A century ago, the brutal killing of Law School favorite Roy Wilson White in Powelton Village horrified Philadelphia. But what happened after his death was even crueler.
By Derek Davis | Illustration by David Hollenbach
ROY Wilson White graduated at the top of the Penn Law School class of 1898, neck-and-neck with Owen J. Roberts, who would become a Supreme Court justice and later dean of the Law School itself. White was one of those rare people who everyone simply knew would make a difference. A scholar and intellect who worked 16 hours a day at his studies, he also tutored his classmates, edited the student-run American Law Register, and gave lessons to students in prep schools around the city to support himself, his mother and his sisters following his father’s early death.
A handsome, square-faced man who parted his hair in the center, White sported the neat mustache common to the time. A classmate, George Nitzsche, described him in a way that recalls the White Rabbit in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: “White’s watch was a great friend to him. It was worn from continual taking in and out of his pocket. He timed everything to the minute, and when talking to you would nervously finger his watch and, pulling it out suddenly, would bid you good-bye and rush off.”
Remember that watch. Directly or indirectly, it became a focus of four violent deaths.
The Law School’s young dean, William Draper Lewis, took on both White and Roberts as lecturers. Roberts quickly became known as the department’s finest teacher, but White was entrusted, at the ripe age of 28, with organizing both the nascent postgraduate program at the Law School and an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program with the philosophy department in the College.
These projects would require him to teach courses in elementary Roman law and Spanish-American civil codes. Lewis asked White what would be required in the way of preparation for such courses. White replied with a minutely detailed 10-page letter (included in the faculty minutes) which suggested a five-month scholarly tour of South America: “It would obviously be folly to attempt to give a course of lectures on ‘social, economic, political, and public-administrative-legal conditions in Spanish America,’ without having oneself beheld those conditions.”
Amazingly for a cash-strapped department, the dean and the faculty proposed the trip for trustee approval. For unexplained reasons–mostly likely cost–White never went to South America. However, on leave from June 1899 to February 1900, he studied Roman law at the University of Paris. By the time he returned in 1900, the Law School’s grand new home at 34th and Chestnut Streets–the largest building in the world devoted exclusively to legal education–had opened to greet him.
I first ran across Roy White while paging through the bound volumes of the Law School’s meeting minutes to research a history of the school for its 150th anniversary in the year 2000. I was delighted by his warm, witty and thorough reports on the French legal system (as well as the French misapprehension that all legal education in America took place at Harvard). His wealth of detail is leavened by a jaunty, self-deprecatory wit: “I hope you will not think me like the German colonial officials, who are said to elaborate such minute reports of what they do that they never have time to do anything.”
Then, in the minutes for May 1900, I read with a shock that Roy White was dead. Scrambling ahead, I found a note that he “was killed.” How could this be? A hundred aged clippings pasted in two scrapbooks soon gave me the sad, horrifying answer.
On May 19, 1900, after dining with Nitzsche and teaching a Saturday- evening review class at the Law School, Roy White left to catch the 10:29 p.m. train to his home in Germantown, which he shared with his mother, a sister and his brother, Tom, a practicing attorney just out of Penn Law. At that time there was a commuter train station at 32nd Street and Powelton Avenue in Powelton Village, a neighborhood of impressive Victorian houses just north of the Penn campus. In 1900, Powelton Village was a summer haunt of the city’s rich at a time when anything west of the Schuylkill River was the “suburbs.” The snug row houses of their Irish servants lay to the north and east.
Then as now, 32nd Street was a quiet, slightly unsettling street above a massive trainyard that borders the Schuylkill River. The commuter station, a round, medieval-looking stone structure strangely out of place among the Victorian rowhouses, was on the southeast corner of Powelton Avenue. Half a block south of the station, opposite the end of Spencer Terrace (now Winter Street), White was struck from behind with an 18-inch bolt. He dropped to the sidewalk, and someone rained heavy blows on his head and face, smashing his nose and right orbital and fracturing his skull.
