They drained the lake in a Staunton city park on Dec. 31, 1951, and authorities spent the first hours of 1952 using rakes and shovels to poke around the muddy bottom. They were searching Fairground Lake for the .38-caliber handgun used in the execution of local businessman Elmer Higgins, but it turned out to be a goose chase triggered by a false confession.
Higgins, 47, was a restaurant owner in Staunton, a picturesque small city of about 20,000 residents located 100 miles west of Richmond. He also was known to be a gambler, taking bets on horse races and hosting after-hours card games. On the afternoon of Aug. 2, 1951, Elmer Higgins was shot once in the head as he napped in a chair in the apartment above his Victory Restaurant in downtown Staunton. He died three days later.
The tight-knit community was shocked. Everybody in Staunton knew Elmer Higgins: for years, his restaurants sponsored the local minor league baseball team. He routinely gave policemen half-price discounts on meals. There were whispers some city cops accepted a free turkey at Thanksgiving or a bottle of whiskey at Christmas in exchange for allowing Higgins' gambling enterprise to flourish.
Initial reporting indicates Higgins was discovered sprawled in an easy chair facing an open window, his face covered in blood. He was shot once behind the right ear, and the .38-caliber bullet exited his forehead and embedded itself in a wall near the window. A friend who discovered the crime scene reported seeing pocket change and a key ring on the floor. There were no witnesses. No signs of a struggle. No one heard the shot, and no weapon was found at the scene.
A reporter's drawing of the layout of the apartment above Victory Restaurant in downtown Staunton, where local gambling kingpin Elmer Higgins was shot to death in August 1951. Higgins was discovered mortally injured from a shot to the head in a chair (labeled #1 here) and the murder remains unsolved to this day. [SOURCE: Staunton News Leader, Sept. 14, 1951, p12]
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“Since Mr. Higgins reputedly was in the habit of carrying large sums of money on his person and a policeman said ‘all he had on him was a dime,’ the robbery motive appeared as a possibility in connection with the shooting,” reported the Staunton News Leader. The police chief said he “could not tell whether the shooting was an out-of-town job.”
By the investigation’s second day, the police chief reported nearly 50 people had been interviewed. The flattened bullet pried from the wall was sent to the FBI lab for analysis. Police disclosed Higgins’ apartment held some evidence of his role as a gambler and a bookie: a wall-mounted cabinet concealed two unlisted telephones and a powerful radio receiver.
"I know he was a bookie because I helped him myself," a son-in-law would tell the local newspaper nearly 50 years later. "I wasn't involved in the gambling business, but he would listen to a radio that he had in his office to get the racing results out of Silver Spring, Maryland. He liked to gamble. Played a lot of poker and dice."
“Everyone classed Higgins as a gambler, but we were unable to get anything on him no matter how hard we tried," the police chief said two weeks after the murder. "We were never able to catch him in the act." Pressure from the press soon mounted over what appeared to be a stalled investigation: a newspaper editorial characterized Staunton's local gambling scene as a "festering sore that will become steadily worse," and suggested local police were not up to the job of stamping it out.
The police chief soon would be relieved of his duties and transferred to the city’s Department of Parks and Plumbing Inspection after it was revealed Higgins financed the chief's 1951 road trip to D.C. for opening day of the Washington Senators baseball season. And a police sergeant would be fired after it was revealed Higgins had co-signed three bank loans for the man.
At the end of the year, an obviously inebriated city worker showed up at police headquarters and confessed to shooting Higgins, claiming it was triggered by unpaid gambling debts. That was the false confession that prompted the fruitless New Years’ Day search for a gun at the bottom of Fairground Lake. The confession ultimately was rejected and the suspect was hospitalized after authorities determined he was a chronic drunk and a pathological liar.
To this day, the 1951 gangland-style murder of Elmer Higgins of Staunton remains unsolved.
*****
Throughout the 1940s and ‘50s, the port city of Norfolk, located 100 miles east of Richmond, was widely known as a rowdy and risqué military town. In fact, in 1948 the American Social Hygiene Association (ASHA) tagged Norfolk for having the highest venereal disease rate in the country. ASHA was created to try to stem alarming VD outbreaks that sidelined sailors and soldiers during the war, and ASHA reported that Norfolk had “flourishing red light conditions” and “widespread vice” fueled by organized prostitution rings working near the naval base.
