True Crime Chronicles: Reversal of initial death sentence sent Mayes County teen murderer to prison for his natural life

On the afternoon of August 8, 1922, on a farm three miles southwest of Pensacola in Mayes County, Mrs. Willie Adair was home with her two children while her husband and his brother worked a threshing machine some miles away. She was thirty-four, white, and Kentucky-born.

She and George S. Adair had come from Bourbon County about eight years earlier. He was the son of Allen Percy Adair and Kitty Stolworthy Adair, a former University of Kentucky football captain who had settled into ranching near Pensacola with his brother Sam. Their daughter was about five. The baby was nine months old.

Elias Ridge was African-American and thirteen years and eight months old that day. He had lived for stretches in Illinois and Kansas City. For a year or more he had stayed with his half-sister and her husband, Hardy Smith, in a tenant house on or near the Adair place.

Ridge and Smith did odd jobs around the farm and knew the layout. Ridge later said he walked up to the house around noon on the pretext of asking about a horse bridle. What followed lasted fifteen or twenty minutes and moved through rooms and onto the back porch.

He used a knife, an iron bar taken from a mowing machine, and a heavy stick of wood. He cut her across the neck from ear to ear, stabbed her in the back and elsewhere, crushed her skull in two places, broke bones, and beat her head.

Nearly all of her clothing was torn from her body. The five-year-old daughter later identified him as the attacker.

Hardy Smith was a sharecropping tenant with a long record of trouble over making and selling whiskey. Contemporary accounts in the Pryor and Vinita papers treated him as the instigator. Ridge told officers that Smith hired him to kill Mrs. Adair, promised a pig and perhaps other small things, and furnished the knife.

 Some neighbors said Smith was at the barn while the assault went on. Others said he arrived afterward, kept Ridge from killing the children and burning the house, then summoned a doctor, alerted neighbors, and told officers that Elias Ridge had done it. The theory that circulated most widely in print was that Mrs. Adair was an important witness against Smith in pending liquor cases and that he wanted her silenced.

 The appellate court later found a different shape in the evidence: a planned attack with an apparent intent either to rob or to ravish. One early report said Ridge had decided to take her diamond ring. The court wrote that the boy’s claim of being hired by Smith could not be reconciled with the rest of the proof.

A white farmer seized Ridge near the scene. The boy confessed to the county attorney and others. Rumors of a lynching moved officials to take him out of the Vinita jail. On September 12, 1922, an information charging murder was filed in the District Court of Mayes County.

The same day Ridge waived preliminary hearing before County Judge T. L. Marteney, was taken before District Judge A. C. Brewster, pleaded guilty on the advice of appointed counsel, waived the statutory time for sentencing, and received a death sentence set for November 17, 1922.

W. D. Mathews, former state commissioner of charities and corrections, appeared as next friend and appealed. On December 18, 1923, the Court of Criminal Appeals reversed and remanded. The judges pointed to the boy’s age, the speed of the proceeding, and the waiver of substantial rights.

Hardy Smith was tried separately. On September 28, 1922, a jury convicted him of murder and fixed his punishment at life. His conviction rested almost entirely on Ridge’s testimony.

The Attorney General later filed a confession of error. The Court of Criminal Appeals agreed there was no corroboration of the accomplice. Evidence from both sides showed that after the crime, Smith gave the dying woman what aid he could, called a physician, notified the neighbors, and identified Ridge to the officers. Smith’s conviction was set aside.

Ridge was tried again before Judge Brewster. On April 11, 1924, a Mayes County jury found him guilty of murder and again assessed death.

He did not testify. On October 25, 1924, the Court of Criminal Appeals modified the sentence to life imprisonment and affirmed the conviction.

The court held that, under Oklahoma law read together with the juvenile statutes, the death penalty should not be imposed on a boy under fourteen unless he possessed the understanding of an ordinary sixteen-year-old and the crime was reprehensible in a superlative degree. The judges found the killing savage enough but concluded the jury had abused its discretion on punishment.

Elias Ridge went to the penitentiary at McAlester for the term of his natural life.

Years afterward, George S. Adair, then forty-eight, killed himself in Paris, Kentucky, on the anniversary of his wife’s death. The Daily Oklahoman used the suicide to recall the Mayes County case.

The two small children who had been in the house that August afternoon disappear from the public record after the trials.

What remains for public discourse s is a farmhouse, a back porch, a rushed guilty plea, two juries, and a pair of appellate opinions that refused both the electric chair and the story that a pig had bought the murder.