Ep. #06, “You’ll Do.”
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.
[ 18 min read, 26 minute listen ]
A real life murder mystery 86 years in the making. The family of a teenager, believed to be the youngest person ever to die in the Pennsylvania Electric Chair, is heading into a Delaware County courthouse this week. They are trying to overturn a 1931 murder conviction of Alexander McClay Williams. New evidence uncovered by a stranger more than 80 years later, may prove the boy never did it, our Chris O'Connell reports.-Fox News 29
Alexander was 12 when he was arrested for allegedly burning down the barns in Markham Township. It would be the beginning of a harrowing 4 years at Glen Mills, culminating in Vida’s death and his own trial and electrocution. I think about the twelve year old boys I know. I was one myself only eleven years ago. I don't believe any child that age is evil or some kind of predator. Rather, in their innocence, children mirror the gnarled and twisted social issues that demarcate the young from the old; the conscious generation that is aware of the harm inherent to human society and yet unable to resolve it. What I am trying to say is that Alexander’s story is not the tragedy of an incorrigible and violent child, sent to a reform school only to kill the sole person who bestowed on him love and affection.
No, this is the story of a society that invents and propagates its own nightmares; the child sexual predator who must be caged to shield society from harm. I want to push back on the story that Alexander was just a bad kid, and society was justified to throw him into juvenile detention. Rather, Alexander’s story is a single, telling example of culture, politics, class and race relations mixing in America. It’s a story of powerful historical trends wrapping around the fate of a small boy from Pennsylvania.
Buried in the wisdom of Dr. King’s saying is the hope that by fighting against violence and hatred and harm, we don’t allow the misfortunes of the past to become the problems of the present. It was this fight that Mr. Ridley took up in accepting Alexander’s case and a fight he lost. Yet we should not dismiss the overwhelming significance of Alexander’s brief time on earth. Collectively, we share the burden of our nation’s past, albeit in different ways, and together we determine its future. As you’ll hear in a moment, this 1930’s murder mystery foreshadowed an unconscionable turn of events that exposes the continuities of time and place regarding race, power and abuse in America.
Here is Osceola Perdue, Alexander’s niece, and her husband Rob Perdue, talking about what happened the day of Alexander’s expungement trial, in which Rob Keller presented his expungement petition to the court to clear Alexander’s record. Judge John Capuzzi, a Delaware County Judge, presided over the trial which was held in the same courthouse that Alexander was tried and convicted in 86 years earlier.
Osceola Perdue
Photograph taken by Shelby Dolche ©2020 Keith Reeves
[Jack Pokorny]: So you want to talk about the expungement here?[Osceola Perdue]: Okay.[Jack Pokorny]: And just tell me how that went in the morning.[Osceola Perdue]: So on our way in the car, it was snowing really really bad, and we live here in Delaware, we had to go to Delaware County Media, P.A. and it was me and my husband. So we’re driving and feeling really excited, because like, we're getting somewhere after what, 80 plus years, we’re getting somewhere. So when we got there it was—all of us gathered a few of us all say about maybe 15 of us.[Rob Perdue]: Something like that.[Osceola Perdue]: About 10-15. So we were all gathered, we're excited, we're hugging each other, we don't see each other all the time. And it was a wonderful feeling to be with family and also to know that Alexander had all these people at the courthouse representing him because before he had nobody, right? From what we heard, so we go in the courtroom, —Oh! Before we start, Sam was there and Robert Keller, our lawyer, was there—well, Alexander’s lawyer was there—and he just went over a couple of things, said what was going to happen and when we go in the room, you know, we just see what the judge does. Is he going to get expunged or partially expunged? Then he just gave us a little quick run down, like maybe a couple second run down, about a minute. So we go in. We're all excited, we're all sitting there. We're just so excited, like just wanting to know what's going to happen, and there was a piece by Chris O'Connell from Fox 29 News, who is amazing. He did a piece and it aired the night before—the night before. Alright, and not only that, it aired the night before, but a couple days before that, we were in the newspaper everyday with the Delaware County Times, Del-Co Times. So it was a lot of—Oh! I'm so sorry, I cannot forget these people! There was a lot of people from Sam's following that came. White people okay.