Too Many Clues: The Puzzling Death of Elias Purcell

"Chicago Tribune," December 1, 1935, via Newspapers.com

Many murders go forever unsolved due to a complete lack of clues.  On certain rare occasions, the opposite happens: the victim left behind so many clues--many of them either contradictory or just plain incomprehensible--that it is impossible to make enough sense out of them to conduct a successful investigation.  Anyone who tries winds up feeling like they are spinning in a room of funhouse mirrors.

With a few cases--such as the one we will examine in this week's post--it even remains uncertain if the dearly departed was murdered at all.

Elias H. Purcell had a varied, and largely successful career.  In the late 1800s, he toured America with the Schubert Concert Company, where he was both director and pianist.  The company included Purcell’s wife Lavinia, who was a singer, and their son Thomas, a precociously talented banjoist and violinist.  In 1899, the family, which by then included a daughter, Virginia, settled in Hibbing, Minnesota.  Thanks to an iron range, the local real estate market was booming, and Purcell invested in land to such a profitable degree that by the time WWI broke out, he was worth an estimated $75,000.  (Approximately $1.5 million in today’s money.)  After the children grew up and began their own lives (Virginia married one John Sheehy and Thomas became the leader of a touring jazz orchestra,) Purcell sold most of his holdings in Hibbings, and in 1918, he and Lavinia moved to Chicago.  The pair moved into an apartment building Purcell owned.

Life for the Purcells appeared to roll on quietly enough until Monday, September 22, 1919.  Purcell was temporarily on his own, as Lavinia was visiting friends in Sterling, Illinois.  That morning, the building’s janitor, Henry Van Vaerender, asked his wife and another tenant, a Mrs. Wegener, to accompany him to Purcell’s apartment.  He said he had a feeling that “something funny” was going on with their landlord.  He explained that Purcell was a man of very regular habits, but the day before, all his curtains had remained down, and Purcell failed to take his usual early morning walk.  In short, Vaerender felt uneasy about going in search of Purcell alone.

When the trio approached the door of Purcell’s kitchen, they found that it was closed, but the key hung on the outside.  When they cautiously peered through a window, the women began screaming.  Purcell was sitting bound to a kitchen chair, very unmistakably dead.

When police arrived on the scene, they noted that the body was rigid, suggesting that Purcell had died some hours before.  A shattered glass was on the floor about two feet away from him.  His wrists were bound to the sides of the chair, but very loosely and carelessly.  Over his head was a towel spotted with dark stains.  When this towel was removed, everyone was further unnerved to see that the dead man’s eyes were wide and staring, as if he had passed away while looking at some horrifying sight.  Stranger still, there were no marks of violence anywhere on the body.

The entire house had been completely ransacked.  Furniture had been displaced.  The beds were stripped of their blankets.  Drawers had been pulled out of dressers, with the contents dumped on the floor.  Despite all this chaos, nothing appeared to be missing from the apartment.

In the dining room, the table had been set for three.  Fingerprints on the dishes did not belong to Purcell or any members of his family.  One egg--and one egg only--had been boiled and distributed in three pieces.  One slice of toast was also cut into three pieces and put on separate plates.  There was a bit of coffee in each of three cups, and on three knives was a small lump of butter.  There was something oddly staged about everything that was found in the apartment--including Purcell’s corpse.  But who did the staging, and why?

Although police were able to establish that Purcell’s wife and children were not in Chicago at the time of his death, there were indications that he had not been in the apartment alone.  A milkman named William Hornung told police that around 4 a.m. the previous day, he was walking to the back porches behind Purcell’s building when he saw a shadow cross the curtain of a rear bedroom in Purcell’s flat.  He heard a noise that he thought was either a groan or a snore.  Then, the curtain was pulled aside, revealing the head of a man wearing an officer’s army cap.  The police took particular interest in this detail, as among the items found in Purcell’s apartment was an officer’s cap belonging to Purcell’s son-in-law, who was a lieutenant in the army.  A neighbor of Purcell’s stated that some time around 2 a.m. that same Sunday, she had heard footsteps either in the backyard or the passageway.  Another neighbor said that early Sunday, she had heard a woman’s voice in Purcell’s flat, along with the sounds of a piano and a violin being played.  Yet another tenant heard voices and saw a light from the Purcell bedroom around that same time.

