The Montgomery Advertiser
- EXPERT DESCRIBES NATURE OF WOUNDS IN DOUBLE MURDER
- WAR CLUBS LIFTED FOR ASSAULT UPON TAX REFUND PLANS
- KNOX DEATH LAID TO HEART TROUBLE BY DAVIS DEFENSE
This Montgomery Advertiser front page mixed national wire news with a case from Alabama's own prison mines. From Somerville, New Jersey, an AP report described a day of technical testimony in the Hall-Mills murder trial: a New York medical examiner told the court that any one of three bullets would have killed Eleanor Mills and that her larynx, tongue and upper windpipe had been cut away after death. From Washington, the paper reported that President Coolidge, facing a congressional fight, had left his tax refund proposal to Congress and asked for nonpartisan treatment. Closer to home, it set the defense's claim that the Mobile convict Knox died of heart trouble against the state's charge that he was beaten for failing to dig his coal task, killed in a laundry vat and dosed with mercury after death to cover up the crime.
Translation
EXPERT DESCRIBES NATURE OF WOUNDS IN DOUBLE MURDER
SOMERVILLE, N. J., Nov. 9. - (AP) - Technical testimony, beginning with fingerprint developments in the morning and continuing to autopsies in the afternoon, claimed a full session's attention of the court trying the Hall-Mills case here, today. Result of an autopsy performed last month on the bodies of Mrs. Eleanor R. Mills and the Rev. Edward W. Hall, was told by Dr. Otto H. Schultze, assistant medical examiner of the district attorney's office of New York county. Dr. Schultze, after testifying that any one of three bullets entering the head of Mrs. Mills would have caused death, said that the larynx, the tongue and the upper part of the windpipe had been cut from Mrs. Mills' body after death. One slash with a knife had cut the slain woman's throat, he said.
WAR CLUBS LIFTED FOR ASSAULT UPON TAX REFUND PLANS
WASHINGTON, Nov. 9. - (AP) - With congressional war clubs already lifted for a tax battle at the approaching short session of congress, President Coolidge today left his tax refund proposal to the mercy of the legislators, with a suggestion for nonpartisan consideration. The official spokesman at the White House declared the president would leave it entirely up to congress if and how tax relief should be given at this time.
KNOX DEATH LAID TO HEART TROUBLE BY DAVIS DEFENSE
The defense version of the death of the Mobile convict, however, differs sharply from that of the state, who claims that Knox had been severely beaten and mistreated for failure to produce his task of coal, and was killed while being ducked in a laundry vat. A solution of bichloride of mercury was pumped into his stomach after death, according to the state, in an alleged effort to "cover up" the crime.
Context
The 1922 wounds behind Dr. Schultze's testimony
The AP dispatch reports Dr. Otto H. Schultze telling the Somerville court that any one of three bullets in Mrs. Mills's head would have killed her and that her larynx, tongue and upper windpipe had been cut out after death. Those details are consistent with what had been recorded since the bodies were found in September 1922. Both victims had been shot in the head with a .32-caliber pistol, the man once and the woman three times, and the original autopsies reported that her throat had been slit from ear to ear and her voice box nearly removed. The mutilation shaped the investigation from the start: in 1922 an early suspect, Clifford Hayes, was jailed in Somerset County, but the prosecutor there could not make a mistaken-identity theory explain the slit throat or the love letters left with the bodies. Schultze's testimony, as the paper reports it, put that deliberate mutilation before the jury again four years later, emphasizing that the larynx, tongue and upper windpipe had been cut out after death.
Fingerprints, the press campaign and the December 1926 acquittal
Fingerprints, which the dispatch says occupied the morning session, became one of the most disputed parts of the prosecution's case. In the prosecution's scenario Willie Stevens supplied the weapon, and his fingerprint was said to be on Hall's calling card left at the scene. That card had been handled by police, reporters and curiosity-seekers, and three fingerprint experts called by the defense found no resemblance between the smudge on it and Willie's prints. The case reached court in 1926 after the New York Daily Mirror, a new Hearst paper fighting a circulation war, led the press in demanding that it be reopened. After hearing 87 witnesses for the state and 70 for the defense, the jury deliberated for five hours, and Frances Hall and her brothers Henry and Willie Stevens were acquitted on December 3, 1926. The crime has never been solved, so the medical evidence reported on this page explained how the victims died without establishing who killed them.
