Marker honors teen wrongly executed 87 years ago
CHESTER TOWNSHIP >> Eighty-seven years after he was executed in the electric chair for a crime he most likely did not commit, Alexander McClay Williams was commemorated Saturday as his family placed a grave marker on the site where he is buried at Green Lawn Cemetery.
Williams was 16 years old at the time of his death, making him the youngest person in Pennsylvania to die in the electric chair, after being wrongfully accused of killing a matron at Glen Mills School.
“It’s something that happened way back when and I guess back then it was par for the course because that’s the way they treated us,” said Williams’ 88-yearold sister, Susie Carter. The attorney who handled his expungement case, Robert Keller, offered another phrase.
“It’s an old story but it’s still very relevant today because there’s still racial injustice,” he said. “It hasn’t gotten that much better.”
Williams was a student at the Glen Mills School in
1930. There, students lived in cottages with families and he lived with Vida and Fred Robare.
Sam Lemon, greatgreat-grandson of William H. Ridley, the defense attorney who represented Williams, has spent decades reviewing the case.
Lemon said Vida Robare had moved to Glen Mills from Michigan, where she had filed for divorce from her husband in 1921 on the grounds of extreme cruelty.
Fred Robare, Lemon said, was a hard drinker and played on Vida’s sympathies.
“Vida Robare was one of the few people at the school who tried to protect Alexander,” he explained. “When he lived in their cottage, Fred Robare would kick him around on the floor and knock the wind out of him and when he would do that, Vida Robare would stand up and try to intervene on Alexander’s behalf.”
So, Lemon added, it wasn’t logical that Williams would want to kill Vida.
“That makes absolutely no sense,” he said. “He didn’t have the means, he didn’t have the method, he didn’t have the motive and he certainly didn’t have the opportunity.”
Lemon said Williams vehemently denied killing Vida Robare the first few times but by the third interrogation, he confessed without a parent or an attorney present.
“It was just him and a group of very angry white men,” Lemon said, pointing out his swollen left eye in a picture of him at trial. “I think you can imagine the kind of pressure he was under … It’s a very high likelihood that he was coerced into this confession.”
Lemon shared the prosecution evidence he evaluated in which the teen was accused of 15 different actions in a 20-minute period.
Sent on an errand, Williams was accused of trying to break into the cottage where he and the Robares lived, trying to steal some shoe polish, hearing Vida moving around two stories above at the other end of the building.
“He struggles with her, he assaults her, he murders her, he stabs her 47 times,” Lemon said of the allegations claimed by the prosecution.
Then, Lemon said, the boy washed up the blood on himself and went back to his work assignment in the exact same clothes he was wearing.
“His work supervisor gave probably the best evidence in the whole case, saying there was no blood on him, he was not out of breath,” Lemon said. “It was simply impossible for Alexander to have committed this crime.”
Susie Carter, who was a baby when her brother was accused, recalled what her family said about his death.
“My parents would say he never did that,” Carter said. “I remember my mother saying when he came home, she asked him what they had learned and he said they were down in the basement. All the black kids were in the basement, no teacher. That was way back then. That was terrible.”
Williams, Lemon alleges, wasn’t aware he was going to be killed for the crime until the day before his electrocution. Attendants at the graveside service Saturday thought for a moment how the teen must have thought, what he felt as he was being led to the electric chair.
“I can’t imagine what my mother went through,” Carter said as her voice cracked and tears welled in her eyes. “My son died last year, last year in June, it was an accident, he worked for PECO and I know how I felt – and that was an accident.”