Meanwhile, ten days after Purcell’s body was discovered, the coroner finally learned what had killed him: nicotine.  There was enough of the poison in his system to “kill half a dozen men.”  The dose was so high, it would have ended his life within just a few minutes.  This just added to the puzzle, as deliberate nicotine poisoning was extremely rare.  It would have been hard for anyone to get hold of enough to kill someone, and only a chemist or someone who was an expert in poisons would even think of using it.  Also, nicotine poisoning would cause extreme convulsions before death, but Purcell’s bound body showed no sign of any such seizures.  Could he have already been dead when he was tied to the chair?

The sheer weirdness of the whole death scene led some investigators to propose that Purcell had committed a suicide elaborately faked to look like murder.  They believed Purcell’s hands were tied loosely enough to enable him to drink the poison from a glass and then throw it to the ground, shattering it.  It was pointed out that Purcell had recently lost a good part of his fortune in the stock market, and that he had recently purchased $15,000 worth of life insurance, which would have been invalidated if his death was ruled a suicide.

This theory brought a storm of criticism, not least from Purcell’s family.  They declared that despite his financial losses, he still had a good deal of money, leaving him with no reason to kill himself.  And what about all the witnesses who saw and heard other people in his flat?  In short, both the suicide and murder advocates had enough material to make a plausible case.

The inquest jurors tasked with making some sense of the whole mess delivered the only reasonable verdict:  

"Elias H. Purcell came to his death in the kitchen of his home at 661 Roscoe street from cardiac and respiratory failure due to nicotine poisoning.  From the evidence presented we are unable to determine how or in what manner or by whom said nicotine was ingested.

“We recommend that the state’s attorney and the police make further inquiry into this mysterious case.”

If any “further inquiry” was made, it proved to be utterly useless.  Elias Purcell either committed suicide in a manner worthy of the cleverest detective fiction, or he was murdered in one of the most brilliantly baffling ways imaginable.

In 1920, the insurance company paid Purcell’s widow the full $15,000.  And everyone moved on.

Weekend Link Dump

 

Welcome to this week's Link Dump!

We have tea!

A haunted historic cabin.

A haunted historic inn.

The life of a 15th century Duchess of Milan.

The saga of the Los Angeles Breakfast Club.

The legacy of Flannery O'Connor.

The debate over "recovered memories."  I know someone who once went under hypnosis, and "recovered" memories of things that I know for a fact never ever happened.  The whole experience screwed up her mind big time, and, incidentally, caused a heck of a lot of trouble within my family.  Just saying.

The auriculas of Spitalfields.

Winston Churchill and the witch hunt.

A French submarine disaster.

A late-Georgian era country doctor.

A dangerous quack medicine.

America's worst dust storm.

The medieval holiday of Hocktide.

What we can learn from ancient kitchens.

A one-legged man attacked a one-armed man, and things got complicated.

Archaeologists are looking for Buddha.

An early mass extinction event.

A mechanical dog from ancient Egypt.

An "unprecedented" hoard from the Ice Age.

An "experimental" weaving station from early 20th century India.

Dessert recipes from the days of WWII rationing.

The politics of pedestrianism.

The photo gallery at the New York morgue.

Medieval castles were cleaner than you might think.

A brief history of Monaco.

AI discovers an ancient civilization.

The airman who fell 18,000 feet and lived to tell the tale.

The mystery of why we don't remember our babyhood.

A secret from King Tut's tomb.

Picturing an ice-free Antarctica.

The final years of former social queen Caroline Astor.

When French Indochina went to war.

Was Michelangelo an art forger?

Why they're called "soap operas."

In which we learn that Mona Lisa is a vampire.

That's it for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll look at a death that was either an unusually elaborate suicide or a bizarre murder.  In the meantime, here's Nessie!

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

Unfortunately, the following is all I could find about what was potentially an intriguing poltergeist case, but I thought it was still worth sharing.  The “New York Daily News,” April 21, 1962:

St. Brieuc, France, April 20-Police and church officials today were investigating reports of a "ghost" in two Brittany villages who is said to have "attacked" people's clothing. 

A man at Landebia recently found himself practically undressed in the market place after seams in his clothing had given away, the reports said. 

Large acid-like burns were said to have appeared on the clothes of a family in Henabbihen--while they were wearing them. The "ghost" slit all the bed-sheets of another family.

