The Mystery of Beautiful Nell Cropsey

by Bland Simpson

  Fanny Mitchell and Alex Brown swore they saw me talking with two men near the corner of South Road Street and Shepard Street just before midnight the night Nellie disappeared. They said they’d seen me talking there in the cold, bright night and that I’d split off from the two men and walked back down Shepard Street to my house.

  Hell, I told em I’d left Nell on the porch when I headed for town to meet some men. I told that part, didn’t I?

  Lawyer Aydlett told the court I had no idea where Nell was and that me and my daddy would do anything we could to help out but the Cropseys never asked for any help from us, no sir.

  They let me go on a thousand dollar bail and a promise that I’d report to Mayor Wilson’s office every day at noon so the town could keep tabs on me. That hearing went on five hours and I was tireder when I left than if I’d of been toting timbers round Hayman’s shipyard. Some New York newsman caught me on Main Street outside and asked me what I really thought became of Nell.

  Want to know what I really thought?

  —I don’t think what happened between us would of made Nell kill herself, I told him. Not at first, but I been thinking that suicide by freezing might be her fate since she’d made remarks in that direction.

  —By freezing? he asked like I was crazy. He said his paper sent him south on account of the Cropseys being a big deal family back in New York.

  I told him once a suicide discussion had come up by my telling a story about how I nearly met with a buggy accident and how I’d said I wouldn’t of cared if I’d been ground to pieces between the wheel and the vehicle it was so cold and freezing hard and there was ice on the ponds the next morning.

  When I got back to Hayman’s shipyard, Mr. Hayman come up to me and said he wished to the Lord they could find Miss Nell.

  —I wish to the Lord they could too, Mister Hayman, I said. I’d go help look for her, but what if I found her? They’d say right away I was the one killed her and knowed where her body was all along.

  —What makes you so sure she’s dead, Jim? he said.

  Next morning when I was coming in to work, Mr. Hayman met me and fired me. He told me I was discharged from my job till I could establish my innocence in the matter. Now how was I supposed to do that?

  I was walking back to town on the Camden causeway one day while she was missing, and M. G. Morrissette gave me a ride in his wagon. After a ways I saw he kept looking at me and I realized he’d seen my pistol with the taped handle that I had stuck in my waist.

  —What’re you doing with that, Jim?

  —None of your business, and if you ever tell anyone you saw it I’ll blow your goddamn brains out.

  I was glad for the ride but that needling made me mad. Way things were going for me, I had to protect myself, and I didn’t want word getting around and folks jumping to wrong conclusions like so many already had.

  I tried to keep in good spirits and sorta hung around town and checked in to the mayor’s, but people were down on me, avoiding me and all like that. I asked my daddy what I oughta do, and he got me a permit to go down Newbegun way to do some hunting and stay clear of this mess for a while.

  The whole town had it in for me from the beginning, and I knew it.

  THE CLAIRVOYANT

  —Wilcox killed Ella Cropsey. He had an accomplice. The girl was chloroformed, wrapped in a big blanket, placed in a Dayton wagon, and driven back into the country where she was killed and thrown into a deep well by an old house, said the clairvoyant.

  She was Madam Snell Newman, the famous spiritualist from Norfolk, and she told the papers what she thought had occurred.

  Harry Greenleaf and his Committee of Five read the story and brought her down from Norfolk to see what she might be able to divine about the case right there on the spot.

  Was she a gypsy? People in town talked about the strange old world-ramblers with odd accents and exotic women and children with dark eyes and dark hair and dark skin, and their wagons with pots rattling off the sides. They read palms and tea leaves and knew the stars in the sky. They stole children. There was an old warning to children: Get up on the porch or crawl under it, there’s gypsies coming.

  It was the sixth of December, time of the new moon of the Cold Moon of 1901, and a hard cold had set upon northeastern North Carolina. The Committee brought Madam Snell Newman to the Cropsey house itself.

  They led her into the dining room where Nell had last been seen, and there she startled her audience. She looked about the room, took a seat in the rocker beside the stove and rested her chin in both her hands.

