Ep. #01, Mystery in a Murder
Jack Pokorny
Podcast Copyright © 2021 by Keith Reeves, Jack Pokorny, and Margaret O’Neil. All Rights Reserved. Executive Producers: Keith Reeves and Maggie O’Neil. Producer: Jack Pokorny. Narrated and Written by Jack Pokorny. Original Music by Hee Won Park and Tommy Neil. Sandbox Atlas Blog Content Editors: Ben Meader and Emily Meader. Based on the meticulously researched book, The Case That Shocked the Country: The Unquiet Deaths of Vida Robare and Alexander McClay Williams by Samuel Michael Lemon, Ed.D. (2017). The podcast was generously supported by the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility and the Program on Urban Inequality and Incarceration, both at Swarthmore College; the Swarthmore Black Alumni Network (SBAN); Keller, Lisgar & Williams, LLP. The producers wish to especially acknowledge the invaluable contributions of: Mrs. Susie Carter (Alexander’s sole surviving sibling); Dr. Sam Lemon (the great-grandson of Alexander’s original attorney); Teresa Smithers (a descendant of Fred Robare, Vida Robare’s husband); Osceola Perdue (Alexander’s great-niece) and her family; Attorney Robert C. Keller; Chris Rhoads; Sean Kelley, Annie Anderson, and Sally Elk, all of Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site in Philadelphia.
[10 min read, 14 minute listen]
[1:32] Dr. Martin Luther King once said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” This podcast is about that arc—about whether or not the world changes in the ways we’d like to see it change. But is also about a sixteen-year-old, and a murder that happened a long time ago.
Like, who the heck’s going to March through a freakin’ town, Ku Klux Klan go on a march to a town and is a predominantly black town. Right? And then the president be okay with that? - Osceola WilliamsAmidst of all this you have this highly charged racial case, in which there are allusions to this young black defendant having sexually assaulted a virtuous white woman. - Sam LemonAnd for so many people to be involved in that case—not one person said we shouldn't do this—that’s not right. - Osceola Williams
I’m wondering, eighty seven years after this murder, has the moral universe actually bent towards justice? I don’t know, but I’d like to find out by contextualizing the troubles of this young man in history—a way to apply a litmus test to Dr. King’s optimism, to his outright faith in humanity. Now, I don’t mean to criticize Dr. King. What I am hoping to do is kind of check in with humanity, to try and glimpse, if only for a moment, who we really are.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Dr. King is widely credited for the quote, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice,” and he did indeed use it frequently, in his many speeches, marches, and social justice campaigns. For an interesting look at this quote and its attribution history, see this NPR article from 2010.
(Right: Photo of Dr. King in 1967 by Don Rice, public domain.)
[3:26] This story is about Alexander McClay Williams, a 16-year-old African American, who became the youngest person ever to be executed by the State of Pennsylvania. [See footnote ^A]. When Alexander was 12 he was placed by Judge Fronefield at the Glen Mills Reformatory School for boys for the crime of arson—he was accused of lighting barns on fire. He would remain at the institution for approximately six years before being executed for the alleged murder of Vida Robare, a 34-year-old matron at Glen Mills and one of his primary caretakers. A criminal hearing and trial began on October 4th, 1930, and a verdict was delivered on January 7th, 1931. There was a motion for another trial in February, but it was rejected and Alexander was executed on June 8th, 1931. The whole legal preceding took under five months, culminating in Alexander’s electrocution. [See footnote ^B].
Even though Alexander died 87 years ago, there have been some recent developments which triggered the case to resurface in the local press and legal circles of Delaware County, which is where Glen Mills School is located. Even as the years have elapsed—and we have had more than enough trouble to be troubled by today—there’s something about Alexander’s story that is unique and remarkably compelling. A number of lawyers, one who is now on the path to being elected a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, dedicated pro bono time to telling this story. As I am coming to find out, things are always more complex than they first appear, as is especially true with this case. But I promise to be as honest and direct with you as I am with myself. How to tell this story has been on my mind and I’m a little worried I won’t do it right. But hopefully the content will speak for itself, and I can just get out of the way. You’ll be the judge. I’m Jack Pokorny, and this is The Arc Towards Justice.
