Winkler Released After 3 Years of 30-Year Sentence, July 30, 1925

Mountaineer Is Freed After Three Years. . . It is Thought He Was Convicted Through Malice for Crime 30 Years Ago

Raleigh, July 30—Ves Winkler, Wilkes county mountaineer, left the state prison a free man today, with a full pardon from the governor of North Carolina.

Winkler, 60 now, had 30 years ahead of him, which meant life, when he was set up from Wilkes county superior court in August, 1922. A jury of his peers had found him guilty of murdering his first wife 29 years before.

Three years Winkler has served in prison because of what the jury found. And now, the governor finds that he was convicted on one man’s testimony, testimony that had been withheld for practically a third of a century and which reached the “light of day and the realm of judicial action upon an inspiration that is so apparently of malice and revenge.”

From page 4 of The Carolina Jeffersonian, Durham, N.C., Aug. 4, 1925

newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn92073001/1925-08-04/ed-1/seq-4/