Editor’s Note: This is the final installment of a series. Read the first installment HERE and the second installment HERE.
BY SHELLIE TAYLOR
What do you get when you cross an executive at a Charlotte power company and a .38-caliber pistol? Murder. Or suicide. Depends on which side you’re on.
On February 11, 1933, police and neighbors were called to the house of the Petermans in Charlotte’s upscale Myers Park neighborhood. Officers were met by the gruesome discovery of Roy Lewis Peterman dead from a gunshot wound upstairs and his hysterical wife screaming that she had killed him.
Some newspaper accounts differ, but most agree that two bullets were missing from the gun, but only one had struck Peterman in the head, killing him. The gun was found lying beside his body. A struggle must have ensued prior to the shooting because the downstairs was trashed. Initially, the coroner’s jury ruled that the shooting was a suicide, despite multiple witnesses reporting that they heard the wife claiming that she had done the deed.
Roy Peterman and his wife Ruth Linter/Linder were supposedly married in 1912 in the State of New York, although I have not found any documents that support this. The newspapers reported that Peterman was originally from Chester County, Pa., and a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. He was working as an executive at a power company up north when a better opportunity brought him and Ruth to Charlotte. He became vice president of Southern Public Utilities Company, which is known today as Duke Energy. This lucrative position allowed the couple to live in a very fashionable part of town, and most likely mix with other wealthy upper-class residents.
By April, parts of the story had changed in the newspaper, and on April 21, the Charlotte Observer published the entire stenographic report as recorded by the Mecklenburg County court. In the report, Ruth claimed that she had not killed her husband, that she only heard one shot, and that she had been drinking heavily at the time of the shooting. Her attorneys provided witnesses who claimed that Ruth had a drinking problem and that she was hysterical at the time of the shooting; therefore, she was not in her right mind to claim that she had killed him. H.B. Baker was a witness for the defense who reported that Ruth showed him bruises on her arms, legs, and chest that very night. Although no account that I have found blatantly accuses Peterman of abuse, Ruth is quoted multiple times saying, “It had to be me or him.” Witnesses also accused Peterman of being the cause of Ruth’s drinking problems, saying that she never had a problem with alcohol until he introduced her to it.
It took a jury of twelve men less than an hour to bring a verdict of not guilty to the judge. However, two key elements are missing from the evidence presented to the court. First, there were no fingerprints taken the night of the event. The science of fingerprinting was still relatively new but had been used throughout Europe since the 1890s and was considered, if not standard, at least acceptable procedure.
Because the wife was screaming that she had killed him, no one thought there was any point in collecting fingerprint evidence. Once the coroner’s jury declared the manner of death to be suicide, that also threw out any necessity of fingerprint evidence. Not until during the trial, when fingerprints would have been helpful to rule Mrs. Peterman in or out as a suspect, was this thought about, and by then so many people had handled the firearm, there would be too much contamination for testing to be useful.
Second, and to me the most peculiar, is that there were two other people, besides Ruth Peterman, in the house that night. The couple employed two young African Americans as servants. One, named Jim, was called for by Mr. Peterman that evening to make their drinks. P.B. Brown, an accountant and long-time friend of the Petermans, said that Mr. Peterman was a very heavy drinker and influenced Ruth to do so also. Brown claimed that he had actually distanced himself from the family because of their excessive drinking habits. The other servant is not named, but the prosecutor on the case, John G. Carpenter, asked reporters why the two servants who had been in the house that night were not called as witnesses to testify about what they saw or heard.
One of the oddest things to me is that I am unable to find much of a history for Roy and Ruth Peterman. I’ve looked for a marriage record, to no avail. I’ve searched both their names (including Ruth’s maiden name with multiple spelling variations) in newspapers from North Carolina up to Pennsylvania and New York. Nothing. Peterman is mentioned a few times as he was climbing the corporate ladder in the power industry, but that’s about it. I don’t even know when Ruth Peterman died. If she changed her name or remarried, I don’t know what her new name would have been, but Ruth Peterman is not found in the 1940 or 1950 census records.
I am forced to accept that the history of this couple is just as mysterious and elusive as the truth was in this case.
Shellie Taylor is the Local History Program Specialist at the Iredell County Public Library. She can be contacted at michelle.taylor@iredellcountync.gov or 704-878-3090, Ext. 8801.