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Thread: Notable North Carolina Executions

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    Notable North Carolina Executions

    Last execution of McDowell convict: 1984

    When a jury sentenced Stephen Monroe Buckner to death Monday, he became one of only a handful in McDowell who has faced the ultimate punishment.

    Buckner was convicted of three counts of first-degree murder, among other charges, for killing 42-year-old Vicky Lynn Lowery, 25-year-old Rebecca Rose Buckner and 14-year-old Chelsea Nicole Gregory. He was given two death sentences and one life in prison without parole.

    A check of prison records and McDowell News archives shows that three people convicted in McDowell have been put to death since 1910, when local government officials passed the power to execute to the state. The last of those was in 1984.

    Since that time, only three others have been tried capitally in McDowell. One was sentenced to die but was later granted a new trial and received life, another was sentenced to life after the jury failed to make a decision and the other is Buckner.

    James W. Hutchins

    Even though he lived in Rutherford County and committed his crimes in Rutherford County, James W. Hutchins was tried in McDowell after the judge granted a change of venue in the case.

    On May 31, 1979, Rutherford County sheriff’s deputies Owen Messersmith, 58, and Roy Huskey, 42, responded to Hutchins’ residence in reference to a domestic dispute between him and his daughter.

    Hutchins shot Huskey in the head as he exited his patrol car and opened fire into Messersmith’s cruiser, killing him.

    A neighbor alerted authorities to the incident, which put 37-year-old State Trooper Robert “Pete” Peterson on the lookout for the suspect and his vehicle. As Peterson drove the roads of Rutherford County, Hutchins’ car sped past him. He attempted to stop Hutchins but was gunned down. Peterson was found with a gunshot wound to the head.

    Hutchins was convicted on Sept. 24, 1979 of two counts of first-degree murder and one count of second-degree murder and was sentenced to die.

    He was put to death by lethal injection on March 16, 1984, the first person to be executed in North Carolina since 1977 when the death penalty was reinstated.

    Records from the N.C. Department of Corrections show that only two other men have been put to death in McDowell County – Lee Flynn on June 28, 1940 for murder and Bill Bryant on June 4, 1943 for murder. In those days, people were executed for murder, rape, burglary and arson.

    No inmates were put to death in North Carolina from 1962 to 1983.

    James Keith Ross

    One of McDowell’s most well known murder cases is that of James Keith Ross, a Boy Scout camp caretaker who murdered two teenage boys in 1985.

    The youngsters, 14 and 15, were found shot to death on Jan. 26, 1985, their bodies buried beside a grease pit at Camp Grimes.

    Ross was convicted of murder that same year and received the death penalty.

    In 1988, the state Supreme Court granted the defendant a new trial, ruling that the case was “severely prejudiced” when the trial judge neglected to instruct the jury on Ross’ decision not to testify.

    He was again convicted in 1989 of murder but received a sentence of life in prison without parole.

    He is the only person from McDowell to be removed from death row.

    Larry Eugene Bowman Jr.

    Larry Eugene Bowman Jr. was tried for his life in February 2004 for raping and killing 13-year-old Tiffany Lynn Freeman in her Virginia Road home on Nov. 1, 2002.

    A jury deadlocked 10-2 in favor of death, forcing the judge to sentence him to life in prison without parole.

    Bowman, 30, remains incarcerated.

    http://www2.mcdowellnews.com/news/20...984-ar-527413/

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    High Point gangster leads daring prison break

    HIGH POINT — “Public Enemy No. 1” is a six-part series chronicling the life and crimes of William Andrew “Bill” Payne, a notorious gangster from High Point. During his heyday in the 1930s, Payne was North Carolina’s best-known gangster, and – though he wasn’t as well-known as such nationally recognized outlaws as John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson – he became one of the FBI’s most-wanted fugitives of that era. Though written in a narrative style, the series is based on exhaustive research of period newspaper articles from The High Point Enterprise and other publications across the state, and all material is factual.

    CHAPTER ONE: The Great Escape

    Nobody should’ve been surprised when Bill Payne masterminded the most daring prison break in North Carolina history.

    After all, the notorious High Point gangster — bank robber, auto thief, highway robber, kidnapper and escapee extraordinaire — had already slipped out of state correctional facilities five times before his bold escape in early 1937. He easily could’ve been dubbed “The Houdini of Cell Block A” if one of his previous partners in crime, the late Otto Wood, hadn’t already earned the nickname years earlier.

    Nonetheless, the 40-year-old Payne had established his own sullied reputation pulling bank heists with several other ne’er-do-wells who came to be known as “The Payne Gang.” Payne was so feared, in fact, that bank tellers across the state had taken to memorizing his mug — the stoney face, sunken eyes and dark, receding hairline — so they would recognize him and know when they were about to be robbed.

    People knew his face well in these parts, too. Though Payne was born in Forsyth County in 1896, his family moved to High Point when he was still a youth, and he called High Point home the rest of his life, even during his years on the lam as the state’s best-known — and most feared — desperado.

    Over the period of roughly a decade — from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s — Payne’s notoriety grew as he delved deeper and deeper into a life of crime. Newshounds across the state clamored to keep up with his trail of trouble, describing Payne as everything from a gang leader, outlaw and safecracker to a bandit, bank robber and, as one prison warden called him, a “bad egg.”

