Probe Death of Woman Monday. . . Coroner’s Jury Views Body, Hears Dr. Caviness, and Adjourns
The coroner’s jury empaneled to investigate the death of Mrs. Maggie Holderfield at her home on Pettigrew street Friday night, yesterday viewed the body, heard Dr. Z.M. Caviness explain the course of the bullet that put an end to her life, and then adjourned until Monday afternoon at 3 o’clock when witnesses will be examined.
Norman Earl Holderfield, her husband, jailed without bond Friday night, although he maintains that Mrs. Holderfield shot herself, yesterday employed Armistead Jones & Son as counsel. Yesterday he was transferred from the city jail to the county jail.
The bullet that killed Mrs. Holderfield was fired from a 32-caliber pistol that was found 10 or 15 feet from the bed across which she was stretched when Holderfield’s mother reached the room after the shooting. According to Dr. Caviness, the bullet entered the middle of the breast and coursed downward to the left, piercing the heart. Dr. Caviness was of the opinion that it might have been fired either by the woman herself or by another.
The defense, according to W.B. Jones, attorney, will maintain that the woman committed suicide. Married about seven months she had been in ill health and very despondent for some time, the attorney stated, after he had conferred with his client, had one before attempted to end her life, and had several times stated that she would rather be dead that alive.
Although there had been a quarrel between Holderfield and his wife earlier in the day over a note which Holderfield had received from a woman inviting him to come see her, peace had been restored when the second quarrel developed over the fact that Holderfield had carried his mother for an automobile ride Friday afternoon. It was after this quarrel, according to the attorney, that Mrs. Holderfield fired the bullet into her breast.
Johnson’s Story of Shooting
When interviewed yesterday afternoon Charles Johnson, father of the dead woman, said, “I was sitting on my front porch next door to the house in which my daughter lived when I heard Holderfield and my daughter quarreling in the house next door. Finally I heard Holderfield shout, ‘You are a G—D d—n liar!’ This was more than I could stand. I started towards the house but as I did I heard a shot and my daughter screamed. I rushed up on the front porch but the door was locked. As I pounded on the door Holderfield flung it open and rushed past me saying, ‘I am going for a doctor.’”
Mr. Johnson, who was prostrate with grief, stated that he had done everything in his power to prevent his daughter from marrying young Holderfield. “I didn’t know anything about him,” he said, “but my daughter loved him and I let her have her way.”
Married Life Unhappy
Mrs. Johnson stated that her daughter’s married life had been very unhappy. “Holderfield’s mother and sister lived with him,” she said, “and they treated my daughter like a dog. I have seen scars and bruises that she received at their hands. Once the sister of Holderfield hit my daughter on the thigh with a glass that she gave her for a wedding present. It cut a deep gash. My daughter tried to hide it from me, but I saw the place, and she told me how it happened.”
The climax of the trouble came, according to Mrs. Johnson, when Holderfield received a letter from a woman of ill-repute named Lee, inviting him to repeat certain visits. Mrs. Holderfield found the letter and brought it to her mother. “Mama, do you think I am going to stand for this kind of thing,” Mrs. Johnson stated her daughter sobbed.
“Why don’t you leave him,” asked Mrs. Johnson.
“Oh, I love him,” replied her daughter, “and I have begged and begged him to get us a . . . and live apart from his mother and sister.”
(I don't know why the newspaper printed those three dots in the article.)
The Johnsons are of the opinion that the quarrel which ended fatally was the result of this letter. They scoffed at the idea that their daughter killed herself although they admitted that she had attempted “to scare Holderfield” on one occasion by threatening to end her life.
The door of the Holderfield house bore terrible testimony to the efforts of Mr. Johnson to break in to his daughter’s aid. The screen door which was locked had been ripped and torn from its hinges. The glass of the front door had been smashed in. The curtains were splattered with blood. No one was at the home yesterday afternoon and the house stood quiet and forbidding.
In the home of the Johnsons next door, the body of the dead girl lay in the sitting room, while many visitors stopped to offer the bereaved family their consolation. Of all the family Mrs. Johnson bore up under the tragedy more bravely than the rest.
“God took one of my daughters,” she said quietly, “but I never thought my other would be murdered.”
The coroner’s jury charged with the investigation is composed of L.M. Waring, P.H. Ray, Edgar Peebles, J.H. Poole, Percy D. Thomas, and J. Milton Mangum.
From the front page of The Raleigh News & Observer, July 30, 1922
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Practical Joke Suicide Factor. . . Wake County Coroner’s Jury Says Mrs. Holderfield Killed Herself. . . Note That Caused Quarrel Was Joke. . . Boy Tells Jury that He Wrote Missive in Spirit of Play and Tried, Too Late, To Recover It; Holderfield Before Jury Tells of Fatal Night
A note written in the playful fancy of a practical joker was one of the factors in the death of Mrs. Maggie Holderfield, who, according to a verdict of the coroner’s jury, shot herself through the heat at her home on Pettigrew street Friday night.
The verdict of the coroner’s jury freeing Norman Earl Holderfield, husband of the woman, from blame in connection with her death, came after Coroner J.E. Owens and the six jurors had heard Hubert Drew, young associate of Holderfield in the employ of the Raleigh post office, admit frankly that it was he who wrote the note that brought on a quarrel between Holderfield and his wife after which she fired a bullet through her heart.
The note, purporting to be an invitation to visit a woman of ill-repute in East Raleigh, fell into Mrs. Holderfield’s hands after efforts of the young joker to regain it from the mails had failed. It was a joke, all a joke, young Drew stated, and he convinced the jury that the note was of his making when he reproduced the writing at the dictation of Coroner Owens who read from the original.
