The Mystery of Beautiful Nell Cropsey

by Bland Simpson

  One of my sisters and I were sitting in the living room when they arrived. Everyone was cold and stiff and Jim was no comfort at all. When Mama walked in she went straight to Jim and put her hand on his shoulder.

  —Please tell me where Nell is, she said.

  —I can’t tell you anything about where she is, Jim said.

  —You left her crying? Mama asked. —Yes.

  —What was she crying about?

  —I told her I was going to quit her, Jim said.

  It was quiet then for a moment.

  —Had you ever seen Nell cry before, Jim?

  He said yes, he had, back in October during the big church meetings when the evangelist came to town. I had already heard them arguing then and I knew they were falling out. Carrie, our cousin, had just come for a visit from Brooklyn with Uncle Andrew, who was a judge there. Jim said he had told her back then that he was going to quit seeing her, and she had cried.

  —I don’t believe it, Jim, Mama shook her head. I just don’t believe it.

  Deputy Reid spoke up and asked me to show him how it had been the night when she disappeared. I walked into the dining room, which was just behind the living room on the same side of the house, and the deputy followed me.

  —That’s where I sat, I said and pointed to a chair. I showed him where Jim had sat in the little rocker between the corner stove and the door to the hall. Then I stepped into the front hall just like Jim had and peeked back in and said,

  —Nell, can I see you out here a minute? Just as he had.

  We all went out on the front porch and Deputy Reid asked Jim to please show where Nell was standing and in what position. Jim went to the right side of the piazza, put his right hand up on the porch post there, and leaned the right side of his head against his hand. That’s how she was, Jim said, leaning against the post like this and crying.

  —Where were you? asked the deputy.

  Jim stood on the second porch step. He said he told Nell twice to go into the house to keep from catching cold. He lit a cigaret and told her again to go in, that he was going to meet some men in town, but she kept crying and said, I don’t care. Go on. So he left her and headed for town after being out there for ten or fifteen minutes altogether. He said that was all he could remember.

  Then Jim and Deputy Reid left.

  Mama was crying and saying she didn’t believe Jim at all and how could he be so?

  I shivered to remember the postcard Mama had written her mother in Brooklyn just two days before Nell disappeared, saying

  I have lost all fear of the number thirteen. For more than a month we have sat down to table, thirteen of us —Will, our nine children, Carrie, my brother Henry, and I. And there is no indication of the ill luck that is supposed to follow the unlucky number.

  Now every morning Mama was walking all down by the river, by the summerhouse, and every evening, too. She spent the rest of the time sitting upstairs staring out her bedroom window or up in the cupola tower keeping her vigil for Nell. And I wondered why, oh, why, Lord, had I let her leave the house with Jim Wilcox?

  TOWN MEETING

  On Saturday night, November 23d, 1901, the local telephone operator called every preacher in Elizabeth City and asked would the preacher mind announcing in church Sunday morning that there was going to be a meeting that night at the Academy of Music. She had been put up to it by some prominent townsmen.

  A few well-placed words from the pulpits, and seven hundred men filled the downtown theater to find out what was going on about Nell Cropsey.

  What was being done?

  The theater occupied the upper rear of the Bee Hive One Price department store building, which had gone up in the late nineties on the northwest corner of Main and Poindexter. The store took up the whole ground floor; there were offices in the second floor front, and a small ballroom above them. Lawyer Ed Aydlett worked out of there. The theater itself was one of those that in a few years would be called a vaudeville house.

  Vaudeville was a nascent form, child of commedia, minstrel show, operetta, and melodrama, being born to troupe with sets, costumery, innumerable hats, masks, and disguises, to troupe by whatever means of transport could get the players to the next town that could boast a palace as plainly grand as the Academy of Music in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. It had a swooping balcony, half a dozen fat black heat stoves down each side wall, and a small proscenium stage with a fluted gold column on each side to frame the action that vaulted forth from or fell flat upon the boards once the great velours were pulled apart.