    The great prison break of 1937, though, made national headlines for its boldness and for the danger it posed to citizens. It also marked the beginning of Payne’s most infamous flight from the law, a nearly yearlong, helter-skelter dash back and forth across the state, during which his list of crimes grew ever longer — and the fear he inspired ever more rampant — as the massive manhunt continued. Before it all finally ended, a young man would die in a gun battle, and Payne would find himself on FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover’s list of the eight most wanted felons in America.

    “Public Enemy No. 1,” declared one state newspaper. And in North Carolina, at least, that’s exactly who Payne was. Of course, prison officials could only blame themselves for Payne’s freedom. After his fifth escape and subsequent recapture in the spring of 1935, he and his closest crooked pal — Wash Turner, of Marion, N.C. — found themselves at Caledonia Prison Farm in Halifax County, a lightweight penitentiary that, shall we say, wasn’t exactly Alcatraz. It was just a matter of time until the two jailbirds flew this coop.

    On the night of Feb. 14, 1937 — Valentine’s Day — they finalized a scheme to break the prison superintendent’s heart. The next morning, they busted out. Payne, Turner and five other inmates — including three men serving murder sentences — escaped after kidnapping two prison employees, using a revolver that apparently had been smuggled into the pen. They forced the two men to lead them to the prison’s weapon supply room, where they absconded with enough guns and ammo to start a small war. Then they held up another guard and took his rifle, too. They swapped their state-issued stripes for less-conspicuous civilian clothes, sliced all of the prison’s telephone wires, commandeered a prison laundry truck and roared toward freedom, still holding the two prison officials hostage.

    As the escaped cons raced away from Caledonia, a prison guard found another vehicle and drove to the nearest phone — a 12-mile trek to Halifax — and notified the state highway patrol. The scent was still fairly fresh, but the escapees had enough of a head start to make finding them difficult. By nightfall, hundreds of officers were scouring eastern North Carolina — even airplanes had joined the search — but all of their efforts, and all of the public’s tips, proved fruitless.

    Meanwhile, the felons had switched vehicles to cover their trail. At a Halifax County filling station, they carjacked another hostage, 19-year-old Walter Willard. When Payne jabbed a gun in the kid’s side, Willard offered the men his money. “To hell with your money — the car’s what we want,” one of the escapees replied.

    Off they went at breakneck speed, with the seven cons and three hostages crammed into one vehicle. Much to the escapees’ delight, Willard’s car had a radio that allowed them to hear frequent bulletins about the statewide dragnet. At one point, the men laughed out loud at a report that officers believed they had the felons cornered near Bailey; at the time, they were actually on the other side of Fayetteville, some 100 miles from Bailey.

    As for the hostages, five of the seven escapees wanted to kill them. Payne, however, convinced the others that doing so could land them all in the electric chair if they were ever caught, so they released the hostages that night — shaken, but uninjured — in the Moore County town of Vass.

    The next morning, High Point police discovered Payne and his crooked pals had visited overnight. Officers found the sedan the men had carjacked stuck in the mud just outside of town, then received a report of another vehicle the cons stole while here. Heavily armed officers swarmed all over the city in hopes of nabbing the escapees, but they came up empty.

    Coming up empty would become a common theme in the weeks and months ahead for North Carolina law enforcement officers. They eventually would nab five of the seven henchmen, but Bill Payne and Wash Turner would prove too slippery for their dragnet. Every time a sighting was reported, it seemed, the two would vanish just before cops made the scene.

    Barring a major slip-up, it looked as if escape artist Bill Payne might never have to break out of prison again.

    http://www.hpe.com/news/local/x17781...g-prison-break
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    Trooper chases down Payne and Turner


    Trooper George Penn of the N.C. Highway Patrol chased Bill Payne and Wash Turner after they turned and fled from a highway weigh station near Asheville.

    Chapter Two: Life on the Lam

    For six months after their daring prison break at Caledonia, following the twisting trail of Bill Payne and Wash Turner was like chasing the wind.

    Law enforcement officers knew the wily criminals were moving around — frequent sightings of the dastardly duo kept popping up all over the state — but officers could never get close enough, or get there quickly enough, to nab the infamous desperados.

    Newspapers, clearly enamored with Payne and Turner’s gritty flight from the law, breathlessly reported every alleged sighting, punctuating each story with the news that, alas, it wasn’t really them, or they had already vanished again.

    One such disappointment happened in High Point — Payne’s home turf — where seven heavily armed officers staked out a house they had been told Payne would visit one night. He never showed.

    Then the escapees were spotted near Madison, where they drank whiskey and ate sardines and crackers in a farmer’s barn, then hightailed it out of there before the cops arrived.

    Other hot tips followed — Red Springs, Burlington, Moncure — but they all fizzled, too. After a supposed sighting in Greensboro came up empty, one exasperated officer muttered with a sigh, “Somebody has been seeing things.”
    In early March 1937, less than a month after their prison break, Payne and Turner apparently ran out of money, so they held up the Bank of Montgomery in the small town of Troy. While Payne waltzed in the front door and pretended to need change for a $10 bill, his accomplice — believed to be Turner — came in a side door brandishing a gun. They made off with nearly $3,400 and, as always, disappeared before the coppers showed up.

    Life on the lam was a pretty good gig. Payne and Turner bounced from town to town, sometimes getting cover from lowlifes they’d met during their lives of crime, other times holing up in motels or tourist camps. When cash ran low, they’d find a bank or some other business to knock off. As long as they laid low enough to steer clear of the law, they had it made.

    That all changed on Aug. 22, 1937, when Payne and Turner got too close to the heat — a slip they nearly paid for with their lives.

