From the Hickory Daily Record, Monday, Aug. 25,
1919
Wycoff Woman Gives
Wrong Version
North Carolina folks who read the Raleigh story in the Greensboro News this morning purporting
to explain away a murder in Catawba county 40 years ago and place the odium on
a dead man naturally inferred that a great miscarriage of justice occurred. To
Mr. J.W. Blackwelder, who heard the preliminary hearing and attended the court
trial at Taylorsville and the story related in the letter of “Aunt Sarah Wycoff
was as transparent as glass and he took no stock in her yarn. The right man was
convicted and hanged, Mr. Blackwelder said.
At the end of this article the Record is reproducing the
story sent out by Mr. W.T. Bost, who had no other information than that
furnished by the letter of the old woman who has been in the pen for 40 years.
The facts, as recalled by Mr. Blackwelder, are these:
Wesley Wycoff, the man murdered, was a harmless citizen,
except for a habit of getting drunk a good fellow. “Aunt” Sarah was a woman
without character in the Sherrill Ford neighborhood. It was to get the husband
out of the way that the killing was arranged and the woman was implicated.
Bob McCorkle, a negro, who carried a sawed off shotgun night
and day, was convicted of the killing. An old negro man hear the shot about 11
o’clock one night and remarked to his wife, “That was Bob McCorkle’s gun.” The
weapon made a louder noise than any other in the community and the old negro
had learned to recognize. With this as a clue, the officers went to the
McCorkle home, investigated his gun and from his powder pouch removed part of
an old newspaper. This, when placed to the gun wadding found at Wycoff’s home,
was a perfect fit, and the whole paper could be read. That was the plainest
circumstantial evidence.
The case was removed to Alexander county and the old negro
who heard the shot stuck to his statement that it was Bob McCorkle’s gun,
though he could not say who shot it. McCorkle was convicted and hanged. The old
negro was a man of fine character and there was nobody to say a word against
him.
When he went to the gallows, McCorkle took off his boots and
gave them to one of his children, but he did not make a confession. He said he
had been betrayed like Judas by 30 pieces of silver.
There was a feeling in the community, Mr. Blackwelder said,
that some white man had conspired with McCorkle and the Wycoff woman to kill
Wesley Wycoff, and little or no effort was made to run down the white man. The
negro who fired the fatal shot was hanged.
Jake Wycoff, whom the old woman indicated as killing his
father, was a quiet, unassuming man and worked for Mr. Blackwelder three years.
He would drink liquor, but he had no motive for killing anybody and was
harmless.
There is the story that was sent out from Raleigh purporting
to show how the innocent had suffered:
The Raleigh Story
Aunt Sarah Wycoff, 40 years without a mark against her
record of service in the state prison for her part in the murder of her
husband, Wesley Wycoff, for which Bob McCorkle, black, has been hanged, has
ceased, by a letter that betrays her innocence to be a prisoner of hope and
remains one of choice.
Aunt Sarah was late getting the letter, her daughter-in-law
recently wrote her telling how a neighbor, in terror of his deathbed, confessed
the crime for which McCorkle died, and which would have cost her life but for
her sex. The Mrs. Wycoff who is the widow of the last member of Aunt Sarah’s
family, writes without great enlightenment to the oldest prisoner in the state’s
service. Aunt Sarah has turned her 40 years and next week will be 78.
The wizened old woman came to the state in 1879, after two
trials and two convictions. More than half her incarceration has been spent on
a little cot on the highest floor in the state prison. She has not walked in 23
years. Rheumatism has drawn her trim fingers double and deprived her of all locomotion,
save the power to crawl and push herself with an invalid’s chair. But in 23
years and flat on her back she has not uttered a word of offense to her friends
in prison and now if the governor will pardon her those attendants will insist
that she die there.
Actual Slayer
Confesses Crime
Aunt Sarah gave your correspondent an interview Friday. She
didn’t mean to be giving interviews—she doesn’t even know what one means. She
was reading her Bible, which is printed in 12 point type, and varying this with
the scrawled letter which has come from her solitary relative, daughter-in-law.
Nothing harder has been undertaken since the original tackler of the Egyptian hieroglyphics
than the reading of junior Mrs. Wycoff’s letter. The dutiful widow merely
wished Aunt Sarah to know that she has suffered in silence and mystery and the
actual slayer of the old man, Wesley Wycoff, has confessed to the crime. Who he
was, the daughter-in-law does not know.
“I am left alone with no one to live with me,” she says,
telling Mrs. Wycoff for the first time of her son’s death. “Jacob is dead and
gone and the children married off. He had six children—three boys and three
girls. They are well as common. Bob Marlow as here. You know her. She said she
knowed you. That man is dead that killed Mr. Wycoff. He told on his deathbed
that he killed him hisself—that you nor Bob McCorkle never done it. He did it
hisself and you and Bob was inosunt. I am glad to no and I wanted you to know
the people had found out how it was done.”
Mrs. Wycoff’s Story
Mrs. Wycoff is as ignorant of the trial and what brought her
to prison as if she had lived in another guise and by some mentenpsychosis (? Mental
psychosis?) or other process had been transplanted from a star, the moon, or
the sea into North Carolina life. She does recall that she had a husband; that
she was accused of murdering him, was tried twice, twice convicted and sent to
prison.
“We were first tried in Catawba county—that’s where they
said he killed my Bob and that I knowed about it,” she said. “And then we was
tried in Alexander. It happened the same there as in Catawba. I don’t know who
the judge was and I don’t know why they tried me. They said I knowed sumpin’
about it. They never said I done it, but said I knowed about it.” She could not
recall whether lawyers and the court talked about accessories before and after
the fact. All that she could recall was that it “happened the same,” meaning
that she was twice convicted.
Why there were two trials does not appear from anything that
she recalls. The Supreme court records to not seem to have the case and it is
barely possible that one of them was tired in one county and the other in an
adjoining jurisdiction. It is not impossible that the judge who tried the case
set aside the verdict. Evidently there was no appeal. Anyway, Bob McCorkle was
hanged and Mrs. Wycoff came to prison to spend her life.
“Governor Russell would have pardoned me 20 years ago,” she
said, “but there was no place for me to go. Other governors have said they
would pardon me, but I haven’t got no folks to take me. I guess I will keep on
staying here.”
“I would like to see aunt Sarah get her pardon,” her
attendant said, “but we have learned to love her so that we want her to stay
here if she gets out. She has never broken a rule and all the prisoners like
her so much.”
Aunt Sarah seems to have “satisfied the law,” whatever that
means, and Bob McCorkle did his part 40 years ago. It isn’t strange that the
law has such difficulty satisfying Aunt Sarah.
