Murder Trial

Five thousand people live in the farming community of Reidsville, N. C. Smith T. Petty was a good deal like the rest of the men in the village, except that he sometimes got conspicuously drunk and beat his wife; on such occasions, his children, Alma, Woodrow Wilson, Smith, and Thelma, would stand in a corner, too scared to look. About a year ago, Smith T. Petty disappeared; after a decent interval, Mrs. Petty died. Last May, a Baptist revival preacher, the Rev. Thomas F. Pardue, gave a sermon in Reidsville on the subject of repentance. After his sermon, Alma Petty, sweet & pretty, who had married the village fire chief, Eugene Gatlin, went to him and made a confession. She said she had killed her father with an axe and put his body in a trunk in the cellar. The corpse of Smith T. Petty was found where Alma Gatlin said it was; there was a hole through the skull.

The revivalist preacher was fixed with a nice choice of loyalties; he chose to respect the law rather than the sanctity of the confession which he had received and last week Mrs. Alma Petty Gatlin went on trial in the village of Wentworth for having killed her father. The courtroom was filled with reporters from Southern papers (Northern newssheets neglected the story) and with the inhabitants of the countryside who felt a strange unreality in the proceedings, as if they had suddenly stopped being real people and had become instead the actors in a play. The Rev. Thomas F. Pardue told his story to the court; after that he sat listening; acute observers noted that he often pared his finger nails. The brothers and sisters of Alma Gatlin supported her contention that, in point of fact; Mrs. Petty had killed their father in self defense and would have confessed the crime before her death had she not been overcome by coma. Two expert lawyers were imported to prosecute, and Alma Petty Gatlin, who had once been voted the prettiest girl in the village, sat and listened to one of them, a thin man with an acidulous voice, calling her story "thin air," and urging that she be killed in the electric chair.

One of her own two lawyers, Percy T. Stiers, made the point that gave the trial its religious significance. Should a confession made, in complete confidence, to a minister, be brought into court as evidence? Lawyer Stiers pointed a thin finger at the Rev. Pardue and called him "a witch-burning Judas." He said: "Let us have freedom to go to our pastors about the things that bear on our souls." At the end there was further exchange of epithet.

When the jury went out, the judge, not expecting a quick decision, left the court. Three hours later, he was fetched from a nearby village and driven back to the courtroom. The jury had reached a conclusion. Whether because they believed the stories the witnesses had told on the stand, whether they disliked the idea of convicting the winner of a beauty contest, or whether, and this was the most likely reason, they felt an instinctive reluctance to accept as mundane evidence a secret that had been intended for the ears only of God, they announced that Mrs. Alma Petty Gatlin was not guilty of the murder of her father. The Rev. Pardue said, "I can truthfully say that I have done my duty to God and the State." Mrs. Gatlin embraced her husband, set off to get her curling iron which she had left in the jail, and then went home.