    The boys were in Asheville, where they’d been hanging out at a local tourist camp. They had been in the area for weeks without being detected, so they felt comfortable enough to go to a nearby diner that evening to grab a bite to eat.

    On the way, they came upon a weigh-station checkpoint being manned by the N.C. Highway Patrol. In a panic, Turner whipped their car around and bolted in the other direction.

    That was all Trooper George Penn needed to arouse his suspicions.

    “Halt! Halt!” he yelled at the fleeing car, to no avail.

    The young patrolman scrambled to his patrol car and took off after the felons’ blue sedan, his siren blaring, not knowing he was chasing the two most-wanted men in North Carolina.

    For some 20 miles, Penn pursued the two desperados through the Buncombe County countryside in a dramatic, pedal-to-the-metal chase that forced other vehicles to swerve off the road. The chase evolved into a high-speed gun battle, as well, as Payne crawled into the back seat and began firing at the trooper, just like a scene from an old gangster movie. Penn crouched as low as he could and swerved his patrol car back and forth to make himself a moving target, still managing to keep the vehicle under control. He stuck his gun out the window and returned fire when he could.

    Eventually, the felons’ car careened onto a country road in the Fairview township, with Penn still hot on their trail. The dirt road dead-ended at a farmhouse, where Payne and Turner’s car kicked up dust and rocks as it screeched into the driveway and barreled up the drive to a barn. Seconds later, the patrol car — its siren still screaming — slid to a stop about 50 yards behind the cons, cornering them in the driveway.


    Van Patton, an elderly Buncombe County farmer, witnessed the shootout in his yard.

    Van Patton, who owned the farmhouse, cowered on his front porch as he watched a surreal gunfight unfold in his yard — Payne and Turner crouching for cover behind their vehicle, and the uniformed patrolman behind his. Patton’s heart thumped madly as gunfire echoed all around him.

    The elderly farmer had no idea who the two criminals were or why the trooper was chasing them, but one thing seemed abundantly clear — these two bad guys were determined they would get away.

    Or they would die trying.
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

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    Payne and pal gun down trooper, kidnap hostages


    Trooper George Penn's gun battle with Bill Payne and Wash Turner left bullet holes in the windshield and hood of his highway patrol car. He reportedly had the only patrol car in the state that did not have a bulletproof windshield.

    CHAPTER THREE: DESPERATE DECISIONS

    Bill Payne and Wash Turner had vowed not to be taken alive.

    Now, outside an Asheville-area farmhouse on a dead-end road — where a long high-speed chase had come to an abrupt halt — that vow was being played out. Either the two escaped felons would go down with guns blazing, or their adversary — 23-year-old highway patrolman George Penn — would die in defense of justice.

    The gunfight hardly seemed fair — two hardened criminals, one with a sawed-off shotgun and the other with a rifle, against one young trooper with a service revolver. Penn had scarcely jumped from his patrol car and fired a shot at the two thugs before a bullet to the head took him down. The owner of the farmhouse, Van Patton, watched the cold-blooded killing in horror from his porch but did not move, numbed by fear.

    “We got him!” Turner yelled. “Come on, let’s get outta here!”

    Knowing backup officers could show up at any moment, Payne and Turner scrambled back into their sedan — now riddled with bullet holes — but Penn’s patrol car still blocked the narrow dirt road. They tried steering around the vehicle, but got stuck in a ditch, inadvertently striking Penn’s lifeless body in the process. With a chain they found in the patrol car, they tied the two vehicles together, then used the officer’s car to pull theirs from the ditch. Turner snatched up the officer’s pistol, and they took off down the dirt road again, making their getaway before more officers arrived.

    Ironically for Penn, he was in the last week of his employment with the N.C. Highway Patrol, having turned in his resignation with plans to begin a new career. The young patrolman, a native of Carthage, would die en route to the hospital.




    Penn’s death triggered a massive manhunt for his two assailants, whom authorities determined to be Payne and Turner after finding their blue sedan the next day where they had ditched it behind an Asheville hotel; fingerprints found on the car implicated the two desperados, who were no longer mere bank robbers but killers — and cop-killers, at that.

    As searchers combed the mountains of western North Carolina, the director of the state’s penal division warned citizens that Turner was “a trigger man — a dangerous criminal,” and Payne was “smart, relying more on brains than violence.”

    Now, though, with the heat on the two fugitives hotter than ever, there was a new adjective used to describe them — desperate.

    A few days after Penn’s death, Payne — temporarily having split from Turner to be less conspicuous — kidnapped two teenagers in Asheville and forced them at gunpoint to drive him through the night to Thomasville.

    “He told us that he had been out in the rain for two days and that he hadn’t had anything to eat for over a week,” one of the teens told detectives, “and he certainly did look it.”

    The teens said Payne treated them kindly, under the circumstances. When they reached Thomasville, he pulled out a large roll of bills and gave the young couple $25 to catch a bus back to Asheville.

    That night Payne struck again, when he and two heavily armed henchmen — one of whom was believed to be Turner — kidnapped a cotton mill worker near Greensboro. After draping a hood over his head, they drove him to Siler City, where they robbed him of $20, removed the hood and turned him loose.

    “I was told not to look back,” V.C. Blount, of Lexington, told a reporter. “Believe me, I left at a fast trot, plenty glad to get my feet on the ground again, even if a bullet might be aimed for my back.”

    After running about a hundred yards, though, Blount risked a quick glance behind him. His car was engulfed in flames, and the three men were riding away in another vehicle.

