The
Slipper Slayer of Southwest Virginia
She would
become known as the Slipper Slayer after murdering her father in the early
morning hours of July 21, 1935 but early reports of the case of Edith Maxwell claimed
she beat her father to death with an electric iron. The Slipper Theory only
entered the case later.
In fact
one of the most notorious murder cases in southwest Virginia history would take
many twists and turns before its eventual ending.
The case
captured the attention of the nation – and why wouldn’t it? Attractive
21-year-old daughter, rough-hewn mountain man father, a broken curfew, the
defiance of an independent college-educated teacher pitted against a father who
ruled his home with an iron hand.
The trial
drew reporters from all over the country, including Ernie Pyle for the Scripps-Howard
newspaper syndicate and James Thurber for the New Yorker. All were drawn
by the story line of an uneducated backwoods daddy who couldn’t accept the
modern values his daughter had picked up at college. Ah, but there was much
more to the story than that.
Sixteen
years later Kingsport Times-News Staff Writer Virginia Davis revisited
the story in a Sunday feature that brought back a lot of memories, not all of
them pleasant.
Here
is her 1951 story:
By
VIRGINIA DAVIS
Wise,
Va. - Somewhere beyond this county lives a woman whose murder trials caused
more of a far-flung sensation than any that ever passed through the Wise County
Circuit Court.
Her
name is Edith Maxwell.
Sometimes
the Edith Maxwell case is still referred to by Southwest Virginians who resent
the embarrassment they felt the big metropolitan Yankee newspapers caused them.
The readers of those newspapers probably would not remember the name or the
story, but Virginians haven't forgotten the newspapers.
The
pretty, young school teacher who slew her father in defiance of the strict code
of the hills would now be 36. Wherever she is living in oblivion to her past
troubles, few people know and few care.
The
story of the Edith Maxwell case, as it was unfolded by special correspondents
and the Associated Press, is found in old newspaper files.
It
was late Sunday night, July 20, 1935, when H. Trigg Maxwell, a 52-year-old
blacksmith, opened the door of his mountain home near Pound, looked about and
missed his eldest daughter, Edith.
According
to testimony given, the 21-year-old girl who was teaching in her first country
school since she attended Radford College, had gone to Wise with a young man
that Sunday evening, and she had not come back. It was about 10:30. Maxwell ran
out the door and headed toward Wise; and, when he came back, Edith was still
out in the night.
Trigg
came back "roaring drunk," the newspapers said, and when Edith walked
in, trouble was in the air. "A man ought to break her damned neck; a man
ought to kill her," he said to his wife and other six children. "You
might can whip me," the young girl replied, and the two scuffled in
semi-darkness about 1 a.m. Maxwell brushed his hand across his head and smeared
off a trickle of blood.
It
was 2:30 a.m. before neighbors and the law arrived, and Trigg lay on his back on
the porch near a meat-chopping block. His wife said he died from a fall on the
block as Edith resisted his efforts to whip her.
Edith
entered a plea of self-defense. The commonwealth's attorney, Fred B. Greear, did
not ask for a death penalty. He declared "no woman has ever died in the
electric chair in Virginia." He referred to a trend of popular assumption
by asserting, "I don't think the girl should be made a heroine because she
killed her father because he cramped her style by refusing to let her run
around at night."
Edith's
11-year-old sister said she saw her father killed with the heel of a woman's
slipper. Some said a flat iron, and there was conflicting testimony concerning
the exact shoe and the chopping block. It was shown in the trial that their
father had consumed about three bottles of beer at the Lonesome Pine Cafe late
that Sunday afternoon before his head was cut open.
Before
Judge H. A. W. Skeen, the Commonwealth's attorney summed up his case with the
Scriptural injunction: "Honor thy father and thy mother." Women
spectators in the courtroom wept, the papers said.
Mountain
justice, the writers dispatched, worked swiftly and in 30 minutes the jury
reached a verdict: Guilty of first-degree murder. This was on a warm, overcast
day, November 19. Edith got 25 years.
Within
a week women's clubs "from Massachusetts to South Carolina" were
organizing fund drives to assist the girl to appeal her case. The Business and Professional
Women's Club in Knoxville already had raised "a considerable amount of
money." Suggestions were made to appeal to the Virginia governor to save
Miss Maxwell from “a rank injustice.”
The
Kingsport Business and Professional Women's Club called a special meeting about
sending aid, and on November 17, "went on record as condemning such an
unjust and inhuman decision as was given" the girl.
