Diabolic.
A Negro Girl Brutally Murders Her Sleeping Step-Father With an Ax and Packs His Body in a Box.
Confessing the Deed, She is Locked Up in Jail, With Her Sister, Who is Charged With Being an Accomplice.

In one of the numerous negro cabins in the vicinage of the ore banks operated by Major Renfroe eight miles from town occurred a brutal and shocking murder on Friday last about midnight, which for fiendishness and ferocity stands abreast with the latest and most approved styles of deliberate and horrible assassination.  The victim was Edmund Williams, a negro laborer at the bank, and the murderess his youthful step-daughter, Mary Simmons.  Her still younger sister Rosalie, or “Tump,” is accused as being an accessory to the crime.  The murdered man lived alone in the cabin with these two girls, but for some time past has been confined to his room on account of sickness, and unable to work.  The mother of these girls, and the supposed wife of Williams, left them something over a month ago, having had to flee the country to escape arrest for a brutal attack upon another negro woman…..  When asked her reason for killing him, she alleged bad treatment, and said on several occasions lately he had made improper overtures to her, and besides that he had threatened to kill her…..It is said that the father of these two girls is a Methodist preacher living in Washington county in this state, a man of probity and general good character…. [This article contains a detailed account of the murder, see also Cartersville American, December 29, 1886.  Another notice of the murder appears in the Cartersville Courant, same date, under “Cassville Items”—giving the murdered man’s name as Emory Williams.]