Matthew Williams

Matthew Williams, 23, a laborer at a local box factory, was lynched by a mob of more than 2,000 people in Salisbury on the evening of December 4, 1931. Earlier that day, Williams's longtime employer, Daniel J. Elliott, was shot dead in his office; Williams was found badly wounded nearby, and the official account at the time held that he had shot Elliott over a wage dispute and then tried to take his own life, though some contemporaries considered it more plausible that Elliott's own son had fired the shots. That evening, while Williams was recovering under police guard at a segregated hospital ward, a mob stormed the building, dragged him from his bed, and threw him from a window into the crowd below. He was hanged from a tree at the courthouse square, his body cut down and dragged through Salisbury's Black neighborhoods behind a car, and then burned; spectators took pieces of his body and the rope as souvenirs. In the same wave of violence, an unidentified Black man was separately killed nearby by members of the same mob. No one was ever identified or prosecuted for either killing. The Justice Department funded a renewed investigation into the case beginning in 2019 under the Emmett Till Act.

Salisbury, MD · Wicomico County

• 1931: Case opens — victim reported missing or found.
• Documented milestones (renewed investigation, media coverage, family advocacy) to be added as sourced.
• Present: case remains unresolved. No named suspect has been convicted.

• Victim identity, background, and the December 4, 1931 date and circumstances, per the Maryland State Archives and extensive contemporary press coverage.
• No one was ever identified or prosecuted for the lynching, per the same records.

• The circumstances of Elliott's shooting — whether Williams or Elliott's son fired the fatal shots — were never resolved.
• The identity of the second Black man killed by the mob that same night has never been publicly established.

• Maryland State Archives — biography and case summary
• International Center for Transitional Justice — case summary
• Project Cold Case
• Murder Accountability Project
• NamUs