  But tonight’s drama was dead serious.

  There was a wild alarm over the girl who had been missing without a trace for four days now, and seven hundred men crowded the Academy to see and hear it all for themselves.

  —Funds should be raised to clear the mystery, said Professor Hinton, the balding, bearded schoolmaster.

  —We must appoint a committee of men who are not tied down to any party or faction in town, said Harry Greenleaf, the hardboiled civil engineer. Men who will go ahead fearlessly and regardless of who may be hurt and bring this crime home to the man responsible for it.

  There was frequent applause.

  —I want this committee to go to work unfettered in any way, said lawyer Ike Meekins, the town’s former Republican mayor. If they so decide then I am willing to see the money I contributed spent on tar and feathers. We must sift this crime to the bottom and find out who carried this girl away.

  The local board of commissioners had already established a two hundred dollar reward for evidence with which to convict the murderer or abductor of Nell Cropsey, and a hundred dollars to whoever found her dead or alive. Now the citizenry at large was funding a full-scale search.

  Hats passed through the crowd. Hands reached deep into pockets, and those without cash or coin wrote pledges on whatever paper scraps were handy. Contributions ranged from twenty-five cents to twenty-five dollars, and in just a few minutes’ time the report came from the stage that two hundred thirty dollars had been collected to fund the work of a citizens’ committee.

  All of a sudden the law was in the hands of everyone and no one.

  They were a vigilante force, and they chose Harry Greenleaf to lead them. They didn’t particularly like him, but he was well known and he was respected. Greenleaf was one of those who had come down from the north to help open up the Albemarle to the world, and by now he had lived in Elizabeth City for twenty-eight years. He had surveyed the Elizabeth City and Norfolk Railway in 1876-77, and he had led the gandy dancers in building yet another railway between Mackey’s Ferry and Belhaven down below the Albemarle Sound. And he spent a month back in the Great Dismal Swamp fixing Colonel Byrd’s hundred-and-fifty-year-old boundary between Virginia and Carolina. He was head of the Aliigator Lumber Mills in Dare County, and he had been involved in running the Camden Telephone line from Elizabeth City to Norfolk.

  Harry Greenleaf lived right next door to the courthouse in a big white house with columns and a front porch. He wasn’t particularly popular with these people, but he had done a lot for their town. He would lead them, and they would get to the bottom of the matter.

  So several hundreds of men who bonded elsewhere as Masons, Odd Fellows, Knights, or Woodmen, in secret society realms of prophets, regents, wizards, dictators, had now created from their number another special society, a Committee of Five, not tied to the old codes and traditions of medieval burial societies but dealing instead with a real mystery, with secrets perhaps unfathomable. And there were real and growing fears about what they might find and have to do, for this whole affair of Nell Cropsey and Jim Wilcox had caught them off guard and pervaded their town with a fearful confusion.

  From the same stage where Charles C. Vaught’s Comedy Company, featuring Miss Tucker and a clever band of comedians, had just completed a three-night stand, and with the blessing of the town’s business and political leaders, this vigilante outfit self-invested as the Committee of Five began its work.

&
nbsp; JUDGE ANDREW CROPSEY

  He was an important man and one of the Old Dutch Brooklyn Cropseys, so the New York Journal and American sent a writer down to Judge Cropsey’s office at Number Three Chambers Street in New York when they got word his niece was missing.

  The Judge’s daughter Carrie had written him the morning after Nell’s strange disappearance, and the letter reached his Blythebourne home Saturday. He had telegraphed immediately for particulars and got a special delivery response from his brother William on Monday morning, November 25th. Nell Cropsey was still missing as of Saturday, the message said. The whole country round was stirred up and there was talk of lynching Jim Wilcox. The Judge wired again, and the reply came right back early Monday afternoon—still no trace of Nell.