  —This is how and where Wilcox sat before he left the room with Ella Cropsey, who was sitting here beside him, she said.

  Ollie Cropsey, who had been there, nodded it was so. Strong men felt ill at ease and in touch somehow with the supernatural. It was weird and marvelous and uncanny.

  —Then Ella got up and sat near the stove, Madam Newman said.

  Again Ollie nodded. God, she was acting out those last moments, before Nell went outside with Wilcox, before—

  Madam Newman went to the hall—dining room door and put a hand to the knob, checked her watch, and then placed a hand on Ollie Cropsey’s shoulder, as if she were Nell.

  —Don’t go away to New York, Madam Newman said to Ollie. Come out on the porch and we’ll talk it over.

  Hadn’t it been thataway that night, over two weeks ago? Hadn’t it? His checking his watch and calling her out like that? And poor Ollie, that gypsy making her play her sister and acting it out like that. How can that woman know all this?

  Madam Newman left the room with Ollie and talked with her on the front porch for a while. Then she walked down to the front gate alone. She seemed in a trance and none dared follow her off the porch. Directly she turned and spoke to them.

  —I heard a long, low whistle, through clairvoyance of course, and then I saw the Dayton wagon standing near the gate and beside it a man, closely muffled. He was of spare build and his features were not distinct. He and Wilcox seized Miss Cropsey, wrapped her closely around the neck and head with a robe, put her in the wagon and drove off.

  The Committee of Five had done the right thing, people nodded at each other. They had thought it was a bad idea at first, but this gypsy was onto something. Why, Harry Greenleaf, when he starts something, he flies at it and covers everything. Who’d of ever thought a gypsy would be down here looking for Nell Cropsey?

  Madam Newman and several Committee members clambered into a wagon and set out to retrace the route that had come to her in the trance, the route Wilcox and his accomplice had taken when they carried Nell Cropsey, chloroformed and wrapped in a robe or blanket one, to her death in an old well.

  A small crew of curiosity seekers and reporters followed along on horseback and in other wagons, and this strange procession moved into the Pasquotank country beneath the dull metal-gray sky. It became an all-day December outing. No one had dressed warmly enough for such an expedition. Madam Newman insisted they go down one county trail after another, down the shellpikes, miles and miles and all day in those wagons in the cold. No one had dressed for it.

  Oh, they found two old wells, but neither yielded the body of Nell Cropsey. Madam Newman insisted they go on.

  Wilcox was jealous, she told the Committee men. Nell was going off to New York, but he wanted to marry her and he feared he’d lose all chance if she went away. If he couldn’t have her, no one would. So he carried her off and killed her and threw her down a deep old well. Madam Newman captivated them and led them through the country and the cold.

  After twenty-five miles, they gave up.

  —I can plainly see the place where the body is at the bottom of a well near an old house, but my power will not allow me to accurately judge the distance, she said. If anyone had a thought that Madam Newman was a sham, it went unvoiced. All were caught up in the excitement of the hunt, and they were willing to try anything.

  Two of the Committee members had been elsewhere that day investigating the disc
overy of a body. When they got back to town, the report of yet another body found not ten miles from Elizabeth City had come in. Something would give sooner or later.

  There were more old wells than two in the area. The Committee could leave nothing to chance, so its chairman, Harry Greenleaf, declared that the well search would go on.

  THE DIVER

  During that first week of December 1901, the Committee brought in a diver and engaged him indefinitely. He was John Edwards, an expert from the M. T. Cashin Submarine Contracting Company out of Norfolk. He would feel over the Pasquotank riverbed foot by foot, and if Nell Cropsey were there, he would find her.

  Most had never seen a diver, so they swarmed by the river again to watch, though all they could see was the clockwork motion of the men manning the air pump on the pier, and then the air bubbles from Edwards’s breathing as they broke the water’s surface.

  All the while there were mutterings against Jim Wilcox.

  Day and night the diver crawled along the river bottorn, and the ghastly signal of his success would be his hand’s first touch on the beautiful girl, wherever her body lay in this black murky juniper river.

