The Mystery of Beautiful Nell Cropsey

by Bland Simpson

  —If the South had forty editors like W. O. Saunders, wrote Mencken, its problems would disappear within five years.

  OLLIE CROPSEY

  Nell had been gone two-and-a-half weeks when we heard the loathsome stories from Norfolk.

  A young man named Edward Kelly, a patent solicitor, came to Seven Pines in December 1901 and told us the most treacherous and base tale. He said that he had met Nell on the Seaboard Air Line train into Norfolk on the morning of November 22d, a day and a half after she was first missed. She was supposedly traveling under the name of Jessie Baker, who was a girlfriend of ours from Elizabeth City.

  This Kelly said he talked with her on the train, spent the day with her, dined with her, and saw her off on the Old Dominion steamer that night, alone and with no baggage. She was wearing new shoes, a light jacket, and a red waist with brass buttons, he said, and he alerted the police chief of Norfolk and the newspapers.

  He also said this girl was missing two teeth.

  How could Nell have bought new shoes or a jacket or changed her buttons? I wondered. And I know for certain she had only a nickel in her pocket when she stepped into the hall with Jim Wilcox.

  Kelly said the girl had mentioned that she would be visiting Baltimore for six to eight weeks.

  Who did Nellie know in Baltimore? I couldn’t believe him, and he so infuriated Papa that there was a nasty scene and almost a fight. Papa had already been enraged over the incident of the spiritualist, Madam Newman. He’d sworn that anyone else who came to our house with incantations or hocus-pocus or any other unholy mess would get out quicker than they got in. And he meant it.

  —You’re a fake! he shouted at Kelly and flew at him in a rage. There would have been a fight but the policeman who had come with Kelly kept them apart. Papa made them leave, and we were more upset than ever.

  There was even another version of this story of Kelly’s, and it was far worse for us if such a thing were possible.

  In the papers it was reported that Nell had a traveling companion named Guy Hall and that Nell and this man spent the night of November 22d in a Main Street boarding house in Norfolk. Then she caught the next morning’s boat for Washington, D.C. We all knew very well who Guy Hall was.

  He was a good friend of Jim Wilcox.

  Guy Hall, the papers said, had been turned out of the state of Virginia for his role in the Hall-Cannon affair. A man named Cannon had hired Guy Hall to seduce Mrs. Cannon or somehow ruin her character in order to win a divorce from her. It was a sordid business, and we had not known about it, though we knew of Guy Hall. He had come to Elizabeth City not too long before and become Jim’s friend. Guy Hall was a gymnast, a trickster, and Lord knows what else.

  Imagine Nell spending the night with such a creature.

  They were all vicious stories, and with each one came reporters seeking our comments and thoughts. We Cropseys were a big, loving family. We had never been invaded and hurt by the world at large. I lost so much privacy and dignity from the way I felt we were treated then that I have never sought society in the long years since. We were curiosities, objects of pity, and the whole history of our lives since then has been isolated and abnormal for that reason.

  Mama, in her grief, would interrupt her vigil in the cupola and come down and talk with the reporters. She thought somehow it might do some good, her words might reach Nell—and she needed to defend her own.

  —I didn’t favor Jim much, she said, but the girls had a good time with him, so I didn’t object to his coming. But he was changeable. Sometimes he would barely speak to me for three or four days and then he would come back and bring flowers. Nell wasn’t in the habit of meeting young men. If she had been I shouldn’t have been so uneasy that night and would not have given the alarm. I hardly know whether or not to think this Norfolk girl is Nell—there have been so many rumors and I am so much troubled.

  I feared Mama would break under the strain.

  When the New York Journal and the Associated Press both announced that the search for my sister in Baltimore was being limited to certain Baltimore institutions, Papa said he would sue.

  How could they print such vile things?

  I was heartbroken for Nell and for us all.

