Ella Maud

by Nicholas Nicastro

  Jim was tried again, this time in a neutral venue in Hertford, Perquimans County. Everything had to be repeated, including the testimonies of their father, Ollie, and cousin Carrie. Ed Aydlett once again excoriated the slipshod performance of the coroners, and once again Jim made a show of his disinterest, this time by sucking lemons in the courtroom.

  This time there were no walk-outs, no false alarms, and no need for the militia to be called out. Jim was still found guilty, but the circumstantial nature of the evidence troubled the jury; on his conviction for second-degree murder, he drew a sentence of thirty years. This sentence stood up on appeal. Jim went to the State Central Prison in Raleigh, and Mary Cropsey faced a choice: to accept that Nell was dead and her murderer was not; or remain in her own prison.

  For the sake of her remaining children, she once again found the strength to move on. She remained fragile, however, leaving the rest of the family unsure whether they should ever utter Nell’s name again. It went unspoken for weeks, until she finally cried out at dinner, “Why do you never talk about our dear sweet Nell anymore? God help us if we ever forget her!”

  Ollie never recovered, and believed she never would. When Jim was sentenced to die, and her father and Uncle Hen broke out cigars to celebrate, she was lashed by guilt. When the conviction was voided, she was inwardly glad. But then she was afraid, because she was sure that the lawyers would never let her get away with that incomplete, misleading testimony a second time. There was no hiding behind that mourning veil now. And yet, to her disbelief, Aydlett again declined to handle her the way she deserved. He asked her about the parasol, and she again made the feeble excuse that she didn’t remember. And he left it that.

  She began to have trouble leaving the house. Her pitiful notoriety in the eyes of strangers was bad enough, for every member of the family had been transformed by their ordeal from unique individuals to bit characters in a piece of local lore. She was no longer Olive Cropsey now—she was just “the sister”. Worse were the chance encounters around town with members of the Wilcox family. The Cropseys crossed paths with Martha and Annie Mae on the streets, in shops, and in restaurants. They never acknowledged her. But merely seeing them left her unsettled and unfit to finish whatever business she had gone out to accomplish.

  The awkwardness threatened to boil over into an outright feud when Tom Wilcox filed an affidavit with the State Supreme Court, in support of his son’s appeal. He alleged that the jury in Jim’s original trial had been subjected to a determined campaign of intimidation. That reports on their debate—including the names of those inclined to acquit—had been written down and passed from the jury room windows to the mob below. That firm plans were afoot to lynch Jim Wilcox if he were exonerated, and that the jurors felt they had no choice but to convict.

  The document never mentioned the Cropseys, but William Cropsey took it as an affront to his honor. It particularly galled him because he took credit for the fact that Wilcox got a proper trial at all. “If it wasn’t for me he would have been hung from a tree last December!” he raged. “All it would have taken was one word. One word!”

  When the appeals court ruled that Jim would get a new trial, her father went a step further: “If I see that son of a bitch again, I’ll shoot him on the spot!” Fortunately for all concerned—and perhaps not by accident—Cropsey and Tom Wilcox did not cross paths again for many months.

  At last, moving day arrived. John Fearing came for a final inspection. As the adults talked in the parlor, Ollie’s little sister Mary took a pencil to the wall of the turret staircase and wrote:

  Fearing found her signature later, long after the Cropseys had left and he was about to sell the house. He was not usually given to tolerate children scrawling on his walls. He went up with a cloth to wipe it away. But the family’s sad story, and how the house had served as the stage for it, gave him pause. In the end he let the inscription stay. For it was at least in his power to make sure the memory of it—if not the girl herself—would never disappear.

  The new Cropsey residence on Park Drive had at least one advantage: Nell’s ghost did not haunt it. There was something about the new electric lighting, so copious and unflinching, that banished not only shadows, but memories. Never once did Ollie glimpse the arch of Nell’s back as she rounded a corner, or glanced at the top of the stairs.