    “It seems like a nightmare,” Blount said, “but I don’t need any pinching to know that it was no dream.”

    Once again, the elusive Payne — whom newspapers took to calling North Carolina’s “will-o’-the-wisp” — vanished, only to turn up again in sightings all over the state: From Raleigh to Denton. From Charlotte to Shallotte. From Durham to Hendersonville. He broke open safes in Greensboro and Salisbury. Held up a filling station attendant in Shelby.

    On Sept. 28, 1937, he and Turner pulled off their boldest heist in months, robbing the Bank of Candor in broad daylight. With Turner brandishing a submachine gun, Payne barked at a bank official, “Make it snappy, pal. I’ve come to clean you out. Where’ve you got the money?”

    They made off with about $2,500, though in their haste to leave they overlooked a stash of an additional $6,000.

    The most significant development in Payne and Turner’s saga, though, was when another law enforcement agency joined the massive manhunt for the two fugitives — the vaunted G-men of the FBI.

    The agency’s famous “Ten Most Wanted” list didn’t exist at the time, but J. Edgar Hoover himself — the FBI’s revered director — had his own list of “public enemies,” as he called them, and Payne and Turner became numbers seven and eight on the list.

    When asked about Payne specifically, an FBI agent in Charlotte confirmed, “Yeah, we’re after him.”
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

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    FBI sting brings crime spree to an end


    An FBI operative stationed in a room of Sanford’s Wilrik Hotel gave a signal for fellow G-men – about a dozen heavily armed agents – to surround Payne and Turner with guns drawn.

    CHAPTER FOUR: CAPTURED

    The end came swiftly — and, surprisingly, without a fight — for North Carolina’s most-wanted desperados, Bill Payne and Wash Turner.

    On Jan. 3, 1938 — nearly 11 months after their sensational escape from Caledonia Prison Farm with five other dangerous convicts — the longtime partners in crime fell into the clutches of heavily armed G-men in a sting reportedly overseen by the big man himself, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. The bandits’ fearful reign of terror throughout the state — which included petty stick-ups, bold bank heists, multiple kidnappings and, ultimately, the slaying of a young highway patrolman — ended peaceably in the front seat of a stolen car, as the two men calmly surrendered with an arsenal of about a dozen submachine guns trained at their heads.


    Buncombe County Sheriff Laurence Brown inspects guns seized from Payne and Turner and used as evidence against them in their murder trial

    The capture went down in Sanford, in a precisely orchestrated sting operation so smooth and swift that most of the locals in the small Lee County town didn’t even know it had happened.

    Around 6:45 p.m., Steele Street in downtown Sanford was unusually deserted, just the way the G-men had planned it. Only three strategically parked cars occupied the street, each of them packed with FBI agents itching to put the squeeze on the elusive outlaws once and for all.

    Just as the G-men had been told would happen, Payne and Turner drove up and parked about half a block from the Wilrik Hotel, where they struck up a conversation with an acquaintance named Spud McLeod. The two wily criminals didn’t suspect a thing.

    When a lookout agent watching from his room at the Wilrik gave the signal, the three FBI vehicles hastily surrounded the desperados’ car, and federal agents poured out into the street and swarmed Payne and Turner with weapons ready.

    “We’ve got you, Payne, so take it easy!” an agent barked.

    Despite having two pistols and a shotgun — all loaded — in their car, the two bad guys were so caught off-guard that they could offer no resistance. The G-men apprehended their stunned prey and whisked them away to the FBI office in Charlotte for questioning.

    “Most remarkable thing of the capture was that not a single shot was fired,” Special Agent-in-charge Edward Scheidt told the press.

    In addition to the pistols and shotgun, the G-men confiscated a cache of ammunition and burglary tools, including everything from sledgehammers and claw hammers to hacksaws, chisels and a crowbar.

    According to reports, it was Payne’s bad-news gun moll — a spicy redhead named Joan Murphy — who betrayed him and led FBI agents to Sanford, in exchange for a lighter prison term of her own. Other reports indicated it was a man that blew the outlaws’ cover.

    However it happened, the capture ended a wild crime spree that was the talk of the state for nearly 11 months, and newpapers practically gloated in reporting Payne and Turner’s capture.

    “BILL PAYNE CAUGHT,” one paper reported in the big, bold letters usually reserved for war headlines. Over Payne’s mug shot, a caption read, “Believe It Or Not — Caught at Last!”


    The Sanford Herald reprinted this photo/illustration from The Charlotte Observer after the arrest of Wash Turner (left) and Bill Payne. The diagram behind them shows how the FBI sting nabbed the two outlaws in Sanford.

    FBI agents grilled the two outlaws all night long, a relentless interview during which Payne revealed he and Turner had planned to knock over one more bank.

    “Then we were going to skip the country,” he told investigators. “Maybe we should have left when we pulled the last one.”

    A couple of days later, the two were transported to Asheville to face trial for the murder of George Penn. Payne confessed to the crime, just as Turner had done under questioning in Charlotte.

    The state wasted no time in prosecuting the two prisoners. The trial began Jan. 25, a mere three weeks after their arrest, with a packed courtroom of curious spectators watching. Among the crowd were Margaret Penn of Carthage — the trooper’s mother, who was dressed in black and wept as she entered the courtroom — and Emma Payne of High Point, Bill Payne’s mother. She, too, wept at various times during the court proceedings.