The Child of Mystery

Henry John “Johnny” Brophy was, to all outward appearances, a perfectly ordinary little boy.  Although described as “slightly crippled” (as a toddler, he had been run over by a carriage) he managed to lead a normal life.  His mother was still alive, and living in Madison, Wisconsin, but since the age of two Henry lived with his grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Kaut Lund, in nearby Mt. Horeb.  (It seems to be unrecorded why he wasn’t living with his mother, who had remarried after Henry’s father died.)  Until he was eleven years old, Henry gave no indication that he was about to get a brief nationwide fame as the “Child of Mystery.”

Young Henry’s descent into The Weird began on March 9, 1909.  As the boy was entering a side door of his home, he was hit in the back with a snowball.  The impact was so fierce, he was knocked to the ground.  Once he picked himself up, he looked outside for his attacker.  He saw nobody.

The next day, another large snowball hit him.  His grandparents joined him in the hunt for this phantom practical joker, but again, no one was in the vicinity.  The three of them shrugged--hey, life does funny things sometimes--and dismissed the mystery from their minds.

On March 11, as the trio sat down for dinner, things suddenly happened which were impossible to ignore.  Various objects--cups, bars of soap, spools of thread--began being hurled throughout the room by invisible hands, quite thoroughly terrifying the family, and, I presume, really ruining their meal.

The following day, Henry’s mother was in town in order to attend a funeral.  That evening, as they were all in the sitting room, the spectral Hurler of Inanimate Objects made another appearance.  Various household items suddenly flew through the air, and the furniture began moving itself around.  The sight was so shocking that Henry’s grandfather feared he would have a heart attack.  The family, not knowing what else to do, called in their minister, the Reverend Mostrom.  Mostrom soon arrived at the home, accompanied by a family friend, Sam Thompson.  The two men were greeted by a Bible, which threw itself off a table and landed at the Reverend’s feet.

When Mostrom, in an effort to calm the group, began playing a hymn on the organ, their invisible guest seemed to take offense.  A carving knife flew past him, embedding itself in the floor in front of Thompson.  This was soon followed by a hatpin.

"San Francisco Examiner," August 22, 1909, via Newspapers.com

The clergyman’s visit just seemed to accelerate the eerie assaults.  Lamps would suddenly and mysteriously shatter.  The hinges of doors would unaccountably lose their screws, causing them to fall to the floor.  Out of nowhere, the family would be pelted with coal.  It was noted that these frightening occurrences only happened when Henry was in the house, leaving many to conclude that he was somehow responsible.  However, others asked, how could an eleven-year-old of only average intelligence somehow fool all the adults around him?  

Some speculated that the household objects were moving because the house had both electricity and phone service.  Perhaps this was causing items to become literally electrified?  The Lunds were skeptical about this theory, choosing instead to believe that Henry had somehow been secretly hypnotized, and his trance state was somehow causing the uproar.  

In an effort to settle the question of whether Henry was--consciously or not--responsible for what was happening, he was sent to visit his uncle Andrew in Springfield.  The minute Henry walked through his uncle’s front door, a pail of water began spinning, dashing its contents on the floor.  A mirror crashed to the ground, shattering into fragments.

That question was being clearly answered.

Poor Henry was rapidly becoming unpopular among the other children, as it was impossible to play with him without things going right off the rails.  When he and another boy tried a game of marbles, the marbles not only kept disappearing, the ones that remained insisted on moving themselves.  The terrified boys both fled.  When Henry tried racing the other children, invisible hands pelted him with rocks and dirt clods.  Storekeepers refused to allow him into their shops, because whenever Henry came in, jars would fall off the shelves and break.  Even the family cat refused to go near him.

When Andrew brought the boy back to his grandparents, he included a present: a basket of eggs.  When he placed the basket on a table, he was unnerved to see an egg shoot out and shatter on Henry’s face.

The frazzled family decided to seek medical help.  Henry was examined by a number of doctors, who reported that he was physically normal.  These physicians said the boy must, in some unknown fashion, be playing a gigantic prank on everybody.  The Lunds then held a prayer meeting in their home, which just seemed to make matters worse.  One George Kingsley, who was both a doctor and a spiritualist, told the family that Henry was obviously a talented medium.  The strange events they were experiencing were merely due to the boy not having the training to control his psychic powers.  Another spiritualist claimed that Henry was surrounded by three spirits: two women and a man.  The publicity the boy was unwillingly attracting became so intense that the Lunds posted an announcement in the local paper, begging the crowds and reporters to leave them in peace.

