Still seeking justice for innocent teen

Eighty-seven years after he was put to death for a murder it increasingly appears as if he did not commit, Alexander McClay Williams’ final resting spot finally has a proper grave marker.

The wait for justice will take a little longer.

Family members and friends gathered Saturday in Green Lawn Cemetery to place a stone marker on the grave of Williams, the youngest person ever executed in Pennsylvania.

Williams was just 16 years old when he was executed at the tender age of 16 for the murder of a matron at Glen Mills School.

In the unheard of span of just about a year, McClay Williams was arrested, tried, convicted and put to death for the murder of a matron at the Glen Mills School, where the teen had been placed. Williams was black; Vida Robare was white.

Williams’ spirit touched the more than two dozen people who arrived at the largely abandoned cemetery, much as it does on the annals of justice in Delaware County.

If there was a rush to judgment in the case, there has been no equally speedy effort to correct a wrong.

The push to clear the teen’s name was much on the minds of those gathered.

“It’s something that happened way back when and I guess back then it was just par for the course because that’s the way they treated us,” said Williams’ 88-year-old sister Susie Carter, his only remaining living direct relative.

Robert Keller, the county attorney who has led the efforts that resulted in Williams’ record being expunged and continues the fight to completely clear the youth’s name and exonerate his record, sees a lingering problem with the way justice is still being handed out nearly nine decades later.

“It’s an old story but it’s still very relevant today because there’s still racial injustice,” Keller said. “It hasn’t gotten that much better.”

Longtime Delaware County author and educator Sam Lemon has spent decades reviewing the case and pushing for justice for Williams. He has turned his findings into a book, “”The Case That Shocked the Country: The Unquiet deaths of Vida Robare and Alexander McClay Williams – the youngest person in Pennsylvania to die in the electric chair – for a crime he did not commit.” He is the great-great-grandson of William H. Ridley, the defense attorney who represented Williams at trial.

Lemon paints a compelling case for why Williams could not have committed the crime, one of passion in which Robare was stabbed to death with an ice pick. Even some of the county investigators handling the case indicated their doubts about whether the slight Williams could have overcome the larger, stronger matron. Williams stood 4-foot-7 and weighed a scant 91 pounds.

After his arrest, Williams vehemently proclaimed his innocence. But after a third interrogation, he confessed without a parent or his attorney being present.

Carter was just a baby when her brother was accused. She recalls her parents talking about her brother’s case.

“My parents would say he never did that,” Carter said.

Those who visited his grave Saturday struggled with the notion of justice, knowing how quickly it was dispensed in Williams’ case, and how long and arduous the path to correct the record has been.

They thought about the history of racial injustice that for many has only reinforced the notion of racial inequality in America.

With Williams now at rest, and his grave properly noted, the quest for justice goes on.

Keller and Lemon want the state Supreme Court to vacate Williams’ conviction. They’ve had his record expunged, but the conviction stands. They want to see that corrected, and not by pardon, which would still include an admission of guilty on the teen’s part.

Lemon offered a final reminder to those who gathered to officially commemorate Williams’ memory. “This is not over,” Lemon told them.

The case of Alexander McClay Williams could accurately be described as a rush to judgment. But the quest for justice in the case of the youngest person ever put to death in Pennsylvania is anything but.