The newspaper headline screamed in large typeface:
“Jealous Wife Uses Razor to Slay Husband.
Laughs About Crime from Behind Bars of Cell.
Head Cut Almost Off.
‘Women and Liquor’ Blamed for Tragedy at Former Site of Camp Greene.”
A “family brawl” at a small clapboard house near a dismantled World War I boot camp became one of Charlotte, North Carolina’s trials of the century—thanks to the bubbly, chatty, tiny young defendant who admitted almost decapitating her bigamous husband. The case had everything 1920’s news headlines craved: a female killer, a gruesome murder, illegal liquor, a flirty woman with a scandalously bobbed haircut, a philandering husband, high-profile lawyers and erudite experts showing off new science.
By the 1920s, Charlotte had been through a dramatic transformation from small inland transportation hub set at the crossroads of two major Native American trading trails to the largest textile mill center in the region, stealing the title “largest city” from the regional ports of Wilmington and Charleston, South Carolina. The large factories attracted workers and their families from piedmont and mountain farms in every direction.
As with other industrializing cities in the U.S., newcomers moving in found hard work—which they were used to on the farm—but steadier, if meager, pay and usually more modernized housing. In addition to their work ethic, rural folks brought with them skills for making or connections back home for obtaining moonshine—good to have during Prohibition. And more people congregating in town meant more opportunities for speakeasies or “blind tigers” and partying, debauchery and crime.
Nineteen-year-old Nellie Greene Freeman earned $15 a week working ten- to twelve-hour days at Charlotte’s Nebel Knitting Mill making silk hosiery. She had married twenty-one-year-old Alton Freeman only five months earlier, not knowing he was already twice-married (though not divorced) and not knowing he would seldom be gainfully employed. The newlyweds had no alternative but to live in the same house with Alton’s family.
On May 22, 1926, Alton told Nellie he was going to pull off a liquor heist to get a stake. She didn’t like that idea. Fine, he said as he packed his bag. He would leave her. She tried to sweet talk him out of his angry bravado, but he “answered by a hiss” and said, “I hate you.”
Later, inside her cell at the police station, Nellie wasn’t at all reticent about describing to reporters what happened. She had a folded straight razor in her dress pocket. “I slipped it into my hand, threw my arms around his neck and cut him.” The newspaper printed her comments on the front page the day after the killing. “I didn’t intend to kill him,” she said. “I just meant to teach him a lesson.”
When Rural Policeman R.W. Goforth arrived at the house, he found Alton Freeman dead on the kitchen floor; “his head appeared to be completely severed except for a small portion of skin and flesh in the back of the neck.” Nellie was allowed to change out of her bloody dress before she, her dress and her straight razor were taken downtown.
The newspaper reported the next day that, by “a strange trick of fate,” Nellie shared a cell with “pretty Georgia Inge,” who was under arrest for being publicly drunk and for having a pint of illegal alcohol tucked in the “bosom of her dress.” She had threatened a $40,000 lawsuit for the humiliation of being searched (about $700,000 today) and to do away with herself rather than serve a thirty-day term in the Mecklenburg Industrial Home. However, despite her well-bred upbringing, Miss Inge was “not perturbed because of sharing her quarters with a slayer.” Six months later, at the end of her six-month sentence, Miss Inge married a young man well-known about town, and the city paper reported the nuptials held at, of all places, the Mecklenburg Industrial Home.
By the time of former cellmate Georgia Inge’s wedding, Nellie’s tribulations too had passed. From her arrest in May to her trial in July, she spent time chatting with visiting reporters, singing and dancing in her cell and alternately laughing and crying as she studied a box of family photos.