The assailant removed White’s watch and ring and rifled his waistcoat pockets but missed $16 in cash and some checks in his trouser pockets. Discovered by police officer Frank Harrigan, White was rushed to Presbyterian Hospital, at 39th and Powelton, where he died at 2:15 p.m. the next day.
A 17-year-old railroad messenger, Ralph Hartman, reported seeing “two Negroes” a block north of the station just a few minutes before the murder. They asked him the way to Germantown Junction, saying they wanted to hitch a freight to New York. Hartman, a loyal Pennsylvania Railroad employee, deliberately misdirected them southward on 32nd Street, toward the spot where White was later found.
Philadelphia police responded with zeal. Superintendent Harry Quirk and Chief of Detectives Peter Miller assigned 30 detectives to the case and spread what was then the largest dragnet in the department’s history. According to the May 21 Evening Telegraph, one of the city’s 10 daily newspapers, “Every colored man in West Philadelphia who was found on the streets and who could not claim a residence or give a clear account of his whereabouts Saturday night was arrested and committed for ten days on the charge of vagrancy.” Black males from train yards throughout the city were rounded up, and the 15 deemed most likely to be the culprits were paraded before Hartman. He positively identified Henry Ivory, of Wilmington, Del., who had been picked up at the Germantown Junction yards. Next to last in the lineup, two spaces over from Ivory, stood Ward Knight, who had been arrested along with Ivory. Hartman, unaware that the two had been found together, thought Knight could be the second man but was not certain.
White’s murder was reported as far away as San Jose, Calif.; its brutality and anonymity galvanized both the press and the populace, igniting the perennial racist fear that, in the unlit byways of the city, brutes–especially black brutes–lay in wait. Roy White’s murder took on a notoriety that quickly eclipsed the understated sorrow expressed by his Law School colleagues. White the man became the faceless victim on which every citizen could paste his own visage.
The following day Ivory confessed to being an accomplice to White’s murder but swore that the actual killer was a chance acquaintance of his called “Buck.” Ivory’s confession had been extracted through the “sweat box,” a technique instituted by detective-chief Miller that involved depriving the suspect of food and water, then subjecting him to a half-hour or more of overlapping and contradictory questions fired by three or four detectives. If the suspect failed to crack, the process was repeated until he did. After five trips to the sweat box, Ivory cracked.
Following Ivory’s confession, the sweat box was lauded by a jubilant and fawning press as the most marvelous interrogative advance of its day, one which could “confuse the wits of even an expert accountant” (Evening Bulletin). The procedure was later condemned by “alienists”–forerunners to today’s psychologists–as the equivalent of the Inquisition in both method and reliability.
Buck, the police established, was a gigantic black man named George Johnson, also known as “Charleston” or possibly “Brown.” On the basis of Ivory’s confession, Superintendent Quirk maintained with confidence: “There was a man with him. One man only.” The hard work of the department had paid off with the rapid, efficient solution of the case. Except …
George Johnson turned himself in and established a clear alibi (reported in the Telegraph through a virulently racist playlet that depicts Johnson greeting “Mistah Quihk” in dialect that would have made Uncle Remus blush). When Ivory failed to identify him as the mysterious Buck/Charleston, Johnson was released.
The May 23 Public Ledger introduced an interesting conjecture at this point: “[Detectives] say that there is a strong probability that [Ivory] is concealing ‘Brown’s’ actual identity from them for fear that ‘Brown’ might come forward and point him out as the actual murderer … ” The Record took the conjecture a step further: Had Ivory fingered Ward Knight, the man with him at Germantown Junction, “the recriminations might have convicted both.”
What seemed the final, necessary break in the case came with the May 25 apprehension at Trenton, N.J., of Amos Stirling, “a worthless, brutal negro” (Press)–as opposed, presumably, to Ivory, “a good-natured darky” (Evening Bulletin).