    Over five days, the state methodically laid out its case against Payne and Turner: Their escape from Caledonia and nearly yearlong reign of terror across North Carolina. The running gun battle as they fled from the young state trooper. The shootout near farmer Van Patton’s barn. Their desperate flight from the law again, an odyssey that included multiple car thefts and kidnappings.

    The defense, meanwhile, contended the fleeing felons had a right to defend themselves, and further argued the trooper’s slaying did not constitute first-degree murder because it wasn’t premeditated. The state countered that the heavily armed outlaws had vowed to “shoot it out” rather than be captured and return to prison, which therefore constituted premeditation.


    Defendants Bill Payne (center) and Wash Turner (right) attempt to cover their faces as they are led into court to face trial for the slaying of highway patrolman George Penn.


    After only 95 minutes of deliberations, the jury sided with the state, returning a first-degree murder conviction on the evening of Jan. 29, 1938. The verdict carried an automatic death sentence.

    The two defendants, who had remained mostly stone-faced throughout the trial, wept as Judge Felix Alley pronounced the sentence.

    “May the great God — who notes even the sparrow’s fall — in His infinite pity, have mercy on your soul,” the judge said.

    Shortly after midnight, they were on their way to Central Prison in Raleigh, where they would take up residence in separate cells on Death Row. For the 250-mile drive, they wore leg chains and were handcuffed to heavy leather belts around their wastes, making their escape all but impossible.

    Barring a successful appeal, Bill Payne and Wash Turner faced a March 4 date with the gas chamber. Regardless of whether God would have mercy on their souls, they needed a judicial panel or a governor to have mercy on their lives.

    http://www.cncpunishment.com/forums/...ina-Executions

    Chapters 5 and 6 coming soon!!
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

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    Payne reflects on his past - and where he went wrong

    CHAPTER FIVE: LOOKING BACK

    Isolated in a small, austere jail cell on Death Row, only a short walk from the Central Prison gas chamber he’d been sentenced to die in, Bill Payne had time to think.

    Time to reflect on the lifelong odyssey — including a 16-year life of crime — that had led him to Death Row, awaiting his probable execution. Time to think about the roads he could’ve taken — should’ve taken — but didn’t.

    “I took a bad road to get started on,” Payne told a reporter, though it’s also fair to point out he was born into difficult circumstances. His father, Elisha, died in June 1896 — some 2½ months before Bill was born — so the son grew up without that fatherly influence in the home.

    Raised on a farm in the Bunker Hill community near Kernersville, Payne and his family moved to High Point when he was still young. As a youth, he worked at Piedmont Hosiery Mill to help provide for the family, then registered for World War I in June 1917. Until that time, he showed no signs of being a bad egg — he didn’t drink or curse, for example.

    It was after he returned from the war, when jobs were hard to come by, that Payne began having run-ins with the law, primarily charges of vagrancy. He spent his days gambling in local poolrooms, then got involved in liquor trafficking.

    Payne turned to harder crimes in 1921, when he was sentenced to serve 2½-3 years for stealing an automobile in Surry County. He served his time, but it was a long enough sentence to turn him against the concept of jail time. When he was incarcerated for subsequent crimes — mostly bank robberies — he escaped time after time, including his daring prison break from Caledonia.

    Meanwhile, a High Point family watched helplessly as Payne bounced from one crime to the next, from one prison to the next, falling ever deeper into a pit of lawlessness. His mother, Emma Payne, ran a boarding house in High Point with Bill’s sister, Minnie. Another sister, Christina, got married and moved to Indiana, but no doubt received family updates on Bill’s troubles.


    Emma Payne, of High Point, supported her notorious son, Bill, during his murder trial in Asheville and visited him on Death Row.

    Payne also had a wife, Wilma Montgomery Payne, whom he married in his early 20s. Though they never divorced, they didn’t live together for very long. They had a daughter, Lucile, who was sent at a very young age to live with her aunt, Christina, in Indiana; and a son, Harry, who grew up in High Point and lives here still. Neither of the children had a relationship with their father.

    “My daddy was never in my life, period,” says Harry Payne, now 89. “I have no memories of him at all from when I was growing up.”

    He knew who his father was, though, and he remembers hearing about all the trouble he and Wash Turner got into in 1937.

    “I was working at the old Leonard Drugstore at the time,” Harry says. “All the papers were full of stories about him every day.”

    Harry became a respectable citizen despite his father’s absence in his life. He served in the Marines during World War II — and earned a Purple Heart when he was wounded at Okinawa — then returned to High Point, where he married, raised a family and earned a solid living in the lumber industry.

    He rarely spoke of his father to anyone, hoping to protect his family from ridicule. And when his mother died in the early 1980s, he made a conscious decision to bury his father’s existence for good.

    “When my mama died, we had an auction at her house, and my wife found this box of stuff — pictures and letters and stuff like that — and she said, ‘Whatcha wanna do with this?’” Harry recalls. “And I said, ‘I don’t care what you do with it.’ So she said, ‘We’re gonna burn it. We’re gonna end this chapter of your life for good.’ So we burned it, the whole box. I don’t even have a picture of my father.”

    It’s clear that for most of his life, Harry has given little thought to the father he never knew. One can only wonder, though, whether Bill Payne — sitting on Death Row, contemplating the waywardness of his life and the likelihood of his impending death — gave thought to the son he never knew. Did he regret not being involved in his son’s life? Did he wonder what kind of man his son would become? Did he consider writing him a letter, telling him how sorry he was for abandoning him and urging him not to make the same mistakes he’d made?