  By the morning of December 5th, he had covered some twenty thousand square feet, beginning at the pier down which Hurricane Branch’s bloodhounds had tracked. On December 6th, the search moved up to the marine railways, still to no avail. There was more muttering against Wilcox as the air-pump men worked in rhythm and the crowds watched the bubbles break the river surface beneath the cold platinum sky.

  —The Cropsey family isn’t taking as much interest in the diver as the general public, one of the Committee members remarked.

  The case now involved rewards and a committee and a massive effort that overrode the tragedy of one family. It had become a cause, a crusade, and now it belonged to the town.

  W. O. SAUNDERS

  Elizabeth City has been good to me.

  I ran my paper, The Independent, here for pushing three decades, and folks the world over have paid attention.

  People called me a crank, so I wrote myself up as such in Colliers.

  Mordecai Ham, the revival preacher, came to Pasquotank and I exposed him, ran that anti-Semite out of town.

  When I advocated pajamas as summer street dress, people laughed. I went to New York City and put on my silk pajamas and walked down Fifth Avenue and my picture ran in papers all over America.

  But all this was way after the mystery of Beautiful Nell Cropsey put Elizabeth City on the map. Betsy Town, I like to call it.

  Now the Cropsey case, the Wilcox trial—this was my first job.

  I grew up over in Hertford, just west of Elizabeth City. I was the butcher’s boy, and people said I was too smart for my own good. When I was ten or eleven, I decided I wanted to be either a Baptist preacher or a patent medicine faker—these were the two men who seemed to get to the most people.

  Then I discovered Elbert Hubbard’s editorials in one of the New York papers, and I realized that while the preacher and the faker were limited to the range of their own voices, Hubbard could be read throughout the world.

  I decided to become an editor.

  All of seventeen, I left home and went off to Norfolk up beyond the Great Dismal Swamp, landed a job on a paper there. But it was only work in the circulation department. Since I wanted to be an editor, I lost my enthusiasm and my new job and went back to my father’s Hertford grocery and butcher shop.

  And that was about the time Nell Cropsey vanished.

  I read up on it, followed the case like a hawk on prey. I watched what happened to the people of Elizabeth City in the course of the long, drawn-out search for the girl. I kept files on it because I was fascinated, and I thought it might be worth something someday.

  Now, in the late thirties, I realize I have probably been more engrossed in the Cropsey mystery than anything else that’s come my way, other than trying to keep my paper afloat. But The Independent shut down in 1937 after twenty-nine years’ publishing, and when I look through my files, the one I most often pull out and sift through is this one, the Cropsey case.

  I was all set to put together a book with Jim Wilcox once. He agreed to tell his story, and I got a boat so we could go up the river where no one could possibly overhear our conversations. We were going to meet down at the R. C. Abbot wharf one Sunday morning in June 1932.1 waited for hours.

  Jim Wilcox never showed.

  Now he’s dead, Governor Bickett who pardoned him is dead, Roy Crawford shot himself, Nell’s brother Will poisoned himself, and I seem to have only my files to piece together the story of what really occurred that night in 1901.

  Soon after Nell Cropsey disappeared, Chief Dawson began to receive reports of sightings from various places around eastern North Carolina.

  She was seen driving in a carriage with a man in South Mills, up the Pasquotank River near the Virginia line, on the second of December 1901.

  W. O. Saunders

  She was seen at Mackey’s Ferry on the south shore of the Albemarle Sound, and then at Plymouth, only six miles from Mackey’s, just a few days later.

  One of my favorites was the report of a young woman supposed to be Nell Cropsey who was held for identification in Wilson, a tobacco market town over a hundred miles west of Elizabeth City, on the fourth of December. She and a male companion had spent the night of the third at Mrs. Ward’s boarding house there, and the young woman paid the bills as the man seemed short of cash. He also got drunk and crashed around the house. Mrs. Ward reported them for disorderly conduct, but when the police arrived, the couple had slipped out. It wasn’t until Turkey Creek that the reward-seeking officers Felton and Bryan overtook and arrested them at the Nichols house, fifteen miles out of Wilson.

