The Mystery of Beautiful Nell Cropsey
Page 14
His two sisters and a small crowd were there when Jim was buried in Hollywood Cemetery, Elizabeth City, on December 5th, 1934. The preacher read a little from John 14:
Even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him; but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you.
I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you. ... Arise, let us go hence.
It was a funeral without music.
All my life I have pondered over this story—there is only one thing more to add. Two weeks before he shot himself, Jim Wilcox telephoned me. He said,
—Mister Saunders, I’m ready to talk if you want to come over.
I had waited for that moment since the first trial. It was a cold night, so I bundled up and went on over to Tuttle’s garage, where for several hours he talked about that moonlit night in November 1901. My family was waiting up for me when I got home, and I was able to tell my wife and children that I finally knew what really happened. But the price of Jim’s telling me was my solemn promise to keep to myself what he revealed in confidence, thirty-three years to the night after Nell Cropsey vanished.
I never told a soul.
Men in a truck following watched the Norfolk-bound automobile swerve left off the Canalbank Highway and run a hundred feet along the shoulder before plunging into the Dismal Swamp Canal. It took several hours to dredge the car out of the eighteen-foot-deep canal that afternoon in late April 1940. The driver must have had a stroke or a heart attack, lost control of the vehicle, and then drowned, it was ruled. W. O. Saunders carried the secret of the mystery of Beautiful Nell Cropsey with him to his death beneath the dark madeira waters of the old boatway.
Chronology
1876
Jim Wilcox born in Pasquotank County, eastern North Carolina.
1880
Olive (Ollie) Cropsey, third child and daughter, born into prominent Brooklyn family, descendants of early Dutch settlers of New York.
1881
Ella Maud (Nell) Cropsey born in Brooklyn.
Elizabeth City and Norfolk Railroad opens.
1884
W. O. Saunders born in Perquimans County, adjacent to Pasquotank on the west.
1894
James Wilcox, Jim's uncle, kills pollkeeper at Newbegun in south Pasquotank and pleads self-defense. Convicted of murder the next year after sensational trial, he is acquitted by the state supreme court the year following that.
1898
William Cropsey moves his family to Pasquotank County from Brooklyn. Jim Wilcox, son of the Republican county sheriff, takes up with Nell Cropsey.
1899
Rebuilt Dismal Swamp Canal opens after three-and-a-half years.
1901
Nell Cropsey vanishes on November 20; she is found thirty-seven days later, dead, in the Pasquotank River. Jim Wilcox is jailed and guarded by reserves called out by the governor. Nell's father disperses the lynch mob.
Elizabeth City's population triples since the coming of the railroad.
1902
Jim Wilcox is convicted in Elizabeth City of first-degree murder and sentenced to hang for Nell's death. A mistrial is declared by the state supreme court because of public disturbances during the trial.
1903
Wilcox is retried in Perquimans County, convicted of second-degree murder, and sentenced to thirty years in prison. The Cropseys leave Seven Pines. Ollie begins reclusion.
1908
Roy Crawford, Ollie's caller on the night Nell disappeared, shoots himself to death.
W. O. Saunders launches newspaper, The Independent, in Elizabeth City.
1913
Will Cropsey Jr., one of Nell's younger brothers, poisons himself to death in Norfolk, Virginia.
1918
Governor Bickett visits Jim Wilcox at mountain prison farm, pardons him several weeks later. Jim returns to Elizabeth City on Christmas Eve.
1932
Jim and W. O. Saunders plan to collaborate on a book about the Cropsey case, but Jim backs out.
1934
Jim summons W. O. to his room to talk. Two weeks later, Wilcox commits suicide.
1937
W. O. shuts down The Independent.
1938
William H. Cropsey dies.
1940
W. O. Saunders dies when his car swerves into the Dismal Swamp Canal.
1944
Ollie Cropsey dies.
