State v. Crawford, 361

Decision Date27 November 1963
Docket NumberNo. 361,361
Citation260 N.C. 548,133 S.E.2d 232
CourtNorth Carolina Supreme Court
PartiesSTATE, v. Marion Frank CRAWFORD.

Atty. Gen. T. W. Bruton and Asst. Atty. Gen. James F. Bullock, Raleigh, for the State.

Hosea V. Price, Winston-Salem, for defendant appellant.

PARKER, Justice.

The record discloses that the State introduced evidence as follows: On Sunday, 18 November 1962 Sandra Denise Marshall, a Negro girl born 14 August 1954, was living with her mother Vera Sanders in a house at 1203 Free Street in the Happy Hill Garden section of the city of Winston-Salem. Defendant Marion Frank Crawford, a Negro man, born on 10 June 1936, lived in a house on Willow Street, which is back of the house where Vera Sanders and her daughter lived. Vera Sanders knew the defendant by the name of Willie. Sandra and other children in the neighborhood called him Uncle Willie.

About 4:00 p. m. on Sunday, 18 November 1962 the defendant came to Vera Sanders' home. He stayed about 15 minutes, and then he and Sandra went out the house about the same time. That was the last time Vera saw Sandra alive.

Eloise Finney lives at 1207 Free Street. About 4:00 or 4:15 p. m. on 18 November 1962 defendant came to her house with Sandra Denise Marshall. Eloise said to him: 'Now that your wife has gone home already, you're just like a little chicken on a wire.' 'I says, you're just running around everywhere.' He said: 'Yes, that when his wife was there he gave her all the loving and affection she needed, but when she was away he did what he wanted to.' Sandra did not say anything, 'she just looked up like she was hypnotized.' They stayed three or four minutes. Then, as Eloise testified, 'he just took her by the hand, and they both went out my back door.'

When Sandra did not return home, her mother went out looking for her. Periodically she returned to see if Sandra had come back. About 11:00 p. m. that night Eloise Finney came to her house to use a buffer She and Eloise went to where the defendant was living, arriving there about 11:15 p. m. The defendant came to the door. Vera asked him about Sandra. He replied, 'he left all the children out on the street playing.' Vera then went to Elizabeth Griffin's house, and called her mother's home. She then went back to where the defendant lived. Then she and the defendant went to a number of places, and finally to the police station to report that Sandra was missing.

About 10:30 a. m. on 26 November 1962 Sergeant G. C. Wilson of the Winston-Salem Police Department and four policemen and the Rescue Squad went to a graveyard in the Happy Hill Garden section. This cemetery is not kept up. It is grown over with briers, honeysuckle vines, weeds, and trees, and in some places it is impossible to get through. They searched this graveyard for about three hours looking for Sandra, but without success. They left and went to other places looking for her, and again without success. Then they returned to the cemetery in the Happy Hill Garden section, and that afternoon found Sandra's dead body in a hole under a tree that had blown over and pulled up some dirt as it was blown over. The dead body and the hole were covered with leaves and honeysuckle vines and a small toy wagon. When Sergeant Wilson raised the little toy wagon and saw the child's coat, he placed the wagon back and called the county coroner Dr. W. D. Vreeland. He did not move or touch the body.

Dr. Vreeland is a graduate of an accredited medical school and is licensed to practice medicine in North Carolina. The court found he is an expert physician and surgeon. When he arrived at the scene and was standing within two feet of the body, he could not see it, because it was covered with vines and leaves. Sergeant Wilson pointed the place out to him. He cleared away the vines and leaves and the little toy wagon that was on the top of the body. When he first saw the body, it was lying on its left side with the head sharply doubled down, up under the left shoulder the arms were wrapped around the head, and the legs were pulled up sharply against the chest. Her dead body was fully clothed except for her panties, which were under the body. Dr. Vreeland used gloves in a superficial examination of the body there, because she appeared to have been dead some time. The body was carried to the Kate Bitting Hospital morgue, where Dr. Vreeland examined the body in more detail. In the hospital he found her vagina gaping open widely, and it definitely appeared to be injured. Dr. Vreeland's opinion was that Sandra died from suffocation and shock due to trauma. Being of opinion that it would be preferable to have Sandra's body examined by a pathologist, Dr. Vreeland sent her body to Dr. Geoffrey Mann of Richmond, Virginia, for an autopsy.

