Then the prosecutor came to me asking if I’d seen anything.

I thought if I gave them a story, made Roy look guilty, everyone would believe it, and I’d be safe.

So, you fabricated the entire testimony? Most of it? Yeah, I did see Roy and Shorty with Bertha earlier.

That part was true.

But everything about seeing Roy shoot her, about him dragging her body, I made that up.

Sheriff Bentley sat back in his chair, his mind racing.

If Billy was telling the truth now, it meant an innocent boy had been convicted of murder and was currently serving 25 years in prison.

It meant the entire trial had been based on perjured testimony.

“Why are you coming forward now?” the sheriff asked.

because I can’t live with it anymore,” Billy said simply.

“Every time I close my eyes, I see her face.

I hear that gunshot and I know Roy Roins is in prison for something I did.

It ain’t right.

I have to make it right, even if it means I go to prison instead.

” Sheriff Bentley called Commonwealth Attorney Douglas Hail that same evening.

An emergency meeting was convened with Judge Morrison and Marcus Webb, Royy’s defense attorney.

Billy repeated his confession, this time in front of all the relevant parties.

A court stenographer recorded every word.

“This is a catastrophic miscarriage of justice,” Judge Morrison said, his face pale.

“If this confession is genuine, we’ve imprisoned an innocent boy.

“We need to verify Billy’s story,” Hail said.

“We can’t simply take his word for it.

” Over the next several weeks, investigators re-examined all the physical evidence.

The bullet that had killed Bertha, which had been kept as evidence, was compared with test firings from Billy’s 22 rifle.

The ballistics experts report was damning.

The bullet matched Billy’s rifle, not a 32 caliber pistol, as had been assumed.

How did we miss this? Hail demanded.

The original analysis was done quickly, the expert explained.

The assumption was made based on the wound size, but a 22 caliber bullet fired at close range can create similar trauma.

No one thought to test Billy Thompson’s rifle because he was a witness, not a suspect.

Additional investigation revealed more troubling facts.

Several people came forward to say they’d seen Billy acting strangely in the days after Bertha’s death, drinking heavily, talking to himself, seeming paranoid and agitated.

One neighbor reported that Billy had asked her what she thought happened to poor Bertha with an intensity that had made her uncomfortable.

Most damning was evidence that Billy had researched penalties for accidental killings versus murder in the weeks after Bertha’s death, asking questions of a clerk at the courthouse that now took on sinister significance.

On January 15th, 1934, Judge Morrison issued an order vacating Roy Roins’s conviction.

Roy Roins was released from the Virginia State Penitentiary on February 3rd, 1934.

After serving 2 years and 10 months for a crime he didn’t commit, he emerged from the prison gates a changed person.

The thin, frightened 15-year-old boy who had entered was now an 18-year-old man, hardened by prison life.

His eyes, once capable of softness, now held a permanent weariness.

Marcus Webb was there to meet him along with a small group of supporters from Weise County who had believed in his innocence.

“But Frank Roins was not among them,” Royy’s father had died the previous year, never knowing his son would be exonerated.

“I’m sorry this happened to you, Roy,” Webb said, shaking his client’s hand.

“What was done to you was unconscionable.

” Roy nodded, but said nothing.

He had learned in prison that words meant little.

The case against Billy Thompson moved swiftly.

He pleaded guilty to seconddegree murder and perjury.

Judge Morrison in sentencing acknowledged that Billy’s confession had at least partially redeemed him, but the damage he had caused was incalculable.

You allowed an innocent boy to be imprisoned while you walked free.

Judge Morrison said from the bench, his voice filled with anger and disappointment.

You shattered the faith of this community in our justice system.

You compounded tragedy with betrayal.

Billy Thompson was sentenced to 30 years in the Virginia State Penitentiary.

As Billy was led away in handcuffs, he looked at William Hood, who sat in the courtroom gallery.

“I’m sorry, Mr.

Hood,” Billy said, his voice breaking.

“I’m so sorry for what I did to your daughter.

It was an accident, but that don’t make it right.

I’m sorry.

” William Hood stared at the young man who had accidentally killed his daughter and then lied to cover it up, sending an innocent boy to prison in his place.

He wanted to feel satisfaction to feel that justice had finally been served, but he felt only emptiness.

Martha Hood had not attended the hearing.

She had stopped leaving the house except for church, her grief having broken something essential inside her.

She would die less than two years later from pneumonia.

But those who knew her said she had really died the night Bertha did.

The true story of Bertha Hood’s death eventually became clear through Billy’s confession and the subsequent investigation.