Alexander McClay Williams
Alexander was born on July 23, 1914 in Pennsylvania to Osceola and John Williams. His parents would go on to have a large family. Although he was only one of a group of boys detained for petty crimes at age 12, he would later be sent away to a reformatory school after being accused of arson.
(Left: Photo of Alexander, cropped from the original. Courtesy of Keith Reeves.)
[5:25] Very shortly after the murder happened, even the day of, newspapers across the United States had picked up the story. The details of this small town murder mystery seemed to beckon for national media attention. The Kansas City Star reported in an article titled, “Mystery In A Murder.”
A missing bunch of keys and a bloodstained hand-print on the wall of the bedroom where Mrs. Vida Robare was slain today furnished the only clues to the murder of the 35-year-old matron at the Glen Mills reformatory school.
The article goes on to say:
An intensive search is being made for the keys, and the hand-print has been photographed by the state police. Mrs. Robare was found on the floor of her room, partly undressed. On her bed was an open magazine and a partly eaten pear. An overturned lamp was the only object in the room that had been disturbed. Nothing was missing but the keys which Mrs. Robare always carried with her (…) Mr. and Mrs. Robare lived in one of the group of cottages that form the school. Mrs. Robare was known as the house mother.
A local paper, The Chester Times, reported three days later on October 7th that the investigation had taken off in a startling course of inquiry:
The belief that a woman may have killed “pretty” Mrs. Vida Robare, matron at the Glen Mills School for Boys near Media, who was found beaten and stabbed thirty-eight times in a cottage on the school grounds, was expressed today by District Attorney William J. MacCarter.
[6:49] This attorney would later become the prosecutor in Alexander’s trial:
We have no definite evidence that a woman did commit this crime,” he said, “but this theory does fit the line of investigation we are pursuing."
He made this statement after he admitted that he would “question today a woman employed at the Glen Mills School.” The article says further:
This woman, it was revealed, had told friends on the school grounds that she knew who killed Mrs. Robare, or at least had strong suspicions. The woman is said to have confessed that she feared to advance her theory because of the danger that she would be killed, too. The report of John Klein, Philadelphia finger expert, is expected to reveal prints of the thumb and possibly the ring finger on the left hand of the murderer. Klein spent several hours yesterday afternoon and last night examining the bloody print of a hand on the wall of Mrs. Robare’s bedroom, on the second floor of Cottage No. 5 at the school. Armed with definite knowledge of the weapon and with the prints of the murder, the process of eliminating subjects will go forward much more speedily.
Image is from Newspaper Archive online. Chester Times, October 07, 1930, Pg. 1, Chester, Pennsylvania, US.
To do this day, we are unsure who the murderer was, although I have my suspicions. What makes this case in part so provocative is how Vida died. She was stabbed, not thirty-eight times as was originally reported, but forty-seven times with an ice pick. [See footnote ^C].
[8:24] Vida was a matron at Glen Mills, like I’ve said—the school where Alexander was incarcerated until his arrest. She was white and blonde with an athletic build, and she was used to working with rambunctious kids of all different ages. She also wrote music and poetry in her free time, and she actually did it well enough to have some of her lyrics published.
The Kansas City Star reported on October 4th, the day after the crime, that Vida was, quote: “regarded as a high type woman and had a splendid record.” She was obviously a complex, creative human being, and she was very well liked by many of the staff at Glen Mills. And her death would come to shine a light on the insidious legal powers of the 1930s and the ways in which they still haunt the Media courthouse today—the exact same building where the trial happened in 1931.