  Eventually word came that the girl had been found. She was a look-alike for Nell but not Nell at all. She was Sara Baker, a pretty milliner from Franklin, Virginia. I was relieved, of course, but terribly disappointed, too, because it meant that perhaps Nellie was in the river after all. The dragging and cannon firing was still going on.

  Nell had been gone three weeks when Papa said it would be a relief if her dead body were to be found. I wept and grieved and blamed myself.

  TALK

  They said Jim Wilcox was proud of his notoriety, that he hung around on street corners in town, smiling brazenly without a trace of worry.

  They also said he ran away, disappeared himself because he was scared and guilty as hell. Though he had only gotten permission to go down and stay at his kin-folks’ in south Pasquotank, he just looked bad no matter what.

  On December 9th, 1901, there was another mass rally, and this time a thousand people came and the county courthouse overflowed. Harry Greenleaf, the vigilante chairman, read an open letter from William Cropsey to the town.

  The police officials and the Committee have done all human agency could do to restore my daughter, without success. I shall always believe that Jim Wilcox was instrumental in my daughter’s disappearance and if she is dead I believe his hand or the hand of his hireling is responsible for her death. Sometime when this life shall cease and we shall stand before the presence of the great Judge I believe we shall learn how and when he murdered my daughter and that the justice he may escape will be dealt with then.

  Harry Greenleaf went on with great drama.

  —After chasing shadows and rainbows, at last we have a tangible clue, he declared.

  A whiskey bottle had been found on the sand beach in front of the Cropsey house. One of the local saloon keepers told the Committee he’d sold one just like it to Jim Wilcox.

  —Let’s make the one who knows all about this affair disclose it, said Greenleaf.

  They applauded wildly and came up with an additional two hundred dollars in donations for the Committee to fund its work. They despised Jim Wilcox with a collective passion and could have lynched him then and there. The blood of that town was boiling.

  JIM WILCOX

  Everywhere I went folks were asking me Jim where is that girl? Even my aunt down the county, but I told her and the rest of em, Ask the Committee, they know all about these things. I went down there for a while in December while they were searching. Daddy said people were a damn sight more interested in pinning something on me than they were in finding Nell. Get out of town, he told me. Lawyer Aydlett agreed and fixed it with the mayor so I could clear out while the heat was on. Everybody’ll know where you are, he said.

  When I came back into town there in the middle of the month, I happened to run into Guy Hall, the athlete from Virginia. We were at the railway depot and I got to sporting with his trained dog. All of a sudden I looked up and there’s a crowd gathering and staring at me while I was making Guy’s dog do tricks on the station platform. And before long there was newspapermen showing up and asking, always asking.

  —Been away, haven’t you, Jim?

  I can hear em now.

  —Been to see your gal?

  —Where you keeping her, Jim?

  —What’ve you done with Nell Cropsey?

  I could of trounced somebody and beat the hell out of em, but it’s always been like that since Nell disappeared.

  —Hold your temper, Jim, Guy Hall said, they just trying to rile you, provoke you into something you’d be sure to regret.

  —Ask the Committee, I said, they seem to know everything. Yes, it’s true I gave her back her parasol and her photographs and we’d had a disagreement sometime before but that wouldn’t cause her to take her life I don’t think. People
put up lies about me. You can hear a lot about me if you listen to em.

  The crowd there at the station kept staring in such a taunting way, and the newsmen kept badgering.

  —When were you going to get married, Jim?

  I can hear em now.

  —Didn’t you tell different ones that she would never go to New York?

  Well, I never said that and Nell and I never talked once about getting married. But we wasn’t engaged.

  —Jim, you heard Cropsey’s blaming you for the whole thing?

  I answered I couldn’t understand it. I’d always been friends of the whole family. I couldn’t account for it, any of it.

  Guy Hall collared his dog and we cleared out of the depot. That’s telling em, Jim, he said as we were leaving. That’s telling em good.

