Ella Maud: The Novel of an Unsolved True Crime Story
A beautiful young woman vanishes; her body is later found. The press runs wild, evidence is irrelevant in the glare of rampant media speculation and popular outrage, and a suspect is tried in the court of public opinion. The disappearance of Ella Maud “Nell” Cropsey, occurring in 1901, has the distinction of being a historical exemplar of these now familiar occurrences. Nell went missing off her own front porch after a breakup with her long-time beau, Jim Wilcox. Acknowledged as a paragon of innocent womanhood, the furor was immediate, rising to fever pitch when Nell’s body, curiously well preserved, was discovered over a month later in the Pasquotank River, mere yards from the Cropsey home.
Using the known facts, media and trial accounts, Nicastro has crafted a compelling novel that is so much more than a murder mystery. Character development is strong, adding dimensionality to the cardboard cutouts created by media accounts. While the plotting could be tighter, its nonlinear structure maintains tension while exploring multiple perspectives with equal competency. Nell, her sister Ollie, and Wilcox are vivid, and the entire town of Elizabeth City, North Carolina, is brought to life. Family and social dynamics are effortlessly conveyed, as is a world on the cusp of modernity, and what that forward momentum means for a family transplanted from Brooklyn to rural North Carolina. Nicastro’s prose is simple and fluid, with frequent moments of figurative elegance: “To preserve the big lie, she was obliged to hatch other, smaller deceptions that multiplied, each demanding its own care and feeding.” The result is a well-written, absorbing fictional take on an already fascinating true-crime story.