Fortunately for the family, Henry’s “wild talents”--whatever may have been their source--soon faded away.  By the time of his marriage in 1917, he had long returned to being a perfectly ordinary mortal who, one hopes, spent the rest of his days in peaceful obscurity.

Weekend Link Dump

 

Welcome to this week's Link Dump!

And dance party!

A family's mysterious disappearance is finally solved.  

The library that employs bats.

An old church in a new light.

The secret trials of Nazi POWs.

An 18th century royal scandal.

The artistic legacy of Eleanor of Aquitaine.

A Los Angeles man who may have been part hero, part villain.

An "affair of honour" in the Crimean War.

That beloved tradition of hating Henry Symeonis.

The fall of Thomas Cromwell.

A brief history of haunted televisions.

Yet another "pushing back human history" discovery.

The Steerage Act of 1819.

A brief history of the pork taboo.

A chat between professional mourners.

Do we owe human evolution to...handbags?

A visit to Chiswick House.

A sailor and his slush fund.

When iguanas sailed the world.

How Moses might have parted the Red Sea.

Why you might want to rethink your ambition to live on a base in Antarctica.

The "hag" of our nightmares.

St. Patrick's Day wasn't always green.

The tomb of an unknown pharaoh has just been discovered.

The Dakota Uprising of 1862.

Ancient humans around the world simultaneously invented farming, and we have no idea how that happened.

The woman who restored the faces of WWI veterans.

Yet another marriage ends in murder.

A brief history of air conditioning.

That's all for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll look at a child with some weird talents.  In the meantime, here's a typical banger from Rockpile.  I loved that band back in the day.

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

This is another of what I classify as “mini mysteries”--cold cases where very little information is available.  The “Scranton Tribune,” July 14, 1936:

William Lynch, 50-year-old WPA foreman who was shot to death Sunday night in Pittston, may have been a victim of mistaken identity, according to a theory advanced by police last night. The possibility that he may have been mistaken for another man also was advanced by the widow of the man whom many termed "a man without an enemy in the world."

Mrs. Lynch, who was with. her husband when he was shot, unable to give a detailed description of the murderer.

Investigating authorities today began a checkup of the WPA employees who worked under Lynch on the grading of the Suscon Highway. WPA officials declared that Lynch, in his capacity as foreman, had no authority to hire or fire any workmen, and that such orders came through Wilkes-Barre.  

“It’s just a terrible mistake,” said the widow, Mrs. Anna O’Boyle Lynch, last night.

She explained that she and her husband had been visiting his sister and later attended the wake of a friend.  As they neared their home, a man crept up behind the couple and fired two shots in quick succession into Lynch's back.

Mrs. Lynch said that her husband cried, "Oh, Anna, I'm shot." and sank to the sidewalk. She bent over him in an attempt to lift him and at the same time saw a man running down the street. 

"After we left the wake we walked straight home, stopping for ice cream," she said.  "We passed no one after turning off Main Street with the exception of four men talking by the church. (The church is three blocks from the Lynch home). The street was awfully dark and I remarked this to Billie, saying that only one house was lighted. Everything seemed so quiet. 

"No one was in back of us or we would have heard him as we crossed the cement street.  Suddenly I heard a shot which sounded like a firecracker. Then there was another one. Billie cried out and I screamed. As I bent over Billie I saw a man running straight down the street--he didn't turn off, he ran straight. He was a heavily-built man about six feet two and he weighed quite a lot.  He wore a white shirt. I didn't notice anything else, I was too excited. 

"We were coming straight home, but we had to go to the hospital instead."

Mrs. Lynch seemed to lose her composure for a minute and then went on, almost as though she were talking to herself, "He might have dropped from the clouds. Some people on the porch of a house down the street saw him cross behind us. He must have had on soft shoes for we heard nothing.  It was so quiet we would have noticed it. Billie never had an enemy in his life. Everyone used to say he was a swell fellow. The man didn't say a word to either of us.  He shot and then he ran. And we were just a couple of doors Mrs. William Lynch from home--it would have been alright but we didn't get here. We had to go to the hospital instead." 

The widow insisted she had no idea who could have committed the crime. She was emphatic in saying that her husband never had an enemy in his life.

