Hallie Totten McCoy, a 23-year-old White/Caucasian woman, was killed on April 6, 1924, near Cass in Pocahontas County, West Virginia. Contemporary newspaper accounts referred to her as Mrs. Hallie Virginia McCoy and described a troubled marriage with her husband, Tiny McCoy. The couple had not been getting along, and Hallie had left him and returned to the home of her parents, Mr. and Mrs. William Totten, at Deer Creek just below Cass.
On that Sunday, Tiny McCoy armed himself with a revolver and went to the Totten home. According to the surviving account, Hallie refused his demand that she return with him. A brief and bitter confrontation followed, and McCoy drew the revolver and shot her. He then turned the weapon on Hallie’s mother, Mrs. William Totten, and her brother, identified in contemporary reports as Hobert or Herbert Totten, killing them as well. The attack therefore left three members of the same family dead in a matter of moments.
After shooting the three victims, McCoy turned the gun on himself, but the wound to his head was not fatal and was described as a scalp wound. He received treatment at the Marlinton Hospital, and by April 1924 he had been removed from the hospital and placed in the jail at Marlinton. There was no prolonged search for an unknown assailant and no competing suspect developed in the surviving accounts: Hallie’s husband was identified from the beginning as the gunman, survived his self-inflicted injury, and was taken into custody. The case proceeded rapidly into the Pocahontas County court system. When a grand jury was convened for the June term, McCoy was indicted three separate times for murder, corresponding to the deaths of Hallie, her mother and her brother.
McCoy was brought to trial specifically on the indictment accusing him of murdering Hallie. Jury selection was substantial enough that court officials had to summon 30 additional prospective jurors to obtain a panel. The trial continued through June 1924 and concluded after the evidence concerning Hallie’s killing was presented. The jury deliberated only a short time before finding McCoy guilty of murder in the first degree. Crucially, the verdict contained no recommendation that his punishment be reduced to life imprisonment, leaving the death penalty available. Judge Sharp consequently sentenced McCoy to be hanged and fixed September 12, 1924, as the execution date.
Before being transferred from the Marlinton jail to the state penitentiary, McCoy provided the local newspaper with a written confession. In it, he acknowledged responsibility for murdering his wife, his brother-in-law and his mother-in-law. He expressed remorse, asked those affected by the killings for forgiveness, and wrote extensively about his religious conversion and his belief that he had been forgiven by God. There is therefore no indication in the surviving record that his conviction rested on an unresolved identification question or that another person was suspected of participating in Hallie’s death. McCoy himself admitted committing all three killings, and his conviction for Hallie’s murder brought a death sentence.
The sentence was ultimately carried out. On Friday, September 12, 1924, Tiny McCoy was taken to the gallows at the West Virginia State Penitentiary in Moundsville. Contemporary reporting described him as composed during his final hours and said he walked onto the gallows without assistance. After a prayer and final statement, his arms and feet were secured, a hood was placed over his head, and the execution mechanism was activated. He dropped through the trap at approximately 4:56 p.m.; prison physicians determined that he was dead at about 5:07 p.m. Thus, the case ended not as an unsolved homicide but with the arrest of Hallie’s husband, three murder indictments, a first-degree murder conviction for Hallie’s killing, a formal confession to all three deaths, and McCoy’s execution by hanging little more than five months after the shootings at the Totten home.
