Norris B. Holmes

Nancy Miller worked in the kitchen at the Stuart Hotel, Beech and Linden Sts., in East Pittsburgh. Norris B. Holmes, who lived the area, had become infatuated with Miller. When his efforts to develop a relationship continued to be rebuffed, Holmes, originally from Ohio, became more menacing.

After fighting with another man whom Holmes imagined as his rival, he purchased a butcher knife and fatally stabbed Miller, who grew up in nearby Westmoreland County, in the hotel kitchen on March 27, 1907.

There were multiple witnesses to the killing. Holmes (aka Walter Howard) was held by some of those witnesses until police arrived.

Newspaper reports were peculiarly charitable toward Holmes, characterizing him as “youthful” and Miller as his “sweetheart,” despite the absence of evidence of any prior relationship between the two and an account in the coroner’s record that “Nancy told me several times that she did not want to have anything to do with him.” As in the Hillman, Wasco, Patterson, and Dabrydino cases, among others, such language normalized the calculus by which female rejection invites male violence.

As in the Woodley and Glazner cases, news accounts also sought to distance the white and native-born Holmes from immigrant and Black working men by emphasizing that he possessed a  “mentality considerably above the average” (Pittsburgh Press, March 12, 1908).

A crowd of 1,000 gathered the day after the killing of the popular Miller and pressed toward Holmes as he was being moved by police, perhaps with the intention of lynching him.

At trial, the twenty-four year old Holmes claimed he was too drunk to realize what he was doing. With numerous eyewitnesses and no doubt about the circumstances of the crime, he was convicted of first-degree murder on September 13, 1907.

Pittsburgh Press, September 13, 1907

Holmes was sentenced to death on October 5, 1907. When Judge Swearingen, newly appointed to the bench, collapsed after reading the sentence, Holmes “smiled contemptuously at the judge” and laughed (Washington Post, October 6, 1907).

His pardon request refused, Norris Holmes went to the gallows on March 12, 1908. As he awaited execution, he delivered a message urging men to “flee from women and whisky as you would from Hell itself.”