Mary Emma THAMES

1936 - 1944  (8 years)

• Name	Mary Emma THAMES  [1, 2]
  Birth	1936  [1]
  Gender	Female
  HIST	Date Published: September 6, 2009 Was 14-year-old a killer? Local resident doesn't believe it, wants 1944 case re-opened Stinney By SHARYN LUCAS PARKER Special to The Item It's been 65 years since a Clarendon County jury said 14-year-old George Junius Stinney Jr. killed two white girls and that the black Alcolu boy should die for the crime. His sister, Aime L. Stinney, like his other family members, didn't believe it then, and she doesn't believe it now. "This isn't something that I just believe," the 72-year-old Newark, N.J., woman said from her home. "This is something that I know. I know my brother is innocent." Aime Stinney has never wavered from her version of what she remembers about Friday, March 24, 1944. That's the day authorities said 11-year-old Betty June Binnicker and Mary Emma Thames, 8, went missing and were murdered. Their bodies were found underwater in a creek the next morning. By midday, George Stinney had been arrested. He would die in the state electric chair 90 days after the crime. Many wrote Gov. Olin D. Johnston asking for clemency, state archive records show, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and various labor unions. Although Stinney's family members have proclaimed his innocence from the beginning, their accounts – as well as those of other possible defense witnesses – were never heard during his short trial that began at 2:30 p.m. on April 24, 1944, and concluded by 4:55. And that is just one of the problems with the sensational case that has been the basis for books and at least one movie, says a Clarendon County man who is trying to have the case reopened in hopes that a new investigation will lead to Stinney's exoneration and an apology from the state. "A Clarendon County jury came back with a verdict, but it was the state that killed George Stinney," said George Frierson, a member of Clarendon School District 3's Board of Trustees and a community activist. Frierson, founder of the non-profit organization A New Day, said a new witness in the case has emerged and that person has given a statement that could clear Stinney. Frierson and members of his advocacy group are seeking pro bono legal representation to help them get the case into the right arena. "We want to see if this merits reopening this case," Frierson said. Family members say the real killer is dead, and Frierson says naming a suspect is not his goal. "The thing is to establish the fact that this young man didn't do it," Frierson said. About two years ago, Frierson began collecting newspaper articles, death certificates and other documents, as well as anything related to the case that he could put his hands on. He keeps the information inside a large orange binder he carries with him. He pulls it out and eagerly shares information with anyone he thinks might be interested or in a position to help with his cause. A friend recently warned him against becoming consumed with the case. For Frierson, a 56-year-old father of four and an Alcolu native, that is easier said than done. "I look at the sadness of this," he said. "This was a 14-year-old boy." Aime Stinney said she found peace a long time ago. "There is a God who sits high and looks low," she said. "I know that anyone who had anything to do with this will have to come before a just God." Writers, reporters and activists have courted the case for decades – all promising closure and a rewrite of history. Aime Stinney said she is always leery of proposals and promises to reopen the case and has long given up hope that her brother's name will be cleared. The spunky great-grandmother who still keeps in contact with family members in Sumter and Clarendon counties was widowed several years ago. She shuns publicity and only consents to interviews on the grounds that journalists use her maiden name. "Enough is enough," she said. "I have nothing to hide, but it gets to a point where you want to move on with your life. I am happy with my life right now. If someone can get something done, great. If not, I'm OK with it. Rejection is something that I can handle. I have learned to accept the things that I cannot change." Despite the dynamics of the case, the story that shook Alcolu – a small farming community about 25 minutes from Sumter — received little national attention. In fact, it is not easy finding information on the story. Most are archived, and new stories are usually filled with rehashed details. "Almost everything said has been by word-of-mouth," Aime Stinney said. Frierson said, "It's like taboo." "All of these years later, no one really wants to talk about it," he said. Authorities involved with the investigation maintained that they had the right guy. Critics have said George Stinney did not receive proper representation and point to the absence of defense witnesses. Many say authorities wanted to make a quick arrest during an election year. "Someone has to be the scapegoat," Aime Stinney said. "My brother was the scapegoat." Death penalty opponents often cite the case of the 5-foot-1, 