Blames Killing on
Liquor and Pleads for Commutation of Sentence…Date for His Execution Is Set for
September 8
Raleigh, Aug. 30—Bryant Stone, Wilkes county killer who had
poems written about him for his capacity to love, today told Judge E.M. Gill,
pardon commissioner, that he killed Wayne Norman, son-in-law of Stone, last
fall in Wilkes.
The courts have found no error in the trial that landed
Stone within 10 days of the electric chair. There had been an evident feud ever
since Norman ran off with Stone’s girl and married her. She stood by her
husband and testified against her father.
Trial Judge G.V. Cowper, who sentenced the middle-aged
mountaineer, has doubt enough of all the murderous elements to recommend
clemency for the fellow. Stone denied that he slew his son-in-law. But today he
caved in and told Judge Gill that the killing was done with liquor as the chief
aid in carrying out the plan.
Warden Honeycutt, whose long experience with prisoners has
never made the prison official dogmatic as to guilt or innocence, nevertheless
doubted Stone’s story. The prisoner said he did not know who killed his
son-in-law. This morning when Parole Commissioner Gill visited the prison, the
warden told Stone that his story did not sound right. Stone then made it
rational. “I did it,” he said, and he put the big part of it on the liquor they
drank.
Mrs. Norman and her mother came to Raleigh weeks ago in
behalf of Stone. The daughter swore to the truth of her courthouse story, but
she begged for her father’s life. She relied upon the dying statement of her
husband who said her father had shot him. The elder man hid in the smokehouse
and fired through the cracks. It lacked little of being assassination.
Stone is set to die September 8. He has had one reprieve of
30 days to allow an investigation. The inquiry has not helped more than his
confession. There may be something that will entitle the little fellow to life
imprisonment.
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