(from the archived RCHC Web site)

by Robert Bailey and Jere Hall

According to the Rockwood Times, an inexplicable and cold-blooded murder took place in that town on June 30, 1921.

On a quiet summer morning at about 7 a.m., E. L. Bennecker, manager of the Roane Iron Co.’s commissary, was walking to work.  Suddenly, he was confronted by Jim McElroy, who stepped from around the corner of a house near the commissary with a shot gun pointed at Bennecker‘s head.  Bennecker evidently ducked, because, according to the Times, “the entire charge entered the top of the skull and blew away the whole top of the head.”

Death was instantaneous.

McElroy returned to the porch of his house nearby and was found shortly thereafter reading his Bible.  When questioned by police, McElroy told them that God had told him to kill Bennecker and nothing could have prevented it.

McElroy had worked for the Roane Iron Co. until just before the crime. When he quit, Bennecker told him it was the policy of the company to provide enough work for men with families so that they would have enough supplies to live on, but if he quit, he could have not more provisions from the commissary.

The Times also stated that he hunger of his crying children evidently preyed on his mind, as well as “Bolshevik literature and socialistic tendencies which the man always had, caused the terrible enactment of the terrible trajedy.”

McElroy had evidently had a bad reputation in Rockwood for many years and the Times intimated that he was a thief.  Bennecker, on the other hand, was reputed to be a well liked and trusted young man of about 37 years with five children, the youngest of whom, at his death, was just two months old.  Both he and his wife had been raised in the Wheat community.

Enraged citizens were about to lynch McElroy when he was brought before a justice of the peace for a preliminary trial.  He was bound over for trial in criminal court, which took place at the historic courthouse in Kingston in September 1921.  He was convicted of first-degree murder; and, as with most death sentences, his case was appealed to the Tennessee Supreme Court.  His death sentence was reaffirmed there.  He was electrocuted in August, 1922.

Justice was much quicker in 1921, since the murder took place in June, the trial three months later and the execution in September of the following year.  Apparently there was no such thing as “jailhouse lawyers” 78 years ago, and obviously there were no tests for sanity, since nothing was ever mentioned in the papers about an insanity plea, even though McElroy insisted that “the Lord had told him to murder Bennecker.”

He made no statement before his death and never attempted to deny his guilt.

Why McElroy was referred to as the “Holy Roller” in the Times is unclear.  He is called the “Holy Roller fanatic” or simply “Holly [sic] Roller” repeatedly in the Rockwood newspaper.