Alexander’s story, particularly Vida’s death, brings into the spotlight issues of African-American children under the supervision of white authority figures. It points out some of the most racist practices of the 1930’s Pennsylvania criminal justice system. And it adds emphasis to how gender has always been an exceedingly influential characteristic of this country’s history. The KKK rears its head on the outskirts of Philadelphia, and Voodoo from the Danish West Indies inspires a family’s complex spirituality. Perhaps most tellingly, this case highlights how individuals—and even moreso communities—often have an opportunity to make decisions that alter the course of history, even in the face of tremendous corruption and mass opposition.
Researching Alexander’s story, I’ve thought a lot about Dr. King’s arc. About how this country’s moral code of decency—it’s vision of an open-hearted, welcoming, idealistic nation—seems to drift farther and farther from reality. From the violence in Charlottesville, the injustices that are taking place on our border with Mexico, and the hundreds of thousands of people we lock up for non-violent drug offenses—these beg the question: How many years did Dr. King mean when he talked about that arc? Ten, twenty, or a lifetime? I think that this question is something a lot of young people, in fact a lot of people, want to know the answer to these days.
[10:30] Here to help me navigate this moral and political minefield is Dr. Sam Lemon. This case would not have resurfaced if it wasn’t for his work. Sam is the great-grandson of William H. Ridley; the first African-American attorney to be admitted to the Delaware County Bar Association, and, it so happens, Alexander’s defense attorney during the trial. [See footnote ^D].
There's been a burden for me in terms of being a great-grandson of the attorney William H. Ridley. I wanted to find out not just the particulars about the case—why it happened and how it happened—but I also wanted to know why my great-grandfather lost this case and did he do the best possible job he could have at the time. And I felt a real obligation to both Vida Robare and Alexander McClay Williams to try to do my best to continue the work that I believe my great-grandfather started. Well, I happen to be living in his home that I bought a couple of years ago. So this is kind of a story with spiritual elements tying three disparate families together, over the course of almost a century—each of us trying to resolve the ghosts of the past and exorcise them from our family histories, by doing something positive, to righting a wrong that happened 87 years ago.- Sam Lemon
Vida spent the Friday of October 3rd, 1930, doing chores in Cottage five at Glen Mills. These cottages were actually three story houses that contained large, open dormitories for the boys, as well as dining rooms big enough to accommodate everyone, including the staff that lived in the cottages. She woke up early that day, and began cooking for the boys under her supervision. She didn’t leave the cottage—from the testimony that we have—at any point during the day. We know from her husband that she didn’t get fully dressed until around 1 p.m., leaving off a full-bodied dress and choosing instead to wear old-fashioned stockings and a shirt.
Vida Robare
Born Vida Kinnee on February 14, 1895 in Thompson, Michigan, she later married Fred Robare in 1916. After losing two young infants, Vida gave birth to Dale Robare, on November 17, 1920. She moved to the east coast and by the 1930s both Vida and Fred were living and working at the Glen Mills School for Boys.
(Left: Photo of Vida Robare. Bradford Era, October 10, 1930, Pg. 1, Bradford, Pennsylvania, US.)
[12:41] At five o’clock in the evening her husband Fred Robare returned home with the boys he’d been supervising while working on a project outside. He led the boys into the basement of the cottage via a backdoor with access to the outside. Everyone changed clothes and washed up before heading upstairs for dinner. Fred sat down in the living room, waiting for his wife to call that the food was ready. She would usually call for them from the kitchen to come in and eat, but today he didn’t hear any dishes or pots clanging in the kitchen, didn’t smell any hot food, didn’t see any sign of her actually.
So he went up to her room. He climbed the stairs that began at the front door of the cottage, leading to a hallway on the second floor. The door to her room was just a few feet down the hall and on the left. Opening the door, which he found unlocked, he saw that her bed was soaked in blood. Then he saw her body. She was wearing only a shirt that fell to her hips. She was covered in congealed blood so thick it was like a quilt, so thick it was impossible to see any injuries or puncture wounds.