At 8:20 p. m. on 26 November 1962, Sergeant C. E. Cherry of the Winston-Salem Police Department picked up the dead body of Sandra Denise Marshall at the Kate Bitting Hospital morgue and delivered it to the morgue of the University of Virginia, Medical Center, Richmond, Virginia, at 2:20 a. m. on 27 November 1962. About 9:00 a. m. on 27 November 1962, Dr. Geoffrey Mann started an autopsy on Sandra's dead body. Sergeant Cherry was present during most of Dr. Mann's autopsy on Sandra's dead body.

Dr. Geoffrey Mann is a graduate of an accredited medical school, the University of Manitoba, Manitoba, Canada. He holds the following degrees: AA, BS, LLB and MD. He is licensed to practice medicine in Virginia and Mississippi. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, a Fellow of the American College of Pathologists, a Fellow of the American College of Clinical Pathologists, a Fellow of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. He is the author of a number of textbooks in the field of forensic pathology and traumatic pathology. He is a contributor to about a hundred papers on the subject. He is Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia; Professor and Chairman of the Department of Legal Medicine of the Medical College of Virginia; and Professor of Forensic Medicine at the University of Virginia. He is senior consultant to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, and senior consultant of the Federal Air Aviation Agency. He has been engaged in the practice of forensic pathology and conductor of post-mortem examinations due to traumatic deaths for about twenty years. He has performed ten to fifteen thousand autopsies. The court held that Dr. Mann is an expert as a physician and surgeon, specializing in the field of pathology.

Dr. Mann testified in substance: Beginning at 9:30 a. m. on 27 November 1962 he performed a post-mortem examination on the body of Sandra Denise Marshall, which body was identified to him by Sergeant C. E. Cherry, a police officer who accompanied the body. He examined Sandra's body from head to toe, inside and out. He first made an external examination of the body. The child had a considerable number of abrasions about the face and forehead and over various other portions of the legs and arms, where the skin had rubbed off. She had numerous scratches about the body, many of which he thought were post-mortem; that is, that they occurred after death, and probably caused from dragging the body, or the body being forced against some object, such as the ground or some extraneous, foreign material. His autopsy disclosed that the child's vaginal orifice had been widely dilated. Her hymen had been violently torn and completely ruptured as a result of some entry into her vagina. He could pick up the hymen by using forceps and reconstruct it. There was a tremendous amount of bruising inside her vagina. The membrane separating the private parts of the child from the lower portion of the pelvis was completely suffused with blood, causing it to be markedly swollen and filled with fluid and blood. It takes tremendous injury to produce this type of membrane in this particular region. In his opinion, based on his autopsy, there had been a forceful entry into the child's vagina by some foreign object applied with considerable force. His autopsy of Sandra's body showed that many of the little air sacs which make up the lungs had been exploded. This is almost one hundred per cent indicative that severe pressure had been applied to her mouth and nose. He found marks on her neck, which he interpreted as fingernail marks, and a small bit of hemorrhage in a muscle of her neck. In his opinion, Sandra came to her death as a result of suffocation by pressure being applied to the mouth and nose: 'that pressure applied to the mouth and nose played the biggest factor in the death of the child.' From his examination he thought she had been dead anywhere from three to ten days, with the probability leaning to ten days rather than three.

About 11:30 p. m. on 29 November 1962, three police officers of Winston-Salem arrested the defendant in the town of Jonesville at the home of Tildon Foster. At that time the defendant was known to them as Willie Gilchrist. They carried him to the city hali in Winston-Salem and talked to him 15 or 20 minutes in the office of Detective Captain Burke. The defendant said his name was Willie Gilchrist, and gave the officers the names of his father and mother in Spartanburg, South Carolina. The officers showed him a photograph of Willie Gilchrist in Spartanburg. The defendant said he was his half brother, and that he had the same name. They then placed him in the county jail.

The next morning between 10:00 and 11:00 a. m. the defendant was carried to the office of Captain Burke. Lieutenant Henry C. Carter of the Winston-Salem Police Department and Detectives Landon and Smith were present. The defendant made a statement, which was taken down in longhand by Detective Landon and later transcribed by typewriter. Defendant was afterwards given a transcribed copy of his statement, and it was read to him. The defendant said it was correct and signed it. The statement defendant made to the...

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