[Jack Pokorny]: Quakers?[Osceola Perdue]: Not just Quakers, just regular people from Media, people who were following the piece because Sam had did an event at the Media Fellowship house. So there was a lot of the people that was following the story that came, just to want to come to know about the case. And we didn't even know them. And some people may have been Quaker's but the rest were just people that was following it, and they were coming up to us hugging us and saying sorry for your loss and whatever. So okay, we go in, we're all feeling like a strong team. We're all feeling like well what's going to happen, anticipation. We're all like really quiet staring straight ahead at the bench. The Judge walks in. Right, so in our heads we're thinking like, this man is going to have sympathy today, it's 2017, and like, the times have changed, thank god like—we're finally going to get somewhere you know. And the judge sits in and like, Keller walks up to the bench, Robert Keller walks up to the bench, the lawyer, and he's like, ‘don't come in my courtroom. You think this is a circus?’ He's like, ‘you guys made a circus out of all of this.’ He made us feel like we were nothing but a piece of crap. And like get the blank out [of] my courtroom and don't come back. And we all left, heads down crying, upset. We couldn't believe that this man was talking to us like this! Like, I just want to scream back and say, ‘Are you insane?’ like, ‘What is your problem, like why are you talking to us like this? Like I can't believe you are a judge that we respect, that you're a judge that is supposed to help people. You took an oath you know? And here you are talking to us like that.’ And I won't forget that. And I'm not going to forget that and I'm going to make noise but we're just—we've got to do one thing at a time. But that man doesn't deserve to be able to take on any case, not after how he treated us.[Rob Perdue]: Can I chime in on that part?[Osceola Perdue]: Yes.[Rob Perdue]: So, me looking at the bigger picture, because this is a, you know, the people, coming up against the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. So the reason why the judge did not, you know, want that proceeding to go forward, because it would’ve been more public. So what the—what we went there to achieve, got achieved, but in the quietness of, you know, behind the chambers with the judge and just the attorney, you know. By—it was—he gave him—we got the partial expungement, which you know some people would be like, ‘Why, you know, why wasn’t it a full expungement?” which was me and probably my wife and a lot of people. Initially it was like, why was there not a full expungement? Why a partial expungement? Well a full expungement would have just been you would have, ‘the case is closed, the book is closed.’ We don't have anything else to talk about. You can't go higher, you can’t go lower, but a partial expungement keeps it open. So that you can keep on going on for the justice that you really really want. So we, you know, what we set out to do was achieved, but the court did not want the embarrassment, you know, to fall at the doorstep of the Commonwealth.[Osceola Perdue]: Not even just the embarrassment, it was more because he's saying that his colleagues before him and that whole judicial system I guess you would say, was guilty. Okay, for him to say that on behalf of all those people that was involved then he looks bad by saying that, and these are my words not his words, I'm just saying this is how I seen it, you know because, you know you guys are wrong. And for you to treat us that way was horrible and for you to say the words that you said to us, not only one person, but a whole room, over 20 some people heard this is.
Judge Capuzzi told Rob Keller, on March 10th, that his expungement case did not have standing because it was unclear who was being represented, despite the fact that half a dozen of Alexander’s family members had gathered in the courtroom at 9 AM during a snowstorm. Rob countered the judge’s rebuke by amending the petition to include Susie Carter, Alexander’s sister, as the defendant. Rob was “acting on her behalf,” a fact that was quite obvious from the beginning of the case. The case was rescheduled for April 6th. The government filed a response to the amended petition saying that they were opposing the expungement. Rob went and talked to the then DA of Delaware County, Jack Whelan, and was able to convince him to drop opposition to the case. Finally, on May 10, the court granted a pretrial partial expungement, which cleared Alexander’s record but failed to exonerate him. The court’s ruling meant that there were unconstitutional aspects of the 1930s trial and testimony, such as removing Alexander from his cell for confessions without a warrant, but it failed to go beyond that.
