The judge ordered the jury sequestered and advised the jury officer not to let them get near any whiskey. But before they left, Solicitor Ward stood and Jim Wilcox stood and Ward said,
—These men will be called upon to pass between your life and your death. You may challenge them, any of them, and you shall be heard.
It seemed to me Jim blanched ever so slightly.
This was all more exciting than upsetting to me at the time. I didn’t know Jim then.
I didn’t know what lay in store.
JIM WILCOX
That W. O. Saunders kept after me ever since I come back from prison, wanting me to do a book about it with him, fifty-fifty.
If I’d just tell my side he’d write it up and print it in his newspaper shop and sell it. All I had to do was talk.
I finally said I would, thinking who knows, maybe there’d be some money in it for me.
I told him I wanted to talk where nobody’d hear us and he said we should take a boat ride upriver toward Camden. I was supposed to meet him down at the wharf one morning in the summer of 1932, but I changed my mind and didn’t go.
A few days after that, my friend Cliff Madrin told me he’d spoke with W. O., who was sorry I hadn’t met him but the offer still stood. It was a rainy night sometime later he got Cliff to bring him over to the shanty where me and George Madrin were living then. We heard a car door slam. I looked out and Cliff was running up through the rain. Couldn’t see who the driver was.
Cliff come in dripping wet and said, It’s W. O. again, Jim. I weren’t much for talking that night so I lit out the back way.
He finally did catch up with me, where I don’t recall, and I told him it weren’t no use—everybody’s expecting me to say I killed Nell Cropsey and I ain’t going to say it. After that, W. O. Saunders pretty much left me alone.
W. O. SAUNDERS
I got there early the first day and sat at the press table, sharpening my dozen pencils over and over. An hour before court convened, the courtroom was filled to suffocation.
All the standing room was taken. The court floor creaked under the shifting weight of so many bodies. A dozen or so boys sat around the judge’s bench at his invitation, while others, more industrious, raided the anterooms for ballot boxes, which they hawked as makeshift seats for up to a dollar apiece. The town’s welldressed women had a section to themselves within the rail. I took it all in.
Looking fresh and even relaxed, Jim came in with the jailer. The jury, having spent a sleepless night locked in the mayor’s office, looked the worse for wear.
The first witness was the coroner.
Doctor Ike Fearing had been Pasquotank County coroner for three years, and even though he was young and green, the court declared him a medical expert. Solicitor Ward led him back to the day they’d found Nell Cropsey in the river, back through every gruesome detail of her public autopsy, and the people hung on every word.
Doctor Ike told how they stripped her naked and cut her wide open.
He said she was a pure virgin.
He told about blood in Nell Cropsey’s swollen left temple, and how the brains ran out.
—Have you an opinion from what you saw what produced that swelling on the left temple? Solicitor Ward asked Doctor Ike.
—Objection! Lawyer Aydlett, leaping to his feet in an instant, was overruled.
—It was caused by a blow.
I ought to give Aydlett his due here. I don’t know who prepped him, but he was fired up and had a strong grasp of the medical facts. The court overruled him as he doggedly objected to virtually every opinion Doctor Ike ventured. I could see he was going to have a field day with the young coroner when his turn came. It was something to watch.
—Have you an opinion, asked the solicitor, as to what kind of instrument would probably have produced a blow of that appearance?
Jim Wilcox, who they said carried a blackjack and bragged about it, chewed gum and looked bored.
—Objection! said Aydlett.
—Some round, padded instrument.
Objection, objection overruled.
—What effect would such a blow produce upon a person of her constitution and physique?
—A half hour of unconsciousness.
Objection, objection overruled. Solicitor Ward laid his medical case before the court.
—Coroner Fearing, what is indicated by the absence of water in the stomach, the lungs, and pleural cavities, and by the absence of blood in the venous, or right, side of the heart?
—Death, said Doctor Ike clearly and without hesitation, by not being drowned.
In the years since then, there’s been plenty of time to reconsider the coroner’s whole line. I’ve learned that drowning is a very complex pathological problem, and I’ve reached the conclusion that there is no reliable way to fix the cause of death in a body which has undergone as much postmortem change as this one. Nell Cropsey was in that river as many as thirty-seven days—too much time had passed to tell.
How was anyone to know? After all, that was the turn of the century in one small corner of the barely civilized world. When Doctor Ike and his fellows examined her and told the town she had been stricken and drowned, they believed him. When he changed his mind and laid it all on a suspected blow to the head, they changed their minds with him.
That afternoon it was Aydlett’s turn, and he bore down on Doctor Ike like a northeaster on the Outer Banks.
—Look at that paper, Aydlett said, holding a copy of the coroner’s report in front of the coroner himself.
—Is that your signature?
—Yes, said Doctor Ike.
—Did you find any marks of violence upon that body at that examination?
—No. Not at the first examination we made.
—Then you had a conversation with Solicitor Ward here and went back to the Cropsey barn?
—Yes.
—With the same doctors?
—Yes.
—Same jury?
—Yes.
Lawyer Aydlett stopped to let his point sink in.
