The Mystery of Beautiful Nell Cropsey

by Bland Simpson

  The coroner lifted out the female organs.

  —She was a virgin, he said.

  That would quiet the gossips. Death would have been God’s just punishment had she been pregnant or unchaste, but now, all the more righteous indignation could come down on Jim Wilcox.

  The three doctors worked on her torso while the jurymen were gathered at her feet. One of them, Ferebee the barber, looked up the length of the dead girl’s body and, after an undertone conversation with the other jurors, ventured,

  —Doesn’t her head look a little fuller on the one side? Ferebee was pointing to a swelling of the left temple.

  —It’s a dropsical form of flesh, one of the doctors said. Being in the water caused it. She’s swollen all over, look.

  He then put his finger on the nipple of Nell Cropsey’s left breast and pressed it down. Those who saw were startled—a nervous snigger ran through the crowd, belying both shame and fascination. It was done by a doctor, surely he had the right.

  —But there’s a great deal more flesh there than on the head, said Ferebee the barber.

  —Well, you do it then, said the doctor.

  Ferebee pressed his finger on her left temple and his touch there left an indentation. Then he, too, put his finger on her nipple and pressed down on her breast just as the doctor had done and with the doctor’s sanction.

  —Good deal of difference, the barber said.

  By that time they had been at their grim task for several hours—ten men in a windowless barn on a cold, sunny day just past Christmas ‘01, cutting apart the body of Beautiful Nell Cropsey, who lay stripped naked on a slab table as two thousand people strained to see.

  Chief Dawson closed the barn doors.

  The ten men went for lunch.

  JIM WILCOX

  I was out laying for ducks. I was down gunning in south Pasquotank when they come out and got me. Deputy Reid called to me across the field and when I got over to him he told me what was what.

  —She’s dead, Jim. Stillman and Long found her this morning in the river. I got to take you in.

  We got on his buckboard and started for town, and I was right scared, knowing we’d be going by the Cropsey house. Deputy Reid said there was a crowd and the town was riled up but good. I hated to leave the country, the way things were running against me in town.

  I’ve kept on coming down to the south of the county to lay low and stay out of the way. Right when Hoover went out last year, Kelly Tillet and his wife Sudie gave me a room and I stayed on down there a while. Kelly and me fished out of his fish camp at Frog Island there where Big Flatty runs into Albemarle Sound.

  They made me feel right comfortable. I don’t know what I’d of done without Kelly and Sudie and the rest. Their daughter married Charlie Eves who always bought me packs of Bull Durhams that we’d sit and roll. My mama was Mattie Eves, and all those Eves were kin to me. The first one in Pasquotank was a Union soldier who come back to live after the War, and there’s Eveses there yet.

  My cough was getting worse but it weren’t a bad time last fall. We played checkers and I worked crossword puzzles in the newspapers. Pearce Eves even learned how to work that solid brass puzzle lock I’d made in prison. There were a lot of squirrels, so me and some of the younger ones’d go out squirreling. They were all good to me. I could come and go down there as I pleased and nobody asked questions.

  I was real taken with Kelly and Sudie’s baby girl Roselyn. I made her a rattan sort of bedstead out of vines from the woods, and once I tied a sucker to a string and swung it in front of her and told her I’d let her have it if she’d say Jim Wilcox. I wanted to hear her call my name, but all she could say was Coocox, Coocox, bless her heart. I told Sudie when I die bury me under the pear tree out front of the house so my ghost could watch over that little girl.

  One evening I went to Charlie Eves’s house where he and Ethelyn was picking May peas on the porch. I was aching bad to talk. Charlie and me went out and sat under the apple trees.

  —They say I killed that girl, Charlie.

  —Course you didn’t, Jim.

  —I think I know who did. When I was up at Central, somebody come to see me, come in when I was polishing up the electric chair. I told him the man that killed Nell Cropsey was walking the streets of Elizabeth City that very minute with money in his pocket. If I could just get a little time with Ollie, but they keep her locked up and won’t let me get to her.