    What is known is that Payne reconciled with his heartbroken mother after his capture by the FBI. When he was locked up in Asheville awaiting trial, Emma Payne first sent a letter to her son — she enlisted a High Point Enterprise reporter to hand-deliver it to him — and she later visited him. She also maintained a constant presence during the trial and visited her son several times on Death Row.

    She held onto slim hope when the N.C. Supreme Court agreed to review Payne and Turner’s appeal, pushing back his execution date. The court ultimately denied the appeal, though, and the executions were set for July 1. Only an intervention by Gov. Clyde Hoey would save them now, and that didn’t seem likely.

    Sure enough, on June 22, Hoey announced there would be no clemency for the two prisoners.

    “From the time they left Caledonia until they were finally arrested at Sanford, each step carried them logically toward the death penalty that they now face,” Hoey said in a lengthy statement. “They did not merely escape from prison — they really declared war on society.”

    Payne received the news calmly, telling a reporter, “I don’t see that anything can be done.”

    Nonetheless, on June 28, a delegation of about 30 relatives and friends of Payne and Turner — including Payne’s mother and sister, Minnie — came to Raleigh and pleaded for mercy at a hearing. However, Paroles Commissioner Edwin Gill gave no indication that the executions would be stayed.

    July 1 loomed, and the die had been cast.

    http://www.hpe.com/news/local/x12026...-he-went-wrong
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  7. #7
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    Last night on Death Row


    Central Prison in Raleigh was where Bill Payne and Wash Turner's lives came to an end on July 1, 1938.

    CHAPTER SIX: THE END

    By June 30, 1938, all of the appeals — legal, emotional and spiritual — had been exhausted. Bill Payne would spend only one more long, grim night on Death Row, followed by the long, grim morning of his death on July 1.

    “I reckon my time has come,” Payne solemnly told a reporter, “and I am ready.”

    As death neared, Payne seemed to be a humbled, changed man, vastly different from the cool, no-nonsense gangster the state had known him as for so many years. Shortly after moving to Death Row in late January, he had requested a Bible to read in his small cell; when none became available, a group of Gideons from Greensboro — a city Payne had victimized numerous times — sent 25 Bibles to Central Prison to be distributed among all of the prisoners on Death Row, including Payne.

    After five months, his well-thumbed Bible showed ample evidence of having been read often. He was reading it the evening before his execution, when a High Point Enterprise reporter showed up to interview him one last time.

    “I’d read it through before once, when I was in solitary — I didn’t get much sense out of it then,” Payne said as he drew on a cigarette. “Now, though, I think it’s real reading. Used to think true stories and detective stories were exciting. The Bible is better than all of them. It’s more exciting after you get used to it.”

    Earlier in the day, as his elderly mother watched and wept, the doomed prisoner had been baptized in a bathtub on Death Row.

    Cynics might view Payne’s radical about-face as a jailhouse conversion, and who’s to say? But if it was, the only thing he stood to gain from it was his eternity, as Gov. Clyde Hoey had already made it abundantly clear he would not interfere with Payne’s scheduled execution.

    And, indeed, on that final full day of his life, Payne seemed more consumed with heaven than the gas chamber.

    “The first thing a man should consider is where he is going to spend eternity,” the 41-year-old High Point man said. “Give all my friends my best regards, and tell all the boys to be ready when the time comes to die, and I will see them again.”

    Meanwhile, Wash Turner — Payne’s longtime partner in crime — seemed resigned to his fate.

    “I am prepared to die now,” the 36-year-old McDowell County native said softly, “but I can’t say I want to die.”

    The next morning, even as the death chamber underwent final preparations for the executions, Hoey continued to receive phone calls and telegrams urging executive clemency for Payne and Turner, but the governor stood firm.

    The prisoners had no doubt given much thought to how they would die. Before Payne and Turner’s executions in the gas chamber, another Death Row inmate — Wiley Brice, sentenced to death for a 1926 murder in Alamance County — would be electrocuted. In 1935, North Carolina had become the fourth state in the country to legally switch to gas executions, but Brice’s death was subject to the means of execution used when he committed the murder, which was the electric chair.

    Strapped into the chair, Brice would not die immediately, but the first jarring jolt of electricity to his brain would render him unconscious, so his suffering would be minimal. Payne and Turner, though, would slowly choke to death — asphyxiation is the medical term — and their suffering would be far more intense.

    So notorious were Payne and Turner that when they were sentenced to die, more than 1,500 North Carolinians had requested passes to witness their executions. The requests were denied, but a couple hundred people — largely curiosity-seekers — still showed up at Central Prison the morning of Payne and Turner’s deaths, eager to catch a glimpse of criminal history.

    Following Brice’s execution at 10 a.m., Turner entered the airtight octagonal chamber at 10:30, and the gas was activated two minutes later. As the grayish vapors rose around him, Turner gasped and convulsed nearly five minutes as he strained for air, then blacked out. More than 16 minutes passed before the prison physician finally declared him dead.

    Meanwhile, Payne prayed with the prison chaplain in his cell on Death Row. Shortly after 11 a.m., he slowly walked “The Last Mile” — the short, grim journey from his cell to the death chamber — passing the cells of eight fellow Death Row inmates and one empty cell, that of his now-deceased buddy, Wash Turner.

    “Goodbye, boys,” Payne said as he passed, looking straight ahead.