She said that it was a terrible shock and that Mr. Lynch had been mistaken for some one else. Friends and police agreed with her in this supposition. A post mortem conducted at the Pittston Hospital yesterday by Dr. R.S. Bierly showed that Lynch was shot with a .32 calibre revolver. One of the bullets penetrated his spine and penetrated the lower part of his heart. The bullets showed that the gun was rusted and had not been discharged in some time.

William Lynch is originally from Hughestown.  For many years he was employed at Butler's and No 6 as a blacksmith and for two months acted as janitor of the City Hall, Pittston, during the illness of an uncle, Mr. Conners. The deceased leaves besides his widow, one brother, Charles, Pittston, and two sisters, Ann, Pittston, and Mrs. Mary Dougherty, Detroit, Mich. The funeral will be held Thursday morning at 9 o'clock.

A requiem mass will be sung at the St. John's Church at 9:30 o'clock. Interment will be in the church cemetery.

Believe it or not, the investigation into Lynch’s murder never progressed an inch beyond this point.  Police finally shrugged, concluded that the dead man must have been the victim of one of the worst cases of mistaken identity on record, and moved on to more explicable crimes.

"Something Utterly Malign"; Or, Why You Should Be Very Careful Where You Hike In Scotland

British author Joan Grant (1907-1989,) is probably best known for her historical novel about ancient Egypt, “Winged Pharaoh,” which expressed her lifelong interest in reincarnation and the supernatural.  However, this week we shall look at a passage from her autobiography, "Time Out of Mind," which describes an experience in 1928 that was as sinister and uncanny as anything in her fiction:

On one of our Sundays off my husband Leslie and I went to Rothiemurchus intending to climb towards the Cairngorms. It was a beautiful day and we had it to ourselves. Basking naked in the sun, we ate sandwiches beside a burn. It was far too hot and peaceful for serious walking, so we decided to wander on for another mile or so, and then go for dinner to the hotel in Aviemore. Nothing could have been farther from my mind than spooks when suddenly I was seized with such terror that I turned and in panic fled back along the path. Leslie ran after me, imploring me to tell him what was wrong. I could only spare breath enough to tell him to run faster, faster. Something utterly malign, four-legged and yet obscenely human, invisible and yet solid enough for me to hear the pounding of its hooves, was trying to reach me. If it did I should die, for I was far too frightened to know how to defend myself. I had run about half a mile when I burst through an invisible barrier behind which I was safe. I knew I was safe now, though a second before I had been in mortal danger; knew it as certainly as though I were a torero who has jumped the barrier in front of a charging bull. 

A year later one of Father’s professors described an almost exactly similar experience he had had when bug-hunting in the Cairngorms. He was a materialist, but had been so profoundly startled that he wrote to The Times--and received a letter from a reader who had also been pursued by the “Thing.” Some years later, when I was living at Muckerach, the doctor told me that two hikers, for whom search-parties had been out three days, had been found dead. He showed me the exact spot on the map. It was the place of my terror. Both men were under thirty. One came from Grantown, the other from Aviemore. The weather was fine. They had spent a good night under the shelter-stone on the highest ridge, for they had written to that effect in the book which is kept up there. They were found within a hundred yards of each other, sprawled face downward as though they had fallen headlong when in flight. “I did a post-mortem on them both,” said the doctor gravely. “Never in my life have I seen healthier corpses: not a thing wrong with either of the poor chaps except that their hearts stopped. I put ‘heart failure’ on the chit, but it is my considered opinion that they died of fright.” 

Weekend Link Dump

 

Welcome to this week's Link Dump, where our staffers will premiere "Strange Company: The Musical."

The Thames of Old London.

The family that slays together...

Yet another "insurance murder."

Van Gogh in Paris.

A very tragic family.

Los Angeles' first policewoman.

Britain's most ghostly places.

A planet's gruesome death.

So, let's talk Danish Protest Pigs.

An English "major UFO scare."

The case for advanced ancient civilizations.  

The Scottish actor who inspired Homer Simpson.

The town of Ludlow and the Wars of the Roses.

A visit to a pet cemetery.

Something swept over our solar system, and astronomers are damned if they know what it was.

An unsolved murder and attempted murder.

The sinking of a WWI hospital ship.

A handy guide to spotting art forgeries.

Oscar Wilde's scandalous tomb.

The Notre Dame of Beijing.

