Mattie Pearl Manning: Child Widow & Killer

Around noon on Saturday, May 9, 1942, Damon Manning burst from a cabin in rural Hamblen County, Tennessee, and ran up the road before collapsing in front of a house, a growing bloodstain soaking his shirt.

Manning told gathering neighbors that his wife, Mattie Pearl, had shot him. He begged them to remove his footwear, saying he didn’t want to die with his shoes on.

They obliged. He died the next day at the hospital in nearby Morristown.

The blonde, blue-eyed widow told the sheriff she and her husband had been arguing for weeks because he wanted them to move out of her parents’ house and in with his family in a neighboring county. She said he threatened to kill her once when he couldn’t find a pair of pants.

Manning was 35. Mattie Pearl was 14. They had been married just three months. She told a reporter he was “the first man who ever kissed me.”

She shot him, she said, because she feared he would kill her.

Authorities charged Mattie Pearl with second-degree murder and her father with aiding and abetting – for throwing the murder pistol down a well. A jury deliberated just an hour before finding them guilty. Each was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

That’s where the story goes cold. I could find nothing about her father, Frank Morgan, who was 50 at the time of the killing. Did he survive prison? No idea.

I unearthed only a few details about child widow Mattie Pearl: She married a man named Charles Greene and lived until 2007, dying in Hamblen County just a month shy of her 80th birthday.