  Mayor Herring wired the Cropsey family and Chief Dawson, who sent back a detailed description of Nell Cropsey.

  —Not a chance, said the Chief. I think it’s the same girl they saw in Goose Nest and other places about there.

  While he awaited Chief Dawson’s return wire, Mayor Herring questioned the couple in Wilson. I suppose he thought he had her and was already seeing headlines and counting cash. He brought in a former schoolmate of Nell’s to see if she could identify the girl one way or the other. And this schoolmate, a Miss Dyer, finally made a positive identification. It took her a while, apparently. She hesitated, saying it had been four years since she’d seen Nell and now Nell’s hair was a good deal shorter than it had been.

  So Nell Cropsey was found. Mayor Herring gleefully questioned the couple, who of course denied ever hearing of Nell Cropsey or Jim Wilcox either one.

  —My name’s MacKay Durham, the man said. Born in Durham County six miles from Durham town. I ain’t lived there in fourteen years. Raleigh’s my home.

  But he couldn’t seem to call up a street address for Mayor Herring, nor could he remember the name of the cotton mill where he said he’d been working.

  —Not just now, anyways, Durham said.

  Mayor Herring turned to the girl.

  —My name is Miss Kersey. I was raised on a truck farm in Chattanooga. My mother’s remarried, Mrs. Elizabeth Clark, and she lives there. I don’t know any Jim Wilcox.

  She was scared and confused and all of seventeen. She couldn’t recall the place names of anywhere she had been recently. Miss Kersey told the mayor of Wilson, North Carolina, that MacKay Durham was a doctor who had brought her to eastern Carolina for some bear shooting, but that he was habitually intoxicated and had tried to kill her.

  —Well, she said, maybe I heard of Wilcox.

  I read these stories and jealously wished that I had been out there rambling about and filing amazing and bizarre reports for some paper, any paper. I read that the Associated Press searched the entire Chattanooga area and found that no one named Kersey or Clark had ever been heard of out there. I read how Mayor Herring got Chief Dawson’s description and looked at the girl’s teeth.

  According to the description, Miss Cropsey had two teeth missing f
rom her lower jaw, but the girl captured at Turkey Creek had one tooth missing from each side of her upper jaw. And the location of gold fillings was all different.

  So they let Miss Kersey and her mad, drunk, bear hunting, mill-working doctor go, and time and the world have swallowed them whole.

  Chief Dawson was right, I thought. It was obviously the same couple that his authorized detective had been trailing through eastern Carolina and had even examined at the village of Speed several days earlier.

  There was another intriguing piece about an elderly man traveling with a young lady in Philadelphia. Someone wired Chief Dawson that Nell Cropsey was found in the City of Brotherly Love, but when Dawson followed the lead, he discovered that the pair was registered at the Walton Hotel as J. B. Murdoch and niece, of New York City.

  Good Lord, I thought, how many there must be. Young girls traveling with men of all ages, the whole spectrum of assignations and elopements and tourist homes and cheap hotels everywhere from Speed, North Carolina, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Chief Dawson was going to have to track down every lead or see that someone else did—kicking in doors and frightening anxious, mismatched couples and demanding their identities. Someone was going to have to get a look at all these girls and know for certain that the latest Nell Cropsey was not really her but, instead, some other terrified stray. Lord, I thought, I don’t know how Dawson’s going to do it.

  But it was all very exciting and tragic and full of the promise of adventure for me, a seventeen-year-old butcher’s boy working in his dad’s miserable meat shop in Hertford, reading up on the big mystery in the town next door, daydreaming about being an editor. I had no way of knowing the day would come and not only would I be one, but H. L. Mencken himself, the master of American letters, would put in print the greatest compliment I’ve ever received. Ed Aydlett, the political boss of Elizabeth City, tried to shut me and The Independent down, churchmen fired gunshots into my house, and I was hauled through the county courts time and again when my editorial candor was mistaken for libel. But the ordeals were well worth it when this notice came to my attention: