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.