CRIME: Mountain Murder

“I went up to Wise that night along with my cousin and not meaning no harm. Along in the evening Raymond Meade came along and said he would give me a lift back to my house in the Pound. There was some more people in the car with him but we let them out down the road a piece and Raymond Meade says to me: ‘Let’s go to the Little Ritz and get something to eat.’ ”

A black-haired, 21-year-old schoolmarm named Edith Maxwell testified last week in the courthouse at Wise, Va. that such was the innocent beginning of the fatal night of July 20, 1935. The trial judge, a jurist of 76 with stand-up collar around his wrinkled neck and a toothpick poised thoughtfully in the right-hand corner of his mouth, nodded encouragingly. The crowd, native to that end of Virginia which is just across the Cumberland Mountains from Kentucky, solemnly waited to see what the “Gov’ment” would do to a gal who stayed out late and killed her pappy.

Raymond Meade tried to get her to drink some liquor, Edith went on, but all she took was some potato chips and a glass of ginger ale. She told him it was getting late and she had better be starting for home because she was going blackberrying next morning. When she got home around midnight her little sister, Mary Catherine, warned her: “Your bed covers is in Pappy’s room but don’t go in there. He’s drunk and he’s going to run Ma out of the house tomorrow.” But Edith went in anyhow. Pappy woke up.

‘I’m goin’ to whip you,” he said.

“Pappy, don’t you do it,” said Edith.

Pappy chased her out of the bedroom and grabbed a carving knife. “Pappy, don’t you cut me,” said Edith.

“I’ll show you I can whip you,” said Pappy.

Edith fell to the floor and fumbled for a pair of old high-heeled shoes she had given her Ma. She flailed out with one of them. Pappy fell back. Edith, half-naked from the fight, caught up a covering, ran out of the house. She could hear Pappy moaning: “Jesus, Jesus, why can’t a man whip his own child?” He was soon dead from the beating Edith gave him.

The prosecutor tried to show that Edith was a fast filly who had saddened her honest mountaineer father with her late hours and citified ways. But he could not shake her story of the fight. It was further corroborated by 11-year-old Sister Mary Catherine who, when twitted by the prosecutor for forgetting certain details, leaned out of the witness chair and yelled: “And you wouldn’t remember so good either if you had been as scared as I was that night with Pappy a-yellin’ and a-cussin’ and Edith a-tryin’ to outrun him!” Edith, argued her lawyers, had exercised no more than her “God-given right of self-defense.” But that did not impress the mountain jury, which, after less than an hour’s deliberation, returned a verdict which sent Edith on her way to prison for 25 years.

Satisfied with the “Gov’ment” court’s attitude toward disobedient daughters who keep late hours, the spectators slouched back to their mountain homes, observing: “It’s a lesson in what’s sinful, all right.”