Carolina Watchman

TWO ROWAN COUNTY NEGROES DIE IN THE ELECTRIC CHAIR FOR MURDER OF FRANK STEWART

Raleigh---Two Rowan county black boys, J. W. Ballard, 17, and Bernice Matthews, 18, gave the state's electric chair one of the hardest pulls in its service of nearly 23 years Dec. 11 when they were put to death for the murder of Frank Stewart, filling station operator, on Labor day of this year.

Effacing them was a job. The younger and guiltier, Ballard, went out almost blithely, but his heart would not stop beating. The state played the current of electricity on him for more than three minutes. And when attendants picked him up to carry him to the dead wagon, one of his ears was burned half off.

His co-slayer died more easily, but not so gracefully. Ballard went into the chair and gave it a perfect survey. He joined the preachers in their chants, but when they lifted a hymn his mouth was bound and the current was devouring him before they had finished the first line of "Pass Me Not, O Gentle Saviour." While there was life he was all talk. He was inviting everybody to join him in the life above and asked particularly that his sister meet him in heaven. To the minister's question as to his guilt, he said without equivocation that he was Stewart's murderer.

The slender black had confessed many times but always left the impression that he killed Frank Stewart as the result of a quarrel over 35 cents said to be due the prisoner by the dead man. But robbery was the manifest motive. Rowan witnesses to the execution said the boys gathered $40 from the killing. Ballard did the shooting, but he said Matthews furnished the gun.

When the attendants carried the youth out, Matthews came in. He chanted with much more difficulty the appropriate scriptures. "Thou anointest my head with oil," he mumbled as the attendants clamped the helmet over his head and fastened it under his chin. Matthews made a strange outcry as though the leather was choking him, but he was warming to a religious fervor. He was caught in a song. There was something weird about the anointment of the black boy's head with oil, when the attendants were pressing down the headgear that guarantees sudden death.

But they did anoint him and his associate with water. Thrice the warden poured from a bucket a mug of liquid to make the killing more certain. The floor and the chair were saturated and Matthews was seated on a bottom from which the water had been wiped. The state found him easier than his junior. Both died hard.

Three neighbors of the dead man drove down from Salisbury to see it. his 21-year-old son, Frank and John Kenerly, Rowan deputy, witnessed the execution, the first that they had ever seen. Mr. Shoaf's father was for many years constable in Rowan and Mr. Kenerly's father had been superintendent of the Rowan prison camps. The boys were too young to have established much of a record for crime.

They never perfected their appeals when they tried in Rowan, but the Supreme court reviewed their case anyway and found no error in it.