—Is it not a fact, he asked, that in drowning victims there is frequently no blood in the right side of the heart?
—Sometimes.
—Then you cannot rule out drowning as a possible cause of death simply because there is no blood in the right side of the heart?
—No, said the coroner.
—Is it not a fact that forty-eight and seven-tenths percent of drowned people have no water in their lungs at all?
—I think so.
—Then you did not mean to tell the jury this morning that because there was no water found in Miss Cropsey’s lungs, it was positive evidence that she did not drown?
—No.
Solicitor Ward must have been furious. Aydlett had backed the state’s chief medical witness into a corner and was closing in.
—Now, Doctor, would not a bruise be about the same in appearance if it occurred just a few minutes before or after death, and would it not be difficult to tell whether a bruise was received ten or fifteen minutes before death or in the drowning struggles?
—That would very likely be about the same, the coroner allowed.
—Is it not a fact that the medical books you have read lay it down that bruises or marks found upon a body in the water must not create a hasty suspicion of murder?
—I think they say something like that.
—Have you ever read of an autopsy on a body which had been in the water longer than the body of Miss Cropsey?
—I don’t think I have, Doctor Ike answered.
—Does not Taylor, in his medical jurisprudence, lay down this, that after the lapse of five or six weeks, even if the body is underwater, no practitioner at the present day would think of reaching final conclusions? The length of time creates doubt and uncertainty as to the cause of death, does it not?
—No. Doctor Ike was contentious. The weather has a great deal to do with it. It was very cold weather, and the body was in a perfect sta
te of preservation.
—Do not Reese and Taylor controvert your position, Coroner?
—Yes.
—Then you tell this jury and this court that you have never seen a drowned body before, if this was not one, and yet you set your opinion against the authority you have read?
—Yes.
Aydlett fired away at Doctor Ike with a line of questioning designed to confuse the young coroner and discredit his findings. Doctor Ike was on the stand a day and a half—the court stenographer gave out after the first day, and they had to beg him to stay on—and Doctor Ike’s concentration wilted, but he never wavered in his certainty that Nell Cropsey had been dealt a death blow that night by Jim Wilcox.
About that blow to the temple. While most of the blood in a dead body decomposes, some blood will always settle in the lowest, most dependent point of the body. If Nell Cropsey had been lying on the river bottom with her left temple at the lowest point, she would have ended up with a bruise there, exactly like the one she had. There’s another little something I’ve become aware of in these intervening years. In the case of a male killing a female, the method of beating or striking the woman’s head is rare. It is very doubtful to me that this was the method in which Nell Cropsey was murdered, if she were murdered. Had it been, it’s doubtful still that one blow would have been enough to kill her. The most common way in which men kill women, and a very difficult method to detect, is strangulation.
It was going to be a long trial. You could see it in the faces of the jurymen, who were being kept at the Riverview Hotel with no women and no whiskey and the whole town watching.
TALK
—You hear when Chief Dawson went to Wilcox’s house to get him that night there was wet clothes hanging on a peg on the back of Jim’s door? He must of carried her out into the river and dumped her body to have wet clothes like that. I forget who I got that from.
—Nell Cropsey never more than just put up with Jim Wilcox. She had practically sent him packing for good. Why, she’d even asked her cousin Carrie to tell Jim she had no more use for him.
—Wilcox was in an ugly mood that night—you know he said all over town that Nell Cropsey would never go to New York?
Word spread, whipping up the townspeople and unleashing the darkness in their hearts. Along the wharves and in the warehouses and textile mills and canneries and brickyards, over what few telephone lines the town had, the word spread of Jim’s certain guilt. And there was talk aplenty in the fields, for it was planting time in Pasquotank.
They were a conservative people, normally, a practical and law-abiding people who had built their town hard by a river and made it the most prosperous place in eastern Carolina, hard-working people who had turned the primeval swamps into truck farms and a riverbend into a town.
But the December fevers had returned with a fury. The rumors went to work on them in the shops and mills and saloons and kitchens and parlors and in the bedrooms. They wanted Jim Wilcox to pay for the death of Beautiful Nell Cropsey, and their talk convicted him out of court.
Women talked secretly of dressing as men and joining the lynch mob that would certainly form should Wilcox win an acquittal. One of the bolder publicly berated Lawyer Aydlett.
—If Wilcox is freed, Ed Aydlett, I hope the mob will string him up to the nearest tree—and I’ll be willing to help.
Men were irate when they heard that one of the jurors had said he was opposed to capital punishment. One man was nearly struck and beaten in a barroom because he hesitated to express his opinion about Jim Wilcox.
An impassioned youth wandered about town soaking it all up. He went to the telegraph office and wired his editor in Norfolk:
Jim Wilcox is a man without friends. It is an ominous sign.
OLLIE CROPSEY
Saint Patrick’s Day was my day to go to court.
There was a cold, heavy rain falling, just as there had been during Nell’s funeral. There was that banshee wind again, just as it was the night we lost her.
Mama woke me early and I dressed slowly in my black suit. I was frightened and numb over what had to be done. Papa held my dark high-collar coat for me and Mama said, Wear your black veil.