On the evening of November 2nd, 1930, Bertha Hood had indeed encountered both Roy Roins and Shorty Hopkins near the railroad tracks.

They had argued with Bertha, making it clear she wanted nothing to do with either of them.

Both boys had eventually left, leaving Bertha alone.

Billy Thompson, who had been drinking moonshine while hunting in the woods, had been watching the entire interaction.

When Bertha continued toward the church alone, Billy, emboldened by alcohol and resentful of her rejection of him, decided to confront her.

He approached her on the tracks, his 22 rifle slung over his shoulder.

He demanded to know why she had rejected him, why she thought she was too good for him.

Bertha, frightened and angry, tried to walk away.

Billy grabbed her arm and Bertha pulled free forcefully.

The sudden movement caused Billy’s rifle to swing around.

In his intoxicated state, Billy had his finger on the trigger.

When the rifle swung, it discharged.

The bullet struck Bertha directly in the heart.

She died almost instantly, collapsing onto the railroad tracks.

Billy, realizing what he had done, panicked.

He dragged Bertha’s body off the tracks into the nearby ditch, hoping it would look like she had been attacked elsewhere.

Then he fled, hiding the rifle and trying to act normal when the search parties formed.

When investigators began focusing on Roy and Shorty, who were known to have been pursuing Bertha, Billy saw an opportunity by fabricating testimony that he’d witnessed Roy commit the murder.

Billy could ensure the investigation went in a different direction while simultaneously making himself appear as a helpful witness rather than a suspect.

The plan had worked perfectly until guilt consumed him.

Roy Roins tried to rebuild his life after his release, but it proved nearly impossible.

The stigma of having been convicted of murder, even though he was later exonerated, followed him everywhere.

Employers wouldn’t hire him.

Neighbors treated him with suspicion.

Young women avoided him.

Within a year of his release, Roy left Virginia entirely, moving west to Tennessee and eventually to Oklahoma, where he worked in the oil fields under an assumed name.

He never married, never had children, and died in 1962 at the age of 47 from a heart attack, having spent most of his adult life trying to outrun a crime he never committed.

Shorty Hopkins also left Weise County, his family’s reputation tarnished by association with the case.

He moved to North Carolina, married, and raised a family.

He spoke rarely of the Bertha Hood case except to insist to his children that he had been innocent, that he had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

William Hood lived another 23 years, dying in 1953 at the age of 71.

He never fully recovered from the loss of his daughter.

His general store, once a thriving business, declined as William lost interest in everything except sitting on his porch staring at the mountains.

Neighbors said that in his final years, William would often walk to Bertha’s grave and sit beside it for hours, speaking quietly to his daughter as if she could hear him.

The Bertha Hood case became a cautionary tale in Virginia legal circles.

An example of how a justice system could fail catastrophically when assumptions replaced evidence, when pressure to solve a high-profile crime led to shortcuts, and when the testimony of a single persuasive witness could send an innocent person to prison.

It also revealed the fragility of truth in a small community, where reputation and family connections could matter more than facts, where prejudice against the poor could tip the scales of justice, and where one person’s lies could destroy multiple lives.

The small white headstone in the cemetery behind the Free Will Baptist Church, still stands today, weathered, but readable.

Bertha Anne Hood’s grave is sometimes visited by historians interested in the case, by true crime enthusiasts drawn to the story, and occasionally by descendants of the families involved, seeking to understand the tragedy that shaped their ancestors.

On the anniversary of her death each November, someone, identity unknown, leaves fresh wild flowers on Bertha’s grave.

The tradition has continued for decades, long after everyone directly connected to the case has died.

Perhaps it’s a descendant of William Hood, honoring a great ant they never knew.

Perhaps it’s someone from the community keeping alive the memory of the innocent girl whose death revealed both the worst and eventually the best of human nature.

Or perhaps it’s simply a reminder that in the Cumberland Mountains of Appalachia, where family and honor and memory run deeper than the coal seams beneath the earth, some stories are never truly forgotten.

Bertha Anne Hood was 15 years old when she died.

A girl full of promise cut down by a moment of drunken stupidity and followed by years of calculated lies.

She never got to graduate high school, never fell in love, never had children, never fulfilled the potential that everyone saw in her.

But her story endures as a testament to the innocent victims of violence, to the failures of justice and to the heavy price of truth delayed but ultimately revealed.

In the end, three lives were destroyed that November evening.

Bertha’s ended by a bullet.

Royy’s stolen by false imprisonment and Billy’s consumed by guilt and ultimately imprisoned by his own confession.

and a community learned that sometimes the real monster isn’t the person accused but the lie that everyone chooses to believe.

End from the living.

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