On his farm a mile outside of Stockton, Md., elderly Farmer Harvey Pilchard raised strawberries, potatoes, fruit. He was successful and well-to-do. One night last week he and Mrs. Pilchard sat listening to the radio. Someone knocked on the door. Mr. Pilchard shuffled over, opened it. From the darkness outside, a shotgun blasted into his face, killed him almost instantly. Three Negroes rushed in, demanded Annie Pilchard's money. She gave them her pocketbook, turned and ran upstairs. With cool brutality, one of the Negroes shot her in the back.
Even so, she managed to stagger up to the attic, crawled out of a window to the steep roof. There she clung while her husband's murderers ransacked the house, finally went away. All night she lay there, afraid they would come back. In the morning she was discovered, finally rescued by the Stockton Volunteer Fire Department. While Sheriff J. William Hall investigated, groups of enraged men started scouring Worcester County, searching Negro shacks, barns, cypress swamps.
One suspect was a Negro named Arthur Collick. Two days later two civilian possemen spotted him emerging from a swamp. With him were two women. The posse caught the women, but Collick escaped, plunging back into the cypress growth. The prisoners were Lillian Blake, Collick's common-law wife, and her 14-year-old daughter Martha. The two were taken to the county jail at Snow Hill, locked up.
In Pocomoke City, George Selby, another Negro, was picked up. Mindful of the nearby Princess Anne lynching in 1933, officers whisked Selby over the county line. Rumor flew that he had been jailed at Snow Hill too. Outside the little red brick building a mob began to gather. "Turn the damn niggers over to us!" they yelled. They pushed over a fence, surged up and pounded on the door.
Out stepped Sheriff Hall, one hand on a gun butt at his hip. It was a situation few sheriffs would like to face. But he faced it. "You've always known me to play fair with you boys," drawled he. "There's only two women in there." With calm deliberation he walked through the mob, got in a car, drove off. As he explained afterwards, he had been on duty 38 hours and he needed sleep.
Left to face the mob was Jailer Gerald Bowen, who decided that the best way to avoid trouble was to admit a few men to the jailhouse and let them see that Hall had told the truth. That was what he did. Still the mob did not disperse. Someone suggested that they get the women out and question them. They rushed to a window and began to hacksaw the bars. Inside, Lillian Blake and her daughter began to pray.
Through the wrecked window men wriggled, seized the two women, dragged them screaming from the jail, roared off in a cavalcade of 200 cars.