Jim Wilcox, on trial for his life in a case still shrouded in mystery, will not take the stand in his own defense.
JIM WILCOX
Early on the morning of December 4, 1934, the sick old sandy-haired man Jim Wilcox scrounged three #6 shotgun shells, jimmied the lock to Johnny Tuttle’s office, and stole a twelve-gauge shotgun. He lay on his dirty bunk listening to the freight trains rumble and couple not far away.
Johnny Tuttle and his family, all of em, have been good to me. To think his wife was one of the last people I saw, that little girl in 1903, before I went off to prison, and there she was at the station with Johnny and her children the day I come back in 1918. That’s been sixteen years now.
It was rough when I first got out. I shouldn’t of come back here but there was nowhere else to go. I’d been a volunteer fireman before so I went over to the firehouse and Chief Flora gave me a paying job—one of two live-in firemen Elizabeth City had. I kept a monkey and let him ride on my shoulder. Well, a fire alarm come in one day and I missed it. Chief Flora said I’d been slack and he couldn’t take chances like that. He fired me, but I didn’t care. I was always getting in fights around there anyway. People wouldn’t leave me alone.
Seems I been drifting ever since. My grocery went under, and it’s just been odd jobs and drinking. Folks say Fm real good with my hands. Real good with my hands and my tools. Some tell me Fm light on my feet.
I come back into town from Kelly Tillet’s fish camp last April, and Johnny Tuttle partitioned me off a little room in back of his car repair shop. Ain’t it something, my sister lives right over on the next street and don’t even come see me with a hot meal now I’m old and sick? She met me crying at the depot how glad she was to see me home all those years ago, and took what money I’d made selling carved canes and wallets and such—a couple thousand dollars—and told me she’d apply it to the house and I could live there the rest of my life.
It weren’t a year later she threw me out.
I been getting pretty bad with the cough this fall. Johnny Tuttle went and gave my sister a piece of his mind but it didn’t do any good. He’s a good heart. It hurt me when he got sharp with me last summer for blaspheming.
I was standing in front of the garage when a storm come up and there was a great thunderclap. I pulled a quarter out of my pocket and flipped it and said,
—Give me another quarter’s worth.
I’d barely got the words out when there was a second thunderclap even louder than the first. Johnny Tuttle he rolled out from under the car he was working on and said real fierce,
—Don’t you let me hear you talk like that again around here. I mean it.
I don’t want the Tuttles getting mad at me, so mostly I been staying in my back room. A Sawyer fellow asked me to go to church in November but I said no thanks. I’d been up to the First Baptist Church and two people got up and moved across the aisle. I don’t want any of it.
People don’t want me around. Everybody whispers and looks down on me. I told Tuttle’s wife time and again there weren’t much point in going on living. There was a crowd around the garage a few weeks ago. I was drinking and got hold of Tuttle’s shotgun. I told em, Look out I’m going to end it all, and the gun went off into the rafters. They all laughed at me except Tuttle, who was mad again.
—Don’t mess with my gun anymore. From now on, I’m locking up my shells in the house when I come in from hunting.
Nobody’11 ever know where I got these three shells.
I gave em warning day before yesterday. I let one of Tuttle’s mechanics have a pair of my overalls and gave one of the other boys a spare shirt and told em I won’t be needing em much longer.
People don’t want me around all right. I know who killed Nell Cropsey, and I always said I was going to tell everything I know before I die.
THE LAWYERS
For two-and-a-half days, the lawyers made dramatic, tearful, imploring speeches. Those were the days, it would later be said, of the great trial lawyers.
Solicitor Ward compared the case to that of Cluverius, a young Virginia lawyer convicted of murder and hanged in front of cheering mobs in Richmond fifteen years earlier. Cluverius accounted for all but six minutes of his time on the night a girl he barely knew met her death in the Belle Isle reservoir, and still they executed him. Jim Wilcox had the better part of an hour to explain.
—The eyes of the world are on this jury, Ward proclaimed. Would it not be an eternal disgrace for North Carolina if this inhuman wretch went free to murder more of our precious girls?
