The Body in the Mine Shaft and a Strange Miscarriage of Justice

This week, we look at the case of a murder victim who turned out to not be a murder victim.  Even though a murder had definitely been committed.  Throw in a murderer who turned out to not be a murderer, and about all you can say is that Life Gets Complicated.

In January 1925, a 31-year-old man named Condy Dabney left his home in Coal Creek, Tennessee to look for work.  His wife and two children stayed behind in Coal Creek until he was able to resettle.  Fortunately, he found employment in a mine near Coxton, Kentucky.  He impressed everyone as a quiet, amiable, law-abiding man.

Soon after Dabney arrived in Coxton, a 16-year-old girl named Roxy Baker disappeared, under circumstances considered mysterious enough for a Grand Jury to be called in.  Just before the jurors met, three Coxton men also inexplicably vanished.  The Grand Jury found nothing connecting the four disappearances, but they were unable to come to any conclusions about Coxton’s sudden depopulation.

In early July, Dabney gave up his mining job to start a taxi service.  A month later, Coxton was rocked by further disappearing acts:  Two married women and a 14-year-old girl named Mary Vickery.  Although no clue was ever found about the whereabouts of the adult women, two Coxton men--William Middleton and Condy Dabney--had been seen taking Mary for automobile rides, which made them the obvious--indeed, only--suspects in her disappearance.  However, the Grand Jury was unable to find any other incriminating evidence against the men, so they were released from custody.

In September, Dabney heard that one of his children was sick, so he left Coxton to find work closer to home.  The following month, United States Marshal Adrian Metcalf got a tip that an illegal still was operating in an abandoned mine shaft on Ivy Hill, just outside of Coxton, so he went to investigate.

In the course of his search, he found something far worse than moonshine.  In yet another abandoned shaft, he found some women’s clothing and an ominous-looking pile of stones.  He brought in some backup, and the men began digging.  Before long, they unearthed a body.  The corpse was too decomposed to allow identification to be possible, but they believed it was of a girl in her early teens.  This led to the obvious presumption that these were the remains of the still-missing Mary Vickery.  Townspeople--particularly a young woman named Marie Jackson--immediately began gossiping that Condy Dabney was responsible for the girl’s murder.  The stories told about Dabney were considered damming enough for authorities to visit his home in Coal Creek to question him, but apparently he was able to convince them of his innocence.  Unfortunately for him, the Grand Jury felt otherwise.  On March 18, 1926, they returned an indictment charging Dabney with Mary Vickery’s murder.

At Dabney’s trial, Mary’s father testified that he was certain the body found in the old shaft was that of his daughter, largely on the basis of a ring he found in the shaft after the corpse was discovered.  He also claimed that a stocking found at the scene was identical to one Mary owned, and that the “sandy like and bobbed” hair on the corpse matched that of his daughter.  On cross-examination, Vickery stated that Mary had never run away from home before, and denied rumors that she had a bad relationship with her stepmother.  Defense lawyers got Vickery to admit that he had not attended the corpse’s funeral, and allowed the county to take charge of the burial.  When asked about this seeming neglect, he hesitated, which caused Dabney’s attorney, G.G. Rawlings, to declare, “You did not know that was your girl, that is what you started to say, wasn’t it?”

“At the present time I wasn’t perfectly sure,” Vickery admitted.

It turned out that there was a great deal of confusion about the body’s identity.  Witnesses were produced who testified to Vickery’s uncertainty about whether the corpse was Mary’s or not.  Nobody could agree on the color of the corpse’s hair--some described it as brown and fine, others said it was black and coarse.

The chief witness against Dabney was Marie Jackson.  She testified that on the morning that Mary disappeared, she and Mary hailed a ride from Dabney’s taxi.  He drove them to a Coxton restaurant, where Marie got out.  Dabney drove off with Mary still in his car.  Dabney and Mary came back at about 1 p.m., after which the trio drove out to Ivy Hill.  They got out of the car and sat in a clearing, where they talked for a while.  Then Dabney asked Marie to go off behind the hill for a while, so he could talk to Mary alone.  Marie claimed that she obeyed, although she could still see the two of them.  According to Marie, she saw Dabney embrace Mary.  When the girl objected, Dabney repeatedly beat her with a stick.  After the attack, Dabney walked over to Marie, warning her that if she ever told a soul about what she had seen, he would “burn her at the stake.”  As she fled, she saw Dabney carrying Mary’s body into the mine shaft.  Curiously, she willingly got another ride from Dabney the following day.  The topic of Mary’s murder, she said, never came up.