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In 1948, the American Social Hygiene Association (ASHA) tagged Norfolk for having the nation’s highest venereal disease rate. ASHA reported that Norfolk had “flourishing red light conditions” and “widespread vice” near its military bases, fueled by organized prostitution rings that preyed upon Navy sailors. ASHA's 1949 report, seen here, indicated significant local progress. [CREDIT: Social Hygiene News, Jan. 1949. American Social Health Association records held by University of Minnesota Library]
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A city the size of Norfolk (1950 pop. 213,000) was host to a lot of illegal gambling, too. As early as 1930, the city’s Black newspaper, The New Journal & Guide, reported that the daily numbers game had “a sinister hold upon the masses in this city.” The Journal & Guide estimated up to 3,000 Norfolk residents worked as numbers writers: “These include women and men, girls and boys, husbands and housewives… Many of the colored writers have downtown white customers who place bets with them daily.”
Throughout much of the 1940s, Norfolk’s undisputed numbers kingpin was Carvel Benson. He was repeatedly arrested on minor gambling charges, and persistent rumors of his alleged collusion with corrupt cops climaxed with a December 1948 raid at his headquarters. There, police discovered a sheet of paper listing the names of “scores of Norfolk police officers,” and one patrolman told a grand jury he accepted $2,000 a month in protection money from Benson and distributed it among the other police officers named on the list. As a result, more than 20 Norfolk policemen were immediately suspended and later indicted.
The New Journal & Guide reported that “concern bordering on consternation” swept the Black community -- not concern that more arrests might be forthcoming, but consternation that Benson's prosecution might limit the easy availability of the popular numbers game.
“Some reliable guesses by those familiar with the operations of the racket place the number of persons employed, or in some manner earning a living by it in Norfolk, at not less than 5,000,” the newspaper reported. “Strangely enough, the lottery has become so embedded into the life of the city that it seems to have taken on a degree of respectability even among people known to be of good moral character.”
Benson ultimately would be tried on the police bribery charges four separate times: the first trial resulted in acquittal, and a jury deadlocked in the second. A guilty verdict in the third trial was later reversed by the Virginia Supreme Court, and Benson’s fourth and final trial resulted in acquittal. Shortly afterwards, a police appeals board needed only 30 minutes to reinstate all 22 Norfolk policemen suspended as part of the Benson bribery probe.
However, Carvel Benson’s colorful story doesn’t end there. One year later, in August of 1951, Benson’s home and a nightclub he co-owned in the city were damaged by explosions which occurred within minutes of each other. “Benson, a key figure in a police drive against the numbers racket last year, told a reporter he did not believe the explosion at his home represented an attempt on his life. He and his wife and their son were asleep when the blast occurred at 4:45 AM. … At Benson’s home, a window was smashed and two small shrubs were torn up. At the Rosemont Club, a three-by-five-foot wide hole was torn in one wall,” according to the local paper. Benson shooed-away news photographers, angrily muttering something about “everybody is getting too much publicity.”
A second bombing rocked Benson’s home one week later, smashing 11 windows but causing no injuries. He told Norfolk’s afternoon newspaper he suspected “out-of-town hoods have been imported to Norfolk to erase” him, but he didn’t elaborate further.
It is not clear if the bombings finally prompted Benson to quit the numbers business, but there are no additional published reports of his illegal gambling activities. A 2020 Freedom of Information Act request to the FBI revealed Benson's name had surfaced in at least some of their archived investigative and surveillance files, but by 2021 the FBI said the files no longer existed.
Carvel Benson died of a heart attack in 1956 at the age of 44.
*****
There are no known connections between the Staunton murder of gambler Elmer Higgins and the Norfolk bombings targeting numbers kingpin Carvel Benson in 1951, but their stories perhaps help to illustrate the absence of mayhem or bloodshed during Harry Donovan’s 25-year reign as the undisputed numbers kingpin in Virginia’s capital city.
“Really, Donovan’s only crimes involved the gambling laws. He was not dumping bodies in the James River or anything like that,” longtime Richmond newspaperman Ed Grimsley told me during a June 2019 interview. "The thing that made Richmond different is the people around the numbers operations tended to be non-violent,” Grimsley said.
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