—Deliver me, O Lord, from the evil man; Preserve me from the violent man. He read from the Hundred-fortieth Psalm, then spoke again of Jim Wilcox.
—I believe him innocent of the dark charge which hangs over him.
A wave of disapproval went through the church, whispers and talk. They would not hear of it. They sang:
Abide with me, fast falls the eventide;
The darkness deepens, Lord with me abide!
Then came the Methodist minister, Devil-Hunter Tuttle he was called, said to be so uncompromising and strict that he wouldn’t let his wife so much as heat gravy on Sundays.
—A sad and mysterious Providence has come to a home in our community, Tuttle began.
—We thank God the family has been sustained in their sorrow.
When other helpers fail and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, O abide with me.
—We thank Thee she had accepted Christ before being taken away. Oh, how inexpressibly sad it is to be cut off in the bloom of young womanhood like this . . .
Like this! At every pause Tuttle made, thoughts raced, the communal anger unspoken but barely contained.
—The dry goods stores were not closed, Reverend Tuttle preached with rising ire. So loud was the sobbing that his sermon was nearly inaudible at the rear of the church.
—What did he say?
—Something about the stores, I think.
—The grocery stores, the jewelry and other shops were not closed . . .
—What’s he getting at?
—Hush, for God’s sake—it’s her funeral!
—... but the liquor saloons were closed in protection of a supposed criminal. . .
—Supposed!
—He ought to swing. He ought to.
—... though on other days they remain open and corrupt the innocent!
The blood was really throbbing in the breast of the blackriver town. There was no forgiveness or hope or mercy for Nell Cropsey’s silent lover, Jim Wilcox. Reverend Tuttle could have kept going. Some feared he would use his moment to rekindle the lynch lust, but he pulled back and let them down gently.
He read aloud the church vows that Nell Cropsey had taken in October. Thank Thee, Lord of Hosts, that she died in Christ.
Behold, I shew you a mystery ... at the last trump, for the trumpet shall sound; and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.
Tuttle finished, and it was done. Surely her soul was at rest. Surely her town now deserved a deep and dreamless winter sleep. They sang:
Lead, kindly Light, amid th’encircling gloom.
That night, Sunday, December 29th, 1901, the body of Nell Cropsey lay in a black walnut casket in a Sunday school room in the church annex. Across the street, a little girl was frightened and couldn’t sleep. The dead body was over there in the church, and there was nothing between them except mortar and clapboards, and it was not enough.
W. O. SAUNDERS
I met every train from Elizabeth City that weekend and pestered the brakemen and conductors for news. Most of what I got turned out to be rumors.
Like the one that Jim Wilcox had been removed from Elizabeth City for safekeeping. A Pasquotank deputy claimed he took Wilcox to the Portsmouth, Virginia, jail after midnight Saturday night. And, in fact, a mud-covered carriage had discharged a handcuffed prisoner there—witnesses spread the story, and the jail was deluged with inquiries.
But Wilcox was in the Elizabeth City jail all the while, eating with relish the meals his sister Sadie brought him, saying he was comfortable and proclaiming his innocence to the man from the Baltimore Sun.
North Carolina officials refused to move him. He’d have to be moved up into Virginia through the Great Dismal Swamp by night, and they said they feared an escape attempt at the state line. I figured what really bothered them was the idea of turning Jim over to Virginia authorities. This case had drawn national attention, and that made Jim a hot property. Extradition could be a problem—what if the Virginia boys decided to keep Jim for themselves?
Over in Raleigh, Governor Aycock threw a fit when he heard Jim had been taken to Virginia.
—I never gave any order or permission to move Wilcox! he thundered.
But keeping him in Elizabeth City posed problems. Even after Nell’s funeral, the magistrates were afraid to let Jim out on bond. The town still wasn’t prepared for the sight of Wilcox walking free—he’d be lynched inside of an hour. Jim would just have to wait it out in jail, it was safer that way. In the cold before-dawn of December 30th, 1901, the bank-cashier captain of the reserves called the muster roll and dismissed the Pasquotank Rifles, who had now been standing guard two-and-a-half days.