  —You know, Jim, a lot of folks think her old man did it.

  I’d heard that story, but I didn’t say so. I wanted to hear it the way it’d come down to Charlie Eves. So I let him finish.

  Then we come in from the apple trees and I went on my way—that weren’t all so very long ago. All my cousins and kin down there been good to me. Most of em weren’t even born that day when Deputy Reid arrested me—for abduction he said.

  —Well, now, Jim. Aren’t you a handsome fellow for a girl to go and drown herself over?

  That was a queer thing for him to say, and so I kind of laughed and said,

  —Ain’t I, though?

  Boy, let me tell you there was trouble in town when we got there. Elizabeth City has just plain had it in for me all my life.

  THE AUTOPSY(AFTERNOON)

  Ferebee the barber and the other coroner’s jurymen, upset over what they had seen and not understood, went to see Solicitor Ward during the lunch break and told him there was a bump on Nell Cropsey’s head and what did he think?

  The solicitor went straight to Doctor Ike and wanted to know if she’d drowned or was it murder? Hard to say. They’d seen no external injuries, but there was no water in her lungs either. Maybe he’d better have another look. The coroner rounded up his examiners and they all returned to the Cropsey barn between three and four that afternoon. The crowds opened a path for the men who were determined to clear this thing up for once and all.

  —We got to get more light on that head.

  —Turn her on around so her head’s up by the door.

  As they shifted the body, several of the long dark curls fell out. One of the jurymen carefully removed the rest a handful at a time. They noticed again how the top layer of her skin was loose and slid like an oiled cloth over a gun barrel.

  Doctor Ike cut all the way around her scalp.

  When his scalpel struck her left temple, about a tablespoon of thick, black blood oozed out. The men leaned in closer. He removed her scalp. They could plainly see a round, bluish-tinged bruise a little larger than a silver dollar.

  He sawed through her skull and took the top of her head off. The decayed brain ran out like pus, and the men reeled back from the table and the immediate, unbearable stench in that airless barn.

  —That settles it, said one of the doctors, and Nell Cropsey’s rough passage from this world was ended.

  The remains lay slit open, the vitals exposed and the head half cut away, and she was naked yet but for the black silk stockings. Next to her lay her dark brown curls all in a pile. The two thousand onlookers were still there. The doctors would, of course, put her back together for burying. Then they and the jurymen would retire and reach a verdict.

  The inquest was over.

  W.O. SAUNDERS

  I’ve known this town right well for a long time now, and if there was ever a time when it was out and out berserk, it was that weekend after they found Nell Cropsey.

  Then and during Jim’s trial.

  Though for a while there, it didn’t look like he was going to need a trial, there were so many anxious citizens bent on saving the state the trouble and money.

  When Deputy Reid brought Jim in from the country, the wagon had to go right smack through the crowd that was milling around enjoying the autopsy Doctor Isaiah Fearing was holding there on the Cropsey property. Apparently the air was thick with threats against him, and they could have easily gotten him then. But that particular crowd was so possessed by its psychosexual interest in the course of the autopsy that Jim was more a distraction than a mai
n feature.

  Not so with the drunk gangs downtown. Our town had filled up with rabble. Country boys and country men had come into town to drink and find a target for the fume and rage left in their guts by a failed crop or a dead mule or bad whiskey or a cold woman.

  Deputy Reid drove the wagon through the muttering crowds and carried Jim across town to the mayor’s office. It must have been one hell of a harrowing ride for that pair.

  There was open talk in the streets for lynching Jim Wilcox that very night, and the county sheriff expected trouble. He wired the governor at four p.m.:

  Miss Cropsey found in river. Threats of violence against Wilcox. Notify naval reserves to be at my command.

  N. G. Grandy, Sheriff

  At seven the return wire came from Raleigh:

  Your telegram received. Naval reserves ordered to obey your orders. Maintain the law at all hazards. Keep me fully informed by wire.