A Philadelphia detective contingent –accompanied by Hartman, the messenger boy, and John Leary, a fireman at the Spring Garden pumping station who had seen the pair crossing the Girard Avenue Bridge about a mile and a half from the crime scene–had gone to Trenton to check out another suspect, whom Hartman and Leary exonerated. The squad then decided to look over several vagrants at the Mercer County Workhouse. One of them was Stirling, who had been picked up at the Trenton trainyards about 36 hours after White’s murder. Both Hartman and Leary identified Stirling as the man they’d seen with Ivory.
One report (Press) said that Stirling had blood on his hat, vest and coat. A second (Public Ledger) said he was wearing three shirts and two pairs of pants, the outer ones new, presumably to cover the bloody underlayers. For his part, Stirling attributed the blood to a nose bleed. He also claimed that he had been released from the Philadelphia House of Correction two days before the murder and had hitched a freight to Harrisburg.
To borrow the bombastic phrasing of the time, I was “numbed by the horror of this fearful story.” Nothing I can recall reading has affected me as deeply as the newspaper accounts of White’s murder and the ensuing trials. Most disturbing, as I sank ever deeper into the case, the energizing image of White–seen perhaps too nobly by me in retrospect–gradually faded, to be replaced by a welling of outrage over a new monstrosity, every bit as brutal as White’s murder, but more systematic. What lay ahead for Ivory and Stirling revealed a rank indifference to the very concept of justice.
First, there is the quality and reliability of the local reporting (probably about average during the reign of yellow journalism). To put it simply: It’s quite possible that nothing I have written so far is true –because no single, unequivocal “fact” can be uncovered in this story beyond White’s death. The most complete initial coverage of the murder appeared in the Philadelphia North American, without byline, as was the universal custom. Though replete with hyperbole, it was basically a careful report taken from first-hand interviews and descriptions. Soon, however, the other dailies had shuffled both the facts and the chronology into a porridge of misinformation and speculation.
In the various accounts over time, elements merge, separate and reform like images in a kaleidoscope. The anonymous “reporters” traded phrases and whole paragraphs like baseball cards. I suspect that freelancers sold hastily written accounts to several papers which, in order to appear independent, stirred the original version into an alphabet soup of internal contradictions. Even the few apparently careful accounts are marred by purple prose and racist diatribe.
Numerous questions cried out for answers, but few reporters even thought to ask: Why were the police so consistent in claiming that Ward Knight had nothing to do with the killing, though his initial statements seem as contradictory as those of Ivory? Why did early reports (Telegraph, May 21) state that Knight and Ivory lived a few blocks apart in Wilmington, and were well-known troublemakers there, while later accounts, without explanation, called Knight a respected servant from Marietta, Pa.? How was it that Hartman, who said he had spoken only to Ivory and that the other man had stayed in the shadows, could later identify Stirling without hesitation? How was it that several witnesses could identify Stirling, a knock-kneed, bandy-legged man, by his “distinctive, shambling gait” when initial reports made no mention of anything peculiar about the second man’s walk? What caused John Exley, a rower who had himself been held up months earlier and who had tentatively identified the photos of Ivory and Knight as his assailants, to switch later to Ivory and Stirling?
Further clouding the reporting was an unquestioning reliance on police handouts and statements by Superintendent Quirk, a minor master of propaganda. The initial burst of police efficiency apparently sprang from a desire to offset the low esteem in which the department was held at the time. An editorial in the Press noted that the murder “coming, as it does, when the public has lost all confidence in the Director of Public Safety, throws a peculiar light on the demoralization of the police force, inevitable under the conditions that have prevailed for the past twelve months … The Police Department is on trial, and it should recognize the fact.”