  But she was still a presence. On the pretext of using them for hand-me-downs, Ollie opposed getting rid of Nell’s things. Instead, she packed them away in the attic. Sometimes, she would go upstairs, open the trunk, and bury her face in her clothes, just to be reminded of how she smelled. Uncle Hen caught her doing this once, making her blush to the very roots of her hair.

  There were other strange behaviors. She kept on wearing mourning clothes when the rest of the family had put them aside. Her father looked askance at her when he heard reports of Ollie coming out of Christ Church on McMorine St.. He worried to his wife, “Are we going to lose another daughter to some other congregation?” But it turned out she was only there to filch votive candles from the Episcopalians, which she used in the little shrine she had recreated for Nell in her bedroom.

  The new house had nothing like the room for a big potato-growing operation. Instead, her father specialized in fancy vegetables he could sell at a premium. He entered his best cucumbers and squash in competitions all over the county, and often won prizes for them. Sometimes he would simply wander the neighborhood, pockets stuffed with produce, showing it off to whomever, black or white, would open his door to him.

  Eventually he and Uncle Hen built a farm stand on the street in front of their house, from which they sold to housewives, picnickers and increasing numbers of day-trippers in horseless carriages. All the Cropsey children took their turns manning the stall, making bank out of oyster tins. Ollie did her part, sitting there in her widow’s weeds, sun-hat tied with a bow around her chin. Sometimes, she heard the customers whispering to each other as they cast pitying looks at her. She ignored these for a long time, until one day she heard a mother and daughter muttering in a way that failed to be at all private.

  “Yes, I am ‘the sister’,” she told them out loud. “I was the one who let her go. You don’t have to treat it like a secret.”

  The mother looked to her daughter, and together they whirled around to go back to their automobile.

  “You’ll have to pay for that rutabaga!” Ollie called after them.

  A different sort of encounter happened in the summer after Jim Wilcox went to prison. Ollie was at the stand, reading, when a young man with balding head and wire spectacles approached her. He glanced over the inventory with his hands in the pockets of his gray suit. Then he looked at her, eyes appraising with professorial detachment.

  “You’re Olive Cropsey, aren’t you?” he asked.

  “Who’s asking?”

  “I publish under the name W.O. Saunders. Maybe you’ve heard of me?”

  “Can’t say that I have.”

  “My, that’s a handsome cucumber,” he remarked. “I might just have to take this fellow home with me…”

  “That’ll be a nickel.”

  He produced the coin from the watch-pocket of his vest.

  “My condolences about your sister,” he said. “I was at the trials. Both of ‘em…”

  She just stared back at him. He went on, “We’re all sure justice has been served. Some kind of justice, I guess. But a trial is never the whole story, is it?”

  Her heart was thumping.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Nothing specific. But if you ever want to share anything—anything at all, like your memories of your dear sister—I’d like you to know I’m at your service.”

  He held out a business card. When she didn’t take it, he laid it on top of the green peppers.

  “You can contact me at any time,” he said.

  “I think I’d like you to leave.”

  “Of course. Thank you, my dear. Lovely vegetables!”

&nbs
p; When he was gone Ollie retreated to the house. She was half-frantic now, stomach twisting, neck beaded with sweat. ‘Why would this stranger feel entitled to ask me that?’ she demanded of herself. ‘Have I done something? What could he possibly know?’

  Her father was waiting for her in the parlor.

  “What did that one want?” he asked.

  “The whole story!” she cried, and threw the business card at his feet.

  “The whole story?”

  “I told you. Didn’t I tell you?”

  “Is he a cop?”

  “A reporter! ”

  Prying the hat off her head without untying the bow, she started up the stairs.

  “Ollie, come back—”

  “I told you!”

  “Ollie, where is the till?”

  “Still out there!” she shouted as she turned at the landing. “Don’t ask me to go out there ever again! I’ve had it with lies! I won’t be party to it!”

  “I won’t have you speak that way. Do you hear?”

  No answer. Cursing, Cropsey retrieved Saunders’ card and went out to shut up the stand.