    As was the custom, the other condemned men escorted Payne to his death with song. A lone, solemn voice echoed through the prison, singing the old spiritual “I Shall Go To My Saviour,” until gradually more inmates took up the plaintive dirge.

    At 11:10, Payne entered the chamber, prayed once more with the chaplain, then shook hands with him and other prison officials.

    “Goodbye, Warden,” Payne said as the warden turned to leave. “I want to thank you for being so nice to my mother.”

    Before closing his eyes, Payne nodded farewell to the 35 witnesses — many of them George Penn’s fellow troopers with the N.C. Highway Patrol — watching from behind a double-plated, vacuum-sealed window in the chamber.

    When the gas switch clicked at 11:12, Payne’s lips moved as if he were praying. He leaned over and breathed deeply, getting a heavy whiff of the deadly fumes rising about him. As Turner had done, he began to convulse, but the contortions lasted only about three minutes. After 15 minutes, North Carolina’s most notorious gangster was declared dead.


    Two boys watch from a distance as the body of Bill Payne is loaded onto a hearse after his execution in North Carolina's gas chamber.


    Bill Payne was famous for prison escapes, but he left Central Prison in a hearse, as did his longtime partner in crime, Wash Turner.

    Newspapers across the state trumpeted the news with bold, hard-to-miss headlines. “GAS SNUFFS OUT LIVES OF PAYNE, TURNER,” the Enterprise reported that afternoon. One paper published a photo of two boys watching from across the street as Payne’s shrouded corpse was loaded onto a hearse. Another published a photo of two hearses pulling out of the Central Prison gates.

    Turner’s body was returned to his native McDowell County for burial, while Payne’s was brought to High Point. To this day, 75 years later, he lies buried in a family plot in the Abbotts Creek Missionary Baptist Church Cemetery, largely forgotten in these parts except for those few individuals old enough to remember his infamous days as an outlaw.


    Bill Payne’s body was returned to High Point for burial in a family plot in the Abbotts Creek Missionary Baptist Church Cemetery.

    The hard lesson of Payne’s life, though, remains as relevant today as it was on July 1, 1938.

    Perhaps Payne’s favorite henchman, Wash Turner, said it best in his final statement before entering the gas chamber: “I guess all that needs to be said can be summed up in a few words: Crime does not pay.”


    Payne’s death certificate indicates his cause of death was “asphyxiation pursuant to court order,” but someone clarified that by writing underneath it “legal execution.”

    http://www.hpe.com/news/x1202636457/...t-on-Death-Row
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

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  8. #8
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    Saunders: 135 years ago, NC had its own 'clumsy execution'

    On May 16, 135 years ago, the hills of Hillsboro were alive with the sound of string music.

    Naw, not from the N.C. Symphony – that wouldn’t be created for another 53 years – but from the executioner’s rope slicing through the air in the Orange County town. (Which was spelled “Hillsboro” back then.)

    Three Chapel Hill burglars – known as “the Chapel Hill Burglars” – were executed on that date as punishment for a series of burglaries and an ax attack that severely injured a woman.

    Many in the civilized world were aghast when, last month, Oklahoma’s “humane” execution of convicted killer Clayton Lockett went awry. Instead of exiting this world smoothly, the dude ended up dying of a heart attack 43 minutes after the state-approved mixture of drugs failed to do what they were advertised to do.

    Death penalty opponents saw Lockett’s excruciating exit via a poorly executed execution as proof that the state has no business being in the killing business. Death penalty proponents argued either that a convicted killer’s death should be gruesome or that a fail-safe, more humane method such as hanging should be re-implemented.

    Fail-safe? Humane? If the ghosts of Alphonso Davis, Henry A. Andrews and Lewis Carlton could speak, they’d disagree.

    Those three members of a uniquely integrated “quartette(sic) of cut-throats” – a fourth member was spared the rope after testifying against his confederates – danced at the end of the hangman’s noose in a Hillsboro field for their crimes. The quartet comprised two whites, Davis and Andrews, and two blacks, Carlton and Albert Atwater. Davis was a member of the Chapel Hill String Band.

    ‘Weary anxiety’

    With help from a researcher at the Chapel Hill Historical Society and news stories of the day, one learns that the yearlong crime spree of the “indolent, foolish and reckless desperadoes … begat sleepless nights and days of weary anxiety” throughout Orange County.

    The N.C. General Assembly in 1974 changed the law that had made first-degree burglary a capital offense – you can still get life in prison for it – but that was too late for Davis, Andrews and Carlton.

    Days after the arrests and nine months before the executions, The New York Times reported, “The feeling against the prisoners was so strong that a party of 300 men stationed themselves at a certain point between Chapel Hill and Hillsboro, for the purpose of intercepting the prisoners … (and) hanging them without judge or jury.”

    Deputies averted a lynching by taking Old Hillsboro Road and getting the prisoners into the jail, the paper reported.

    Of course, that didn’t stop the Times from appearing to convict them even before a trial. Its story concluded, “There is little doubt that they will all be convicted and promptly hanged.”

    Gee, good job, Newstradamus.

    May 16, 1771, saw another “reign of terror” in the town, according to Scott Washington of the Orange County Historical Museum. Washington, the museum’s assistant director, said that was the date of the “Battle of Alamance,” in which the British governor’s forces killed some people who’d formed a militia to protest taxation and government corruption.

    ‘Clumsy execution’

    In a headline on the 1879 hanging story that appeared in The Observer – a predecessor of our beloved News & Observer – the triple hanging was referred to as “a clumsy execution.”

