Edwin Roscoe Stephenson

Edwin Roscoe Stephenson (March 8, 1870 – August 4, 1956) was a minister of the now defunct Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and a member of the Ku Klux Klan. He and his wife, Mary Etta Thompson Stephenson, had one child who survived infancy, a daughter, Mary Ruth Stephenson. A side-line clergyman, Stephenson worked as a barber and married people, for a fee, in the Jefferson County Court House.

Killing of James Coyle In 1921, six months after his father died, his only child, Ruth, converted to Catholicism. A well-known member of the Ku Klux Klan, he killed Coyle one hour after 18-year-old Ruth married a Catholic, 44-year-old Pedro Gussman, whose Spanish parents lived in Puerto Rico. The marriage ceremony had been performed by Father Coyle. On the afternoon of August 11, 1921, the enraged Stephenson fired three shots at Father Coyle on the porch of St. Paul's rectory. There were many witnesses who heard but did not see the actual shooting.

Stephenson turned himself in to the authorities who were located a block away. He requested that Hugo Black, a future member of the U.S. Supreme Court be his attorney because Hugo Black held anti-Catholic views (in 1923, Black would join the Klan ). The Ku Klux Klan paid for his defense by a powerful group of attorneys.

The trial started on October 17, 1921. The defense entered a dual plea of "not guilty and not guilty by reason of insanity", arguing that at the time of the killing, Stephenson was temporarily insane and he had acted in self-defense. The defense played on fears of racial miscegnation by trying to claim that Gussman was an African-American man, and made anti-Catholic arguments. His daughter Ruth was not called to testify as a witness during the trial.

Stephenson was acquitted and released.

Death Stephenson died on October 3, 1956, at the age of 86.

Literature John Beecher published a poem, "Alter Christus", about Coyle's killing. In 2021, Sheila Killian, Father Coyle's grand-niece, published her debut novel which is titled Something Bigger, the novel is about her grand-aunt Marcella Coyle, and it also describes the events which surrounded the killing