Christmas Slay Ride: Most Mysterious and Horrific Christmas Day Murders Read Online Free

be rather above the average of negro intelligence.” It was the reporter’s way of saying that Moses “Cooney” Houston did not look like a murderer.
    When he took the stand, Cooney’s story differed from the one he had told the arresting officer back in December. With a straight face, he claimed that Willie West had sent him to a gun repair shop to retrieve a pistol. He obediently brought it to the house and left it on the table, hidden beneath a napkin. Later, when the Christmas party was in full swing, he and his friend Eddie Cohen got into a playful wrestling match over the weapon and it went off, accidentally hitting Delia.
    Cooney’s friend Willie Mills corroborated this version, but Eddie Cohen disputed it furiously. He testified that he was not there when the murder took place and that he never wrestled with Houston over the weapon. Another witness told the court that Willie Mills had not been present either.
    The jury found Cooney Houston guilty of murdering Delia Green, but recommended mercy. The boy’s elderly mother burst into tears, although he himself did not react. When Judge Paul F. Seabrook ordered him to stand, he did so calmly and politely.
    “Houston,” Seabrook said, “you have been indicted and tried for the crime of murder. The jury has seen fit to accompany its verdict with a recommendation to mercy, and it now becomes my duty to impose the sentence directed by the law. I perform this duty with some pain and some reluctance. I dislike condemning one of your youth and apparent intelligence to life imprisonment. In so doing, I exhort you to be a man, even in confinement, to repent of your past evil deeds and strive to earn the confidence and respect of those placed in authority over you.”
    Mrs. Houston continued to sob, but Cooney smiled and thanked Seabrook before strolling calmly out of the courtroom in a bailiff’s custody. Everyone who watched him leave had the impression that his fate did not bother him at all. The News commented that the boy’s age had “saved his neck.”
    In a later petition for clemency, Houston’s attorney, Raiford Falligant, said that the youthful murderer had been “a mere child” when he shot his girlfriend. He had “got into bad company and so unfortunately committed the act that he now suffers for.” The killing had been a tragic accident, taking place when Houston “was crazed by drink in boisterous company for the first time in his life and … the crowd he was with and in got him drunk.”
    Falligant’s appeal eventually worked. After serving only twelve years, Cooney Houston was paroled on October 15, 1913, by Governor John Slaton. Upon his release, he supposedly continued to have trouble with the law, so he left Georgia and went to New York, where he died in 1927.
    Delia Green is buried at Laurel Grove Cemetery South, in Savannah. Her grave is unmarked and its exact location is long forgotten, although the songs inspired by her murder, such as Johnny Cash’s “Delia’s Gone” and “Delia” by Bob Dylan, continue to be sung.

THE HOLYHEAD HORROR
     
    One of the most horrific murders to occur in North Wales took place on Christmas Day, 1909.
    Forty-nine-year-old William Murphy was a retired corporal with the Royal Anglesey Engineers. After his military service concluded, he found work as a general laborer in Holyhead, the largest town in the county of Anglesey. Although he could be violent when drunk, Murphy was popular and admired for his fearless disposition.
    Like most bachelors who could afford to do so, he employed a local woman to do his laundry. His laundress was Gwen Ellen Jones, an attractive married woman in her early thirties. She had left her husband, Morris, and needed money to support herself, her seven-year-old son, and 13-year-old adopted daughter.
    She and Murphy supposedly fell in love, but when drunk or angered, he would beat her unmercifully. Although afraid of him, Gwen stubbornly persisted in seeing his good side. She