Such comments, however, were few. Police-beat reporters most likely feared losing insider access with negative stories, and Quirk made every effort to control the flow of information from the top. As an example, in the several accounts of Stirling’s capture, whole paragraphs are repeated from one report to another. Yet each reporter attempts to give the impression that he was direct witness to a remarkable–and frankly unbelievable–scene in which both Hartman and Leary spontaneously shout “There he is!” and place their hands together on Stirling’s shoulder. The scene smacks of having originated in a police handout that served as raw material for embellishments. Worse yet is Quirk’s “wanted” telegraph, supposedly sent to Trenton before the Philadelphia contingent arrived, which describes the as-yet-unseen Stirling so perfectly as to seem clairvoyant–and which includes a nickname or alias for Stirling, “Burrell,” that was not known until after his capture. Yet the rail detective who had picked up Stirling had said that he ignored Stirling as a suspect initially because the descriptions sent by Philadelphia police did not fit him.
The police campaign of misinformation reached its height during the later trials, when Quirk assumed–all too rightly–that both the public and the newspapers would have forgotten salient evidence.
According to the Inquirer, following Stirling’s return to Philadelphia (where a crowd of some 300 waiting passengers cheered his unannounced arrival, in shackles between two detectives, at Broad Street Station), Ivory fingered Stirling as the killer in a dramatic hallway encounter: “The keen sense of the colored race was forcibly in evidence. Stirling, shifty, rambling in his step, rolling his eyes from Quirk to Miller and then to Ivory, fixed his gaze upon the latter. It was the look of defiance; of composure; of stolid indifference.” The following day, the Record took a more sympathetic tone: “Amos Stirling … has been subjected to the moral torture of the ‘sweat box’ once every two hours since he was brought to this city from Trenton … It is doubtful if any alleged murderer in this State has ever been put through such an ordeal.”
Despite repeated visits to the sweat box, however, Stirling steadfastly denied his guilt, ultimately outlasting his inquisitors.
Quirk’s department claimed to have more than enough evidence to wrap up the case: Ivory’s confession, three positive identifications of Stirling (by Ivory, Hartman and Leary) and the bloody clothes. Suddenly, however, a complication appeared, and with it a new inclination on the part of the press to question the infallibility of Quirk, Miller and their methods: A man named Charles Smith attempted to pawn Roy White’s missing watch–for which the police had circulated identifying numbers–at a shop in West Philadelphia. Collared by police, Smith claimed he had been given the watch by his roommate, Charles Perry.
Initially, the papers reported that Perry gave conflicting accounts of how he acquired the watch, without explaining what these accounts might be. A day later they more or less agreed that he claimed to have bought it a few blocks from the murder scene from a man who might have been Ivory, shadowed by a second figure whom he could not identify. The press shouted that this development threw a monkey wrench into the clean Ivory-Stirling scenario. The Evening Bulletin even mused, “Was Ivory’s alleged confession made under promise of immunity?”
Though it’s difficult to see how Perry, simply by possessing the watch, materially clouded the picture, the police-department’s reaction to media pressure pushed the case in a new direction. After stating that Perry was an innocent party who had bought, bartered or otherwise received the watch from Ivory, Quirk switched tactics and placed him in the notorious sweat box. It claimed another victory when Perry confessed that he too was a party to White’s murder, a second bystander while Stirling did the dirty work.
“Perry’s confession was secured without the man knowing anything of Ivory’s admission,” the Philadelphia Times declared. “The stories of the two negroes were then compared, and they agreed in every particular.” This is a remarkable claim: Ivory’s original confession pointed to no one beyond himself and the killer, as Quirk emphasized at the time.
According to Quirk, the fragmented case had once again been glued together. But by now the press, particularly in the person of a stylistically recognizable reporter for the Telegraph, openly questioned the convenience of the department’s hastily assembled scenario. No one to date–not Ivory, not the police, not Hartman, not Leary–had mentioned a third man.
At the formal early-June inquest into White’s murder, Stirling cleaved to his story that he had been in Harrisburg on the day of the killing, refusing to back down under heavy cross examination. Said the North American, “The man’s manner, his simple protest of innocence and boldness in turning squarely toward his accusers and charging them with falsehood, made a deep impression upon the spectators who crowded the Court room, and even upon the police who have believed him guilty of the actual murder.”