  Ollie never made good on her threats. She never called Saunders or anyone else to unburden herself. She kept Nell’s fate a secret from the rest of her family. It remained something she and her father shared, both the most precious thing and the thing that could not be borne. In time, the guilt and the loss hardened into a tumor of misery—an intrusion that came to feel as familiar to her as her own reflection. A few years after the trial, she already spied gray streaks in her hair, and sprays of wrinkles where she furrowed her brow. Her taste for ornaments withered, as frivolous accessories did not befit a mourning that never ended.

  Rarely seen on the streets, she drew no gentlemen callers. Instead, she served as chaperone for her younger sisters Mary and Carrie Elizabeth, and a severe one at that. Her presence, in her regular suit of black, cast a funereal pall; the girls begged to have anyone else along, even the embarrassing Uncle Hen, instead of Ollie and her silent reproofs.

  A series of premature deaths, connected only by the Cropsey tragedy, seemed to confirm she was trapped in some kind of indefinite purgatory. In 1904, less than a year after Jim’s second trial, one of the jurors committed suicide by cutting his own throat. The man, Lewis Felton, was said to be “well-known” and “highly respected” in the environs of Hertford. Believing himself to have been cheated in a deal over a horse, he became increasingly despondent; his body and that of the horse were found together less than a mile from his home. He had cut the horse’s throat with a pen-knife and hung the bridle neatly from a tree. He then proceeded to cut himself so deeply that he severed the windpipe.

  In 1908 she heard that Roy Crawford, the young man who had called on her on Nell’s last night, was shot dead by his own hand. She had neither heard from him since the first trial, nor heard any details of his life after. Tongues wagged that he was more involved in Nell’s disappearance than he had let on, and that he couldn’t live with his knowledge of it. Ollie knew this to be nonsense, of course; she had not exchanged a significant word with Roy Crawford even when he was courting her. Why would anyone believe him to be privy to her most painful secrets?

  Five years later the family was struck by tragedy again. The troubles of William H. Cropsey Jr., her younger brother by a few years, had long been known. Due to heavy drinking, he had drifted from job to job, and struggled to support his wife and daughter. His condition became so serious that his wife was forced to go to all the bars in south Norfolk, pleading with the saloonkeepers not to serve him. On his last night he came home drunk anyway. The couple quarreled. William retreated to the bedroom, and was seated in a chair when she went in to check on him. His head was bowed, and in his hand was a bottle of disinfectant.

  “Will, what’s the matter? Are you hurt?” she asked.

  Without answering, and without looking at her, he tilted the bottle and downed most of the contents. His wife screamed, his five-year old daughter cried. A doctor was summoned quickly, but it was too late: Will Cropsey, the next youngest Cropsey child after Nell, was dead at twenty-eight.

  Only her father, Uncle Hen and William Douglas went up to see to the arrangements. She and her mother were in no state for a train trip, much less to view the body. Ollie, at least, did not have to switch her wardrobe to black again.

  After this, people began to speak of the Cropsey “curse”. To the common mind, the accumulation of dead bodies could mean only one thing: something was not right with the way the case was resolved. Even if Jim Wilcox did it, others must have known more than they let on, and could not live with what they knew. Had Roy Crawford seen something when he left Ollie that night—something so horrible that he was sworn to silence? Did Will Cropsey know something about the fate of his sister that turned him to drink?

  Early in ’08 an astounding story made the rounds in the out-of-town papers: William Cropsey was dead! Moreover, he had made a deathbed confession to murdering his daughter. When friends showed him these stories, Cropsey was too amused to conjure much outrage. “Goes to show you what they’ll put in print!” he declared, and tore the papers to shreds.

  And yet rumors continued to circulate much closer to home. Stories about heavy deliveries of ice to the Cropsey residence in the time before Nell’s body was discovered. Accounts of an eerie light that had been seen burning, around the clock, in the turret of Seven Pines. Had Nell been kept prisoner up there, in punishment for defying her family over Wilcox? For Nell was such a pretty girl, and her father was a known hothead, and—well, decent folks left speculation at that. But out on the waters of Albemarle Sound, and in the logging camps of the Great Dismal, dinnertime talk often turned to the case, and the unspeakable ways it might have unfolded.

