and her husband today live in Kissimmee, Fla.
It was in this same courtroom that the suspects were tried.
Without the children, life became an uncharted journey. They would eventually settle in Florida.
“There were times we would sit in a room and it was just silence. We didn’t know what to say,” said Jeannette, now 87. “Everything we did and everything we talked about encompassed our family and our children.”
“When that was gone, I’d look at him and he’d look at me and we’d say, ‘You know the sun is out today. Yes, the sun is out.’ We had to learn to live together as husband and wife. We just lost track of the two of us because we were so involved with our children,” she said.
J.T. Thomas still has flashbacks of his siblings.
“I can remember one night I came home back when we were all still living in the projects,” he said. “We had bunk beds. I was on top and my little brother was on the bottom. There he was sleeping and I just saw him as so innocent, so vulnerable. I remember I was rubbing his head and I said a prayer that I would always protect him. I would make sure I was there for him.”
The Thomas family, ardent members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, had been living in a housing project on Staten Island, one of the five boroughs of New York City. When they decided to move to a new locale, friends in Athens helped them locate a home to rent.
“We were so glad to be somewhere we thought the children would have a better influence because we lived in the housing project. The drugs were moving in, things like that. We studied the Bible with our children, trying to raise them according to the right things,” Jeanette said.
Another benefit to the location was a Jehovah’s Witnesses Kingdom Hall located nearby.
The eldest son, J.T. Thomas, remembered the family was impressed with the “big beautiful house” surrounded by cultivated fields and forest.
“For a family coming from the New York projects, moving to that place was like paradise,” he said.
The Thomas family describes the 5 children who died in the 1976 house fire
Joshua L. Jones, Athens Banner-Herald
The move to Georgia the first week of June that year wasn’t easy for the children because they were leaving their friends and familiar surroundings, Jeannette said.
Their daughter, Jeanette Carlotta, who was 18, had an outgoing personality, but due to her dyslexia, she had difficulties in school. In Georgia, she revealed to her parents that she had secretly become engaged to a young man in New York. They expected that she would return there at some point.
The teenager enjoyed preparing meals in the kitchen with her mother.
“If she had been here long enough, she probably would have been a hairdresser because she liked that,” the mother said.
Jeanette Carlotta was found in the room where the fire began. She might have taken a few steps toward the door before being overwhelmed by the fire and smoke.
Cynthia at 15 wasn’t an outgoing youngster, as her personality was more introverted.
“She was beautiful. She had long hair down in the middle of her back,” her mother said, adding that she was an affectionate child who loved her siblings. Cynthia’s body was found embracing her younger sisters, where they apparently sought refuge.
Steven was a typical playful, young boy, who could make one laugh.
“He looked out for his sisters, even though he was younger,” his mother recalled. Steven also loved his collection of Hot Wheel cars. Steven was found in the ground-floor bedroom, where he crawled under his bed to escape the encroaching fire and smoke.
Karen, who was 9, was the outspoken little one among the children. With an extroverted personality and a talkative spirit, she would sometimes mention how some of the Southern children would pronounce their words. Jeanette said she believed her daughter would have been a “strong-willed adult.”
She was found with her sisters as they clung together in fear of the fire.
Allison was the youngest at 5. She wasn’t yet in school and was a daddy’s girl.
“The thing that used to hurt me the most was when her father was out working and she’d see him coming in the driveway. She’d say, ‘There’s my daddy. There comes my daddy,’” her mother said. The little girl would run to her father’s open arms.
“That’s something I think about a lot,” Jeannette Thomas said. Allison’s body was also found bonded with her older siblings in the bedroom.
Her husband, she said, “wanted me home to take care of the children and he worked. He did whatever he had to do to take care of his family ... That’s the kind of family we were and that’s what he wanted.”
J.T. Thomas also remembered how his father, who never finished high school, would have family Bible study each week. And even though they lived in the projects, their father would take his family on vacations, such as to Niagara Falls.
“I don’t know how the man did it. I didn’t appreciate it then,” the son said.
The Thomas family was centered on the close relationship of a large family. Then five were gone.
“We never prepared ourselves to get along without them. That was the hard part,” Jeannette said.
In the years to follow, J.T. Thomas made the difficult decision to read results of the death investigation, which detailed the locations of the children’s bodies among the burned rubble.
