The Innocents (1964)
by Edward D. Radin

Excerpt on

Gus Colin Langley
 

Hue and cry in Asheville brought Gus Colin Langley to the literal brink of death; he had just twenty-five minutes to live. He had eaten his final meal; the legs of his trousers were slit, and his head had been shaved and measured for the tight-fitting brine-soaked helmet that would help speed his electrocution at the North Carolina State Prison. He stood up when the prison chaplain entered his cell, expecting to start the brief walk to the electric chair. Instead, he was informed that his execution had been delayed; a legal error had been made in pronouncing sentence, the judge having inadvertently omitted the words "first degree" in citing his murder conviction.

That meaningless technicality saved the life of an innocent man. Langley's case is an example of how investigators sometimes will blind themselves to facts in their haste to provide a prisoner when the pressures of hue and cry mount against them.

It was not Langley's only close brush with death. All told, he had been slated to die seven times, and his final reprieve, like the first, arrived only minutes before his scheduled execution. Yet, from the very moment of his arrest, there had been positive and easily verifiable proof of his innocence.

The case began in the depression year of 1932. It was not a happy year for large segments of the population, particularly for many in Asheville, at the gateway to the Great Smokies, who at that time depended largely upon summer visitors for most of their year's income. With a dearth of free-spending tourists and a retrenchment at many lavish estates in the area, the summer season that year had been a poor one financially, and uneasy residents faced a lean and hungry winter in the "Land of the Sky." With people in such a mood it did not require much to set off a hue and cry.

The explosion that caused it was the murder of Lonnie G. Russell, a gas-station attendant. He gasped out to a nurse that two men had tried to hold him up and had fired a bullet into his back when he resisted. By the time police arrived at the murder scene, the crowd was so large that officers had to battle their way through it. The investigation was headed by the sheriff's office.

Police were able to round up two witnesses, neither of whom had heard any shot. A hotel employee said he had seen two men, one taller than the other, run from the service station to a car parked across the street and speed away. A woman also saw two running men and thought their car was equipped with New Jersey license plates. This information brought forward a third witness, an insurance agent, who said that on the day before the murder he had noticed a New Jersey car parked near the station. Because he had once lived in that state he had stopped and chatted briefly with the two men in the car. One was taller than the other, and he described the taller man as having blond hair.

The murder occurred about 9 P.M. on September 27. This made two dates important in the case: the time of the murder, and the late afternoon of the twenty-sixth, the previous day, when the insurance man saw two men lurking near the station in a car with New Jersey plates.

Langley was in North Carolina on both of the days involved. A native of Wilmington, a town on the coast, 390 miles from Asheville, he had been living in New Jersey for some years, working as a house painter. With business in his area at a depression standstill, his father, also a painter, suggested that he return to Wilmington and share what orders came in. Mrs. Langley decided to remain home with the children while Gus tried it our first. He was accompanied by a friend, Wilcey Johnson. Langley was of average height, several inches taller than Johnson.

In preparation for the trip Langley had plastered his old sedan with gaudy signs advertising painting at low prices; he hoped to pick up business along the way to help pay the expenses of the trip. His car, of course, was equipped with New Jersey license plates.

Langley had a perfect alibi for the afternoon of the twenty-sixth, the day before the crime when the insurance salesman had seen a New Jersey car parked near the murder scene. During that afternoon he had stopped at a service station some four hundred miles from Asheville, where he met a group of Army officers stranded by a breakdown and gave them a lift to Fort Bragg. They became friendly and exchanged names. While leaving the military reservation about 9 P.M., he collided with a soldier on a bicycle, and a report of the minor accident was made at the post. Not long afterward a front wheel developed a wobble, and since it was too dark for him to make roadside repairs, he slowly limped his way to the police station in Elizabethtown, where a sympathetic police chief gave him permission to park in a nearby schoolyard and sleep in the car overnight. The next morning, the day of the murder, Langley completed his repairs about 11 A.M. and spent an hour or more chatting with the police chief. He was still almost four hundred miles from Asheville.

That afternoon Langley reached Wilmington, where again there were disinterested witnesses to attest to his arrival. Langley and Johnson had completely exhausted their meager funds as they approached the toll bridge leading into Wilmington. They explained their circumstances to an attendant at the bridge, but although Langley promised to return immediately with the quarter which he would obtain from his father, the collector would not let him through. The painter had two quarts of oil in his car, and he then canvassed gas stations in the vicinity, offering to swap it for the toll. A kindly owner gave him the money to get across the bridge. That night, at the very moment of the murder, Langley was at his father's home in Wilmington, surrounded by old friends and neighbors who were welcoming him with a party.

