Raleigh, Nov. 15—W.B. Cole, lately acquitted of the murder of W.W. Ormond, is due in Rockingham this week, and his return will give “new” news on the $150,000 damage suit instituted in Wake County Superior Court.
Mr. Cole has been in Arkansas since his acquittal five weeks ago, a day or two intervening for the hearing on a question of sanity. Shortly after taking the trip to the distant state where Mrs. Cole’s relatives live, Rev. A.L. Ormond, administrator and father of W.W. Ormond, brought a civil suit in Wake courts. The summons made returnable in Richmond court November 12 brought nothing additional in the form of procedure. Suggestions that the plaintiff might go ahead and levy on the absentee did not pan. The case will be regularly tried.
Bynum May Be Witness
The return of Mr. Cole was made known here a few days ago by Fred Bynum, attorney for the manufacturer prior to the homicide, and then important witness to Ormond-Cole affairs preceding the August 15 shooting. Mr. Bynum will very probably be another witness in this case. The plaintiff seeks both compensatory and punitive damages. He will hardly get a hearing within a year.
Meanwhile Mr. Cole returns to Rockingham to begin work where he left it off. The town isn’t settled yet and friends of both families to not expect it to be calm completely for a long time. Nevertheless, the friends of Mr. Cole do not think residence in his county and town will be made disagreeable for him. Some of his friends and witnesses have feared as much. Mr. Bynum believes the community will be just to him.
Treat Miss Elizabeth Fairly
Likewise it will treat fairly Miss Elizabeth Cole, to whom no wrong was ever imputed prior to the shooting. The young woman seems to have suffered from lost chronology. There was an impression that she wrote Bill Ormond letters after the “slander letter,” which undoubtedly se the state for a killing. The newspapermen, Mr. Bynum things, honestly confused the few letters written to Ormond after Miss Cole broke with him. The scribes thrught there was a correspondence after the “slander letter.” All friends and atotorneys of thecole family insist that no such communication ever took place and that the “slander letter” was wantonly and wickedly false.
It is news that Mr. Cole is back—this week. The manufacturer who hosted himself with three bullets from the drudgery and monotony of machinery into national limelight will find it impossible for a few days to avoid being news. He will have little to say of the damage suit, of course.
And while attorneys promise quite some thrills in the unpublished letters of Miss Cole and Ormond, the defense counsel in the Cole case has no more fear of them in the civil suit than in the criminal case where they were not read at all.
--Greensboro Daily News
From the front page of The Smithfield Herald, Tuesday, Nov. 17, 1925
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn92073982/1925-11-17/ed-1/seq-1/
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