Hickory, Feb. 10—Persons who resided in the vicinity of the Weslie Wycoff murder in the lower edge of Catawba county many years ago, were amazed by the recent stories sent out from Raleigh as to “Aunt Sarah” Wycoff, alleged victim of circumstantial evidence, receiving information several months before her death that somebody else had confessed to the crime for which Bob McCorkle, negro, was hanged in Alexander county. Those who do not care to read further may set it down that “Aunt Sarah” however well she might have behaved during her long term in the State prison, was no innocent and modest woman during the days that she reigned on a throne of immorality.
T.A. Sherrill, a well known Hickory man living within two miles of the Wycoff home, knew Wesley Wycoff and his wife and Bob McCorkle personally and got all thenews in court and out of it as to the character of the woman she was. Discussing her case Mr. Sherill said that if the officers, spurred on by public opinion as they are today, had made half the effort to clear the mystery in the Wycoff case, probably a white man would have been hanged and “Aunt Sarah” still would have gone to prison. The negro on the scaffold muttered something about others as guilty as he, but he did not give his white friend away. He never denied shooting Weslie Wycoff.
The case was tried twice, the second time in Alexander county, because of feeling in Catawba in the matter. McCorkle was found guilty of murder and the Wycoff woman as an accessory before the fact. The chain of circumstances was conclusive.
To begin with the court had a very bad woman as one of the principals. Her immorality was generally known and it was practiced at the home of her husband, a good natured but worthless fellow, whose force of character did not commend him to anybody.
Some white man in the community, whose name has been mentioned privately a thousand times, was believed to be at the bottom of the murder. He wanted Weslie Wycoff out of the way and his unfaithful spouse was a party to the conspiracy, the evidence showed, that ended in his murder at his barn,where he had been lured. The correspondents all get the facts straight about Bob McCorkle, Mr. Sherrill said, because that was such an interesting detail that it appealed to them. It was a fact that McCorkle carried a single-barreled muzzle-loading shotgun with him everywhere he went and everybody in the country knew it by the sound. He also carried a pistol in his coat and when he removed his coat he left it close by, always placing it near him when he went away for any distance. McCorkle was impudent but not regarded as mean.
When his gun went off on that fatal night, a man sleeping in the neighborhood was awakened and remarked to his wife, “That’s Bob McCorkle’s gun.” By means of comparing paper wedding shot from the gun with paper found in his shot pouch, the authorities were able positively to connect McCorkle with the case. He refused to make a confession on the scaffold, but he admitted that somebody else was in it.
The alleged confession, to which reference has been made on one or more occasions, was never made in the opinion of Mr. Sherill. No names were given and no dates and the mutterings of an old woman who had caused much trouble in her neighborhood were seized upon to tell the world that an innocent person had been convicted on circumstantial evidence.
J.W. Blackwelder of Hickory, to whom Warden Busbee wired when the old woman died, also bore out Mr. Sherrill’s statement as to the facts in the case. Mr. Blackwelder said he preferred to let the public forget the affair, but he was astonished at the importance given the old woman without any apparent investigation.
From the front page of the Mount Airy News, Feb. 24, 1921. (Name was spelled Sherill and Sherrill in print. I don’t know what is correct.)
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