  The burning lamp, of course, was easily explained: Mary Cropsey had been in the turret, keeping watch for her daughter. Of extra ice, William Cropsey shrugged. Let them gossip all they want. The man who had killed Nell—the party that was truly responsible—would spend most of his life rotting in prison. That was all that mattered.

  II.

  ‘We believe James Wilcox to be guilty of the murder of Nellie Cropsey, but we do not believe that he has been legally convicted of the crime. In other words, he has been sacrificed to the clamor of public opinion, and this is a very grave reflection upon the administration of justice in North Carolina.’

  —Petersburg Index-Appeal (Va.)

  After his first conviction, misgivings for the way Jim had been treated became utterable. Whether or not Jim was guilty could be a matter of debate, but few on either side felt the reputation of the town had been enhanced by the tragedy. “The feeling against Wilcox is cooling,” observed the correspondent for the Concord Times. “Many leading citizens of this town would like to sign a petition to the Governor asking that the sentence be changed to life imprisonment. Some assert that the Cropseys would sign it.”

  A few months later this assertion was put to the test by the State Supreme Court in Raleigh. The Economist reprinted the full text of Chief Justice Furches’ ruling on the appeal, which Ollie read with trembling hands:

  ‘In reading the record of this case, it hardly seems possible that the jury could have given that cautious and vigilant attention to the evidence which the law required…In their immediate presence, one hundred people in their deliberate purpose to prejudice the rights of the prisoner, committed a great wrong against the commonwealth and a contempt of the court…Soon thereafter while the same counsel was addressing the jury, a fire alarm was given near the court house, which caused a number of other persons to leave. The court is of the opinion and so finds the fact that these demonstrations were made for the purpose of breaking the force of the counsel’s argument…The prisoner must not only be tried according to the forms of law, these forms being included in the expression, the law of the land, but his trial must be unattended by such influences and such demonstrations of lawlessness and intimidation as were present on the former o
ccasion. The courts must stand for civilization, for the proper administration of the law in orderly proceedings. There must be a new trial of this case.

  The ruling once again tore the town in half. The critics believed themselves to be vindicated. The rest felt the dignity of the town insulted anew. There was talk that the saloons would be closed again (they were not). The final straw was broken when, shortly after the ruling, a note was found posted on the gate of the county jail:

  He was not moved by Saturday night, but there was no ignoring the writing on this particular wall. On the eve of the Hertford trial, the prisoner was transported to the train station by closed carriage. For the short trip, Sheriff Reid brought enough guards to keep order, but not so many as to attract attention. The Norfolk & Southern special was held until the carriage arrived, boiler stoked, spitting steam. The second the prisoner was aboard, the engineer released the brakes, and “Vox Populi" got its wish.

  Applications for a governor’s pardon of Jim Wilcox began as early as 1904, with the required notices in the newspapers. A petition, arguing that the case against him was circumstantial and the verdict preordained, drew a surprisingly large number of signatures from around the state. But the campaign gathered no momentum, being vigorously opposed by the Cropsey family and Uncle Andrew in particular. “The mere thought Jim Wilcox may get out of jail, when he has put in only one year of the thirty he was sentenced to serve, is enough to drive me distracted,” Judge Cropsey declared in the papers. “If he serves one day less than thirty years there is no sense of justice.”

  Wilcox’s application finally reached Governor Locke Craig in 1915. In the twelve years since his imprisonment in the old State Prison, Wilcox had contracted tuberculosis, and it was feared that he didn’t have much time to live. The petition for pardon bore five thousand signatures from as far away as Pennsylvania; visitors from distant places like Cuba were inquiring about the case, being intimately familiar with the details of Nell’s disappearance. Uncle Andrew, meanwhile, had passed away in 1911. Ollie—who was still reading newspapers at the time—refused to make any statement for or against clemency, and no other living relatives stood against it. Public opposition was therefore slight, amounting to only one letter.