Some people take their shrouds very seriously.

The Pope with the Evil Eye.

A Victorian embroideress.

It turns out that Saturn has more moons than you can shake a stick at, plus the stick.

When the Sahara was green.

The life of Princess Charlotte, daughter of George III.

When accused witches filed lawsuits.

That time when the BBC wanted to censor George Orwell.

A famed 18th century perfumer.

Virginia's first female newspaper publisher.

The world's oldest-known impact crater.

A brief history of the manicule.

The tragic, and slightly mysterious, end of three siblings.

One of the world's most famous beds.

That's all for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll look at a hike in the countryside that turned very, very weird.  In the meantime, here's a real golden oldie.

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

I have nothing to add to this story, except that it’s certainly a funny old world.  The “Blairsville Enterprise,” March 14, 1899:

A petition filed at Cordele, Ga., for a receiver for the First National Bank ends a peculiar story. The bank was established by Dr. George W. Marvin. A few months after organizing it he married a Mrs. Cunningham, a widow, who brought to him a large amount of property, which was added to the capital of the bank. A few months after the marriage Mrs. Marvin died and Dr. Marvin soon married Miss Trammell, a typewriter. In 1892 Marvin died and Mrs. Marvin married Joseph E. Bivens, who succeeded to Marvin's fortune.

Mrs. Bivens died in 1896, leaving all of her property to Bivens. The most uncanny feature of the story was Mrs. Bivens' treatment of her first husband's body. She had it perfectly embalmed by an expert and placed in a glass case in her parlor.

The coffin was so arranged that whenever she entered the room an electric motor forced it up to an upright position. After her marriage with Bivens this ghastly spectacle was relegated to the graveyard.

An article in the “Commercial Appeal,” on October 11, 1896, gives a bit more information.  (As you can well imagine, I wanted to learn every available detail.)

CORDELE, Ga Oct 10—The death in this town of Mrs. Joseph E. Bivens, wife of the president of the First National Bank, recalls a sensation as ghastly as it was realistic. 

Mrs. Bivens was formerly an old maid in Atlanta where she had some little property. Dr. Marvin, a specialist from Omaha, Neb., came to Atlanta, wooed the matured maiden and made her his wife. He engaged in some real estate speculations which made him worth nearly $500,000. He then removed to this city and erected a magnificent home which was a dream in the eyes of the country people hereabouts.

The happy couple lived in this new palace, but a few weeks passed when the doctor sickened  and died. Mrs. Marvin refused to be comforted. She forbade a funeral and telegraphed to New Orleans for an expert embalmer and an expert electrician. The result of their joint efforts was that Dr. Marvin was enabled to remain in his seat in the parlor and by an electrical appliance would rise and bow to his widow and then take his seat again. Ridiculous as this may seem there was no arguing the widow out of its continuance.

After about a year of this kind of enjoyment the widow concluded to give her hand and heart to Joseph Bivens, who had become her business manager. After her marriage she carried him to her home and then it was that she gained the remarkable distinction of having two husbands in her home at the same time—one alive and the other dead. She carried Mr. Bivens to look upon the body of her dead husband in the parlor and it was only after urgent solicitation on his part that she consented to the remains being sent to Macon and buried in Rose Hill Cemetery,

Notwithstanding this very peculiar conduct Mrs. Bivens was a lady of great charity and many Christian virtues.

The Coby Murders

When there is a clear motive for someone’s murder, the police are usually at least half-way to solving the crime.  However, when a cold-blooded killing happens for seemingly no reason whatsoever…you have a real problem, one that usually ends with the murderer getting clean away and the victims winding up on the pages of this blog.  The following haunting mystery is a prime example.

31-year-old Dennis Coby lived with his wife of eleven years, 30-year-old Evelyn, and their eight-year-old son Tom in a quiet, pleasant neighborhood in Cincinnati, Ohio.  Dennis was an orderly at the psychiatric ward of the Cincinnati Veterans’ Administration Hospital, while Evelyn was a busy, seemingly perfectly happy housewife.  The Cobys were devoted to each other and their young son, and appeared to be the ideal middle-class family.