State’s attorney Frank McNinch—a former city mayor, the brother of a former mayor and soon to be head of the Federal Trade Commission—had vowed to see the end of women getting away with murder, as had happened in a recent case of a wife wielding an ax on her abusive husband. Nellie, though, had attracted some of the best defense lawyers in town, no matter she couldn’t afford to pay them. They brought in a psychiatrist or “alienist” who testified that Nellie was little more than a child who hadn’t intended to hurt her husband and who had no idea what had happened until after it was over. “I think she is shot through and through with unsoundness,” said Dr. James K. Hall. “Her mental condition would become more unsound under stress.”
Nellie remained calm throughout, even during her own testimony and cross-examination. Describing her “bobbed hair and flashing brown eyes,” the headlines captured the essence of her testimony: “‘I didn’t have it in my heart to kill him. I wanted to teach him a lesson and make him a better man,’ diminutive child-widow dramatically tells court jury.”
In a sweltering July courtroom, the all-male jury deliberated into a second day. The first vote had been split: one for second-degree murder, four for manslaughter and seven for acquittal. Returning to deliberate for a second day, they shared some Bible verses on forgiveness and the holdouts came around. They agreed that she’d been temporarily insane and therefore was not guilty.
After the verdict, Nellie announced that she was “through with men,” and she left town to stay with relatives in Kentucky. The judge allowed her to take her razor and her dress with her.
Almost a century later, journalist David Aaron Moore reported that one year after her trial, Nellie remarried, returned to Charlotte and began a life raising their three children, attending church and taking care of her husband and home in northwest Charlotte. She died on May 22, 1969, at age 64, after more than forty years of a quiet, happy marriage.
In 2013, her son Robert told the journalist about trolley rides his mom would take him and his siblings on to visit an older couple on the north side of Charlotte. “I remember we visited a few times. I never knew their names, but there seemed to be a genuine affection between them. I’m convinced that was the Freemans”—Alton’s parents or family.
Over time, Charlotte’s textile mills closed or moved overseas, and the abandoned Nebel Knitting Mill became the Spaghetti Warehouse restaurant in 1991, one of the first businesses to begin the transformation of the old warehouse and mill districts. Southern chivalry slowly vanished, and women eventually earned the right to be tried equally for their crimes without solicitous treatment or the convenience of being struck temporarily crazy as a viable defense. Newspapers stopped reporting trials with scintillating detail—and courtrooms got air-conditioning. When Nellie died over forty years after the trial, few in Charlotte knew that the wife and mother living in the Enderly Park neighborhood was the woman whose trial had packed a humid July courtroom and attracted hot-dog vendors and sellers of commemorative Nellie Freeman straight-razor pins.
Old crimes can do more than recount just another ordinary, oft-repeated domestic tragedy. Historic cases can illustrate where a city or a region started, how it changed, how its crimes were shaped by the city—and how its crimes in turn shaped the city’s unique flair or flavor.
But old crimes can too easily disappear, taking with them a glimpse into how people loved and fought, survived or died, made their way or wasted their chances. Without the efforts of journalists like David Aaron Moore and research librarians like Shelia Bumgarner at the Charlotte Library, Nellie’s story could have disappeared beneath the continual accumulation of later “crimes of the century.” Likely no one would remember Razor Girl, but her case aptly highlights that time in the 1920s when young women started to move away from their families to find work in factories, and bobbed their hair and shortened their hemlines. Cities were growing, Prohibition took partying to a criminal level, criminal court reporters chatted with defendants in their cells and shared details about what female defendants wore to trial. Those reading the newspapers—and even small cities had more than one—could feel as though they had a seat on the front row.
I was one of those young women who moved from a small town to Charlotte forty years ago. I’ve written about countless crime cases in the Carolinas and across the South, but of all the stories, Razor Girl is still the “old crime” that speaks the most about where Charlotte came from and what we tend to forget, a century later.
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Cathy Pickens is the author of the Blue Ridge Mountain Mysteries (Joffe Books) and a History Press series on Carolina true crime stories, including Charlotte, Raleigh, the Outer Banks, and the Western North Carolina mountains. She writes a continuing column on True Crime for Mystery Readers Journal.
1 comment:
Fascinating story. Thanks!
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