I reached out to Judge Capuzzi to sit down with me and talk about how he understood Alexander’s expungement case. His law clerk responded to my email saying that “it was not the Judge’s practice, to speak with the public regarding cases that he has presided over.” Legally, it was a win. But for Susie Carter, Osceola and Sam, it was a disgraceful win, another example of a judge thoughtlessly, or not so thoughtlessly, furthering the harm that began with a damaged boy locked up for petty theft and property damage. They all hope that Governor Tom Wolf might bring Alexander’s case to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and give him a full exoneration. [See footnote ^A]
The Supreme Court Building
Governor Tom Wolf is one of the few people who have the power to bring Alexander Williams’ case to the supreme court for a potential full exoneration.
When I began reporting on this story nearly two years ago with Sam, I was confronted with the problem of trying to understand the significance of an old court transcript. How could I bring a story confined to 1930’s legal documents into the present in a way that would spark listeners' curiosity?
In a letter to the editor published April 20, 2019, in the Delaware County Daily Times, Will Richan writes, “In 1973, a youth died in a fire in a locked cell at Glen Mills. He was burned to death because it took staff 10 minutes to locate the key to the cell. The subsequent investigation revealed that another teenager had been held in that cell for days…” As a result of the investigation, the Glen Mills’ superintendent was replaced, but the school continued to operate, housing and providing services to thousands of boys and young men over the years.
Despite incidents like the one I just spoke about, Glen Mills had a stellar national reputation. Lisa Gartner, who broke a story on the school in February of last year, described its image as “the Harvard of reform schools.” From community members that I spoke to, Glen Mills was exceptional in the eyes of society because of its ability to sculpt Olympic and NFL quality athletes out of boys that were largely discarded as dangerous or useless. But Lisa Gartner’s reporting for the Philadelphia Inquirer brought the accolades and praise to an abrupt, startling, and horrifying halt. In late February of last year, Gartner published a damning and explosive exposé on a culture of chronic physical, sexual, and verbal abuse by the school’s staff and counselors towards the boys held at the facility since the 1970’s.
Gartner writes:
“Serious violence is both an everyday occurrence and an open secret at Glen Mills, and has been for decades, an Inquirer investigation has found. Internal documents, court records, incident reports, and more than 40 interviews with students, staff and others, show top leaders turn a blind eye to the beatings and insulate themselves from reports while failing to properly vet or train the school’s counselors. When students and their families try to report these attacks, the Inquirer found, Glen Mills staff uses the school’s prestige as a weapon: They say Glen Mills is as good as it gets, and that if students complain, they’ll be shipped off to a state-run facility crowded with boys who are mentally ill or have committed sex offenses.
To keep teens quiet, counselors and supervisors threaten the boys with longer sentences, claiming that if they went to another placement, their time would restart. Other Glen Mills staffers have hidden students until their bruises disappear.
‘There are kids who can’t come home because they are getting abused,’ said James Johnson, a former Glen Mills student who went on to become a counselor — then quit in 2015 over what was happening to boys. ‘I’ve seen people thrown through doors, like it was a movie.’”
An April 2 article by Gartner was titled, “Glen Mills laying off 250 after students are removed because of abuse probe.” In July, another article from the Inquirer began, “Glen Mills Schools promises a ‘vastly different’ program if allowed to reopen.”
“Three months after the state revoked its licenses over abuse allegations, the Glen Mills Schools is pledging to change its programming, hiring practices, and even its philosophy if allowed to reopen.” However later on she says, “Glen Mills has consistently and vigorously pushed back against The Inquirer’s report, saying – without any specifics –that it ‘disputes virtually all the allegations and conclusions; in the article.’” Gartner’s reporting also exposed that the school’s superintendent, Randy Ireson, was having notes slipped under his door at night by boys pleading with him to help them get away from their abusers, counselors and staff, who he supervised. In response, Ireson had the boys nightly route changed, and ignored their pleas.
By November of 2019, the U.S. Representative that I alluded to in the first episode, Mary Gay Scanlon, had introduced legislation creating an easier route for the abused children and their families to sue Glen Mills in court. And by January 29, 2020, the Inquirer went on to publish “Glen Mills faces more than a dozen lawsuits, alleging beatings and sexual abuse.” In it, William Bender writes, “The attorneys have filed eight similar suits since November and say they now represent more than 300 former Glen Mills students who allege they were abused there between 1976 and 2018. Additional suits are expected.” Today, Glen Mills has been shuttered, seemingly for good. The school had an annual revenue of 40 million dollars and at the height of enrollment had over 1,000 boys. [See footnote ^B]
When I read about this chronic abuse, I think about Alexander. Did anyone know besides Vida about how Fred would beat him, kicking him on the floor? What can we say about the boys at Glen Mills before 1931? And what about the boys that were held there in the 1940’s, 50’s, and 60’s? We know about the boy who burned to death in the 1970’s. And only now are we coming to terms with the reality that there were hundreds of abused children, much like Alexander, that were being held at Glen Mills up until last year. What does this say about our community that we voluntarily placed our most vulnerable boys in an institution that brought such violence and malice into their lives? Why don’t people care more about another person’s child?