95-pound boy who was electrocuted in the old Central Correction Institute in Columbia on June 16, 1944. At 14 years, seven months and 29 days, he was the youngest person legally executed in the United States in the 20th century. Reports that have made their way through history state that officers had a hard time strapping the small boy into the chair, which was built for adults. When the electric current was turned on, his convulsing body caused the mask to fall off, exposing his face to the approximately 40 people in the room — including the fathers of the two slain girls. Their skulls had been beaten in. An autopsy revealed Mary Emma had been struck at least six times with a blunt instrument. Betty June received at least seven blows. A handwritten report from a Clarendon County deputy stated that George Stinney confessed to the crimes and led officers to the murder weapon — a 15-inch railroad spike. Aime Stinney said she and her brother were playing along the railroad tracks and tending their cow, Lizzie, when the two girls walked by and asked if they knew where to find maypops, which are climbing perennial passionflowers with edible fruit. Aime Stinney said it was unusual for white children to be in that area. "We noticed them right away," she said. She said the girls continued on their way and that she and her brother went home. She said George Stinney worked on some homework and never left the house. She said her brother was an "A" student who loved to draw pictures. Their lives, she said, revolved around church, school and family. It is those memories and her faith in God that have allowed her to move on. "I've lived a long time with this," she said. "The only thing I want to do is get my soul salvation in order. My brother has been out of his pain and suffering for a long time." Family of alleged Stinney victim oppose retrial of executed teen BRISTOW MARCHANT / THE ITEM The living relatives of murder victim Betty June Binnicker hold a photo of their aunt. George Stinney Jr. was convicted and executed for Binnicker's killing at the age of 14, and the family is opposing new efforts to overturn his conviction. From left are Harold Bailey, Carolyn Geddings, Gerald Bailey and Frankie Dyches. BY BRISTOW MARCHANT bmarchant@theitem.com Betty June Binnicker has nieces and nephews she never met. All of them were born after the 11-year-old Alcolu girl was murdered on March 23 or 24, 1944. But those children of Binnicker's late siblings are determined to keep her memory alive. The family is now speaking out to ensure the deaths of their aunt and her 8-year-old friend Mary Emma Thames aren't overshadowed by the coverage of a potential retrial of George Stinney Jr., who was convicted and executed for the girls' murders at the age of 14. "We feel like it's necessary to connect a face to her name," said Carolyn Geddings, whose mother was Binnicker's sister. "It's like nobody's defending them." The two young white girls were out on a bicycle picking wildflowers when they disappeared. Stinney, the young son of a black millworker, was arrested the day the girls' bodies were discovered and sent to the death chamber within a few months. Activists have taken up Stinney's case as an example of Jim Crow-era injustice, and on Tuesday a hearing will be held at the Sumter County Judicial Center on a motion to have Stinney posthumously retried, effectively vacating his conviction. But the victims' surviving family members and other Alcolu residents with memory of the case are opposing the motion. In contrast to supporters' portrayal of Stinney as a railroaded innocent, some locals who remember Stinney say he was "mean" and a "bully" who they think is guilty of the killings. 'I KNEW GEORGE STINNEY' "Mom didn't like us to drink out of (our) well, so we went to one behind Green Hill Church," in the area where the missing girls' bodies would later be found in a shallow ditch, said Sadie Duke, who was 7 years old at the time. "George Stinney came up to us pushing a tricycle with his foot on the back. He asked us what we were doing there ... and then he told us 'get away from here, or I'll kill you.'" Duke remembers the encounter occurred the day before the girls went missing. She and her friends recognized him because he was often seen in the area grazing the family cow. Duke said she was threatened along with Violet Freeman, who was also friends with Binnicker. "My mother remembers (Binnicker) came to our home and asked for Violet" on the day they disappeared, said Freeman's sister Ruth Turner. "She told her Violet wasn't there, and they went on down toward the church." Evelyn Roberson remembers her late husband, Bethea, would graze his family's cows "on the edge of the railroad tracks," and Stinney, who was younger but a similar height, would often try to "wrestle" or "fight" with him. "It wasn't like it was once a week; it was every day," she said. "He always just tried to pick a fight with him, for no reason." THE REVEREND SPEAKS Turner said she thinks Stinney's motive for the crimes was to steal the girls' bicycle, citing a story told by Francis Batson that Stinney once tried to push