When a wealthy white woman turned up dead in 1944, Philadelphia wasted no time sending her black maid to the electric chair. But did anyone care about the truth?
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The car pulled away from the curb, gliding through the narrow cobbled streets. A few gas lights were starting to come on, illuminating the listing row houses huddled together. On the barren streets, patches of dirty snow remained. As they drove north, the streets became wider and leafier, leaving Philadelphia's crowded city center behind.
"Thanks for taking me," Corrine Sykes murmured as she straightened her skirt over her legs. She was starting her first day of work as a maid and was surprised to have gotten the job. As the youngest child in a family of three daughters, with overworked and underpaid parents who came north during the Great Migration looking for a better life only to be sorely disappointed, Sykes never thought she'd amount to anything. At 20 years old, she had been told her whole life that she was a simpleton, a truant, a good-for-nothing.
"You looking nice, baby," her 39-year-old bootlegger boyfriend, Jaycee Kelly, said, according to court-ordered psychiatric interviews with Sykes, as he took in the tailored uniform she wore. Sykes watched out the window as they rounded the corner to 6305 North Camac Street, where she would be working as a maid. She clenched and unclenched her hands.
"I'll let you out here," Kelly said, stopping a hundred yards before the large white-columned house, according to an attorney interview with Sykes.
"I don't want to go," she said. He reached over and caressed her hair before opening the passenger door.
"It's not forever. It's just until we get the money for the farm," Kelly called, as he watched her walk up the stone steps.
To Sykes, working at the beautiful house was paradise, even if she had to be there under an assumed identity: Kelly had insisted she take the job using false identification that gave her name as Heloise Parker. For the first two days, the job was normal. She cleaned, took the dog for a walk — anything her employer, Freda Wodlinger, required. But on Thursday, Freda's husband, Harry, stopped at the house on his way to play golf, according to court records, intending to drop off some meat he had purchased for dinner. He found the front door slightly ajar, according to court transcripts.
He pushed the door open and walked inside. He heard their dog, a Sealyham, barking furiously from the cellar, according to an article in The Evening Bulletin.
"Freda?" he called. There was no answer.
Wodlinger pushed the bathroom door open and saw his wife lying in a pool of blood. She was lying on her right side, on the delicate white tiles with hand-painted wild rose borders, which she had picked out so happily a few years before, her feet partly curled up. The bathroom shower curtain had been ripped to shreds, evidence of a vicious fight. Blood was splattered everywhere; there were four stab wounds on the left side of her chest and a deep cut through the center of her chest that ran through her ribs.
