A Black teen was wrongfully executed for murdering a White woman in 1931. Now, his family is suing to defend his name
For 85 years Susie Williams Carter believed her brother was guilty of the crime he’d been convicted of and executed for: A brutal murder of a White woman at a Pennsylvania youth detention center.
In 1931, Alexander McClay Williams became the youngest person to be executed in Pennsylvania, when his death sentence was carried out by electric chair at the age of 16.
Alexander was convicted of murdering Vida Robare, the matron at the Glen Mills School, a youth detention facility where he was housed located just outside of Philadelphia.
Carter, who was a year old at the time of her brother’s execution, told CNN her family rarely discussed Alexander as it was painful for her mother and father to relive the anguish and heartbreak of his execution.
But in 2015, all that changed.
That’s when Carter, the only living sibling of the family of 13 children, was presented with evidence that shifted an image she held of her brother for decades.
Now, more than 90 years after his execution, Carter and her family are suing the county for damages, alleging that Alexander was “improperly arrested and subjected to the horrors of imprisonment, unfairly tried, wrongfully convicted and ultimately executed in the electric chair for a crime he did not commit,” according to the lawsuit filed last week in the district court for eastern Pennsylvania.
CNN has reached out to the district attorney’s office for comment on the lawsuit.
Carter, who is 94, told CNN she wants to raise awareness that wrongful convictions continue to plague young people of color across the US.
“I want them (the public) to realize that these things are still going on,” Carter said. “Something should be done to stop it.”
She “had been stabbed 47 times with an ice pick and suffered two broken ribs and a skull fracture,” according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit that maintains an extensive database on capital punishment cases in the United States.
A local newspaper, The Chester Times, “reported that district attorneys and detectives had reviewed the ranks of Glenn Mills’ students and decided to question” Alexander, according to the complaint.
It’s unclear why he was singled out from the group.
William Ridley, the first African American admitted to the Bar of Delaware County, represented Alexander at trial.
There weren’t any eyewitnesses to the crime or physical or forensic evidence that connected Alexander with the murder, the complaint states.
An adult’s bloody handprint was found at the murder scene, but that evidence was not introduced at trial and an officer later testified that he did not observe any blood on Alexander, according to the complaint.
But, Lemon said, it wasn’t until he reviewed the original 300-page transcript from the trial that all the pieces fell into place.
“When I read that, it was just stunning,” he told CNN. “But what really astonished me was, they made no effort to hide what they did.”
On the day of the murder, a school officer asked Alexander and another boy to get shovels that were “located between one and two blocks away.” He then asked Alexander run a separate errand – a task that the officer said took the boy 20 minutes to complete, according to the complaint.
At trial, the Commonwealth argued that within those 20 minutes, Alexander committed the murder, according to the complaint.
Lemon said when he outlined all the teen was accused of doing within that short time frame he counted 15 separate actions.
“That’s when I hit this eureka moment that this was impossible,” he said. “So, I started doing these walking tests, time trials around my hometown in Media and I measured distances with my car and a stopwatch, and it came to me that it was just impossible. It was impossible for him to do all these things in 20 minutes and then go back to work without any blood on him whatsoever.”
For 85 years Susie Williams Carter believed her brother was guilty of the crime he’d been convicted of and executed for: A brutal murder of a White woman at a Pennsylvania youth detention center.
In 1931, Alexander McClay Williams became the youngest person to be executed in Pennsylvania, when his death sentence was carried out by electric chair at the age of 16.
Alexander was convicted of murdering Vida Robare, the matron at the Glen Mills School, a youth detention facility where he was housed located just outside of Philadelphia.
Carter, who was a year old at the time of her brother’s execution, told CNN her family rarely discussed Alexander as it was painful for her mother and father to relive the anguish and heartbreak of his execution.
But in 2015, all that changed.
That’s when Carter, the only living sibling of the family of 13 children, was presented with evidence that shifted an image she held of her brother for decades.
Now, more than 90 years after his execution, Carter and her family are suing the county for damages, alleging that Alexander was “improperly arrested and subjected to the horrors of imprisonment, unfairly tried, wrongfully convicted and ultimately executed in the electric chair for a crime he did not commit,” according to the lawsuit filed last week in the district court for eastern Pennsylvania.
CNN has reached out to the district attorney’s office for comment on the lawsuit.
Carter, who is 94, told CNN she wants to raise awareness that wrongful convictions continue to plague young people of color across the US.
“I want them (the public) to realize that these things are still going on,” Carter said. “Something should be done to stop it.”
‘They made no effort to hide what they did’
On Oct. 3, 1930, Robare’s body was discovered by her ex-husband Fred, who also worked at the Glen Mills School, according to the complaint.She “had been stabbed 47 times with an ice pick and suffered two broken ribs and a skull fracture,” according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit that maintains an extensive database on capital punishment cases in the United States.
A local newspaper, The Chester Times, “reported that district attorneys and detectives had reviewed the ranks of Glenn Mills’ students and decided to question” Alexander, according to the complaint.
It’s unclear why he was singled out from the group.
William Ridley, the first African American admitted to the Bar of Delaware County, represented Alexander at trial.
There weren’t any eyewitnesses to the crime or physical or forensic evidence that connected Alexander with the murder, the complaint states.
An adult’s bloody handprint was found at the murder scene, but that evidence was not introduced at trial and an officer later testified that he did not observe any blood on Alexander, according to the complaint.
But, Lemon said, it wasn’t until he reviewed the original 300-page transcript from the trial that all the pieces fell into place.
“When I read that, it was just stunning,” he told CNN. “But what really astonished me was, they made no effort to hide what they did.”
On the day of the murder, a school officer asked Alexander and another boy to get shovels that were “located between one and two blocks away.” He then asked Alexander run a separate errand – a task that the officer said took the boy 20 minutes to complete, according to the complaint.
At trial, the Commonwealth argued that within those 20 minutes, Alexander committed the murder, according to the complaint.
Lemon said when he outlined all the teen was accused of doing within that short time frame he counted 15 separate actions.
“That’s when I hit this eureka moment that this was impossible,” he said. “So, I started doing these walking tests, time trials around my hometown in Media and I measured distances with my car and a stopwatch, and it came to me that it was just impossible. It was impossible for him to do all these things in 20 minutes and then go back to work without any blood on him whatsoever.”
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