    Clumsy it was. The ropes were apparently too long, causing the feet of two of the condemned men to hit the ground, necessitating an immediate re-hanging. It took the trio 13, 14 and 15 minutes, respectively, to die.

    More than 10,000 people reportedly watched the execution.

    The Observer reported the day before the executions that, “The thousands whose sickening curiosity will make them hover round about the three dead wretches dangling at midday in mid-air will look upon a sorry sight. Let us hope that they may hang as banners before the eyes of all who would rob their neighbors while they sleep.”

    Fair enough. We all should worry about those who would rob their neighbors while they sleep.

    Want to know who else I’m worried about, though? Anyone who wasn’t robbed of sleep that night, after watching three human beings writhing from the end of a rope, for 13, 14 and 15 minutes.

    Washington, of the historical museum, wasn’t sure when the “ugh” was added to the end of Hillsboro’s name.

    I’m guessing May 16, 1879.

    Ugh, indeed.

    http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/05/...#storylink=cpy
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

  9. #9
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    Why Sir Walter Raleigh lost his head (hint: he wasn’t a nice guy)

    We are this fall commemorating two of the most notable beheadings in North Carolina’s history. On Nov. 22, 1718—300 years ago—the iconic pirate Edward Teach, or “Blackbeard,” was cut down in North Carolina’s Ocracoke Inlet in a bloody clash between his crew and a group of bounty-hunters dispatched by Virginia’s governor. Blockaded by two Virginia sloops, Teach valiantly faced his enemies in hand-to-hand combat until stopped by five gunshots and 20 sword slashes to his body. The Virginia commander, Robert Maynard finished this gory business by separating Teach’s head from his body, disposing of the corpse in the waters below, and suspending the head to the bowsprit of his sloop as he set out for Williamsburg to collect his reward. Teach had been declared guilty of piracy without trial by a colonial governor with no authority to do so.

    On Oct. 29, 1618—400 years ago—the explorer and namesake for North Carolina’s capital city, Sir Walter Raleigh, received two axe blows to his neck separating his head from his body in the shadow of the Houses of Parliament. He had been on death row in the Tower of London for 15 years. A duly-empowered court found him guilty of treason for conspiring against King James I and for participating in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 to blow up Parliament. In 1618, he was found guilty of piracy for capturing a gold-laden Spanish ship in specific contradiction of Royal authority. Following the execution, his head was presented to his faithful widow Elizabeth (“Bess”) Throckmorton. His body was interred without a marker in the adjacent church of St. Margaret.

    Prince Charming?

    I grew up in North Carolina where we lauded Raleigh for choosing the Carolina coast for the first English explorations and attempted settlements in North America. We compared him with a mythic Prince Charming for paving a muddy path with his finest robe for Queen Elizabeth who then made him her “favorite.” In a land where tobacco was our richest product, he won honors for introducing pipe smoking to refined English society. And for importing the potato to starving Ireland. When I became a historian, I found much disbelief on these supposed accomplishments.

    Yet I thought I knew enough about Raleigh to accept an invitation in 2006 to talk about our hero in the Irish city of Youghal (pronounced “y’all). Upon finishing my talk, a man in the audience angrily rebuked me for failing to mention that in 1580 Raleigh had personally supervised the massacre and dismemberment of six hundred “popish” prisoners at nearby Smerwick—one of blackest moments in English history.

    Then I learned that Raleigh transferred some of his executioners to Roanoke Island in 1585 under the command of Gov. Ralph Lane, who used these same tools to execute native Indians. Lane’s reign of terror culminated in the assassination of the Algonquian chief Pemisipan, who saved the bumbling English from starvation during the winter of 1586. This diplomatic blunder assured the failure of Raleigh’s 1587 venture—a permanent settlement of men, women, and children. Though we’ve spun this egregious error into the romanticized saga of a “lost colony,” Raleigh’s errors consigned innocent beings to inexorable death and permanently soured Indian views of Europeans.

    Troubled man

    Though a grand figure in the court of Queen Elizabeth, a luminous poet, and fearless warrior against a Spanish Armada, Raleigh was a troubled human being who left destruction wherever he turned. He disaffected himself from the queen by impregnating and secretly marrying Bess, a gentlewoman of the queen’s Privy Chamber. His delusional searches for Eldorado in Guiana (Venezuela) depleted Bess’s fortune, lost their beloved son Wat in a jungle skirmish, and spurred him to pirate a Spanish ship.

    We’ve failed to acknowledge Raleigh’s tragicomic career. Blackbeard has inspired dozens of adventure books and countless movies. Raleigh’s legacy is scholarly works and uninspired movies. When I brought Raleigh’s great biographer, Cambridge historian Mark Nichols, to North Carolina a few years ago, he wanted to see how his subject is venerated in his namesake city. I sheepishly told him not much at all.

    When I organized a Raleigh research conference at the Tower of London a few years later, my chagrin about our Raleigh ignorance multiplied. As I told my North Carolina born, bred, and educated sons I was headed to England to preside over a conference about Raleigh at the Tower of London, they asked, “Why the Tower of London?” “That’s where Raleigh lived for fifteen years,” I explained. “Why?” they asked. “Because he was a traitor and a pirate,” I replied. With a look of disbelief, they asked, “He got out, right?” “No,” I said, “he was beheaded.” With jaws drooping, they asked rhetorically, “Why did we not learn that in school!”

    https://www.newsobserver.com/latest-...#storylink=cpy
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

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