Lawyer Aydlett waived a preliminary hearing. A third public airing of the case just then would have been futile and very unpopular. He probably thought he could get the case thrown out by the grand jury in March for lack of evidence.
—Wilcox is young and unusually cautious, he told the Baltimore Sun. I haven’t heard any more from him than you have. He insists on his innocence and therefore doesn’t fear the mob. On Friday and Saturday nights, when the jail was under guard, he was apparently the coolest man in town.
—Are you guilty? the man from the Sun asked Jim Wilcox.
—No, Jim said without a flinch. I am not.
JUDGE ANDREW CROPSEY
Judge Andrew Cropsey had arrived in Elizabeth City the day after Nell’s body was found and had set at once about helping Solicitor Ward build his case against Wilcox. Now he was taking her back to Brooklyn to bury her among her own people.
The morning after the funeral service, the Judge had Nell’s coffin packed in a white pine shipping crate and carried to the depot by the river in which they had found her.
Before they loaded her onto the train—not the regular dispatch, now, but a special train sent to carry her to Norfolk—Doctor Ike showed up with the required notice, which he dutifully tacked onto the pine box.
This is to certify that this is the body of Ella M. Cropsey who died of no disease but of violence or drowning.
Coroner Fearing
A throng met the funeral train in Norfolk late that afternoon. They watched as the pine box was lowered from the baggage car onto a waiting hearse, and they followed it to the steamer wharf. The press dogged him through the streets of Norfolk, asking what were his thoughts? And Judge Cropsey spoke freely with them all.
—Nell didn’t drown herself. Why, when her body was found, the knees were drawn up just as they collapsed beneath her weight when the blow on her temple killed her. Drowned people aren’t found like that and drowned women don’t float face downwards. Furthermore,
—Wilcox owes his present existence to my brother. If it weren’t for him, Wilcox would have surely been lynched. This Wilcox has an uncle who is said to have killed three men in cold blood. My brother is nearly distraded—all last night I could hear his sobs as he walked the floor. His wife is in a pitiable condition. No,
—I haven’t seen her remains. I preferred remembering her as I last saw her—alive, well, and happy.
—What I think is that she was held captive till three days before her body was found, kept alive by the abductors who desired to return her. Finding themselves unable to do so, they killed her and threw her body in the river in hope her disappearance would assume the aspect of suicide.
At 6:20 the Judge and his silent charge sailed north from Norfolk on the Old Dominion steamboat.
herbert wykoff, Undertaker.
The black wagon met Judge Cropsey in the Jersey City depot the next morning, and Nell Cropsey’s coffin was loaded into the Dutchman’s hearse and carried across the great harbor to the New Utrecht cemetery in south Brooklyn. Judge Cropsey had brought her back from that alien swamp country, back to the place where Cropseys had been buried for a century and a half.
THE BURYING
Some five hundred friends, relatives, and curious strangers jammed the small graveyard. Boys climbed trees for a vi
ew. A squadron of police kept order.
The pallbearers slid the dark walnut coffin out from the heavy white curtains inside the hearse—Wykoff had torn open the pine crate at the depot and discarded it—and carried her casket to the open grave. The preacher from the church Boss Cropsey built like a fortress conducted a short service. At the head of the grave stood one of Nell’s aunts, waiting to throw her large bouquet in after the coffin began its descent from the grave trestle.
But when it reached ground level, the coffin bumped, tilted sideways into the hole, and hung there at an angle.
A jolt went through the weeping crowd.
The grave was too small.
An old family grave, that of Nell Cropsey’s infant brother, buried nine years before, had been opened. The gravediggers were instructed that her coffin would lie beside his; but they had left the opening too small for the casket bearing a grown woman.