Two
days later, the Knoxville club announced withdrawal from the movement. It had
sent four women to Wise to investigate.
They
reported: "Much to our surprise we found the facts in the case did not at
all justify the enormous amount of mail which has come to us. We learned that
Miss Maxwell and her attorneys have signed a contract with a newspaper syndicate
[Hearst] giving it exclusive rights to interview and photograph the
defendant." The women were not permitted to talk to the girl.
The Kingsport
club immediately announced it would have no part in aiding further defense of
Edith Maxwell. "Any woman who commercializes on a murder conviction does
not merit the sympathy nor support of this woman's organization," said the
president of the Business and Professional Women's Club.
But
before the business women dropped like a hot potato this form of business
dealing, the Kingsport Times wrote an editorial. It, too, based its information
on the press reports and by the swarm of non-Times staff writers who gathered
at the court.
The
editorial said: "She was convicted under a code of the hills. Evidence
against her proved nothing more serious than disregard of the curfew law and willfulness
when it came to obeying iron-rod parental authority. But to these men who trod ‘The
Trail of the Lonesome Pine,’ it was a capital offense for a child of the
feminine gender to question or gainsay the absolution of the father," the
editorial asserted.
"Edith
Maxwell was of legal age and well taught, besides, in Virginia normal college.
Her father was untaught, uncouth perhaps a drunkard. The girl had been educated
out of the hard, narrow, exacting life of the foothills. To those rugged people
of her acquaintance, she was a painted woman.
"This
lordship of the father over his household among the Nordic strain of the
mountain folk extending from Pennsylvania to Georgia, is rooted in tribal life
of long ago. It goes back to those people of unkempt yellow hair and blue eyes
paling to gray and clad in animal skin in the highlands of what are called the
British Isles.
"Morganatic
marriage was adopted among them for the purpose of giving one man absolute
control over one woman and her children. They developed to the high level of
kilts and bagpipe, but they never relaxed in the tyranny of the man over his
household. Edith Maxwell dared to flaunt her modernity before their antiquity
and it was her undoing. There was no suggestion that she was immoral only
different.
"In
college, Edith lost her taste for the old order of the tribe ... She struck
back with a shoe and the blow was accidentally fatal," the editorial
explained.
The
Virginia supreme court granted a writ of error, and the case was heard again there
before Judge Ezra T. Carter, appointed by the governor. The state, charged Miss
Maxwell beat her father to death with an unnamed instrument. The defense
contended medical testimony failed to prove wounds on the miner-blacksmith's
head caused his death.
Edith
did not testify. The jury found her guilty of second-degree murder and set a
maximum penalty, 20 years.
Appeals
were made, but Edith was denied a third trial. She served about five years of
her sentence and was paroled. Where she is now, Wise Countians say they haven't
heard in a long time. But they are still touched close by the stories the big
boys wrote.
Chicago,
Philadelphia, Washington and New York sent writers who, the Southwest Virginians
allege, made the hill natives look crude and uncouth.
The
reporters, they said, wrote that their beloved judge chewed in court and spit
tobacco juice on the Wise courthouse floor. Wise Countians denied this and
upheld the modern appearance of their courthouse, the writers wrote of
disparagingly.
Even
Ernie Pyle came into Wise and stayed at the Colonial Hotel to cover the trial.
What caused this influx of outsiders? A pretty, young schoolteacher killed her
father allegedly with her slipper in resistance of the old-fashioned dogma of
the backwoods.
Postscript
In
1937 Hollywood got in on the act, releasing “Mountain Justice,” a thinly-veiled
account of the Edith Maxwell story. It was directed by Michael Curtiz, who would
later direct “Casablanca!”
Edith in her famous slippers
After
her pardon in 1941 Edith Ann Maxwell changed her name to Elizabeth Ann Grayson
and moved to Indiana where she married a former state legislator named Cecil Otto
Abshier. They moved to Jacksonville, Florida shortly after the marriage. They
raised two children and were living in Jacksonville when Virginia Davis noted
that Wise Countians didn’t know where Edith Maxwell was and didn’t care.
The Abshiers
moved back to Indianapolis in 1972. Cecil died in 1974. Edith Maxwell, now
known as Ann Abshier, passed away in 1979.
Wise
Countians might have shaken their heads if they had read her obituary. She had worked
16 years as a deputy constable and was a past president of the Business and
Professional Women’s Club of Jacksonville. That was the same group that
withdrew its financial and moral support after they learned the true story
behind the High Heel Homicide.