I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that abuse at boy’s schools goes far beyond Glen Mills. Across the state of Pennsylvania, similar stories of chronic abuse have surfaced in the last year. The Department of Human Services (DHS) has been intensely criticized for consistently ignoring or failing to follow up on victim’s complaints. That culture of complicity may begin to change following the Inquirer’s reporting. I wanted to close out the podcast with Sam reflecting on what all this has meant to him.
Though he died before I was born, my great-grandfather was a figure of heroic stature to me. From him, I inherited an obligation to stand up when encountering racial and social injustice. It was not a choice for my great-grandfather, or me. Alexander’s case forced me to resolve two fundamental questions: why a teenage boy would commit such a horrendous crime; and like a falling star, why my brilliant great-grandfather lost this case at the zenith of his pioneering career. It would be a lengthy lesson for me, indeed. I began my book – The Case That Shocked the Country – with a compelling quote from the late Maya Angelou:“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”And, with good reason. For more than 10,000 days, I have carried his untold story in my heart and mind, thinking of him – and Vida Robare, a sweet young woman who tried to protect him; both of whom suffered and brutally died through the acts of her murderous ex-husband. The magnitude and horror of this story bore down on me with crushing weight, pushing me beyond exhaustion. Painstakingly piecing this story together over the course of three decades, from disparate threads many had hoped had been forgotten was physically and emotionally grueling; often moving me to tears. The image of Alexander, sitting in the electric chair with a hood over his head, crying his eyes out over a crime he didn’t commit, would sometimes suddenly appear to me at unexpected times, even while driving my car. And I would suddenly burst into tears. This story haunted me, ensnaring me like a spider’s web, pulling me ever deeper inside. At some point I realized there was no way out, and I had to stay with it until the indefinable end, whatever that meant. In 2015, I had the opportunity to meet and talk with another former inmate – Anthony Ray Hinton from Alabama – who spent nearly 30 years on death row but was finally freed after 16 years of litigation by Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative for a murder he did not commit. Despite having witnesses who swore that he was at work with them, miles away at the time of the killing, he asked a policeman why he was being arrested. The officer’s somber reply was: “you’ll do.” Alexander served the same purpose, but unlike Hinton’s slim ray of hope, Alexander was doomed.
Anthony Ray Hinton
Since his release in 2015 Anthony Ray Hinton has written a memoir entitled The Sun Does Shine: How I Sound Life and Freedom on Death Row. Anothony has become a powerful advocate and speaker, for criminal justice reform focusing his attentions of the Alabama judicial system.
For more on Anthony Ray Hinton
[See footnote ^C].
This is a recurring theme in American jurisprudence that continues to this day. Young people of color are presumed guilty until proven innocent, often, regardless of what the evidence may indicate, or when police, prosecutors, or judges break the law to prove a point. The point being, that race and poverty skew our judicial process and that there is no equal justice under law. By failing to address this recurring theme, we see 90 years later an explosion of abuse that has been repressed so long at Glen Mills. No amount of deceit or cover ups could suppress it. Alexander McClay Williams, Sandra Bland, George Stinney, Jr., Emmitt Till, Trayvon Martin, Kalief Browder, Eric Gardner, and countless others provide grim evidence of that. The list is long. The faces are typically black or brown; only the names are different. As Dr. King said, “The moral arc of the universe is long…” Yes, very long, indeed. It may “bend toward justice” but it has not yet arrived. And will it ever? This podcast is a plea for justice. Since I am not an attorney, I have taken this case as far as I can. But now it’s time for some other soul to step up, to take the challenge. It’s never too late for justice, or for the next Alexander McClay Williams, who is surely to come along, any day now. In fact, nearly every day now.—Sam Lemon
Alexander is buried at a small abandoned cemetery called Green Lawns on the edge of Chester. The whole cemetery is a small field and it’s bordered on one side by a highway that runs down towards Delaware. Until last year, he lay in an unmarked paupers grave a few feet away from a single tree in the middle of the field. At the time of his death, William's family either couldn't afford to mark his grave or perhaps because of the shame associated with his death, chose not to. Sam found the grave last year. Osceola and Susie fundraised and together the family collected enough funds to buy a thick black granite headstone for Alexander. The headstone reads, “Executed for a crime he did not commit. Justice deferred is justice denied.”