Map 1. Elizabeth City, North Carolina
Map 2. Eastern North Carolina and Tidewater Virginia
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
One afternoon in the late 1950s, my mother, Dorothy Page Simpson, took me over to the Pasquotank River to see the deserted, vine-covered Cropsey house, my teacher Audrey Austin having just read our fourth-grade class in Elizabeth City the Nell Cropsey chapter from John Harden’s The Devils Tramping Ground and Other North Carolina Mystery Stories. And my late father, attorney Martin Bland Simpson, Jr., took me along with him many times into the same Pasquotank County Courthouse where Jim Wilcox once stood trial.
Two decades later in Elizabeth City, my great-aunt Jennie Simpson Overman and local historian Fred L. Fearing both graciously toured the community with me in search of the Cropsey story. Among those I spoke with about the case there (and elsewhere) were: N. Elton Aydlett; Caroline Cropsey Bartron (Cedar Creek, N.C.); E. O. (Jack) Baum; Garland Dunstan; Ethelyn Tillet Eves; Wilson Eves; Rob and Lei Fearing; Nancy Meekins Ferebee; Sudie Tillet Fulcher; John Harden (Greensboro, N.C.); D. Walter Harris; the Arthur Hemphills; Margaret Fearing Jackson; B. Culpepper Jennette, Jr.; Jack Jennette; Chief of Police W. C. Owens; Daniel W. Patterson (Chapel Hill, N.C.); Gladys Cropsey Perkins; Billie Saunders Smith; Keith Saunders (Washington, D.C.); Edna Morrisette Wood Shannonhouse; the Dwight Sylvesters; Evelyn Dawson Tuttle (Havelock, N.C.); Sam Twiford; and Boots Ziegler.
Several special collections yielded invaluable materials—court records, local newspapers, commercial appeals—that helped me both to reconstruct the story and to establish a sense of coastal Carolina life around 1900: the North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, under both William S. Powell and H. G. Jones; the Sargent Room at the Norfolk Public Library, Norfolk, Va.; the North Carolina State Archives, Raleigh, N.C.; and the private library of coastal historian David Stick, then at Southern Shores, N.C., now housed at the Outer Banks History Center, Manteo, N.C. These books also proved useful: Pasquotank Historical Society Yearbook, volumes 1-3; On the Shores of the Pasquotank, by Thomas R. Butchko; A Pictorial History of Elizabeth City, N.C., by Fred L. Fearing, Edward Fearing, and Gloria J. Berry; and The Independent Man, by Keith Saunders.
In Washington, D.C., Frank Queen went through turn-of-the-century big-city newspapers with me in the Library of Congress Periodicals Collection. And in Brooklyn, N.Y., Homer Foil joined me in looking for Cropseys in the Long Island Historical Society’s library and in the old graveyard of the New Utrecht Reform Church. Others helpful in the North were Charles Lood and the Reverend Pangburn of New Utrecht Reform Church, Catherine Van Brunt, James Cropsey, William Keppel, and Henry C. Smith.
Dr. Page Hudson, Jr., former chief medical examiner of North Carolina, reviewed the medical evidence in the 1902 trial transcript, and journalist-novelist Loyd Little also worked through the intricacies of the case with me.
Novelists Doris Betts and Lee Smith allowed me to present material from early versions of this work to their creative writing classes at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Literary agent Roberta Pryor was taken with the story from the first, and my editor David Perry has shown once again how deeply he shares my and my family’s love for eastern North Carolina and all its wonder and mystery.
Jerry Leath Mills has read and commented upon every draft of this work; for his encouragement, wisdom, and friendship over twenty-five years, I am forever in his debt.
To these people I offer my deepest gratitude, to all the living and the dead.
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
Beautiful Nell Cropsey, from the New York Journal and American
Jim Wilcox, from the Philadelphia Inquirer
Seven Pines, from the Charlotte Observer
W. O. Saunders, from the North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The Narrows, from Kramers: 90 Years in the Lumber Business in Elizabeth City, North Carolina; unpublished, illustrated typescript compiled by Frank K. Kramer, 1967; copy in the North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The Three Theories, from the News and Observer, Raleigh, North Carolina, January 7th, 1902
Carrie, Ollie, and Nell Cropsey, from the New York Journal and American