Update on Tom Gwin, Accused of Raping High School Girl, May 1, 1919

From the Hickory Daily Record, May 1, 1919

Negro Thought Girl Would Not Tell

Further details of the criminal assault upon the young high school girl Tuesday afternoon by Tom Gwin, negro, have been learned since the first news of the crime became public. Chief Lentz went to the scene of the tragedy yesterday and stepped off the distance from the road leading to Mr. John Hildebrand’s home from the main sand-clay road through Icard township and found it 165 yards. The negro, when he stopped the girl, carried her bicycle into the pine field and after he returned from the woods brought it to the road. The despoiled girl was then told to go home. She started and fell off her wheel once in the few hundred yards to her father’s house.

A large stick that the assailant had is in the possession of Chief Lentz. Gwin, for there is no longer any doubt that he was the guilty brute, stopped the school girl with a threat and she screamed only once before his beast-like hands throttled her neck. A storm was coming up and nobody was traveling—though Gwin’s team had been seen earlier in the afternoon on the side of the road—and the criminal was in little fear of detection. He did not believe the victim would tell of the crime and that accounts for his return to the road camp.

He charged the child with threats of death not to divulge the affair, and she waited two hours to inform her father. The officers on being notified made a hurried trip to Valdese and there found the negro. He is the right man. There was a rumor last night that he had admitted his guilt, but this was not confirmed today.

Gwin was carried form the jail at Newton to Lincolnton after the attempt to lynch him early Wednesday morning and he was moved again last night. It is not known where he was taken. The preliminary hearing will be held next week before Judge Jason L. Webb, probably at Newton, and precautions will be taken to prevent any untoward incident. If Gwin is guilty—and there seems no reason to doubt it—he will go to the electric chair in the state prison at Raleigh and pay the penalty for his foul act.

There has been a good deal of feeling in Hickory and this entire section, but men who realize both the seriousness of his crime and that of lynching were relieved that nothing has occurred to place another stain on the county.