Marjorie Detterick
Marjorie Detterick, the mother of the murdered nine-year-old twins Cora and Kathe Detterick, appears in Paul Edgecombe's memoir only in a few concentrated scenes, yet each one carries the full weight of a catastrophe that has been legally misattributed. She is the figure who first discovers that her daughters have been taken, and she is the voice that hurls the most savage words at John Coffey as he sits in the electric chair—words that, unknown to her, are aimed at the wrong man. Her grief is real, her rage is real, but the target of both has been supplied by a system that saw a black man holding white corpses and stopped looking.
Discovery and Immediate Grief
On a warm June night in 1932, Marjorie Detterick kissed her twin daughters goodnight just before nine o'clock, allowing them to sleep on the screen-enclosed side porch as a special treat. That was the last time she saw them alive. The next morning, after her husband Klaus had gone to the barn to milk, she sent their son Howie to fetch the girls for breakfast. Howie returned white-faced and said, "They're gone." Marjorie went out onto the porch, at first more annoyed than alarmed, supposing the girls had decided to take an early-morning walk to pick flowers. One look changed everything: the blankets had been cast into a corner, the screen door had been yanked off its upper hinge, and on the boards of both the porch and the steps there were spatters of blood. She screamed for Klaus, shrieked for him, and when he came on the dead run she begged him not to go hunting after the girls alone, and not to take their son if he felt he had to go. Her pleas were ignored; Klaus took his shotgun, gave Howie a .22, and the two set off, paying no attention to the shrieking, weeping woman who wanted to know what they would do if they met a gang of wandering hobos or "a bunch of bad niggers escaped from the county farm."
The Trial and Its Aftermath
Marjorie Detterick sat through the trial of John Coffey, watching the man who had been found on the riverbank with her daughters' bodies in his arms. She heard the prosecutor argue that Coffey had charmed the family dog with sausages, broken its neck, and then abducted, raped, and murdered the twins. She heard Coffey say, "I couldn't help it. I tried to take it back, but it was too late." The jury was out forty-five minutes. Marjorie had her verdict, and she had her explanation. What she did not have—what no one in Trapingus County had—was the truth: that the real killer was William Wharton, a drifter who had painted the Detterick barn a month earlier under the alias Will Bonney, who had eaten dinner at the family table, who had listened to the girls chatter about sleeping on the porch, and who had returned on that June night to commit the murders while John Coffey, wandering nearby, stumbled onto the scene too late to save them.
The Execution
On the night of November 20, 1932, Marjorie Detterick was one of the witnesses in the front row of the storage room at Cold Mountain Penitentiary. When John Coffey was led to the electric chair, she spat at him and screamed, "Die slow, you son of a bitch!" Sheriff Homer Cribus grunted his approval. As the execution proceeded, she cried out again, "Kill him twice, you boys! You go on and kill that raping baby-killer twice, that'd be just fine!" Her husband Klaus pulled her against his shoulder, and she began to sob. When Coffey, moments before the current was applied, said simply, "I'm sorry for what I am," she screamed back, "You ought to be! Oh you monster, you ought to be! YOU DAMN WELL OUGHT TO BE!" Then, as the electricity surged through Coffey's body and three overhead lights blew out, Marjorie Detterick screamed again and fainted in her husband's arms.
The Unknowing Irony
Marjorie Detterick never learned that the man she had watched die was innocent. She died eighteen years later in Memphis, in a trolley-car accident, still believing that John Coffey had murdered her daughters. The narrative gives her no moment of revelation, no reconciliation with the truth. She remains, to the end, a figure of righteous fury aimed in the wrong direction—not because she was a bad person, but because the system that was supposed to find the truth had already decided, on the basis of race and circumstance, that it had found the right man. Her grief was real, her loss was real, but the justice she thought she saw was a fiction constructed by a society that could not imagine a black giant as anything but a monster, and could not imagine a white drifter as anything but a harmless hired hand.
