OBITUARY: Sophie Wilkins, R.I.P.(Obituary)

I wrote in 1965 an article for Esquire magazine in which I told of a young man who had already spent more time in a death house (at Trenton, N.J.) than anyone in American penal history. Edgar Smith had caught my attention after telling a reporter, covering his story on one of the unconsummated eves of his execution, that he would have to do without reading National Review because the prison's chaplain had been reassigned, and with his departure would go the copy of NR which he had been passing on to Smith. I wrote to him to say that we would send him a lifetime subscription; he enjoyed the irony, and we began a correspondence to which he contributed amusing and prepossessing letters every week, from which I drew to tell his story in Esquire.

I thought him innocent, so did Sophie Wilkins on reading the piece, and through him, we became friends. I last saw her in St. Luke's Hospital, where she died last week, 88 years after her birth in Vienna, 75 years after arriving in New York as a twelve-year-old child, bringing with her what seemed the whole inventory of European culture.

Except that she could not give the whole of her infinite attention to any single person or enterprise, I'd be tempted to write that she gave all of her time to Edgar Smith after learning about him. She wrote to him regularly and traveled periodically on the train to visit him, limited only by death-house rules as to frequency. The objective of believers in Smith's innocence was a new trial. That didn't happen, but tough legal work by a resourceful lawyer from Williams & Connolly achieved a Supreme Court order for a new trial, the result of which was a pleading and, after 14 years, his release. Sophie Wilkins edited his memoirs, Brief Against Death, which became, in a way, even more interesting to read five years later, when Edgar Smith tried to ...