Dead and Gone: Classic Crimes of North Carolina

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Text originally published in 1954 under the same title.

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DEAD AND GONE

CLASSIC CRIMES OF NORTH CAROLINA

BY

MANLY WADE WELLMAN

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

DEDICATION 4

FOREWORD 5

1—THE GENERAL DIES AT DUSK 8

2—ARSENIC AND OLD FAYETTEVILLE 20

3—THE PREACHER AND THE GUN 31

4—THE CORPSE IN MUDDY CREEK 44

5—WHERE ARE YOU, KENNETH BEASLEY? 55

6—POOR’ OMI 65

7—A BULLET FOR NIMROD 76

8—THE LIFE AND DEATH OF CHICKEN STEPHENS 84

9—TWO SONGS OF THE SCAFFOLD 94

1. For Now I Try That Awful Road 95

2. Bow Your Head, Tom Dula 104

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND SOURCES 113

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 115

DEDICATION

To

Those Who Helped

FOREWORD

PEOPLE BEGIN TO SEE, pronounces Thomas De Quincey in his lecture On Murder Considered As One of the Fine Arts, that something more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed—a knife—a purse—and a dark lane. Later in the same work, he develops the viewpoint: "Everything in this world has two handles. Murder, for instance, may be laid hold of by its moral handle (as it generally is in the pulpit, and at the Old Bailey); and that, I confess, is its weak side; or it may also be treated aesthetically, as the Germans call it—that is, in relation to good taste."

This attitude would have seemed curiously hyper-sophisticated to the forthright North Carolinians of the nineteenth century, when most of the events considered here took place. Yet these ten murders were each the object of tremendous and widespread interest among the masses of people, who, Tolstoi repeatedly assures us, are the critics most to be respected. Nor was this preoccupation due to any rarity of homicides there and then. For instance, from 1811 to 1815, North Carolina courts tried eighty-nine charges of murder, at a time when the state’s population was less than 600,000, with only occasional small urban concentrations and no notable reputation for neuroses. Nor does that figure include manslaughters or unsuccessful attempts, or cases of escape from justice, or duels—frequent, those last, in an era of strong political rivalries, when statesmanship tended to walk hand in hand with marksmanship. To discuss all of the state’s murders that might meet De Quincey’s exacting standards would necessitate, not a volume, but an encyclopedia. And so it is contemporary interest which, more than anything else, has dictated the choices for this collection.

I have deliberately omitted several recent cases that excited great public interest and illustrated vividly the night side of human nature. Public inquiry into breaches of the law is, of course, the duty of the police, the courts, and the juries of the state, and the reporting of crimes is a legitimate concern of newspapers. But the historian may be excused if he refrains from noticing crimes of such recent date that their recounting may needlessly wound the feelings of living persons who may have been innocently involved.

The earliest date, then, among crimes presently reported is 1808, and the most recent is 1914. Of all the victims—they include, among others, a Confederate general, a lovely orphan girl, a pathetic little boy, and a highly offensive political boss—perhaps two, and no more, might have survived to this time of writing had their slayers been less pressing with their attentions. Dead, too, are most of the criminals, accusers, witnesses, man-hunters, and others directly concerned. Nobody is apt to suffer agonies of the spirit if reminded of this felony or that.

Four of the murders were committed in North Carolina’s piedmont, three in the coastal regions, and three in the mountains, which, be it suggested, sums up to something like geographical impartiality.

As to motivations, it is gratifying to establish that only two men were killed for the sordid purpose of gain. Four were crimes of vengeance, and three were what F. Tennyson Jesse describes as murders of elimination. The tenth murder was for reasons of jealousy, and those reasons were, as the evidence will show, not particularly well founded.

Of those who committed the murders, three were women; and, at risk of seeming to adopt an outworn journalistic convention, it must be recorded that two of these, also two unfortunate feminine victims, possessed exceptional beauty of person. The writer of these essays and his grave advisers are well aware that any woman involved in a major crime, whether actively or passively, is apt to be described as breathlessly lovely. Yet they, and the readers too, must accept the contemporary descriptions of these ladies, which are specific and circumstantial enough. By way of balance, the third murderess was ugly to a surpassing degree, though she was devotedly admired and courted in spite of that, and was publicly compared to the great exemplar of her avocation, Lady Macbeth.