November 25, 1964, began as a perfectly normal day.  Tom came home from school to have lunch, then returned to his class at around 1 p.m.  Dennis was getting ready for a 3 p.m. shift at the hospital.  At 2:15, a neighbor saw Dennis and Evelyn walking to their garage, but did not notice their car leaving.  An hour later, Tom returned home to a puzzling scene.  The front door was open and the TV was on, but his mother was nowhere to be found.  He was also surprised to see that their lunch dishes were still on the table.  Although he did not know it at the time, his father had unaccountably failed to report for work.  The bemused child, not knowing what else to do, went to his grandmother’s house. 

At 4:45 p.m., another neighbor saw two people whom he assumed were the Cobys sitting in their car, which was parked in front of the garage.  When he walked past the Coby house fifteen minutes later, the car was inside the garage, but there was no sign of Dennis or Evelyn.

Meanwhile, Tom’s grandmother, understandably alarmed about the boy’s strange story, phoned Evelyn’s brother-in-law, Ray Temke.  When Ray went to the Coby house, he saw the car parked in the garage.  (The garage was an open, windowless recess, so anyone standing on the sidewalk could see inside.)  He also saw Evelyn and Dennis lying motionless in the back seat of the vehicle.  Assuming that they were suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning, Temke called paramedics.  When one of the firemen began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on Evelyn, he found that her sweater was soaked in blood.  A closer examination found that both the Cobys had bullet holes in their chests.

"Cincinnati Enquirer," February 4, 1965, via Newspapers.com

The autopsies were able to give investigators some information about how the couple had been murdered, even if the “why” remained elusive.  Dennis and Evelyn had been shot multiple times.  The assassin had shot from point blank range.  The Cobys had both eaten a full meal just before they died, suggesting that the murders had taken place soon after lunch.  No fingerprints were found in the car.  The car doors were unlocked, the key was left in the ignition, and the engine was still warm.  There were no signs of a struggle, either in the car or their house.  It seemed clear that Evelyn had walked her husband to the garage, expecting to immediately go back to watching TV.

The Coby garage as it appears today on Google Maps

This was one of those cases brimming with unanswered questions:  Very little blood was found in the car, leaving it uncertain if the couple had been shot in the car, or someplace else.  Were they killed soon after the neighbor saw them walking to the garage, or just before Ray Temke discovered their bodies?  Although the undigested food in their stomachs would suggest that the couple must have died soon after eating their lunch, the coroner believed that they must have been shot sometime after 4 p.m.  If that was the case, where were the Cobys and what were they doing during the 2-plus hours after their last meal?  In this well-populated suburban neighborhood, how could someone commit these relatively public murders without anyone seeing or hearing anything?  Most importantly, who could possibly have had a motive for wanting the couple dead?  It is small wonder that, faced with so much murky and contradictory evidence, some police officers resorted to the simple, straightforward theory that it was a murder/suicide, with someone--probably Ray Temke--removing the gun afterwards.  Harry Sandman, the Chief of Detectives, could only grumble to reporters that “everything we have checked so far seems to lead nowhere.”  Such statements were small comfort to the late couple’s neighbors, who were understandably petrified that a homicidal lunatic might be in their midst.

Although police doggedly continued investigating the case for some months, their inability to find a motive for the murders or any plausible suspects led to an inevitable conclusion:  someone had committed an impossible-to-solve crime.  The deaths of Dennis and Evelyn Coby drifted into the “cold case” file, where they will probably remain forever.  However, many years later, true-crime writer J.T. Townsend interviewed the couple’s now-adult son Tom, who was able to provide one previously-unreported detail:  a few days after his parents were killed, his grandmother received a phone call from an unknown woman who said that her son had committed the murders.  She added that he did not intend to kill “the Mrs.” but she “got in the way.”  Then the woman hung up.  This caller was never identified, leaving it impossible to say if her statement was truthful, or--as seems more likely--just the ramblings of some crank.

In the words of Detective Sandman, “The intangible elements have fallen in favor of the killer.”  That is what makes this unusually baffling case so terrifying.

Weekend Link Dump

 

Welcome!  Our hosts for this week's Link Dump will be two members of the crack Strange Company HQ research team.

A notorious Appalachian murder.

A look at glacial archaeology.

An examination of a musical conspiracy theory.

The long-unsolved disappearance of three small boys.

And here is your unparalleled opportunity to view the contents of an ostrich's stomach.

The Case of the Disappearing JFK Wreath is finally solved.

A visit to the tomb of Ulysses S. Grant.

Ancient puppets in El Salvador.

Some very weird natural disasters.