  C. B. Ay cock, Governor

  The huge fire alarm bell atop the firehouse rang out, calling out the reserves to protect the most roundly despised man in all Pasquotank. Within minutes picket lines were stationed, and the Third Division, Naval Battalion, North Carolina State Guard, known locally as the Pasquotank Rifles, bivouacked that night beneath the pecan trees in the courthouse square.

  The Rifles, who had won a gold medal at the 1896 Edenton fair for best-drilled corps, were rattled. The alert had come so fast that no one had had time to get into uniform. And there was a fear abroad among them as they felt the confused hurt of suddenly finding themselves at blood odds with their friends and neighbors.

  The mayor ordered the bars shut down.

  Nell Cropsey’s body was placed in a metal casket and, after nightfall, stored in a vault in the old Episcopal cemetery not far from the Wilcox home. Doctor Ike and his coroner’s jury moved to the Academy of Music to deliberate.

  And at seven-thirty, this telegram went to the governor:

  All quiet now. Jury has not yet returned a verdict.

  N. G. Grandy, Sheriff

  Friday, December 27th, 1901, was a wild day for Elizabeth City, and it was not over yet.

  TALK

  The bars were closed, but there was no shortage of liquor for the gangs that were roaming the streets. There were gruesome rumors abroad about Nell Cropsey.

  —Her neck was broke.

  —The crabs and fish eat up her flesh something awful.

  —I hear they got her over in the Pool family vault. —Let’s go have a look.

  Spurred by whiskey and morbidity, the drunk mob barged into the Episcopal cemetery and trampled through gravestones, cold December slabs in the torchlight, and they searched vault to vault.

  —Hell, it’s locked.

  —What?

  —The damn vault’s locked. —Maybe she ain’t here.

  —That’s right. Maybe they carried her back over to her folks’ place. That’s what they’d do, ain’t it? So they could be with her just these last days?

  —When’s the burying?

  —Funeral was supposed to be tomorrow at five. The doctors kept examining so long they moved it back to Sunday at two. Don’t know anything about the burying.

  —What if she’s over at the house? You think we—

  —No.

  —Hell.

  W. O. SAUNDERS

  Doctor Ike and the others agreed in secret session that the town was too heated up to take their report, and they decided to wait till morning to release it. There was already some garbled report circulating, and Doctor Ike wasn’t about to play into the hands of the mob. Finally the gangs broke up and went home.

  It was a shrewd move, and I think I’d have done the same thing had I been in Doctor Ike’s place.

  But Saturday was market day, and Elizabeth City was full to brimming again. Curious farmers and their families massed outside the Academy of Music, along with the hotheads from the previous night. They quieted to hear the report read. I saved the clipping that quotes it verbatim:

  We, the coroner’s jury, havingly summoned and been dusworn by Dr. I. Fearing to inquire what caused the death of Ella M. Cropsey, do hereby report, from the investigation made by three physicians of Elizabeth City, and from their opinion and also from our personal observation, that said Ella M. Cropsey came to her death by being stricken a blow on the left temple and by being drowned in the Pasquotank River.

  We have not yet investigated nor heard any testimony touching as to who inflicted the blow and did the drowning. We are informed that one James Wilcox is charged with same, and is now in custody. We recommend that investigation as to his or any one else’s probable guilt be had by one or more magistrates in Elizabeth City township, and that said Wilcox be held to await said investigation.

  I. Fearing, M.D., Coroner

  B. F. Spence

  Robert J. Mitchell

  J. H. LeRoy

  P. S. Shipp

  Maurice Wescott

  J. B. Ferebee

  Their actually naming Jim Wilcox fascinated me—they were in effect using the report as a surrogate indictment. No one would try a thing like that nowadays, but back then it wasn’t questioned. To me it reflects the extent to which the town had made this one strange case into a crusade almost from the beginning. Why this time? It seemed as accidental, as passionate, and every bit as unpredictable as a love affair, which in a way it was. The death of a beautiful young woman, Poe once wrote, is the most poetical topic in the world.