  OLLIE CROPSEY

  I was sick when they came in from the drag boats with a piece of dress goods. Oh, we tried to believe it couldn’t be, but we knew then she was dead in that cold river. Till then we had held out hope that Nell might still be alive. Even those awful cruel rumors from Norfolk weren’t this bad. That sealed it, and after that we never expected to see her alive again.

  Mama kept up her vigil in the tower till she was nearly crazy with fatigue and grief. We tried to keep our feelings from the little children, but they knew. The detective Uncle Andrew sent down to us, Connor, stayed with us till he simply threw up his hands and gave up and said in all his forty years he had never run up against a case so intricate and hopeless. We knew she was in that river. About the time Mister Connor left to go back north, Uncle Andrew sent a submarine lighting device to us to help the diver as he searched the dark river bot-torn for poor Nell. It was the week before Christmas, and by then she’d been gone a month. I didn’t mind at all when we moved away from Seven Pines not long after that. I began to use the side door because if I went out the front there was that cold black river.

  How it haunted me and haunts me still.

  W. O. SAUNDERS

  The longer Nell Cropsey was missing, the more fascinated I became with the case and with reading whatever news stories we could get about it over there in Hertford.

  There were two divergent reports from men who had been out in boats on the Pasquotank at exactly the time Miss Cropsey had stepped out to say good-night or goodbye or whatever it was she said to Jim Wilcox. One report had it that a tugboat towing a barge pulled out of the Knobbs Creek shingle mill and headed downriver at exactly eleven p.m. The tug captain said his boat came abreast of the pier near the Cropsey home about fifteen minutes later and that when it did, a white sixteen-foot skiff appeared in the moonlight. That would have been ten minutes from the time Nell and Jim went into the front hall, according to both Jim and Miss Olive Cropsey.

  The tug captain said the skiff pulled out of the shadows of the wharf and headed westward, upriver, toward the town a quarter-mile away. He saw one man seated in the stern and a second man rowing, and that was all.

  The second report came from New Bern. A local man said he’d talked with the officer of a revenue cutter there some days after Nell Cropsey vanished. The officer said that his boat had been anchored in the Pasquotank out from that same pier on the night she disappeared, and that his watch declared that nothing unusual occurred. Had anyone plunged from the pier into the river or taken a boat from there, his watch would most assuredly have noticed, the officer said.

  But Len Owens and a mate on the Ray, a launch plying upriver and passing the Cropsey house at 11:15 that night, seemed to corroborate the tug captain’s story. I heard and read that they saw a skiff glide across the river from the opposite shore to the Cropsey side and then skim under the bushes near the summerhouse.

  I’ve mulled over these stories for years. None of them ever showed up as evidence in any testimony, yet Jim Wilcox might easily have been lynched with a rumor like the white skiff story floating around.

  On the other hand, terror is a whimsical beast. Between wild rumor and vigilante fever, the town was crazed. And if the same beast that destroyed Robespierre could claim Jim Wilcox, it could turn and destroy virtually anyone.

  Even the father of the missing girl was not immune.

  A letter from George Hotteso of Rocky Mount, North Carolina, arrived for William Cropsey on December 21st, 1901. Hotteso supposedly wrote that a young man had left Nell Cropsey in that town with a half-breed woman named Mary Kenny, and that Nell wouldn’t give her name. She was afraid of her father, afraid he would kill her and the young man both.

  Two members of the Committee went to investigate, and two days before Christmas, three disparate stories came back from Rocky Mount.

  One said Miss Cropsey had been identified and was being taken back to Elizabeth City by the Committee men.

  Another said she had disappeared from Mary Kenny’s house and had given the Committee the slip.

  The third report said that the Hotteso letter had been forged by none other than William Cropsey. And, further, the Committee claimed to have caught Cropsey in several falsehoods, confronted him, and found his manner indifferent.

  SUSPICIOUS FINGER POINTING AT CROPSEY!

  DID HE HIDE THE GIRL?

  I clipped that story from the front page of the Raleigh News and Observer, and I would look at it from time to time over the years and wonder, especially in light of some of the dark and horrifying tales I’ve heard people in Elizabeth City tell about William Cropsey and what really became of his daughter, Beautiful Nell.