So many were there it was quite warm in the courtroom. I couldn’t speak loudly enough for them to hear me, so I lifted my veil. They all leaned forward and stared.
I heard myself telling the story of a family who once lived and prospered in a beautiful part of a great city and how this family uprooted itself and came to live in a house with a tower and porches beside a wide dark river. Then I heard the dogs barking and my uncle calling my father to get his gun and I felt the bed and she wasn’t there. And I cried, Don’t shoot, Papa, Nell and Jim are out there yet!
I wept.
For how long I don’t know, and when I recovered my composure and looked up, the people in the courtroom were frozen and silent. Jim Wilcox never took his eyes off me. I only saw him once more in my life.
I will not mourn him.
Carrie, Ollie, and Nell Cropsey
W. O. SAUNDERS
For the longest time there was only the sound of the sobbing girl. The crowd had hung breathless on her every word and was moved. The judge himself was visibly affected. Ollie Cropsey was tall and slender, with pretty hands and, beneath her high-piled hair, a white swan neck. She was a lovely young girl—to me she was a vision. No one coughed, no one stirred, no one said a word. The emotion behind her tears was so pure than any remark would have been a blasphemy against the sovereignty she held over that moment.
Now if this trial had anything like a comic relief, it was Cale Parker, who testified that afternoon.
He’d shot off his mouth so much and changed his story so often that by the time he got on the stand, he was a public laughingstock whom no one believed. All he would allow was that he’d seen a man and a woman of about the same medium height and that there had been a second man walking some ways behind them—right in front of the Cropsey house, November 20th, 1901. It had been a bright moonlit night and the top was down on Parker’s buggy, but he said he didn’t recognize the man he saw with the woman. And he had known Jim a good ten years or more.
It turned out that before the trial Nell’s father had taken a New York detective to see Parker. From a rough diagram they’d learned how and where Parker had seen a woman resting her head on a man’s shoulder near the Cropsey home that night. But Parker’s own brother claimed he could prove that Parker was over at his house before Nell ever stepped out onto the porch with Jim. I would have been inclined to dismiss Parker altogether, except for Carrie Cropsey’s testimony. She had gone up to bed between ten-thirty and quarter to eleven and had seen a buggy pass by some ten or fifteen minutes later. Now that could have been Parker’s buggy. And if more time had elapsed than Carrie remembered, Parker was there at just the right time. As to what he saw, if anything, you could take your pick.
Beyond that, there was only speculation.
Before the trial, Solicitor Ward floated the story that a Negro named Thompson was prepared to swear he saw Jim Wilcox cross the road just in front of him carrying a limp young woman toward the river. Thompson had been holding back because he was afraid Jim would kill him. He could have been the other man Parker saw.
Thompson never testified.
And there was the rumor that a Negro—Thompson? —would take the stand to disclose a conspiracy between certain well-known persons not theretofore mentioned in connection with the case. That witness never materialized, either.
I caught up with Parker in the street outside the courthouse after he testified. He was in a big hurry.
—It’s reported, I said, that you told your wife you saw Jim Wilcox dragging the body of a woman toward the water.
—I told her some time after, when this thing came out, that I saw somebody might be him but I thought nothing of it. That nigger that works for me—he tried to get me into a terrible mess. I got to be going.
And Cale Parker took off down Main S
treet.
I went back to the press table and watched Jim Wilcox even more closely. Everything was against him and yet he sat through the whole business as if he were the most disinterested spectator. I had read up on Lombroso’s theory of the born criminal and decided maybe that’s what Wilcox was—a throwback, a reversion, a congenital killer.
The eighteen-year-old with a sensational murder case for his first job had a big imagination. There was plenty to feed it.
I asked around and didn’t hear one favorable word about Jim. The Norfolk papers reported heavy wagering there on the trial’s outcome: bets of hundreds of dollars, with odds two to one that if Jim got the first degree he’d break down on the gallows and name his accomplice. The feeling in Elizabeth City was that the evidence was inconclusive, but still public sentiment grew stronger and more bitter against Jim Wilcox as the trial ground on hour after hour.
A strong current of denunciation of Jim ran through William Cropsey’s testimony on Tuesday, March 18th. When he stepped down from the stand, the audience broke into cheers and thunderous, protracted applause. Judge Jones gaveled hard and threatened to clear the court.
Then it was the defense’s turn to call witnesses, and the crowd was going to get what it came for—Jim Wilcox’s firsthand account of what he did between eleven and midnight that night. Probably no more than a handful outside of Jim’s family was prepared to believe a word he’d say even under oath, but everyone wanted to see how this cold creature would behave on the stand.
Jim stunned us all.
I bolted down the center aisle ahead of the rest, raced to the wire office on Poindexter Street, shoved a dictionary in front of the telegrapher and told him to send it till I got my story written. The other reporters were plenty heated at the way I’d tied up the only telegraph line out of town. I wired the Dispatch in Norfolk a story the gist of which was this:
E. F. Aydlett, defense counsel in the most widely publicized criminal case in North Carolina history, will neither call witnesses nor present evidence.
The Mystery of Beautiful Nell Cropsey Page 12