The arc of history is long. It is often deferred, often denied to those most deserving of justice. Caught up in this storm together, somehow we often believe it is not our place to care for the pain of others in this big world, that we don’t have time and we don’t have the money. Even in the pain of the modern era, I see a path forward that affords us companionship in these dark days. It’s a path of binding the past with the present to make a better future. It’s a future in which Alexander would still be alive today.
To close out, Professor Reeves, my executive producer, wanted to share one last quote by Dr. Martin Luther King. King implores us, even begs us, to remember one important piece: the connection between power, injustice, and love. Dr. King, who himself would have known about Glen Mills during his time at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, reminds us of this, quote:
“Power, properly understood, is the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political, or economic changes. In this sense, power is not only desirable but necessary in order to implement the demands of love and justice. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love." —Dr. Martin Luther King
End quote
—Read by Keith Reeves
Footnotes:
A. On Differences between Expungement, Partial Expungement and a Pardon. There are a few key differences between expungement, partial expungement and a pardon. Alexander Williams was granted a partial expungement. This means that the person is now seen as being in the court's good standing and this conviction is set aside. In some states it is more of a confirmation of a person's reformation not that the convictions have been cleared. In a partial expungement the case file still remains at the courthouse.
A full expungement means that the criminal convictions are ‘erased’. The court is to treat the criminal conviction as if it had never occurred and the physical record is either destroyed or sealed from the state or federal records depending on the varying laws from state to state. Where as a legal pardon is considered a “forgiveness” granted often by public officials. The person is relieved of the legal consequences from the conviction but the criminal record is not erased.
B. On Recent Glen Mills Abuses Glen Mills school for Boys has had a long history being the oldest reformatory of its kind and not all the stories are good. A facility such as itself should aim to nurture growth but instead seems to misuse it’s structure, exploiting the power dynamic between the boys and the counselors. More recently the school had caught public attention with the videoed assault of a seventeen year old by two school counselors. The boy, partaking in a group activity, ended up in an argument with a counselor who hurled the boy into the ground while another counselor began to punch the teen. Both counselors were arrested and for a time it was seen as an isolated incident.
In early 2019, an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer shocked many by bringing to light numerous abuses committed against Glen Mills boys, which occurred over the span of forty years. Over 300 former students have come forward against the school, all attending between 1976 and 2018. An investigation took place and by April 2019 all 14 of the school’s licenses had been revoked by DHS, due to gross incompetence and negligence as well as the mistreatment and abuse of children in care at the facilities. All of the boys were removed and the school was closed up. In 2021, while still in the midst of lawsuits from abuse allegations, there was talk about Glen Mills reopening under a new name and new leadership.
C. On Anthony Ray Hinton In 1985 two armed robberies of Birmingham fast-food restaurants, resulted in the deaths of John Davidson and Thomas Wayne Vason. After a third robbery Anthony Hinton’s picture was chosen out of a line up by the manager who survived the attack. This prompted the police to investigate him. Hinton was arrested and the alibi given by his boss, that he was working during the shootings, was disregarded. The prosecutions only evidence was the bullets from the crime scenes supposedly matched a gun owned by Hinton’s mother. No other evidence was introduced, and on this alone, Hinton was sentenced to death.
After multiple appeals and years on death row and the help of the Equal Justice Initiative, the case was dropped. The new forensic experts were unable to match the bullets to the gun owned by Anthony’s mother. Anthony’s conviction was overturned and he was released from prison on April 3, 2015 after spending thirty years on death row, for murders he didn’t commit.