  Everyone who heard the coroner’s report had his or her worst angry suspicions confirmed. It was murder, they said, and it was Wilcox that did it.

  Again there were open expressions against Jim at every turn. There was the constant reminder of black crepe bunting draped in the store windows and on office doors. There were the militiamen, standing guard out of uniform, but with Winchesters and pistols loaded.

  As for Jim Wilcox, he occupied the top half of the two-story steel jail cage, having the run of four adjoining cells there, while six Negroes huddled in the bottom and wondered whether they too might get caught in the lynch wrath that could easily carry all before it. There were laws against the practice on North Carolina books, but, at the time, no lyncher in the state had ever been punished.

  They say Jim was indifferent and unconcerned, that even as armed guards kept the crowds a block back from the jail, he said to one militiaman,

  —You might as well go on home. I ain’t afraid of a lynching.

  I’d say Jim Wilcox has been one of the most talked-about people in this town. And I wouldn’t be so sure he was as cool as all that, however bluff he may have tried to act.

  His sister Sadie paid him a visit that Saturday afternoon and spent a half hour telling him about the coroner’s verdict and how the town was more worked up than ever. When she left, tears streaming down her face, he was shook and nervous.

  The local solicitor, George Ward, was already putting together what he must have known was a circumstantial murder case against Jim. He told the press that he feared the mob was heating up again and that Jim might not last the night. He noted that though the bars remained closed, there was a lot of drinking going on and a seemingly constant supply of liquor. The crowds were growing more aggressive and truculent. Solicitor Ward looked out on the town that had elected him and said,

  —All that mob needs is a leader.

  OLLIE CROPSEY

  Papa was upset and angered by the coroner’s report. He thought it went much too easy on Jim. The evidence was strong against him, but it was still hard to believe he would hurt Nell. That he would kill her. They had been sweethearts so long. But it’s true, he didn’t so much as lift a finger to help find her. Papa asked the Committee to take over the arrangements for Nell’s funeral. None of us had strength enough to face that.

  The night before the funeral, a great crowd of men came to Seven Pines and called Papa out on the front porch. They told him they were going after Jim Wilcox with a rope. They said they had friends and supporters among the r
eserves and deputies who guarded Jim, and that these would stand aside or even join them when the time came. Once they got Jim out of jail they would hang him from the nearest stout tree.

  They wanted Papa to lead them.

  Papa said no.

  He said no and thanked them and told them to let the law take its course. Though no one wanted to see justice done so much as we Cropseys, he would not join them in this lawless act.

  So many, many times Papa has wished, not that he had led them, but that he had simply nodded yes. They were in such a fever, he said, and they would have torn the jail apart to get at Jim.

  To me, one of the queerest things about the whole tragic affair is this: on the day the coroner’s verdict practically indicted Jim, the night before poor Nell’s funeral, my father stood out on the porch where Jim may well have killed her and told the lynch mob no.

  My father saved Jim Wilcox’s life.

  THE FUNERAL

  The Methodist Church bell began to toll the moment the undertakers carried Nell Cropsey’s casket from Seven Pines, placed it in a rubber-tired hearse, and drove off. Jim Wilcox heard the bell and asked his jailer if there was going to be much of a crowd at the funeral.

  Despite an intermittent, driving rain from the winter storm that had kicked up, fifteen hundred people assembled in the Methodist Church, and hundreds more lined Church Street on either side.

  They took off their hats when the hearse arrived and the pallbearers, the Committee men, lifted the black walnut casket from the hearse. Weeping in the church increased as they bore the black box down the center aisle. Beneath the three green-and-white sprays, where none could see, was a small inscription, At Rest.

  The bell stopped tolling.

  One of the ministers cautioned the congregation to hold its judgment of Jim Wilcox. Be guided, he said, to a peace and equanimity beyond this moment.