Editor’s note: There are numerous unsolved murders on the books in southcentral Kentucky. For the next three Sundays, we will profile three such cases as a special offering of our Histories & Mysteries series titled “Unsolved.”

The attack was especially brutal. Lissie Goad undoubtedly recoiled when she saw the body of her friend, W.D. Hale, commonly known as “Dad” (for unknown reasons).

Goad, a 51-year-old widow, had visited with Hale, 65, at her Portage Road home that Saturday afternoon, April 25, 1936. He left around 3 p.m. with the promise that he would return that night “while the children went to the show” — perhaps they were headed to the Capitol to see “The Garden Murder Case” — a movie touted as “Mystery flavored with romance … a laugh follows every thrill!” in a Daily News ad.

Hale never showed up. It was his custom to also visit the Goad home on Sundays. When he also failed to appear that day, Goad became concerned.

She headed to the apartment building where Hale lived — a building known locally, for unclear reasons, as the “House of David.”

It’s likely that Goad had some trepidation as she headed to Hale’s apartment. After all, it was located in perhaps the most notorious neighborhood to ever exist in southcentral Kentucky — Burke’s Alley.

• • • 

As Bowling Green grew in population and prosperity in the 1800s and early 1900s, stately homes were built around the perimeter of the downtown area marked by Fountain Square Park.

And as in many cities, lower-income residents had few options but to settle in cheap, crowded housing. In Bowling Green, that area, just a few blocks from Fountain Square Park, was know as Burke’s Alley, sometimes spelled Burk’s Alley.

It would be logical to assume the area may have been named after John Burke, an Irishman who came to America around 1856. He settled in Louisville before moving to Bowling Green in 1866, where he built the Nashville Hotel. He became a well-known local figure and served several terms on the city council.

But, curiously, several other U.S. cities had areas populated mostly by African Americans that were also called Burke’s Alley. This included Nashville, where Burke’s Alley was second only to Shanklin Alley as a notoriously downtrodden area. The origin of the name remains a mystery. 

Bowling Green’s Burke’s Alley, between Adams and Kentucky streets, was entered at what was then numbered 108 Main Street through “The Hole in the Wall” — a narrow, dark path between two large brick buildings filled with cheap apartments.

The Hole in the Wall opened eastward to a row of small, single story brick houses on either side of a trash-strewn lot. In the center was a small building that served as the communal bathroom for all the homes.

Across Eighth Street, Burke’s Alley was a cinder-paved path lined mostly by crumbling shacks. The Alley crossed Sixth Street before it ended at the L&N Depot. 

The Alley was occupied by both white and Black residents, and was notorious for decades as a crime-ridden eyesore.

As early as 1905, a Daily News article reported that “Blood flowed again in Burk’s alley” after a fight between two women. “Both are said to have been drunk, which is the normal condition of the denizens of the alley, and a fight resulted in which Gertie Ray was wickedly and seriously carved by (Agnes) Ruder.”

For the next several decades, there were almost daily reports of criminal activity in Burke’s Alley, from robberies to moonshining and numerous murders. Several involved spouses shooting each other after arguments.

The area’s residents were also linked regularly to crimes in other parts of the city. There was an undeniable stigma regarding those who lived in Burke’s Alley, even if the majority of residents were law-abiding individuals who couldn’t afford to live anywhere else.

Prohibition had started nationally in 1920, setting up a massive business in illegal alcohol manufacturing and sales.

Home-based gaming and drinking establishments were prevalent in the Alley. Police regularly raided the homes there, arresting residents by the dozens on gaming, alcohol and other charges.

In the 1920s, a one-armed “preacher” named Sam Edwards was arrested regularly for running a “liquor dive” in the Alley.

“Since Edwards’ arrest, The News has learned that (Edwards) while in the (police) station house, had his wife bring him his Bible,” the Daily News reported. “He appears to be very religious, but this hardly jingles with the business he is in.” 

Police in 1925 were reporting that a new type of alcohol was being produced in the Alley, called “Canned Heat” after its main ingredient, Sterno, a jellied alcohol product most commonly used to heat chafing dishes.

Canned Heat was more intoxicating than regular home brew — and more dangerous, with at least one Burke’s Alley resident dying after consuming the concoction.

Edwards was reportedly one of the chief brewers of Canned Heat — The Daily News reported after one of his arrests that “he had enough of the stuff on hand to make every man, woman and child in Bowling Green drunk. It takes a very small amount to ‘make the drank come,’ and a four-ounce bottle will knock several people completely out.”

Later, wood alcohol and even paint thinner, sometimes strained through a loaf of white bread, were sold as cheap intoxicants; the dangerous concoctions were know as “Burk’s Alley vodka.”

The Black parts of Burke’s Alley had the added burden of the racism of the time. 

A 1926 Daily News editorial reported on a large public dance in the Alley that resulted in the death of the man who allegedly had been given a cup of Canned Heat to drink.