White’s murder involved a clash of four conflicting cultures with vastly different needs and perceptions: (1) the white lower-middle class (the main target audience for newspapers), which the press assumed could be made to identify with Roy White only by turning his murder into a raw racial drama; (2) the black lower class, whose lives remained a fearful mystery to the middle class; (3) the police, with much to prove and little to lose from a quick conviction of three men without advocates or public sympathy; and (4) the press, presenting strident black-and-white simplifications, unhindered as yet by a code of ethics or responsibility.
These cultures met most dramatically during the trials of Ivory, Perry and Stirling. At Ivory’s October 1900 trial, members of the public used every variety of subterfuge to gain entrance to the courtroom in a preview of later widely publicized cases. The papers also noted that Ivory was being represented for the first time by an attorney. Throughout his interrogation and incarceration, no one had taken his part. The same was true of Perry and Stirling.
On the stand, waitresses Agnes McNeil and Elizabeth Boyle stated that Ivory, Stirling and Perry had eaten lunch at a restaurant on Market Street near 31st on the day of the murder–the only persons, at any point in the investigation, to claim to have seen the three together. Police Superintendent Quirk told how Ivory, sitting in his cell, was taken with a sudden urge to confess. The same bland account appears in virtually every report of the trial: “Superintendent Quirk said that when Ivory showed an inclination to make a statement he advised the prisoner that it was his privilege to keep silent and that whatever he would say might be used against him.” None of the papers carrying this rendition mention at this point the sweat-box procedure which they had so righteously applauded in their earlier reports of Ivory’s confession. Ivory’s supposed original confession, as read in court, bears almost no resemblance to initial reports of its contents.
On October 23, despite his claims of limited complicity and a half-hearted defense by an attorney who had not had time to assemble even the basic facts of the case, Ivory was convicted of first-degree murder. The entire trial–jury selection, presentation of witnesses, cross examination, closing arguments, deliberation and verdict–took less than two days.
Perry’s trial began three days later. As with Ivory, a “pool” reporter seems to have provided the main courtroom account, since several papers’ stories contained virtually identical wording. Perry’s attorney, David Amram–also a part-time lecturer at the Law School, though there is no indication that his status there had any bearing on his accepting the case–attempted a vigorous defense, but, like Ivory’s attorney, he appeared unfamiliar with the early history of the case and its myriad contradictions. On the second day of the trial, Amram attempted to challenge the sweat-box system, but the judge admonished him: “What more could have been done than these [detectives] have done in obtaining the evidence in this case? Could there have been more prudent, discreet and careful conduct shown than these men have exhibited?”
Possibly, there could. Furthermore, the official account of Perry’s confession given at the trial was an out-and-out lie. Detectives stated that he confessed spontaneously, never mentioning his earlier claims that he had bought the watch from Ivory.
Amram’s closing argument had little substance but trod perhaps the only rhetorical road left to him: “No matter how repulsive the exterior, no matter how dark the skin, Almighty God has implanted a soul in that black frame, and you should be morally and absolutely convinced of your right to kill him before you consign him to the gallows.”
After three hours of deliberation, the jury found Perry guilty of first-degree murder.
On November 17, Ivory and Perry were condemned to hang.
JUSTICE came less swiftly to Stirling. Incarcerated at Moyamensing Prison in South Phila-delphia and diagnosed with consumption (tuberculosis) and “other diseases,” he lost 50 pounds and was pronounced mentally and physically unfit to face trial, which was twice postponed. It finally took place on April 29, 1901.
Perry, as a witness for the prosecution, repeated the basic elements of his confession: he met Ivory and Stirling near the Market Street Bridge, went with them to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in the North Philadelphia trainyards, back to eat at the Market Street restaurant, back again to the show grounds, then back once more to murder White–some 12 to 15 miles of walking. Perry’s confession included one detail so unlikely as to be strangely convincing: while standing guard during the robbery, at 10 o’clock in the evening, he heard the distant strains of music from an Italian organ grinder.