Holderfield, the last witness before the jury, told a story of the events of the afternoon and night that led up to the shooting. In the main it tallied with the stories of other witnesses who heard the quarreling of the young couple in their room and it also had the reinforcement of a frank manner that carried conviction.
He told of the quarrel over the note, of his efforts to reassure his wife, of the renewal of the quarrel after he had taken his mother to ride in his motorcycle side car, and of the fatal shot fired while he was at the back of the house trying to find the key to the bureau drawer, secreted there, his wife told him, to prevent him from finding the pistol with which she had threatened to kill herself.
He finished the story with a sort of dry sob.
“That’s the truth,” he said. “I know it’s the truth. Mama knows it’s the truth.” Then raising his hand he added, “And God knows it’s the truth.”
The mother had been one of the witnesses before the jury and even then was waiting in the corridors to learn the fate of her boy. She had left the jury the conviction of complete devotion on the part of mother and son and a loyalty on his part that she told in a simple sentence.
“He hasn’t been away from me but three nights in his life,” she said. “And they were the last three nights since he has been in jail.”
The Joke Letter
Holderfield’s recital before the jury began with the interception by his wife of the “joke” letter addressed to him. Holderfield didn’t know was a joke, not even yesterday morning when he faced the Coroner’s jury. Mrs. Holderfield accepted it at face value and, according to her mother, Mrs. Charles Johnson, carried the note straight to her.
“Mother,” she said, “I can’t stand this any longer. Have you got room for me?”
“Yes,” the mother replied. “I’ve got room for you. Your same room is waiting for you.”
That was Mrs. Johnson’s testimony. According to Mrs. Holderfield, the mother of Norman, the young woman went into a rage when she read the letter, cursed the supposed writer of it with vile language and started to dress with the purpose of making good her threat of death.
The quarrel started when Holderfield came home from work.
“You ought not to get excited about that,” he reassured her. “I don’t know anything about that woman. I carry specials over there in East Raleigh sometime, but that’s all.”
Peace was restored and after supper, according to Holderfield, he carried his mother for a ride out the Garner road in his motorcycle side car, and, later, to visit his sister. When they came home, Holderfield asked his wife if she would help him take off his side car. She started to the rear of the house where the motorcycle had been left and resumed the quarrel.
‘You can always find time to take your mother and sister to ride but not me,” she began.
“Maggie,” he replied, “that ain’t so, I take you and sister and mama, too, every chance I get.”
There was more complaint on her part, Holderfield testified, and an exchange of oaths.
“Look here Maggie,” that’s a G—damned lie, he said when she repeated her assertion that he could never find time to take her to ride.
“Then,” said Holderfield to the jury, “My wife sat down on a chair and started crying. ‘I’m going to end my life right now’ she said. I pushed her back on the bed and went to the bureau where we keep the pistol. I tried the drawer, and it was locked. I asked her where the key was. ‘If you want to know where the key is, it is under the back door step wrapped up in a piece of paper,’ she told me. I went out in the back porch and saw Mr. and Mrs. Johnson standing in their yard where they had been listening in the quarrel. I started to flash the motorcycle light on the steps to see how to find the keys when I heard a shot.
“I ran back in the room. My wife was across the bed with her feet a little off it. I lifted her up, looked at her and laid her back down. Then I ran out the back way, where the motorcycle was and passed Mr. Johnson.
“’She’s shot herself,’ I said. ‘I’m going for the doctor.’ Mr. Johnson made at me shouting, ‘Oh, yes! G—damn you! I’ll get you.’ I ran around the house and up to New Bern avenue where I telephoned for a doctor.”
The letter, he testified, he had given to Deputy Sheriff W.E. Mangum. It was introduced before the jury by J.J. Harward, to whom it was given by Mangum.
Other witnesses testified to finding the pistol a few feet from the bed, and the opened bureau drawer, the key to which was in the lock with a silk handkerchief tied to it.
The mother and father of the dead woman gave their version of the quarrel and the events which immediately followed, most of which tallied closely with Holderfield’s story. They heard the quarrel from their front porch, next door, and reached the house immediately after the shooting. Murder was their theory.
J.W. Green, formerly a roomer in the Holderfield home, testified to other temperamental outbreaks on the part of Mrs. Maggie Holderfield, and told of another attempt at suicide when in turn, it was necessary for those in the house to take away from her a pistol, a pair of scissors and an ice pick, with which she attempted to end her life. Frequently, Green as well as other witnesses testified, the woman had threatened suicide.
The mother of the young woman, however, told the jury that these threats were made, her daughter had told her, in order to prevail upon Norman to take her away from his mother’s home, that they might have a home of their own.
“Mama,” the mother quoted her as saying, “You know I’ve got too much sense to take my life.”
Alleges Mistreatment
Mrs. Johnson told of her daughter’s distress, harassed daily, she alleged, by the mother and sister of Holderfield, both of whom imposed on her. On one occasion, she said, Holderfield’s sister struck her daughter with a glass vase given her as a wedding present, inflicting a gash in her hip. Mrs. Holderfield, the boy’s mother, admitted the throwing of the vase, but maintained that the vase hit the wall before it struck the young woman.
Other witnesses before the jury included Louis Howell, post office employe who mailed the letter written by Drew and who knew of its contents and its purpose; J.J. Harward, deputy, and W.E. Mangum, deputy sheriff who went to the Holderfield home with Earl Holderfield on the night of the shooting; and William Gill, a neighbor, who listened in to some of the quarrel.
The jury, after hearing Holderfield, made up its verdict in less than five minutes. The jury was composed of J.M. Waring, J.H. Pool, Edgar Peebles, P.H. Ray, Percy D. Thomas and J. Milton Mangum.
From the Raleigh News & Observer, Wednesday morning, August 2, 1922