him off his bicycle. Batson today said he "vaguely" remembers the interaction as he rode near the black part of town. "I don't know if he meant to be malicious or playful," he said. "I thought I got along with everybody in Alcolu." Batson, a former pastor at Alice Drive Baptist Church who now lives in Arkansas, was a year older than Stinney and recalls the younger boy often coming into the store where he worked. A preacher's son, Batson would go on to play a key role in discovering the bodies of Binnicker and Thames in a shallow ditch and is cited in defense motions pushing for a retrial because he was never called to testify about the scene. But Batson said he still believes in Stinney's guilt, as he did at the time. "I was always told that," he said. "If he didn't, I hope they find the person who did." The defense motion says Batson "did not see any footprints or drag marks leading to the ditch," and "(t)here was not a significant amount of blood in or around the ditch," facts they assert show the girls "were probably murdered elsewhere." But Batson said he wasn't looking around for any such evidence, merely trying to find the missing girls. "I've blotted a lot of that out" of his memory, he said. "I don't appreciate it being intimated I said anything like that." The retired preacher is still friendly with relatives of George W. Burke, another man in the search party that day who went on to serve as foreman of the coroner's inquest that blamed the murders on Stinney, something defenders say constituted a due process violation. "I don't want them to think I'm trying to implicate their father in anything," he said. THE MISSING EVIDENCE Another Binnicker niece, Frankie Dyches, said she spoke to one of the officers who arrested Stinney, the late S.J. Pratt, who happened to discuss the case while Dyches' husband was cutting his hair. "He came to me and said there was never a broken link in the evidence, and he never had any doubt who killed my aunt," she said. While defense attorneys assert no evidence can be found from Stinney's original trial, family members have heard over the years how more evidence was collected but was never introduced at trial because Stinney confessed, and they cite previous reporting on the case to support the legitimacy of Stinney's confession. "I would swear on a stack of Bibles today that that boy was guilty," James E. Gamble Jr. told The Item in 1995. The son of J.E. Gamble, Clarendon County's sheriff at the time of the Binnicker and Thames murders, Gamble told how he rode with his father and Stinney on the way to the young convict's execution in Columbia. During the ride, Gamble remembered Stinney "repeated his confession several times." "He repeatedly told my daddy how he hit one of the girls and the other girl was squealing, so he hit her to stop her squealing," he said. "The boy said he was mainly trying to make them be quiet, but he didn't mean to kill them." Locals then and family members now also say they heard how law enforcement seized bloody clothes from Stinney's home, or even recovered a murder weapon, but there's no record any such evidence was introduced at the trial. CLOSURE REOPENED Geddings and Dyches said they and other relatives met with Third Circuit Solicitor Ernest "Chip" Finney III to encourage him to defend Stinney's original conviction when the retrial motion is heard at the Sumter County Judicial Center on Tuesday but aren't optimistic much can be done. "I know what's going to happen," Dyches said. "I think they'll grant him a new trial, and then he's not going to be indicted because there's no evidence left, and then it will be as if it never even happened." Marsha Bailey, a daughter-in-law to Binnicker's sister, said growing up with the violent murder of her sister as a child had a lifelong impact on her mother-in-law. "It was devastating for her to have to live with that," she said. "It changed her perception of people." If the 1944 verdict in the Stinney case is overturned, the family of the victims feel they'll never have any closure for the brutal murder of the aunt they never knew. "The solicitor said he was sympathetic to the Stinney family," Geddings said. "And so are we. But I'm sympathetic to my family, too." Reach Bristow Marchant at (803) 774-1272. Posted in Local news, News on Saturday, January 18, 2014  [1, 2]
  _UID	01DFC334D30A43249B6DD11CC5D20A9F5025
  Death	24 Mar 1944	murdered and found in a creek near Alcolu, Clarendon County, South Carolina   [3]
  Person ID	I102464	Singleton and Related Families
  Last Modified	18 Jan 2014

  
  

  Father	Ben Oliver THAMES, Sr.
  Mother	Lula Mae BARNES,   b. 28 Jun 1915, Wilson, South Carolina d. 11 Jul 2003, Hopewell Healthcare, Sumter, South Carolina (Age 88 years)
  _UID	DD758ABBCDF3450EBD62E833A66C16F905F9
  _UID	DD758ABBCDF3450EBD62E833A66C16F905F9
  Family ID	F46906	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

  
  

• Sources

  [S12688] Was 14-year-old a killer? Area resident wants 1944 case re-opened. [S20504] The other side of the Sinney case - Family of alleged Stinney victim oppose retrail of executed teen. [S2457] Lula M. Thames.