Yet five days later Langley and Johnson were plucked out of Wilmington, taken to Asheville, and accused of the murder of the gas-station attendant there. The tenuous thread that led to their arrest was the simple fact that Langley's car was equipped with New Jersey plates and it was the only one Buncombe County officials could find in the state that also had been there on the day of the murder.

A glance at a map will show that Asheville is in the extreme western portion of North Carolina where the state narrows like a thin pointing finger, wedging itself between Tennessee on the north and South Carolina and Georgia on the south. The quickest and easiest escape route from Asheville is in either a northerly or southerly direction, since it is less than forty miles either way to the state line.

Although Langley informed two deputy sheriffs from Asheville that they could easily check his presence in Wilmington on the day of the murder, the officers were not interested; when hue and cry is on, police are anxious to find a suspect to still public clamor. He was told they had witnesses back in Asheville.

The sheriff in Asheville promised to check Langley's alibi for the two key days. He was still promising to do so several weeks later when both men had been indicted for the murder. Because the charges against Johnson were quietly dismissed some months after Langley had been tried first and convicted, the story centers on Langley.

Two events of importance occurred while Langley was being held in jail prior to his trial. When he learned that the insurance agent had identified him as the man he had spoken to in Asheville the day before the murder, he promptly wrote to the Army officers at Fort Bragg, the soldier with whose bicycle he had collided, and the police chief of Elizabethtown, who could verify his story that he was four hundred miles away. When days and weeks passed with no reply, he wrote again to all of them several times. Langley had been kept in a cell by himself. Some time after his arrest, he was given a cell mate, who re­mained only several days and then was transferred.

Langley's trial opened on December 20. His attorney was ill, and at the last moment another lawyer offered to defend him and suggested that the trial be delayed so that he could study the case. But a group of witnesses had arrived from Wilmington, and Langley was so certain he would be acquitted that he insisted on an immediate trial.

It was a curious trial. In its direct case the prosecution presented no witnesses to prove that Langley had been in Asheville on the day of the murder. The state presented only two important witnesses. The first was the insurance agent who said he had talked to Langley the day before the murder while he had been parked near the gas station. During cross-examination he said he was certain that it was a New Jersey car because the license plates were yellow and red; the New Jersey plates for that year were dark green and white. He admitted that he originally had described Langley's hair as light; it was jet-black. He said Langley had been wearing an open shirt with short sleeves and there were no markings on his body; Langley's chest and arms showed prominent tattoo marks.

The second important witness was the man who had been briefly in Langley's cell. He testified that Langley had admitted the murder to him and had boasted he would bring "enough witnesses from Wilmington to clear me." It might be said at this point that this man had been under arrest on a mayhem charge; two other prisoners had received forty-five-year sentences, but a mistrial had been declared for him. The charges were dismissed against him after he had testified against Langley.

Langley took the stand in his own defense and detailed his alibi for both September 26 and 27. Witness after witness placed him in Wilmington, 390 miles away, on the day of the murder.
In his summation to the jury the prosecutor said, "Witnesses who have been brought here for Langley could only say one thing, 'Tuesday, September twenty-seventh.' A bunch of parrots could have been taken from a pet store and done as well." The twenty-seventh, of course, was the vital day, the day of the murder. Throughout the trial the prosecutor asked repeatedly why Langley had no witnesses to show where he had been on the twenty-sixth and used this failure to discredit Langley's story. A jury took a little over two hours to convict Langley of first-degree murder, and he was sentenced to die in the electric chair.

It is to be hoped that while the prosecutor was taunting Langley about having no alibi witnesses for the twenty-sixth, he was not aware of why none did appear. At a hearing conducted later by the governor's office the Army officer and the police chief of Elizabethtown testified that they had not received any of the letters Langley sent them. Langley had turned these letters over to the county-jail guards to be mailed for him; they were employed by the sheriff's office which had made the arrest. Perhaps it was coincidence that all those letters, written on different occasions, had somehow gone astray in the mails.

Langley had no funds to process an appeal, and it was the lawyer who defended him who discovered the technical error that managed to halt the execution at the last moment.

A barrage of angry letters from the Wilmington witnesses who claimed that Langley was being railroaded to the electric chair caused the other six postponements of his electrocution while a lengthy investigation was being conducted. Even after it had been established that Langley was not in Asheville on either the twenty-sixth or the twenty-seventh, the state was in no hurry to admit publicly that an error had been made. First the death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and then Langley was conditionally released, paroled to New Jersey authorities. On August 5, 1936, almost four years after his original arrest, North Carolina finally admitted that he was innocent and he was granted a full pardon.