By contrast, Ivory dropped a bombshell the following day. When asked to tell the truth and protect his immortal soul, he replied: “I’ll tell the truth so far as I know. What I don’t know I won’t say nothin’ about.” “Well,” asked the district attorney, “what do you know?” “All I know is I wasn’t there, and I don’t think Stirling was there either.” Ivory even denied that he had signed the two confessions.
Stirling repeated that he was in Harrisburg at the time of the murder. This claim was supported by Sarah Gray, proprietor of a Harrisburg restaurant, who recalled him asking for a free meal, which she refused, only to have it paid for by “a colored regular,” Robert Boone. Philadelphia detectives, however, said that when they first showed her Stirling’s picture, she could not recall him. Boone could not clarify the matter. He had died three weeks before the trial.
Stirling’s jury kept up the suspense for a bit, deliberating for three hours on April 30, then retiring before handing in their verdict at 10 a.m. on May 1: guilty of murder in the first degree.
On October 8, 1901, Ivory and Perry ascended a scaffold for the first double hanging in Philadelphia in 50 years. It was not a shining example of the gallows art. Neither man’s neck was broken in the simultaneous drop. Ivory was relatively lucky, noted the Telegraph reporter; he fell immediately unconscious. Perry struggled and strangled in his harness for 17 minutes before suffocating.
Stirling followed them on February 27, 1902. At his hanging the press unearthed their “terrified-Negro” image, noting that his knees shook and that he required two men to assist him up the stairs to the gallows–conveniently forgetting that they had earlier described him as so mentally and physically wrecked by disease and prison life that he was barely able to walk. This time the hangman had done his homework. Stirling died of a broken neck.
The elements of this case lie like shards of glass from a hundred broken containers, impossible to reconstruct. Whatever the objective truth of the case, it is clear that Justice kept both thumbs on the scales. Perry and Stirling were most likely innocent; nothing ties them to the crime but the presence of a watch (Perry) and three highly suspect eye witnesses (Stirling). A convincing case could be made for Ivory as lone murderer, attempting to foist blame on a non-existent partner. For what it’s worth, I believe Roy White was murdered by Henry Ivory and Ward Knight, his boxcar companion and (possibly) Wilmington neighbor. Why the police kept an uncharacteristic distance from Knight will remain forever a mystery.
I have not yet uncovered a single reference to the police and court proceedings in Dean Lewis’s voluminous office correspondence, which includes numerous references to his personal sense of loss at White’s death and to any number of more frivolous matters. (Lewis seems to have saved copies of every letter or note he ever made.) I wish there were some way to know how those at the Law School reacted to such a blatant miscarriage of justice done in the name of White and of the law.
Certainly, White’s death reverberated across the campus in a personal sense. Though the Pennsylvanian (the earlier incarnation of the Daily Pennsylvanian) seems to have largely ignored a case amply covered in the city dailies, it did carry a letter from Raymond Alden of the College which attempts to catch the special quality of White: “I am sure there are many members of the University who, like myself, knowing him only in the way of cursory acquaintance, yet found that acquaintance a real pleasure and uplift. There are a few men from whom it is a happiness to have a smile and a passing word, one does not precisely know why.”
At a memorial service arranged by Roy White’s students, Dean Lewis delivered this eulogy: “He died just as the struggles of his earliest manhood seemed about to bear rich fruit. And yet I think his life was long enough to some of those who knew him to leave a lasting influence, and to be for us all a lesson. Roy White was … of things evil as simple as a little child.”
Derek Davis C’61 is a writer in Philadelphia. All background materials for this article can be found at the University of Pennsylvania Archives and Records Center. The major source is two huge scrapbooks, compiled by an unknown hand, holding virtually every local news report of the case over its two-year existence.