Why had no one thought of this before now?
After all that had befallen her, Nell Cropsey could not even go to the earth without one last ghastly moment of delay marring that passage. Back into the hole the gravediggers went, lengthening and enlarging the grave, their shovels slicing into the hard, frozen ground of New York shook shook shook.
W.O. SAUNDERS
All the attention over in Elizabeth City then was on the prosecutor’s office. It wasn’t just that everyone was depending on Solicitor Ward to see that justice was done and Jim was strung up. They were counting on Ward to tell them what had really happened.
We still didn’t know. Did Jim have accomplices who kept her somewhere or had she been killed that first night and thrown straight into the river?
I read every paper I could get my hands on there in Hertford and met the westbound trains when I could steal away from the butcher shop. I couldn’t hear enough about the Cropsey case.
A curious and damning story had come in from a farmer named Caleb T. Parker, who was a friend of the Wilcox family and, I understood, had gone bond for an uncle of Jim’s up for murder in the 1890s.
The story went that Parker, driving his buggy home late on the night Nell Cropsey disappeared, told his wife that he had seen Jim dragging a young woman across the road in front of the Cropsey home. Parker’s wife was spreading this around, and when some reporters asked Parker about it, he said that if his wife said it was so, then it was so. To other reporters, he denied the whole thing.
The thinking in the prosecutor’s office was that Jim had lured Nell to the front gate, struck her, carried her to the river’s edge, put her in a boat, rowed out into the Pasquotank and thrown her overboard. Jim was said to have known of three boats kept nearby at Hayman’s shipyards, where he was working at that time. And there were stories circulating about a mystery skiff, supposed to have left the shore in front of the Cropsey home about quarter past eleven that night in November 1901.
But the roughest thing against Jim, as far as I could see, was his inability or unwillingness to explain how it came to be that he was seen by Leonard Owens a ten-minute walk away from the Cropsey home some forty minutes after he left it.
The Three Theories of Miss Nell Cropseys Death (from the News and Observer, January 7th, 1902)
The popular notion was that there was nothing else Jim Wilcox could have been doing in that unexplained time but murdering Beautiful Nell Cropsey.
TALK
—Missus Cropsey got a anonymous letter the night before they found her girl in the river.
—What’d it say?
—Your daughter will appear in front of your house tomorrow.
—Well, who the hell wrote it?
—Anonymous means nobody.
—Well, I heard that whoever was guilty for it got afraid on account of the electric searchlight they ordered up for the diver to use, so the killers went on and cut her loose from the weights that were holding her down on the river bottom.
—There weren’t no weights.
—Well, I got it from—
—The coroner said there weren’t no weights.
—Oh.
—You see in the paper what the Committee’s up to?
—What’s that?
—They’re saying that Chief Dawson and Mayor Wilson tried to hold em up and keep em from finding that gal when everybody was so all het up about it. They got a report she was over in Wilson and they sent off a couple of their men to go check it out—and even so, Chief Dawson wired em in Wilson to turn her loose ‘cause he was sure it weren’t Nell Cropsey. It weren’t either.
—Harry Greenleaf say all this?
—No. He’s the only one that didn’t. The other four Committee men did though. You want to know what else?
—What?
—Chief Dawson and Mayor Wilson are suing the hell out of the Committee.
—For how much?
—Thousands of dollars. Thousands.
W. O. SAUNDERS
I’d badgered them for months to give me an assignment and let me write, but it came as a pretty big surprise when the story they were caught up short on was this one.
—Cover Wilcox trial for Dispatch.
The telegram from Norfolk came March 13th, 1902, the day they were picking a jury to try Jim Wilcox. There were no other instructions. You can bet I left Dad’s meat shop and lit out for Elizabeth City in a hurry.