Alabama's convict-lease system and the coal 'task'
Knox, described on this page as a Mobile convict, was working to produce coal when he died, and the system that put him underground was Alabama's convict lease. Between 1875 and 1928 the state and counties profited by renting prisoners to private employers, and by the 1880s nearly all of the several thousand leased state and county prisoners labored in coal mines around Birmingham. More than 95 percent of county prisoners and 90 percent of state prisoners were African American, and whipping was the accepted norm for punishment. Leased miners worked to daily quotas and could earn extra cash for overtime once a quota was met. That quota system is the background to the state's charge, reported here, that Knox was beaten and mistreated for failing to produce his 'task' of coal.
Knox's death at Flat Top and the end of convict leasing in 1928
Later accounts show where both versions on this page came from. James Knox, a convict from Mobile, died at Flat Top, a mine prison where Sloss-Sheffield used convict labor. His death was first reported as suicide by swallowing bichloride of mercury, but the autopsy found heart failure, with the poison injected after death, and investigators concluded that his fatal injuries came from being whipped with a steel wire and immersed in hot water. The defense's 'heart trouble' explanation therefore echoed an actual autopsy finding, while the state's account of a vat and a post-mortem cover-up matched what investigators concluded. The Encyclopedia of Alabama records that in 1924 the death of a prisoner tortured by being lowered into a vat of boiling water prompted an investigation, a description that fits the Knox case. Sloss-Sheffield kept using convicts at Flat Top until Alabama outlawed the practice; on June 30, 1928, Alabama became the last state to abolish convict leasing, and many historians argue that Knox's death helped hasten that end.
What Coolidge put before Congress in December 1926
The dispatch shows Coolidge stepping back from his tax refund idea on November 9 and leaving it to Congress. In his Annual Message of December 7, 1926, he set out what he wanted. Economy, he said, would leave a Treasury surplus estimated at $383,000,000 at the end of the fiscal year. Since he did not think a permanent reduction was yet practical, he proposed a simple measure reducing the tax payments falling due on March 15 and June 15, 1927. He repeated the appeal his spokesman had made, calling the question so much a purely business matter that it ought not to be dealt with in a partisan spirit, and he again acknowledged that it was for Congress to decide whether to make such a reduction or apply the surplus to retiring the war debt. The 'refund' in this headline is best understood as that one-time cut in installment payments financed from the surplus.
Original
EXPERT DESCRIBES NATURE OF WOUNDS IN DOUBLE MURDER
SOMERVILLE. N. J., Nov. 9. - (AP) - Technical testimony, beginning with fingerprint developments in the morning and continuing to autopsies in the afternoon, claimed a full session's attention of the court trying the Hall-Mills case here, today. Result of an autopsy performed last month on the bodies of Mrs. Eleanor R. Mills and the Rev. Edward W. Hall, was told by Dr. Otto H. Schultze, assistant medical examiner of the district attorney's office of New York county. Dr. Schultze, after testifying that any one of three bullets entering the head of Mrs. Mills would have caused death, said that the larynx, the tongue and the upper part of the windpipe had been cut from Mrs. Mills ' body after death. One slash with a knife had cut the slain woman's throat, he said.
WAR CLUBS LIFTED FOR ASSAULT UPON TAX REFUND PLANS
WASHINGTON, Nov. 9. - (AP) - With congressional war clubs already lifted for a tax battle at the approaching short session of congress, President Coolidge today left his tax refund proposal to the mercy of the legislators, with a suggestion for nonpartisan consideration. The official spokesman at the White House declared the president would leave it entirely up to congress if and how tax relief should be given at this time.
KNOX DEATH LAID TO HEART TROUBLE BY DAVIS DEFENSE
The defense version of the death of the Mobile convict, however, differs sharply from that of the state, who claims that Knox had been severely beaten and mistreated for failure to produce his task of coal, and was killed while being ducked in a laundry vat. A solution of bichloride of mercury was pumped into his stomach after death, according bo the state, in an alleged effort to " cover up " the crime.
Source: Holding institution