History of Hagerstown

An autopsy by Charles Petty, Medical Examiner, said that Carroll died of a cerebral hemorrhage.  Because she had hardening of the arteries and high blood pressure, the judges reasoned that her death was caused by stress (from the attack) aggravating poor health. The charge was lessened to manslaughter and assault.

Zantzinger’s trial was moved to Hagerstown where he was tried by three judges instead of by jury.  He was found guilty of manslaughter and assault and sentenced to six months’ jail time on August 28, 1963.  This was the same day as the peaceful March on Washington and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech.  The judges also allowed several weeks’ delay before he was to serve his prison term so he could bring in his tobacco crop.  

Zantzinger's fines amounted to $625: $125 for assaulting hotel employees, and $500 for the death of Hattie Carroll.

The judges reasoned that Zantzinger would be safer in the smaller Washington County jail than in a larger state jail, where he might be harmed by angry African-American prisoners.  A jail sentence of over a year would need to be served in the state prison; shorter sentences could be served in a county jail.  Zantzinger served his sentence in the Washington County Jail in Hagerstown.

The episode is memorialized in Bob Dylan’s song, “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”. 

After serving his sentence, Zantzinger returned home to his first wife (Jane Duvall) and his three children. They eventually divorced; he remarried. He ran afoul of the law again in 1991. He had owned several "rural shacks" but lost