The Escape
On a cold December night in 1949, Bill Allman was killed. This series follows the ripple effects — from courtroom to clemency, from grief to guitars — and the music that rose from it all... music that outlasted everyone who played it. Read the full series introduction here.
The legal system had denied Buddy Green everything: a new trial, a new appeal, a new chance to convince a judge that he was too broken in the head to fry.
All Buddy could do now was sit in Sheriff Malbon’s Princess Anne County jail and think about going to the state penitentiary in Richmond. He also must have thought about his upcoming death.
The Commonwealth machinery ran slowly, giving November 20, 1951, plenty of time to circle Buddy’s mind like a vulture. As the days crept, each footstep in the hallway echoed louder than the last, each meal tray sliding through the metal bars with the finality of a coffin lid.
Buddy must have thought about the electric chair at the State Penitentiary — the wooden seat, the leather straps, the black hood pulled over his eyes. Some nights he was sure to lay awake wondering whether he’d feel the surge when it came, or whether his heart would leap out of his chest before the switch was thrown.
Buddy was cornered, plain and simple, now 28 years old. A few months earlier he probably thought he would beat the charge or get life. But the finality was settling in with each hour; Buddy wasn’t just waiting for prison, he was waiting for death… and the pressure was building.
Sheriff Malbon believed the iron bars of his Princess Anne County jail could hold Buddy. The bars would hold. So would the locks. But a man? A man could be tricked. Or dropped to the floor. And Buddy was desperate: lying awake in that cell, mind circling the wood chair, dreaming and dreading the crackle of the switch waiting for him in Richmond.
Every night, he might have studied the men who passed his cell, hunting for a weak spot in Malbon’s fortress — the soft spot he could slip through when the time came.
Then, at 10:30pm on October 12 — just a month before the state planned to wire him to the chair — Buddy watched as 70-year-old dispatcher Moscoe Taylor opened the cell door to bring in a new prisoner.
When Moscoe was close enough Buddy threw a blanket over his head and swung a lead pipe.
One swing, one sharp crack to the skull, and Moscoe hit the concrete like a dropped sack of meal.
Granby Street in Norfolk, Virginia, circa 1950s. Neon tavern signs glowing, sailors on shore leave, and night thick with possibility. On October 12, 1951, Buddy Green attacked his jailer and escaped into a night like this one, with Princess Anne County on edge and the hounds closing in.
In the dark tangle of footsteps and panicked shouts, Buddy zipped through the narrow corridor, down the stairs, and out the side door, Fred Palmer right behind him; one man bound for quick surrender, the other for the swamp.
Two men slipped through the same weak spot that night, but they didn’t share the same fight inside. Buddy Green had nothing left to lose except the date circled on his death warrant.
Fred Palmer was different. Only nineteen years old, he’d been sentenced to two years for grand larceny — time he’d likely survive and come out clean enough to start again. Maybe Buddy talked Fred into escaping, spinning the promise of freedom. Or maybe Fred stepped through that gap on his own, not fully grasping what it meant to run when you didn’t have to.
A kid like Fred probably felt the thrill for half an hour — the fresh air on his skin, the idea of disappearing down a country road. But he had no real plan. Unlike Buddy, Fred didn’t have a death sentence licking at his heels. So 30 minutes later, Fred walked back into jail, hands up, his future still salvageable.
Moscoe Taylor, on the floor under a blanket, had been born in Winton, North Carolina, in 1882 — the same year his mother died giving him life. He’d fought for his country twice, came home, traded his rifle for carpenter’s tools and then for a ring of jail keys. For fifteen years he had kept the Princess Anne County jail locked tight.
Back when Moscoe Taylor first picked up a rifle as a teenager, the world still fought on horseback. The Spanish-American War was dirty and short — boots in Cuban mud, mules pulling field guns through cane fields, bolt-action rifles that jammed when you needed them most. Men died more from mosquitoes than bullets. A boy from Hertford County, NC, could swing a rifle and come home with his boots rotted out but his head still high.
By the time Moscoe went overseas again, the world had changed. World War I was mechanized slaughter. The trenches chewed up entire generations in France, and the horses that pulled the artillery carts had to dodge machine-gun fire and mustard gas. Moscoe might have carried the same kind of rifle, but the sky above him now hummed with biplanes, and the earth shook with shells that could kill a thousand men in an hour.
Between his first war and the second, Moscoe lived through the shift:
• From cavalry charges to tanks crawling like metal monsters
• From rifles that shot a few rounds a minute to machine guns
• From telegrams to radio signals crackling across oceans
• From the Spanish-American cry for empire to world order built on death trenches
And when the next war came — the Big One, the war to end all wars — Moscoe didn’t carry a rifle, but he watched Norfolk’s shipyards overflow with men half his age, loading bombers and carriers bound for Europe and the Pacific. He watched the city’s streets fill with uniforms. He listened to the air raid drills. He saw the world’s boys fight their next war in planes that could drop fire from a mile high.
But all that survival, all those changes — horses to trenches to atom bombs — couldn’t save 70-year-old Moscoe from the simplest weapon of all: a desperate young man. One swing of a pipe and Moscoe Taylor’s lifetime of service collapsed on the floor of a county jail.
It was the same old heartbreak that followed Bill Allman all the way from Normandy’s beaches to a cold Norfolk dirt road. Bill survived D-Day — survived the shells, the snipers, the sea. But he didn’t survive Buddy Green.
Soldiers like Moscoe and Bill carried the weight of the world as it changed faster than any horse could gallop — and the new world found ways to break them anyway.
Luckily, Buddy didn’t kill Moscoe. One swing should have done it, but the old man’s stubborn heart kept beating. He’d live another eight years, to be buried alongside his second wife Hettie at Oak Grove Baptist Church Cemetery in Norfolk.
But that night, an aged veteran lay knocked cold for doing what he’d always done: trying to keep his world safe while seeing that justice was done.
If Princess Anne County slept at all that night, it was the shallow, restless sleep of a place waiting for the hounds to sound. Buddy Green was loose in the dark, the bars and locks behind him, the November air sharp in his lungs.
Sheriff Malbon’s men would be stringing out across the marsh roads with flashlights, shotguns, and bloodhounds — because a man condemned to die had just turned the whole county into a manhunt.
The storm Buddy had started on a dirt road two years earlier wasn’t over. It was gathering speed, and by morning, Princess Anne County would be fully awake.
About the Author
Cindi Brown is a Georgia-born writer, porch-sitter, and teller of truths — even the ones her mama once pinched her for saying out loud. She runs Porchlight Press from her 1895 house with creaking floorboards and an open door for stories with soul. When she’s not scribbling about Southern music, small towns, stray cats, places she loves, and the wild gospel that hums in red clay soil, you’ll find her out listening for the next thing worth saying.