  —It’s the strangest thing I’ve ever heard of, Judge Cropsey told the Journal man.

  —I know my niece very well. She’d never consent to an elopement, nor would she take her own life. In her letter, Carrie says the impression of the family is that Nell was seized, carried off into a boat, possibly thrown in the river or held captive perhaps in the Dismal Swamp—the suggestion is maddening to those who love her. Nell and Carrie were to have left on an Old Dominion Line steamer Saturday last to come up for a family Thanksgiving. And I understand that two young men, old friends of the family, were to come up on the same steamer—I see no reason for publishing their names, said the Judge.

  More than the papers were interested. Letters and wires flooded the Judge’s home and the homes of the many other Cropsey relatives who lived about Brooklyn.

  —What do you hear of Nell?

  —How can we help?

  —The Lord will guide this lamb safely back to the flock.

  —Who would harm her?

  —Our prayers are with you.

  —Our prayers are with you.

  Then came two more alarming telegrams from the North Carolina Cropseys. From his brother:

  Nell not found. Ascertain the cost of sending a good detective here from New York. Important. Wire immediately.

  W. H. Cropsey

  and from his niece, Alletta, one of Nell and Ollie’s older sisters:

  Have not had one word of poor Nell yet. Have made a most careful search for her without result. Will let you know as soon as we hear anything. We are almost wild.

  Lettie

  What could the Judge do? He had taken Carrie down to that river town in Indian summer for a long visit with her cousins, and now this. He had planned for a cheerful Thanksgiving reunion at their Rockland County farm, and now this.

  —There’s a strong suspicion of Wilcox, I hear, Judge Cropsey told the Journal man. Those young Southerners are hotheaded fellows and there’s no telling what they would do in an emergency where love is at stake.

  OLLIE CROPSEY

  I tried to comfort Mama. We all made an effort to believe Nell was still alive, but it was no easy task with the boats dragging the river, back and forth, day after day, just offshore in front of our house.

  Every thought about what might have become of my sister was horrible. Papa thought Nell was alive but where, he had no notion. Chief Dawson had searched a hundred of the colored houses in southwest Elizabeth City garret to cellar with no luck. He said he thought poor Nell had been murdered and that whoever had done it carried her downriver in a boat and threw her overboard out of range of the search.

  Suicide was mentioned.

  Nell was about to embark on a long winter’s trip to Brooklyn, our ancestral home. She and Carrie had been very popular students together at Pratt Institute, and they were full of anticipation over their journey home. Nell and Jim were on the outs, but that was from her side, not his. She wanted to be rid of him—I could never seriously consider the idea that my sister Nell would have killed herself over Jim Wilcox. A writer from the Charlotte newspaper called at our home during the search and I spoke with him, told him there was no reason for Nell to have thought of either suicide or eloping with Jim Wilcox.

  —I have no suspicion of intimacy between Nell and Jim, I said. They put it on the front page.

  In my heart I thought Jim had hidden Nell somewhere because during the search he would walk by Seven Pines, our home, carrying bags of groceries and grinning up at the house as if he wanted us to know he was taking food to Nell wherever he was keeping her.

  Either he really was or he wanted us to think so—he was that cruel.

  My little sister Caroline was only a few years old when Jim courted Nell, but she always said she could remember that Jim was mean to our cats and sometimes pinched her on the back of her legs. She was so frightened of him that when Governor Bickett pardoned him, Caroline insisted that her husband move their family away. She told me she was afraid Jim Wilcox would come back and get her like he got Nell.

  We were all frightened of him.

  After Nell had been missing for a week, the searchers brought out an old iron cannon that Papa said was probably left over from the Civil War when the federal gunboats sailed upriver and shelled and occupied Elizabeth City. They set the old cannon on the rivershore and fired it over and over out across the Pasquotank River, trying to raise Nell’s body to the surface by percussion.