In whispers, the prosecution painted the murder scene and the recovery of Nell’s body till there was not a dry eye in the Pasquotank County Courthouse. Hundreds strained to see some sign of guilt from Jim Wilcox.
—If the trees could talk, if the wind and stars could talk, they could tell who put her in that river, Ward con-eluded. But Jim Wilcox is the only one who can.
Wilcox sat unmoved and expressionless. The town was amazed.
When Lawyer Aydlett began his defense, three hundred people stood en masse and marched out of the courtroom by design. The word had been passed—there would be a walkout to break the force of his argument. Aydlett started anew, but within fifteen minutes the fire bell rang out, and those still in the courtroom ran to the tall side windows. The boiler wagon, followed by the hose carts, clattered down Main Street. But there was no fire.
Jim Wilcox sucked on a lemon—as if he had heard that was what Stonewall did in battle—and ignored the commotion.
Lawyer Aydlett said Jim had barely ten minutes to account for—hadn’t Roy Crawford told Ollie Cropsey at 11:30 that Nell and Jim were in the hall yet? Then, ten minutes or so later, Jim met Len Owens at a point that was a ten-minute walk from the Cropsey house, spoke briefly and nonchalantly, and walked on to the corner of Shepard and Road, where he was seen talking with two men just before midnight. It all timed out perfectly in establishing Jim’s innocence. There had been no motive —there had been no time.
—The pictures Jim returned which were undiscovered are probably at the bottom of the Pasquotank, Ayd-lett suggested. Miss Cropsey, distraught over the attentions Jim had been paying her cousin Carrie, walked across the rivershore road, down the pier that Hurricane Branch’s bloodhounds had tracked, and threw herself into the river and drowned. The sad, simple truth of the case was that Nell Cropsey’s death was suicide.
—Why would Wilcox have left all the doors to the Cropsey house open when Nell came out on the porch? Surely he would have closed them as a minimal precaution had he planned to murder Nell Cropsey. And why would he have waited so late in the evening, when he must have known Roy Crawford would be leaving shortly? Murder is not only highly implausible; murder has not been proven. The circumstantial evidence is not strong enough—you must acquit Jim Wilcox.
The town clock in the courthouse cupola struck five as Aydlett finished.
Jim Wilcox pulled out his gold watch and checked the time.
W. O. SAUNDERS
The judge was hoarse from the strenuous trial, and he rasped his instructions to the jury a week after Doctor Ike had given the opening testimony. Try the case as men, the judge said. Get up above public opinion, lest you do violence to your oaths.
Friday, March 21st, 1902, was a warm spring day in Betsy Town, and men and women stood about the street corners and hotel lobbies awaiting the verdict.
I heard toasts drunk to Jim’s execution.
The jury’s deliberation dragged like a wounded snake on into Friday night. A gang of laborers and stevedores got nearly worked up enough to attack the jury quarters in the Riverview Hotel and demand a verdict at once.
In a barbershop on Saturday morning, word was that the jury stood locked eight to four for hanging. Someone else said no, it was ten to two.
I heard a well-dressed out-of-towner say he hadn’t come to Elizabeth City for any damned foolishness. He had come to see Jim Wilcox lynched.
I saw Tom Wilcox running back and
forth across town, taking this one and that one aside for a quick word,
—Who are they? Tell me, goddamn it, or I’ll break you in half.
He was desperate to find out who the lynch leaders were, and there was no concealing it. I learned that Chief Dawson had a carriage waiting ready to spirit Jim out of town at a moment’s notice. Every nerve in town was on the stretch.
I’d never seen people act like this before. I had never felt that tight-gut feeling either, but it was powerful and contagious. There was no escaping or shaking it. I was a reporter doing a pretty good job for the first time out, but another feeling got to me that Saturday while the Wilcox jury was out.
I was afraid, and I wanted to go home.
OLLIE CROPSEY
I think we learn almost from birth the sadness of the tolling bell. Where we live now at the edge of town, the sound of the bells is very faint.
The town clock rang ten o’clock but didn’t stop, a signal, Papa said, that the jury was coming in at last after thirty-six hours. He left for the courthouse, alone in the moonlight.
