A High Heel Homicide

 

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.