On the evening of November 2, 1930, fifteen-year-old Bertha Hood kissed her mother’s cheek, waved to her father, and stepped out of her family’s farmhouse in Wise County, Virginia, carrying a kerosene lantern. She told her parents she would be home by nine o’clock, after the evening prayer meeting at the Freewill Baptist Church, about two miles away. She never reached the church. She never came home.
The Cumberland Mountains that autumn were in the grip of the Great Depression. Mining towns like Big Stone Gap and East Stone Gap scraped by on coal and iron, and families in the surrounding hollers survived through hard work, deep faith, and mutual obligation. The Hoods were respected in that community. William Hood, forty-eight, ran a small general store and was known across the county for extending credit without interest to families whose breadwinners had been laid off or struck down by black lung.
His wife, Martha, kept the household together. Their children were James, seventeen, who worked part-time in the mines, Samuel, twelve, and Bertha, the only daughter, a bright and kind fifteen-year-old who walked three miles along the railroad tracks each day to attend East Stone Gap High School. She sang in the church choir, helped her neighbors, and had never uttered an unkind word about anyone. In the weeks before her death, two local boys had been competing for her attention.
Roy Rawlins, fifteen, was a thin, intense loner from a poor family, raised by a violent, drinking father after his mother died in childbirth. Shorty Hopkins, also fifteen, came from a prosperous family and was popular, but possessive and jealous when it came to girls he fancied. Their rivalry over Bertha had already exploded into a fistfight on the railroad tracks in late October, after which William Hood spoke to both boys’ fathers and demanded they stay away from his daughter. On the evening she disappeared, Bertha had been seen near the tracks arguing with both boys.
Witnesses could not make out the words. Around eleven o’clock that night, a search party found her body in a ditch about a quarter mile from the railroad crossing near Wildcat Creek. She had been shot once through the heart. Death had been nearly instantaneous.
The bullet was small, likely a . 22 or . 32 caliber, and still lodged inside her. She was still wearing her navy blue Sunday dress, soaked with rain and mud.
The murder shattered the community. Sheriff Amos Bentley questioned both boys. Roy Rawlins stammered through denials, claimed he had been home, and admitted he owned a . 32 caliber pistol that he said he had lost.
Shorty Hopkins gave a composed alibi backed by his family, and his father worked to shift suspicion onto Roy. No murder weapon was found, and no witness came forward. The case stalled. William Hood, consumed by grief and rage, finally took matters into his own hands.
On the morning of November 5, he drove to the Rawlins farm, loaded his revolver, and marched fifteen-year-old Roy Rawlins three miles to the sheriff’s office at gunpoint. The sheriff disarmed him and promised the law would do its work. Roy, under relentless questioning, admitted he had been near the tracks that night and had spoken with Bertha. He insisted he had not killed her.
But he also said Shorty Hopkins had been there, following her through the woods. Then, in January 1931, a break came from an unexpected direction. Sixteen-year-old Billy Thompson walked into the sheriff’s office and said he had witnessed the murder. According to Billy, he had been hunting rabbits near the tracks on the evening of November 2 when he heard Bertha arguing with Roy and Shorty.
He claimed Roy had said, “If I can’t have you, nobody can,” then shot her, threatened to kill Shorty if he spoke, and dragged her body into the ditch. Billy said he had been too frightened to come forward sooner. That testimony changed everything. Roy Rawlins was charged with first-degree murder.
Shorty Hopkins was charged as an accessory after the fact. Shortly afterward, a group of about twenty vigilantes, friends and kin of the Hood family, assembled with rifles and pistols, planning to hang both boys. Sheriff Bentley intercepted them before they could reach the farms and turned them back with a warning against mob justice. The trial opened on April 16, 1931, before a packed Wise County Courthouse.
The prosecution presented William and Martha Hood’s devastation, the coroner’s testimony about the fatal wound, and the report that Roy had owned a . 32 caliber pistol. The centerpiece of the Commonwealth’s case was Billy Thompson. On the stand, Billy described the argument, the gunshot, and Roy dragging Bertha’s body into the ditch.
The courtroom erupted. The defense attacked Billy’s credibility, noting he had waited more than two months to come forward, had asked Bertha to a church social and been rejected, and claimed to have heard precise words from forty feet away in fading light while hiding behind a tree. Roy took the stand in his own defense, sobbing as he swore he had never threatened Bertha, that he had left her alive and walking toward the church, and that Shorty had been there. The prosecution hammered his violent temper, his vanished pistol, and the fact that he was the last person seen with the victim.