Waiting up for Papa, I lay back on the lounge and closed my eyes. I tried not to weep over it any more, but I failed. I tried to be calm and tell myself it didn’t matter what the jury ruled. In my mind I passed judgment upon Jim and upon myself. I loved Nell deeply, and he took her from me and our family. I loved her, and I let her go.
You know what you have done, Jim Wilcox. And no matter what, you will suffer and you will pay even as I have.
Even as I.
JIM WILCOX
Oil-light shadows danced on the courtroom walls, grotesque distended images, and amid the flickering, a weird yellow glow fell on every face. Spectators trembled from suspense, while outside men waited with a coiled rope.
—Have you reached a verdict?
—We have.
—The prisoner will rise and face the jury.
So ordered, he stood like a statue, pale even in that light, and with a military precision turned and looked the jury full in the eye.
—What is your verdict?
—Guilty.
Jim’s father looked from the jury to the judge and back again, as if he had misunderstood. —In what degree?
He must pay, thought Nells father, to the full measure of the law.
—In the first degree.
Solicitor Ward buried his head in his hands. Lawyer Aydlett wept openly. Still Jim didn’t flinch, but rather walked without a tremor and stood before the judge.
—It is sadder for me than you, but I must sentence you on April twenty-fifth next to be taken from the county jail and carried to a public place between the hours of ten and three and hanged by the neck till dead.
He showed no reaction, nor any trace of emotion, and as the sheriff led him away to jail, the prosecutor said almost in disbelief
—He has the most remarkable nerve I ever saw.
Well I’m sick now, maybe with the TB again, and I’m sick of this town and how they whisper and point.
I been holed up in this room long enough.
It was no trouble to break in early this morning and get that shotgun. They say you don’t even hear the noise, so let somebody else feel guilty for a change—it’s no trouble to get real comfortable and wonder what they’ll make of it and put the muzzle tight up against my chin and just go on and pull the trigger.
Gene Betts was pulling a tire off a car when he heard the report of the shotgun. Old Jim’s shooting up the roof again, he thought. When he walked around back ten minutes later, he was staggered by what he saw through the back room window.
Jim’s head was shot away.
In the grimy back room were just a table and a bunk built into the wall. Two or three hard biscuits lay on the table. Over the mattress was a raggedy, soiled quilt, and at the foot of the bed an old overcoat Tuttle had given Jim. The pillow was soaked with brains and blood. Later someone found a small piece of skull and tied it to a string and hung it from a rafter in Tuttle s garage, a grim memento of Jim Wilcox.
W. O. SAUNDERS
Jim’s suicide evoked a certain amount of sympathy in Elizabeth City, and it stirred up the town’s old memories and old talk about the Nell Cropsey case. Some folks believed that surely this was proof of Jim’s guilt, an admission that he could no longer live with himself and the awful burden of his crime. Others took it to be the last statement from an innocent man scorned and disbelieved and hounded to the grave.
Then the dark stories came pouring forth, rumors and theories some of which had lain unspoken for years.
Among the most persistent was the notion that William Cropsey had killed his own daughter. It was a hair-raising thought, but even people who believed in Jim’s guilt were willing to entertain it out of some irresistible fascination.
In one version, Cropsey found Nell embracing his neighbor John Fearing—the very man whose advertisement had brought the Cropseys to the South—and as he attacked Fearing with a singletree, Nell stepped between the two men and caught the blow. Fearing and Cropsey then found themselves in an unholy alliance to conceal a double conspiracy—adultery and murder—and Jim, who had gone home hours earlier, was left to take the blame.
Yet William Cropsey is said to have stopped in at the Fearing home on his way back from the Wilcox house that night, and John Fearing, awakened and alarmed, joined Cropsey in his search.
Others heard that Cropsey came out onto the porch that night while Nell and Jim were still together and slapped her around in a violent argument. Jim left before it was resolved. Josh Dawson saw a light burning in the attic tower of Seven Pines during the long period of Nell’s disappearance, and he and others speculated that Nell was being kept, dying, up there in the attic. Clothier D. Walter Harris believed Cropsey had hidden her body in his icehouse for some time before putting her in the river.
Implausible as they were, these stories would not die.