“That’s how they found them,” Thomas said. “I didn’t tell my folks that for years. I let that stay until I felt like they could handle it.”
Jeanette Thomas was hospitalized due to her serious burns after the fire.
“I was in there for eight days. I never went to the funeral,” she recalled.
The funeral service, held at the nearby Jehovah’s Witnesses Kingdom Hall, was covered by the press and TV news media. Through an outpouring of grief and concern by the public, the funeral expenses were paid through donations to the family.
“We had no money and everything was being paid by contributors. We were getting contributions. I must say not from Jehovah’s Witnesses only, but people of all backgrounds and all over the world,” J.T. Thomas said.
The Thomas family recounts the funeral service for their 5 children
Athens Banner-Herald
The children were buried in four caskets. Five-year-old Allison was placed in a casket with her brother.
As the hearse departed the church for the cemetery in Monroe, a young J.T. noticed how people stopped their vehicles and stood outside in silence along the roadways. Men would take their hats off in a show of respect.
Helene Royster said that during the next week there was a memorial service for the children near their former home on Staten Island.
The deaths made news around the world.
“I have a box at home with letters from New Zealand, Iceland, from every country in Europe and from Tahiti,” Jeannette Thomas said. “We were surrounded by encouragement and that’s what, to me, got us through it. That kept us going because they cared.”
Not everyone was so compassionate.
Ruth Chancey and her son would eventually receive insurance money for the loss of the house, but she wanted more.
“She even had a lawyer get in touch with us a month after the fire – for the rent,” Jeannette Thomas said. “She was going to sue us for the rent.”
When the family first moved to the farmhouse, they felt a warm reception from the community.
“We spoke to everybody. We were friendly people. We came into town and the townspeople spoke to us,” she said. “We didn’t get into any confrontations with anybody.”
When Ruth Chancey first met the family, she was apparently surprised they were Black.
“She looked so stunned and we saw that,” Jeannette said. The negotiations for renting the house had been done over the phone.
Ruth Chancey would make trips to the house to collect the rent.
“She said, ’You keep the house so clean and so nice.’ It was like a surprise to her. Here we were with Black children and the two of us. And the place was spotless. Well, that’s the way we lived,” Jeanette said.
Harold Chancey would occasionally visit the farm to work the land.
“Harold wouldn’t even say good morning – good afternoon, nothing. He would come with the equipment, cut the grass and everything around the house and then would be gone,” she said.
In the days and weeks after the fire, the couple found themselves submerged in an emotional darkness created by a danger they couldn’t understand.
“When you have that kind of loss you start to think is someone is out to get the whole family,” Jeannette said. “I couldn’t sleep at night. I was even afraid to walk around because I said we were the only two still alive and we didn’t know why.”
The couple remained in the area and James Thomas obtained a job in Athens with the city’s bus service.
The deaths of the 5 Thomas children shouldn't be 'swept under the carpet and forgotten about'
Joshua L. Jones, Athens Banner-Herald
“After the fire the GBI agent — he was wonderful — his name was Moses Ector. He really spent a lot of time with us. We were investigated by the GBI, the FBI, the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms – all of that because we had come from New York and they wanted to make sure that it wasn’t something we had been involved in when we lived in New York,” Jeannette recalled.
Ector told the couple their backgrounds had been investigated from Georgia to New York as they tried to unravel the mystery of who would burn a house where a family of seven lived.
“He said, ‘I’ll be honest with you. We have never seen two people that have such a clean background as you have,” Jeannette said.
Ector “used to come very often and sit down with us and let us know how the investigation was going. He did say, ‘We know that Harold Chancey had something to do with this, but we don’t have enough evidence to bring him to trial.”
The Chanceys were eventually brought to trial, but never exonerated by a jury of peers and never convicted.
Today, most people have forgotten about that deadly night.
“I just don’t feel it’s something that should be swept under the carpet and forgotten about,” Jeannette Thomas said.
Follow Wayne Ford on Twitter: @TheWayneFord[2].
References
- ^ cans of gasoline and ill intentions (bit.ly)
- ^ TheWayneFord (twitter.com)
from GANNETT Syndication Service https://ift.tt/3mQYP6v
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