Justice seems to have been plain but moderate in the times when these various tragedies befell and their authors were sought out for punishment. Only three of the ten killers suffered the death penalty, all of them by hanging, all of them in the mountains, and all of them manifestly and inexcusably guilty. Two others escaped the consequences of their deeds by committing suicide. There were three acquittals. One defendant so exonerated was later lynched, and to what extent he deserved lynching the reader may judge for himself. In one case the death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, with later release on parole. One murder, and that perhaps the most cunningly and daringly devised in North Carolina’s whole catalogue of violence, was never solved by officers of the law.

Only nine cases, then, came to trial, and the courts dealt with them ably and justly under the state statutes. Of the nine defendants, seven successfully sought change of venue. Six verdicts of guilty were appealed to the State Supreme Court, and for what degree of fairness and intelligence the justices disposed of those appeals the published court records may be consulted.

Since the various cases approximate separate narratives, no effort has been made to offer them in any deliberate order, chronological or otherwise, except where two murders in the mountains showed certain curious similarities that made convenient their inclusion together in a sort of double-barrelled essay.

The facts have not been embroidered with romantic conjecture. Direct quotation, for example, is always from some contemporary account, with, in several instances, indirect quotation made direct by substitution of first person for third. Nor has there been need for embroidery.

For in every instance, the records of the crime and its investigation and trial go far to show us how North Carolinians lived at a certain time and in a certain place. The most obscure person, as slain or slayer, comes to the fixed attention of his fellows, and injuries and trials are singularly vivid in their expositions. The study of a well-documented murder case may tell us as much, perhaps, about those concerned as do the reports of a political campaign or of a marching, fighting army.

In short, these people died, but before they died they lived, and here is an honest effort to prove it.

Manly Wade Wellman

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

May 1, 1954

1—THE GENERAL DIES AT DUSK

THE HOT SATURDAY SUN went down over Old Washington, August 14, 1880. General Bryan Grimes was going home to Grimesland in Pitt County, to his broad white house with its pillared porch and its lofty chimneys and its door that locked with a seven-inch key. Surely that evening he did not think much about his old acquaintance, violent death.

In 1861, when he was a grave-mannered plantation baron of thirty-two, Bryan Grimes had been a member of the convention that voted North Carolina out of the Union and into the Confederacy. Thereafter, Bryan Grimes had joined the Southern army as an infantry major. His regiment had been shot to pieces behind him at Seven Pines—450 killed and wounded out of 520. Promoted colonel of the survivors, he recruited them to 327, of whom 250 fell at Chancellorsville. More blood and bullets at Gettysburg, more still in the Wilderness; a brigadier, he survived Sheridan’s cannonades in the Shenandoah Valley and, a major general, led the last charge of ragged gray infantry on the morning of Appomattox. Then, because he must, he gloweringly accepted the facts and terms of Lee’s surrender, the furling of the Stars and Bars, the oblivion of the Confederate States of America.

A thousand had fallen at his side, and ten thousand at his right hand, but it had not come nigh him. Importunate death had seemed always to shrink back from Bryan Grimes’ bearded battle-scowl. A musket ball in the foot, a rib-cracking kick from a horse—those were the only war injuries he suffered.

Fifteen years of peace had calmed but not greatly mellowed the man who, says Douglas Southall Freeman, was lacking in no soldierly characteristic. Avoiding Reconstruction’s bitter squabbles, he had labored to improve his five thousand fruitful acres at Grimesland, had shown warm affection to Charlotte Grimes and their eight sons and daughters, and had been bleakly polite to most other fellow-creatures. Josephus Daniels remembered that Grimes was fair-minded without suavity toward tenants and poor neighbors—forty-acre farmers like Jesse Parker and Oscar Griffin and Sam Dixon, colored patch-dwellers like young Dick Chapman. A very few close acquaintances knew the warm, brave heart cloaked by that formidable reserve. Joseph John Laughinghouse, for instance, loved his neighbor Bryan Grimes as he would love an older brother. Children, too, flocked after the general and won from him the smiles he rarely lavished on adult strangers. Everyone, seemingly, wished him well.