  Papa said the men were complaining that the dragging equipment was inadequate and that the draglines mostly had small fishhooks not designed to grapple a body. Lord, I thought, if Nell were in that black river and they should hook her!

  They seemed to try everything and still never find her, so we kept hoping. They even tried putting quicksilver in a bread loaf, believing it might float to the spot in the river where Nell’s body lay. They threw sticks of dynamite into the river from the drag boats.

  I winced as the shore by Seven Pines rocked with one explosion after another.

  And I winced at what turned up in the papers. A fortune teller in Norfolk was saying Nell had been taken away by boat and was alive and engaged to be married. Deputy Reid, who later became our sheriff, was scoffing at a rumor that Jim had paid someone to carry Nell away.

  I kept up with these reports and grieved. And I climbed the stairs to the cupola tower where Mama kept her vigil and tried to be some comfort to her. What had ever let me nod yes to Nell and let her go?

  JUDGE ANDREW CROPSEY

  It was the first of December, 1901, when Judge Cropsey in New York opened the letter that read:

  I am only a poor workingman but I am honest. As I was going out of town the night your niece disappeared, I was astonished to hear a remark followed by many threats. I judged there were in the party two, but to my astonishment, there was only one. As I was not fifteen yards away from the person, that was about four hundred yards away from the house, and the time was 11:45 p.m. Be sure that I am not giving you any wild talk, but the truth as I think the man who deserves punishment ought to be locked up. The night I refer to, I was not 400 yards away from your brother’s residence, and I know more than some people think I do.

  Desperately yours,

  George Hellenback

  More information was to be had if the Judge would wire or write Hellenback in care of

  General Delivery

  The Bourse Building

  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

  Instead, he wired Chief Dawson in Elizabeth City, who found a lodging record indicating that a man with a similar-sounding name, one A. E. Wellenbeck of New Milford, New Jersey, had been in town on November 19th and 20th. Wellenbeck turned out to be a drummer for the New York Molasses Company, and he denied being in Elizabeth City as well as all knowledge of the case. The Philadelphia address proved a dead end.

  Judge Cropsey found and employed a detective named Connor, who promptly headed south to join the search.

  JIM WILCOX

  I was minding my own business working there at the shipyard in early December ‘01, when along come Chief Dawson and arrested me again and hauled me off to the courthouse downtown for a second hearing.

  There was a howling mob followed me and the Chief all the way. My
daddy, when he heard about it, went and got Lawyer Aydlett to speak for me in court. After all, we’d hired him before when my uncle was on trial for killing the pollkeeper down at Newbegun. Aydlett was the biggest damn Democrat in these parts and we Wilcoxes were Republicans, but we hired him because he was good.

  Lawyer Aydlett weren’t much of a speaker, but he was tough—he hit hard and didn’t ask no quarter. He took my case right into that second hearing and I listened while people talked about me and how I acted and then I really began to get the drift of what people were thinking and saying.

  They were after me from the start.

  —Jim’s a bit cold and aloof, lawyer Aydlett told the court, but that’s just the way he is by nature. He and his father—you all know Tom Wilcox, used to be sheriff. Lawyer Aydlett smiled a bit about that because he’d helped beat my daddy out of office. Anyway, Aydlett said, Jim and his daddy are no less concerned than anyone in town for the welfare of Miss Cropsey.

  I sat there and listened to old man Cropsey saying how I weren’t myself that night. He said I looked at my watch a lot and was absorbed in some faraway proposition. Well, Mr. Cropsey went up to bed almost as soon as I got there to Nell’s that night. I’d like to know how he knew those things when he weren’t even downstairs with us, unless Ollie told him. If I could of just had ten minutes with Ollie I know I could straighten this whole thing out. I’ve tried since I come home from prison but they won’t let me see her. They keep her locked up in that house out on Southern Avenue.

  Cropsey told that hearing that my behavior since Nell disappeared was indifferent, that I didn’t care to search for where she was because I already knew.