Was Wrong Man Hung? Should Woman Who Served 40 Years Be Pardoned? Aug. 25, 1919

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.