Three young women--two sisters named Stewart and a “Miss Smith”--testified that on the afternoon of Mary’s disappearance, the Stewart sisters and Mary were walking along a road, when Dabney drove by, offering them a lift. They declined, but after they were joined by William Middleton and one Otis King, the three girls rode with them for a short time, after which the Stewarts left, leaving Mary in the car with Middleton and King.  These two men substantiated this story.  All this took place between two and four p.m., which contradicted Marie Jackson’s claim that she had been with Mary and Dabney on Ivy Hill from one p.m. until dusk.

The state brought out a “jailhouse witness”--one Claude Scott, who had been imprisoned with Dabney for a short time before the trial.  He was an old friend of Marie Jackson.  He claimed that he had given Marie a letter from Dabney, and that Dabney had offered him fifteen dollars to testify in his favor.  Claude said that Dabney “tried to make me remember stuff that Marie Jackson should have said through that window to me; while he was sitting there he tried to make me remember stuff I never heard her say and she never said to me.”

When Dabney himself took the stand, he stated that he did not remember ever having Mary Vickery in his taxi, although he admitted that it might have happened, as he often gave rides to people he did not know.  He did, however, occasionally taxi Marie Jackson.  He declared that he had never been on Ivy Hill, and had no idea in the world what had happened to Mary Vickery.

Unfortunately for Dabney, the jurors obviously found Marie Jackson’s lurid tale more convincing than his protestations of innocence.  On March 31, 1926, they delivered a guilty verdict, with a recommendation for life imprisonment.  Dabney faced the prospect of spending the rest of his days doing hard labor at the state penitentiary in Frankfort.

Dabney’s lawyer immediately appealed the verdict.  While the appeal was still pending, a policeman named George Davis checked into a hotel in Williamsburg, Kentucky.  He happened to notice the name “Mary Vickery” on the register.  The name rang a bell with him, although he could not remember why.  When he asked hotel workers about it, he learned that someone by that name had once lived in the hotel, but she went across the Cumberland River to visit friends.  Davis--who had, by then, remembered that Mary Vickery was supposed to be dead--managed to track her down.

Marie Jackson

Mary told him that she had left Coxton on August 23, 1925, because she couldn’t get on with her stepmother.  She took a taxi to the train station.  The driver was a stranger, but the description she gave of him matched that of Dabney.  She said she didn’t even know Marie Jackson.  Mary went to various cities, finally settling in Cincinnati, where she worked in a woolen mill.  She admitted that while there, she heard that a man had been convicted of her murder.  When asked why she hadn’t let anyone know that she was very much alive, Mary replied, “I just never thought about that.”

After Mary was persuaded to return to Coxton, embarrassed officials immediately pardoned Dabney, and appointed a special prosecutor, G.J. Jarvis, to investigate Marie Jackson.  The young woman obviously had some explaining to do.  Despite this official inquiry, it remains uncertain why Marie was so eager to ruin an innocent man’s life.  Jarvis was of the opinion that she concocted her testimony to get the $500 reward that had been offered for information about Mary’s disappearance.  However, Dabney himself said that Marie had accused him of murder out of revenge because “I refused to desert my family for her.”  In any case, Marie was convicted of perjury on March 27, 1927.  Coincidentally enough, on that very same day Mary Vickery was married to a C.E. Dempsey.

After this coda, everyone involved went on with their lives, leaving behind one rather obvious question:  Who was the body in the mine shaft, and who killed her?   It was speculated that the corpse was that of a young woman named Leslie (or Letitia) Cole, who vanished around the same time as Mary Vickery.  Interestingly, Mrs. Cole’s estranged husband Carlo was said to have been romantically involved with none other than Marie Jackson.

It is possible that Marie knew much more about this unsolved murder than she ever let on.