Shorty Hopkins testified that he had seen Billy Thompson in the woods with a rifle that night, watching them. The defense suggested Billy himself might have had motive and means, but the damage was done. After five days of testimony, the jury deliberated for seven hours. On April 21, 1931, they found Roy Rawlins guilty of murder in the second degree.
The judge sentenced him to twenty-five years in the Virginia State Penitentiary. At fifteen years old, Roy was sent to serve his sentence among hardened criminals. Frank Rawlins sold his farm within six months and moved to West Virginia, where he died two years later. Shorty Hopkins received a suspended sentence, and his family continued to insist he was innocent.
The case did not end there. In November 1933, exactly three years after Bertha’s murder, Billy Thompson walked into the sheriff’s office, visibly drunk and trembling, and said he needed to talk about what really happened. He told Sheriff Bentley that he had lied at the trial. Roy Rawlins had not killed Bertha.
Billy confessed that on the evening of November 2, he had been hunting in the woods, drinking moonshine he had stolen from his father’s still. He had watched Bertha argue with Roy and Shorty, and he had watched both boys leave her alive and walking toward the church. Then, driven by liquor and the sting of an earlier rejection, he had followed her onto the tracks, grabbed her arm, and demanded to know why she thought she was too good for him. When she pulled away, his rifle, slung over his shoulder, swung around.
His finger was already on the trigger. It discharged. The bullet struck Bertha directly in the heart. Billy confessed to dragging her body into the ditch, hiding his rifle, and waiting for the investigation to turn toward Roy and Shorty.
He had then stepped forward with a fabricated eyewitness account, knowing the community was eager to believe the volatile Roy Rawlins was guilty. The plan worked perfectly, until his conscience finally broke him. Investigators re-examined the bullet that had killed Bertha. Ballistics testing revealed it matched Billy Thompson’s .
22 rifle, not a . 32 caliber pistol. The original assumption about the caliber had never been checked against his weapon because he had been a witness, not a suspect. Further investigation turned up evidence that Billy had been drinking heavily and behaving strangely in the days after the murder, and that he had quietly asked a courthouse clerk about the legal penalties for accidental killing versus deliberate murder.
On January 15, 1934, Judge Morrison vacated Roy Rawlins’ conviction. Roy walked out of the Virginia State Penitentiary on February 3, 1934, after serving two years and ten months for a crime he had never committed. He was eighteen years old, shaped permanently by prison life. His father had died the previous year, never knowing his son would be cleared.
Billy Thompson pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and perjury. The judge sentenced him to thirty years, telling him he had allowed an innocent boy to be imprisoned, shattered the community’s faith in its justice system, and compounded tragedy with betrayal. As he was led away, Billy told William Hood he was sorry, and that the shooting had been an accident. William Hood lived another nineteen years, but he never recovered.
His grief hollowed him out, and his general store declined as he lost interest in everything except sitting on his porch and watching the mountains. Martha Hood died of pneumonia in 1936, though those who knew her said she had truly died the night her daughter did. Roy Rawlins moved west, working oil fields in Tennessee and Oklahoma under an assumed name, never marrying. He died of a heart attack in 1962 at age forty-seven.
Shorty Hopkins settled in North Carolina, married, and raised a family, insisting to his children that he had merely been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Bertha Ann Hood was buried in the cemetery behind the Freewill Baptist Church. Her small white headstone still stands, weathered but legible. Every November, on the anniversary of her death, someone leaves fresh wildflowers on her grave.
No one has ever claimed responsibility for that tradition, which has continued for decades, long after everyone directly connected to the case has passed on. The Bertha Hood case became a cautionary tale in Virginia legal circles, a stark example of what happens when assumptions substitute for evidence, when the pressure to close a high-profile case leads investigators to cut corners, and when the testimony of one persuasive witness is allowed to send an innocent person to prison. In the end, three lives were destroyed that November evening. Bertha’s ended by a bullet.
Roy’s was stolen by false imprisonment. And Billy’s was consumed first by guilt and finally by the confession that put him behind bars. The hardest lesson the community was left to reckon with was that sometimes the true monster is not the person standing accused, but the lie that everyone decides to believe.