Grimes had spent that August 14 at the pretty courthouse town of Washington in Beaufort County—Old Washington, they called it then and call it now, reminding you that it bore the great name before even the nation’s capital. Stalwart, bewhiskered, wearing a linen duster and a broad hat like a preacher’s, the general stowed purchases in the rear of his two-horse buggy, ordered other goods to be delivered at Grimesland during the next week. Between whiles he heard, without entering, sidewalk arguments to the effect that Winfield Scott Hancock would be elected president next November or there wasn’t a just and Democratic God in heaven. And he agreed to do a favor for his old friend Tom Satterthwaite—surely Mr. Tom’s twelve-year-old son Bryan could ride with Grimes to the home of an uncle, Colonel J. B. Stickney, just this side of Grimesland Plantation. Let the boy hop in. He’d be at his uncle’s in time for supper.

Grimes let his young passenger drive the buggy away on one last errand, a happy responsibility for a twelve-year-old who loved good horses. The general himself waited in front of the store of S. R. Fowle & Son, speaking gravely with John W. Smallwood of Smallwood Plantation. The buggy rolled up. Excuse me, I must be getting home, said Grimes, and got in and took the reins.

They rolled out of town across the bridge that spanned the broad Pamlico River, to Pitt County beyond. Bryan Grimes himself had once owned that bridge and operated it for toll, then had sold it to the state. Little Bryan prattled worship-fully, the old soldier rejoined with quiet, understanding courtesy. Leaving the main Pitt County Road, they followed a tree-bordered wagon lane to Bear Creek. The sun was dropping behind the leafy tops of oaks, cypresses, and sweet gums. All was quiet save for the roll of wheels, the plodding fall of hoofs. If you’d asked most folks right then, they’d have guessed that General Grimes, healthy and vigorous at fifty-one, had a good quarter-century of life ahead of him.

The woods crowded the banks of Bear Creek. In their depths, a hunter could stalk and shoot deer and sometimes a bear, if he did not disdain to wade in swampy pools. That dry August, only a slow trickle marked the Bear Creek ford. Grimes pulled up his horses to let them drink before finishing the last three homeward miles. As they dipped their grateful noses, he leaned back in his seat beside the boy. A dozen yards from his left elbow grew two big, gnarly-kneed cypresses.

From between those trunks crashed out a shattering explosion. A puff of smoke rose like a gray ghost in the early evening, and there was a momentary hail-like rattle among the hoops of the carriage top.

Frightened, the horses sprang forward, splashed across the creek and bustled the swaying buggy up the far bank. Almost instinctively the general dragged powerfully on the reins, bringing the team to a halt, then swung around to stare back.

Bryan Satterthwaite, peering in terror, saw, or fancied that he saw, a figure backing away into the swampy brush.

What are you doing there? shouted Grimes.

The dark cypresses gave him silence. Then the general sagged forward from the waist.

Bryan, he mumbled in his beard, I am shot.

Are you much hurt, General? tremulously demanded the lad.

Yes. The word was barely audible. It will kill me.

Grimes’ broad felt hat dropped from his head. He sank upon his buckling knees. Then his booted feet slid out of the carriage to the left, and he sprawled prone in the bottom.

Young Satterthwaite acted with pluck and presence of mind beyond his twelve years. His small hands snatched up the reins that had fallen from the general’s big ones. Slapping the free ends on the rumps of the horses, he called out to them. They began to trot away from Bear Creek and the cypresses and the gun that had roared between them. Driving swiftly and capably, with the silent body at his young feet and the night thickening upon him, the boy brought carriage and team to the door of a man named Carow. There he pulled up and called shrilly for help.

Carow ran out, and stood staring and dithering. He was one of those who, in emergencies, can never say or do anything helpful. The preadolescent at the reins was more reliable in the crisis.

Help me get his legs into the carriage, he begged, and this much the unstrung Carow made himself able to do. Then, still wisely, little Bryan Satterthwaite decided to tarry no longer with so sorry a companion. He whipped up and drove another mile, to the home of his uncle.

Colonel Stickney hurried out into the gloom to hold a lantern over Grimes. Blood soaked the left sleeve of the general’s duster as he lay without motion. Stickney recognized, from a full and stern war experience, the condition of death. Lifting the lantern, he stared at the pock-marks of big buckshot on the hoops of the carriage top. Then he leaped in beside his nephew and drove Bryan Grimes home.

Summoned to the broad porch of Grimesland manor house, Charlotte Grimes heard what Colonel Stickney and Bryan Satterthwaite had to say about the silent form out there in the carriage. She was gentle, loving, and brave. Mastering her grief before the man and the boy, she said softly, Don’t tell the children just now.

News travelled fast. Through the small hours of the night gathered neighbors, to offer what help and comfort they could. A doctor examined the body, and found that a single buckshot