When Coroner Henderson met the Deputy Sheriff again, the latter suggested that in all probability Clyde Rickey had accidentally killed his son and that Mrs. Rickey and Jim Andy Day, learning of the tragedy, had decided to help him cover up the crime. All he had learned from his visit to the Reverend Richard Short was that Mr. And Mrs. Rickey had joined the pastor’s church a few weeks before. He had conducted the prayer meeting in their home Friday, and as far as he knew, both were devout Christians.
“I too have about come to the conclusion that the old man Rickey killed the boy,” said the Coroner, wearily, ash the two men made their way back to Olive Hill. “But how are we going to prove it?”
“I don’t know,” replied Stephens, “but those footprints—they ought to cause someone a lot of grief.”
Feeling sure that either Mr. or Mrs. Rickey, or else Jim Andy Day, knew the details of the crime, it was decided after a conference with the County Attorney, to take the three into custody and try and match one against the other to get at the truth. This was done, in spite of the protests of Mrs. Rickey and Day. Clyde Rickey took his arrest rather non-chalantly. The investigators had refrained from persistent questioning of Clyde because they believed he would prove the most difficult to handle and be least likely to give information.
With the men in custody it was a simple matter to check the shoes they were with the footprints found at the death mound. The comparison was a direct blow to their theory. Clyde Rickey’s shoes did not fit the prints, but those of Jim Andy Day did.
This indicated that regardless of who had committed the crime, Day must have known about it. In all probability, he had been the man who had conveyed the dead boy to the tree and hung him there.
When accused of this, Day called attention to the fact that he had discovered the body and said that out of curiosity he had walked backward and forward, between the tree and the mine opening. That sounded convincing.
Thus the matter stood at the end of August 1932. The officials had three people in jail, held under suspicion of murder, but they had no evidence by which they could hope to convict any one of them for the most dastardly crime that had ever occurred in Carter County.
The first week in September, a report came to the County Attorney that seemed to complicate matters. He learned that Herbert Rickey, an older brother of the dead Roy, had mysteriously disappeared several weeks prior to the tragedy. Had he been slain also? That was another point to clear up.
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