Two days before, an eighteen-man grand jury had spent the morning hearing from the Cropseys and the autopsy doctors in the matter of superior court docket number 19. The state was seeking a murder indictment against Jim Wilcox. His father, Tom Wilcox the former sheriff, hung around the courthouse all day talking with his old buddies and putting up a good front despite the circumstances. Lawyer Aydlett wondered even at that late date whether or not to ask for a change of venue.
Just after noon that day, Solicitor Ward was interrupted in the middle of a courtroom speech on another case. In the rear of the courtroom was a big commotion. The grand jury tramped down the center aisle toward the bench followed by a trail of spectators. The foreman lined his grand jury up and handed a paper to the judge. There was a hush in court.
—Is this paper your finding? asked the judge.
The foreman nodded it was.
After lunch the bailiff brought Jim Wilcox into court, fifteen pounds heavier than when Elizabeth City had last seen him being hauled through its streets the day Nell’s body was found. He wore a short dark coat and light trousers, a clean shirt with a turned down collar and a black bow tie. At twenty-five, his hairline was receding. Just the day before, he shaved the full beard he’d grown in jail since December. Solicitor Ward ordered him to stand and remain standing as he read the grand jury finding.
—Indictment for murder, he said.
—The jurors for the State upon their oaths present, that James Wilcox with force and arm feloniously, willfully and of his malice aforethought did kill and murder Ella M. Cropsey against the statute and against the peace and dignity of the State.
The sheriff took Jim to the bar. How would he plead?
—Not guilty.
How would the defendant be tried?
—For good and evil, Lawyer Aydlett answered the court, and the trial was under way.
The judge had ordered two hundred and fifty freeholders to appear, and when I got to town Thursday afternoon, they had already started on jury selection. A ten-year-old boy had drawn the names from the county jury box—they always assumed a child would act with a hand of innocence, but I recall reading about a boy in Elizabeth City whose father sent him home to fetch a revolver when the December mobs were forming against Jim.
I was finally in on it—not just there, but there as a reporter, sitting at a press table with top-dog space writers from the big city papers. I was nearly eighteen and in on a national sensation. Elizabeth City was swarming again, the morning train down from Norfolk was packed, and farmers’ wagons were parked wheel to wheel all over town.
A bevy of agents pushing farm equipment added to the crush around the courthou
se square early that morning. But the main draw was a man with a Vandyke beard and mustache, pulling crowds away from the hayrake vendors as he hypnotized people, worked puppets, and threw his voice. Folks called him the Big Indian Tea Man because he rode the county-court circuit all over eastern Carolina—I knew him from Hertford—performing and peddling Indian herbal remedies and homemade philters. They said he once rode with Buffalo Bill, and now here he was in Elizabeth City.
The new courthouse itself was a great, three-story brick building with four plain white columns and Corinthian caps. The columns stood on rough-hewn granite piers, and they, in turn, supported a pediment in the center of which was a granite slab inscribed 1882. Above that rose a cupola housing the town clock and bell.
It still stands, and we still use it.
Inside, the second-floor courtroom was an enormous box with seats like church pews, bare plaster walls, and a thin-strip slat ceiling thirty-five feet above the floor. Along the side walls were oil lamps and an occasional heat stove, and from the middle of the ceiling above the center aisle, there hung a chandelier with twelve lamps. The jury box was up front on the right.
In this room Jim’s life was on the line.
For six hours that Thursday, the court went through the lists. Most of the two hundred rejected men said their minds were set against Jim Wilcox, and evidence to the contrary wouldn’t make any difference to them. It was eight in the evening before they had a jury.
The twelve good men and true were a mill worker, a butcher, a veneer factory owner, a barkeep, a machinist, and seven farmers. Ten were Democrats, white men; the other two were black Republicans.
—The Wilcoxes are Republicans, people said.
—This case’s too important to have nigras on the jury, they said.
—They’ll come back with a hung jury or acquittal one.
You can bet the town was riled over that.
The Mystery of Beautiful Nell Cropsey Page 11