Some heard a tale concocted by a pulp detective magazine that had Jim conspiring with Ollie’s suitor Roy Crawford and with Ollie and Nell’s younger brother Will. They kidnapped Nell, possibly with her approval, hoping to collect ransom enough to cover their gambling debts at a Norfolk horse track, but something went wrong—Nell was killed and abandoned to the Pasquotank. After all, hadn’t Roy Crawford gone near mad and shot himself in 1908? And hadn’t Will Cropsey poisoned himself in 1913?
And now Jim.
No one remembers much about Roy Crawford, but Will Cropsey’s bleak end attracted a great deal of attention. It seems he came home drunk and depressed one night in Norfolk. He had lost a job with one railroad several months earlier, and though he’d just hired on with another line, he was miserable with his wife and five-year-old daughter and was drinking heavily. He offered to shoot the two of them and himself, but instead, right in front of them, he sat and drained a bottle of carbolic acid and was dead in minutes.
I doubt it had anything to do with Jim and Nell. The Cropseys were a family whom tragedy had inexplicably visited twice inside of fifteen years. At the time of Jim’s death, they became a subject of public curiosity once again.
For years Jim had whispered to various ones in his family and around his Church Street haunts that he would tell all he knew before he died. And since he had never said one word at either of his trials—for Lawyer Aydlett did get him a second trial in 1903—the myth grew up that Jim knew more, much more than ever came out in court. He realized this, and he played on that myth. When word flew through town that Jim had killed himself, what everyone wanted to know was,
—Did he leave a note?
—Did he name the killer?
—Did he confess?
Kelly Tillet came into my office just after Jim’s death and told me Jim had done a lot of writing when he stayed at the Tillet place in south Pasquotank, and Jim had buried these writings in a tin box near the house. I made the mistake of printing Kelly’s hoax in The Independent, and when he took his wife back to the country they found their house ransacked, mattresses s
lit, downfeathers everywhere—even flowers dumped out of their pots by someone searching for whatever Jim might have written.
Some Kitty Hawk fishermen say Jim had drifted down to the Outer Banks to fish in 1933. One of these told of rowing out into the sound with him one summer night, where Jim staked and sank an oil bag with a box of writings inside. That fall, a great hurricane carried the stake away and the writings were lost.
I don’t believe it. If Jim had really wanted to do any writing, I think he would have gone on and let me put out that book with him in 1932. As long as he didn’t, though, he could always corral someone into listening to his sad story, because of course no one ever knew what he might come out with or when.
It was odd and ironic that a new coroner had been sworn in the day before Jim killed himself, no stranger to the dead man whose suicide was his first case. In 1901, as a member of Doctor Ike’s coroner’s jury, he had noticed a crucial swelling on Nell Cropsey’s left temple. In 1934, Coroner J. B. Ferebee, the barber, found only a cigarette butt, a fine-tooth comb, and two razor blades on Jim’s body—no letter, note, or diary either confessing or denying the crime that had wrecked his life.
Jim Wilcox, the silent lover, the despondent drunk, was dead. He had never joined the search for his lost Nell, and many thought he never mourned her, so cold and indifferent was his heart. And yet he kept a photograph of her on his prison wall, a lock of her hair in his Bible.
He had survived lynch mobs twice. His lawyer appealed his death sentence, and the state supreme court threw out the whole first trial because of the walkout and the false fire alarm. For months Jim was held in Pasquotank County jail awaiting a new trial. When some friends dynamited a hole in the jail wall through which he could have escaped, he surprised them and stayed put. He was going to get off in court, he said.
People fled Perquimans County in droves to avoid jury duty in that second, relocated trial in January 1903. But the trial itself was well attended, almost a replay of the first. This time, though, Aydlett was a spellbinder. When he finished his jury speech, he was roundly applauded. The jury deliberated twenty hours. When the verdict came in, both Jim’s and Nell’s parents were waiting at the Hertford depot to catch the train back to Elizabeth City. They got word over the station telephone that Jim had been convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to thirty years in prison. Governor Bickett pardoned him in 1918, but Jim pulled his own time right up till the morning he blew his head off with that shotgun.
The Mystery of Beautiful Nell Cropsey Page 13