  CHRISTMASTIDE

  The wind had blown dark clouds across the waxing moon, and men in boats on the river saw, or thought they saw, a ghost skiff as the shadows from the moonlight shifted.

  After a month, the search for Nell Cropsey became an endless sifting of sand. The river dragging was abandoned, the diver was sent home, the reports and letters from hither and yon proved false or inconclusive. So traceless was her disappearance that by Christmas 1901, the family and the town had given up hope—not of finding her alive, but of finding her at all.

  2 The Town

  OLLIE CROPSEY

  I didn’t know what to think, whether to laugh or cry when Papa told us he was going to move us to Elizabeth City.

  He had read an advertisement that John Fearing had placed in one of the New York papers wanting someone to farm land near his place on the Pasquotank River in eastern North Carolina. Papa loved farming, and he thought in the South we could have crops and some sort of garden almost year round.

  So he accepted the offer, and Uncle Andrew paid first rent on the land.

  John Fearing sent Papa back a delighted reply and a bundle of commerce pamphlets that he read over and over and showed the rest of us. The pamphlets said the Pasquotank was a cornucopia offering a brilliant harvest from its lands and waters. They said the Pasquotank was very much like the south of France in the demeanor of its climate.

  The south of France!

  Papa made a trip down first, and then we all came in April of 1898, and we stayed at the Fearing home because our furniture had been misdirected and shipped to New Jersey and we hadn’t found a house yet anyway.

  The very first things we saw in Elizabeth City were crates and crates of strawberries and the herring criers in the streets. I heard one old man say at market that he’d follow strawberries all over the world, he loved them so.

  We had seen a picture in one of Mister Fearing’s pamphlets of the strawberry pickers who camped beside the fields at harvest. They wore bandanas and scarves and wide-brimmed straw hats and carried shallow trays into the fields by day. They brought the berries into the grading shed, where they were sorted and packed and put on a one-mule, two-wheel wagon headed for market. Except for the wagon driver and one grader and the bald overseer, all the rest were black people.

  They must have broken their backs picking berries for that old man.

  Anyway, this is the sort of thing Papa showed us and talked about before he brought us to the South. Our whole family, other than Uncle Andrew, was against
our move and I was too. I was young then and all my friends and cousins lived in New York.

  We were the Cropseys of Brooklyn. We were among the Old Dutch that built Brooklyn, and New York too. Our ancestor Casparse came from Germany or Holland to New Amsterdam. Then the Dutch spread out into Jersey and Long Island, and Papa says they called it Brukelen then. Our name changed to Crasparse, then Craspar, Cropsow, Cropsie, Cropsy, then finally Cropsey like it is now. I’ve even gotten mail from a woman who spelled it Crapsey who must be some sort of cousin. She sent me a poem about Nell.

  Cropsey Avenue is a big street in Brooklyn, named after our relative James Cropsey, who led the Kings County Buckskins against the British in 1812. He was a hero. When he got the contract to build Fort Hamilton at the Verrazano Narrows, he walked the highway between his home and the fort site so much that they named it for him. Cropsey Avenue. He was called Boss Cropsey because he was a builder, and he built good solid forts. He built Fort Wadsworth, Fort Totten, Fort Schuyler, and he died while he had Fortress Monroe under construction at Hampton Roads just as the Civil War started. He was our kin.

  We belonged to the New Utrecht Reform Church, which Boss Cropsey had rebuilt using stones from the original Dutch church there. He had the pews nailed down so tightly and solidly that when it was remodeled way later they marveled at his diligence and said Boss Cropsey had built the church just like one of his forts.

  This was our stock.

  We buried our little infant brother in the graveyard of the New Utrecht church, long before Papa brought us to Elizabeth City. He gave up the position of excise commissioner of New Utrecht to go south. We were good Tammany Democrats, and we left it all behind.