Two North Carolina troopers were killed 67 years ago, resulting in the state’s greatest manhunt.
Wister Lee Reece and James Thomas Brown, both fathers and members of the North Carolina State Highway Patrol, were conducting traffic stops on November 5, 1957, when they were shot and killed, according to the law enforcement agency and newspaper footage historians shared with McClatchy News via email.
“The crimes would grip the nation,” the N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources stated in a blog post, adding that the FBI later focused on Frank Wetzel of New York.
Wetzel was convicted of murder but claimed innocence till his death in 2012. Here is what we know about the case on the anniversary of the troopers’ deaths.
Deaths sparked national manhunt
On that fatal day in 1957, Reece, a 10-year highway patrol veteran, stopped an Oldsmobile on suspicion of speeding. During a traffic check in Richmond County’s Ellerbe area, the driver shot and killed him, according to state officials and The News & Observer at the time.
Within an hour, five-year trooper Brown stopped a “suspicious vehicle” near Sanford, about 50 miles from the first location and approximately 40 miles southwest of Raleigh. Troopers and historians reported on their webpages that he was also shot and died in surgery.
During the search for a suspect, individuals were warned to be cautious after discovering an abandoned Oldsmobile with a pistol inside. Though the car was detected in Tennessee, law enforcement also set up obstacles at North Carolina’s borders with Virginia and South Carolina, according to The News & Observer.
The weeks-long manhunt, which became the largest in state history, eventually centered on Wetzel. He purportedly fled a New York mental hospital before to the killings with the intention of freeing his brother William, who was on death row in a Mississippi jail, according to state officials and The Cornell Daily Sun at the time.
“His fingerprints matched those inside the Oldsmobile, though a witness who said he was a hitchhiker in the assailant’s car at the time of Reece’s shooting gave a description of the gunman that didn’t match Wetzel,” according to scholars.
Meanwhile, Wetzel claimed he was the “target of a law enforcement conspiracy,” and his supporters questioned how he could have gone so rapidly between the crime places, according to The Richmond County Daily Journal from 2012.
“I’ve offered anyone who can do that a million dollars,” the man’s half-brother, Richard Wetzel, told the newspaper. “I don’t have a million dollars, but I’m not worried that anybody can do that, not anyone in NASCAR or speed racing.”
Frank Wetzel was convicted of murder in two separate trials in 1958. He received two life sentences and died in prison in 2012, aged 90.
“He maintained his innocence until his death, pointing to that fact that Brown was shot nearly 50 miles away from Reece and the murders were committed roughly 20 minutes apart,” historians penned.
Resolutions made in 2000 designated bridges in honor of Reece and Brown, years after the troopers’ deaths.