Greensboro Record
The perfunctory trial and practically instructed verdict of acquittal in the case of Mrs. Rodgers, a Raleigh woman under indictment for the killing of her son Preston B. Rodgers in the aftermath of a New Year’s Eve drinking celebration will hardly surprise anyone who has followed the case through its development and delays. When the tragedy first became known, it was given out that young Rodgers had killed himself, and, while considerable evidence calculated to discredit this, the story is said to have gathered by officers and as a result of which this indictment of the mother followed. It is doubtless there that the state could not produce sufficient evidence to maintain a charge of murder against the mother. So far as we now recall, no motive for the killing of the son by the mother has ever been clearly established.
This case may now be regarded as closed, with small probability that the real facts as to the circumstances leading up to the tragedy or the identity of the person who fired the fatal shot will ever be known. It may be true, even though not absolutely provable, that the young man shot himself and that his mother or some other revelers may have ridiculed or reproved him; but so long as those in a position to know and reveal the precise circumstances keep their lips sealed, the state has no way of prying them open. One may call this termination of the case a miscarriage of justice if he will, but the records of the tragedy disclose many instances in which the state was baffled in its most persistent efforts to probe the facts completely and successfully and disclose information which would justify a conviction.
Whether or not this case and the failure of the authorities to establish the guilt of anyone played in any part in the defeat of Solicitor Evans in the recent primary can only be conjectured, but it is at least of interest to recall that he was defeated after the state’s effort to ferret out the facts and secure conviction in this case had failed.
From page 4 of the Goldsboro News, Sunday, June 27, 1926
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn93064755/1926-06-27/ed-1/seq-4/
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