The Wilmington Morning Star

Wake Woman Avers Mate
Made Her Admit Murder
RALEIGH,
April 12.-(AP)-Demure Margaret Cotten, who said she married at 14 and learned to mind my husband like a child," testified in Wake superior court tonight that she confessed to murder because he told me to."

Mrs. Cotten, 20, and her husband, Woodrow, 27, are on trial for their lives in connection with the shotgun slaying of Mrs. Cotten's mother, Mrs. Mary Lee Herndon, who was killed in a corn crib on their Wake county farm last February 19.

The jurors were sent from the court room when Mrs. Cotten took the stand, in order that they might not be influenced by her testimony, in the event that the judge decided not to admit the confession as evidence.

Without a flicker of emotion, she told this story:

On the day of the killing she was digging in a ditch when she heard a shot. As she ran in the direction
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WAKE WOMAN SAYS
HUSBAND TOLD HER
TO ADMIT MURDER

(Continued from Page One)

of the corn crib, she heard her mother scream, "Woodrow, you've shot me."

Woodrow came out of the corn crib, wringing his hands. They went together to her mother, who was still alive. Woodrow made her take the shot gun, rub his fingerprints off it, and place her own prints on it. They then slid the gun under Mrs. Herndon.

"Go tell them you did it," she quoted Cotten as saying. Take it on yourself. Play crazy. I'll get you out."

Mrs. Cotten wore the same plain but fashionable black and white outfit in which she appeared when the trial opened yesterday. Except to arrange her light brown hair, she sat motionless while questions were shot at her by Solicitor William Y. Bickett.

The Cottens' four-year-old son and infant daughter, who had frolicked on the floor of the court room this afternoon, were not present tonight.

The state has alleged that both Mrs. Cotten and her husband confessed to the slaying, but that both later repudiated the confessions.