The Abduction and Murder of Hubbard Harris, Jr. in South Carolina
On December 23, 1933, a 15-year-old young man named Hubbard H. Harris, Jr. went missing from the Columbia, South Carolina area on his birthday The boy was the son of Hubbard Harris, Sr., vice president of Home Stores, Inc., a grocery chain.
Forty-eight hours after he went missing, three residents of the Olympia mill village discovered a body in a deserted home about 11 miles outside of Columbia, underneath a dilapidated mattress. He had been beaten to death, and the murder weapon, a blood-spattered iron bar, was found nearby.
Hubbard Jr.’s mother told officers a man had called their home several times to offer her son an employment opportunity. The last time he was seen, he was getting into a light-model car with a man wearing glasses on Saturday morning. His mother assumed the man was the same one who had been telling her son about a possible job.
Police quickly tracked down a suspect, a 49-year-old unemployed auto mechanic named Robert Wiles. He admitted he’d picked Hubbard Jr. up on Saturday morning in a borrowed car, but denied murdering him. He said he had let the young man out of the car on an area of town called the Bluff Road.
It didn’t take long for more information about the murder to come to light. Police told the media at first they believed Wiles was hired by a third party to kidnap Hubbard Jr., possibly for ransom, but things got out of control once Hubbard Jr. realized something nefarious was going on. Wiles said a man named John Rushton, a meat cutter employed at one of the Home Stores, devised the plan. Rushton denied any involvement, but was jailed anyway.
Wiles told police the young man was suspicious when they had arrived at the deserted home in Columbia. Wiles told him that boys used to go to that area to meet girls, which Hubbard Jr. responded with, “This is a devil of a place. Let’s go.” When Wiles told the young man he could get used to it, he said Hubbard Jr. struck him in the face. That’s when Wiles picked up the iron bar that was lying nearby and beat hit him several times about the face and head. Then he dragged the boy’s body from the backyard up into the house.
He said he had devised the plan to kidnap the boy for ransom, hoping to collect at least $1,000 from Hubbard Jr.’s family. Wiles then drove back into town, encountered Hubbard Sr. on the street, and wished him a “Merry Christmas.”
A large number of stores in Columbia closed on the day Hubbard H. Harris Junior was buried. The president of the student body of his junior high school requested all classmates attend the services for the young man. He was described by his peers and teachers as a good student who was interested in a variety of sports. He’d wanted to explore football and track once he entered high school. He enjoyed spending time with his parents and sister, which included attending weekly church services, where he was the President of his Sunday School class.
Less than a month after Hubbard Junior was murdered, Robert Wiles, who had pleaded insanity in the case, went on trial for the crime in Columbia. In the closing arguments, the prosecutor C.T. Graydon said the case was a difficult one because the crime was unusual for the state of South Carolina. It was the first case where an innocent child had been lured into an automobile to be made way with, “the first time that the serpentine head of the kidnapper had shown itself in the state.” As to the plea of insanity, Graydon responded that he had never seen a man display a better memory than Wiles. He said Wiles had gone on the witness stand and recalled exact dates of events that occurred years earlier. He said the defendant himself had said on the stand that he knew what he did was wrong.
The defendant’s wife, two daughters and son waited were seated outside the courtoom. It took a jury 22 minutes to find him guilty. He was sentenced to death by the electric chair. The judge said he had been on the bench for 22 years, and he never dreamed he would be sentencing a man to death. After hearing the verdict and sentence, Wiles showed no emotion. His attorneys requested a commitment to the state hospital for a sanity examination. The judge ruled that the execution date would allow time for Wiles to be evaluated, but said he could not order a commitment to the state hospital in light of the testimony presented at the trial.
An interesting fact revealed in some of the newspaper reporting was that Wiles had also murdered his first wife and her alleged lover several years prior. I was not able to find out if he had ever served time for those crimes or if those details were shared at his trial.
Wiles was not spared. On March 12, 1934, as he was being led to his execution, he said, “I am guilty. I did it, and I am ready to pay for it. There was no one else in it—all the rest are free and clear.” On the table, he began praising God in a song before the high current voltage caused his death.
This story appeared as part of Episode 119 of the Missing in the Carolinas podcast, “The 1933 South Carolina Murders of Mary Ravenel and Hubbard Harris, Jr.” You can hear the full episode here.