“These public dances among the lower element of the negroes are a disgrace to the town and furnish the opportunity for all sorts of disorder and brawls and killings and they should not be permitted,” according to the editorial.

But the newspaper police reports from the time were among the only things fully desegregated, reporting on countless arrests of both Black and white Burke’s Alley residents.

There were also sporadic efforts to help the people of Burke’s Alley.

In a December 1929 letter to the Daily News, Mrs. H.M. Wolfe described hosting a community Christmas meal and toy distribution for Burke’s Alley children, some whom she found eating cold beans for breakfast that morning.

The result of the free meal and toys was “that look of gratitude that you could not forget.”

She ended the letter with a poem:

“Down in Burk’s Alley there is Misery and crime.

Down in Burk’s Alley there is Squalor and crime.

Yet in the Alley there are girls and boys, who at Christmas time had no toys.

Still like others their hearts did yearn, for the Christmas cheer of which they learned.”

There was even more focus on Burke’s Alley after Hale’s murder.

• • •

When Goad got to Hale’s apartment, she found the key to the front door in the lock and the door unlatched. She entered and saw nothing amiss initially, but then she noticed a shape on the floor at the rear of the small, dark apartment. It was Hale, whose lifeless body was covered partially with a coat. There was a burlap bag under his head like a makeshift pillow. A pool of dried blood surrounded Hale’s head.

When police and coroner Joe W. Lowe examined Hale’s body, they found that his neck had been broken and his left eye nearly knocked out of its socket, among other signs of a terrific beating.

There already were signs of decomposition of the body, leading Lowe to believe Hale had been killed sometime Saturday. Lowe wrote in Hale’s death certificate that his demise was “at the hands of unknown parties.”

Robbery seemed to be the most obvious motive. Hale had a job in the city through a Federal New Deal Great Depression relief program, and Goad reported that when she last saw him, he had about $22 in cash.

Hale’s body was taken to Burgess Funeral Home for closer examination. Police then found $2.56 in his pockets; the leftover cash and the brutality of the attack made it seem less likely that a simple robbery had taken place.

The apartment was also more closely examined and neighbors interviewed.

While Hale had been bleeding profusely from his wounds, there was little evidence of blood in the apartment except what was around his body, leaving police to speculate that Hale had been attacked elsewhere and then taken to his apartment. It may not have been the attacker who took Hale home and placed the burlap under his head and covered him with a coat. 

If it was a neighbor who brought Hale home, no one would admit it. All police could get from Hale’s Burke’s Alley neighbors was that he was last seen in the area around 4 p.m. Saturday.

Hale was buried that Monday at the Friendship Church Cemetery in Allen County. He was survived by one adult daughter, listed as Mrs. A.R. Meadows.

The only lead that police developed was that a young man, a resident of Burke’s Alley, had left for Nashville right after the killing.

He was found in Nashville and returned here for questioning, but was never charged.

Police returned to Burke’s Alley and again questioned anyone who would talk, but made no headway. Even with the investigation just days old, police reported it was, like so many Burke’s Alley murders, unlikely to be solved.

One potential clue to a possible motive, if not killer, was that Hale was among a group of local men arrested for gambling in 1926. Many had been killed over the years in Burke’s Alley for much less than a gambling debt. 

Hale’s killer wound up taking his, or her, secret to their grave.

While Burke’s Alley had long been considered a scourge on Bowling Green, 1936 saw new calls for reform.

A local grand jury issued a report that spring calling for local officials to address the “Burke’s Alley situation,” which it characterized as “general disorder.”

It also cited unsanitary living conditions, and an environment, The Daily News wrote, that “automatically dooms most of the children in the area to lives of crime and moral indolence.”

In May, the paper published a column by Lydia Beck Smith titled “Our Brother’s Keeper — Home visiting in Burke’s Alley.”

Smith described visiting several homes during the day and finding the yards littered with empty liquor bottles and other trash and occupied by mostly unkempt children, Black and white. Their parents were usually working at “the sewing factory” or hauling junk, in jail or simply missing.

One child told Smith about recently moving because her family’s previous apartment was near where “poor Mr. Hale was murdered last week.”

Smith described the homes as having walls “no better than the average stable, the roof not nearly so good” and the area as being populated by “bootleggers, street walkers, thieves, degenerates … “

• • • 

There was no sudden end to Burke’s Alley. At different times in more recent decades, the buildings there were demolished and never rebuilt. Realignment of city streets, especially Sixth, also took away parts of Burke’s Alley.

Today, the only vestiges of the alley are crumbling blacktop in otherwise empty lots across from Bowling Green Ballpark and next to the L&N Depot.

Smith, in her recounting of the visit to Burke’s Alley, ended it this way:

“Place of ill-repute, Bowling Green’s most known eye-sore, its children attend the city schools with our children; its men and women vote in our elections. And who knows but that some day the fates of our own children may lie in a pair of hands now small and grimy in Burke’s Alley.”

Next Sunday: Cash-lined pockets made wealthy farmer a target