The officer in charge of Cottage 6, which is connected to Cottage 5 with a covered porch, purportedly heard Fred crying out, shortly before he found him rushing from the bedroom. Investigators would arrive shortly after, but why anyone would kill Vida was far from obvious.
Glen Mills School, as shown on the 1934 map of Thornbury Township in the Delware County, Pennsylvania.
Next time, we’ll find out more about Alexander, about his childhood and family, and why he was placed at Glen Mills in the first place. Stay with us. Production management is Maggie O'Neill and Professor Keith Reeves. The original music is by Heewon Park, Tommy Neal, and myself. A special thanks to the Swarthmore Black Alumni Network and The Lang Center for supporting this podcast.
I’m Jack Pokorny, writer, narrator, and producer, and this is The Arc Towards Justice.
Footnotes:
A. On juvenile capital punishment: A similar case to Alexander McClay Williams is that of 14-year-old George Stinney, Jr. of South Carolina. George was charged for the murders of Mary Emma Thames and Betty June Binnicker in 1944. Like Alexander, George was questioned without an attorney or his parents present, after which the police said a confession was given with a sexual motive. His trial lasted three hours and it took the ten white men of the jury ten minutes to decide his fate. On June 26, 1944, George Stinney, Jr. was sentenced to death by electrocution. He was the youngest person in the 20th century to be executed. The Supreme Court outlawed juvenile death sentences in 2005 in Roper v. Simmons. George Stinney, Jr. was exonerated in 2014, seventy years after his death.
B. On the use of the electric chair: Alexander was executed by electric chair in the Rockview Prison in Pennsylvania in 1931. In 1913, Pennsylvania law regarding executions had changed; the state's preferred method switched from hanging to electrocution. Rockview Penitentiary was the first prison in Pennsylvania to have an electric chair. It was used 350 times between 1915 and 1962. Rockview’s chair, though not used for years, was disassembled in 1990 when the method of execution changed to lethal injection. As of 2021, the electric chair is still used as an alternate form of execution in nine states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.
C. On news reporting inconsistency: The media offered some conflicting details surrounding the murder even before Alexander was identified as a suspect.
On October 4, 1930, the Evening Gazette in Xenia, Ohio spoke of “Mrs. Vida Robare, attractive 33-year old instructress (…) found partially disrobed (…) thirty-six wounds in all marred her breast, back and skull. (…) from all indications the woman had been lying on her bed reading a novel.” On the same day The Times Herald from Port Huron, Michigan would report of a 35-year-old Vida, who was found by her husband Fred, with 38 stab wounds (not “thirty-six”) on her body. The novel she was reading is instead reported as a magazine, and there’s the added detail of a partly eaten pear on the bed. New Britain Herald, from New Britain, Connecticut reports on the same day that Vida was discovered by her husband Charles Robare (not “Fred”), pierced more than thirty times. Her body was unclad (instead of “partially disrobed”) with a silk garment thrown across it and on the bed a magazine and a partially eaten apple (not “pear”).
After the confession of Alexander Williams, the focus turned to him, yet not a single news source used his correct age, which was 16. It was stated that he was 18 years old with some papers aging him even more as he neared his execution date. On June 8, 1931, The Daily News in Huntington, Pennsylvania said he was “aged about nineteen.”
One of the first newspapers to bring up the age discrepancy was Leader Times in Kittanning, Pennsylvania. On May 5, 1962, an article stated; “The death certificate on Williams is confused in that while it records he was born July 23, 1914 and died June 8, 1931, it also lists his age as 18 years, 10 months and 16 days. This is exactly two years more than he would have been according to the birth date given.”
D. On William H. Ridley, Jr.: William H. Ridley, Jr. was born on June 12, 1867, the son of two former slaves. He grew up in Media, Pennsylvania; he did well in high school and graduated in 1887. He decided to study law and passed the bar examination in 1891. He was admitted to the Delaware county bar and became Delaware County’s first African-American attorney. He would become Alexander Williams’s Defence Attorney in 1930.