When cremation goes very very wrong.

A 7,000 year old "alien head."

The doomed Rendel Cruisers of the Chinese Navy.

A banned play by Oscar Wilde.

When you go looking for tortoises and find human remains instead.

The Wizard of Oz visits the USSR.

The rise and fall of a notorious rock & roll muse.

A famous aviation mystery has apparently been solved.

Hitler vs. the Edelweiss Pirates.

Nobody seems to know why coffee is called "a cup of Joe."

The records and manuscripts that went down with the Titanic.

The last of the Jacobites.

Why people freeze wedding cakes.

The "Father of American Cavalry."

That time when the sun turned blue.

Reappraising Tom Wolfe.

The patron saint of ice skating.  And pain, which is not illogical when you read her story.

What the well-dressed woman was wearing in March 1825.

Divorce in 19th century France.

What may have been the real start of the American Revolution.

The unsolved murder of the Short family.

Naming supernatural entities gets complicated.

Billy Possum vs. Teddy Bear.

Yes, coconut milk is milk.  Sort of.

A photographer's final images of the Mount St. Helens eruption.

Anonymous phone calls, a disappearance, and a murder.

Why you wouldn't want to make Kitty Mulcahey mad.

An ancient female "extreme ascetic."

A woman's mysterious murder.

Meet New Zealand's Bug of the Year.

Meet the lecturer who uses sheep livers to predict the future.

That's all for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll look at an unusually puzzling double murder.  In the meantime, here's one of those songs I haven't heard for years until I was accidentally reminded about it the other day.

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

Yet another “vision of murder” story, but this one sounded more plausible than most.  The “Chicago Inter Ocean,” December 1, 1907:

CAPETOWN, Nov. 30.--A little girl named Ellen Pinnock, returning home in Grahamstown from making purchases at a grocer's, disappeared recently, and no trace of her could be found. A detective at length picked up one of articles purchased by the girl near the Grahamstown golf links and took it back to the grocer, who suggested the calling in of a young man named Staples, a clairvoyant. 

Staples was placed in a hypnotic trance, and in the presence of two or three witnesses was asked if the child was dead. "She is dead--murdered." he replied, "and her body lies under the floor of a house."

“Can you see the house?" he was asked.

"I can." he replied, and proceeded to describe the murder in detail. He was roused from his trance, and. accompanied by the detective and a party of five other men, went to the golf links and indicated the caretaker's house as the house he had seen in his trance. The place was broken open, and in a cellar low the body of the murdered child was found.

It lay beneath the foundations of the house itself, and was covered with sacking soaked in iodoform. The body was found on the sixth day after the girl's disappearance. Suspicion fell at once on the caretaker, a man named Kerr. Previously it had been thought that the girl might have fallen into a large road pond on the golf links, and at the moment of the discovery of the corpse Kerr was engaged in dragging this pond. He had posed as a friend of the Pinnock family, and called on them to express his sympathy the day after the girl was lost.

Staples had never seen Kerr before. The clairvoyant was taken to the pond and asked if he could identify among the men at work there the murderer whom he saw in his trance. He pointed to Kerr, who was subsequently arrested. Much circumstantial evidence was produced against Kerr at the inquest, though the coroner refused to hear anything as to what the clairvoyant had done.  A verdict of willful murder against Kerr was returned.

Thomas Kerr was put on trial for the girl’s murder, but the jury was unable to reach a verdict.  Kerr was subsequently rearrested, this time for assault (it was decided that he could not be tried twice for murder.)  However, I’ve been unable to find what happened next, so I presume the authorities were eventually forced to set him free for a second time.  As far as I know, Ellen Pinnock’s murder remains officially unsolved.

The Fate of Mary Nicholson

Mary Nicholson was an orphan.  Strike One.  She was penniless.  Strike Two.  She was of limited intelligence, being described as "of very weak intellect."  In eighteenth century England, all of this generally amounted to "Strike Three, and you're out!"

Mary, however, at first seemed an exception to this grim rule.  She was given a position as a servant in the household of John Atkinson, a farmer in the village of Little Stainton.  The family was a prosperous and respectable one, and Mary proved to be a gentle-natured, industrious, and honest worker.  To any outside observer, all would appear to be very well.

The Atkinson household, unfortunately, harbored a very dark secret.  It later emerged that the head of the house had taken advantage of Mary's powerlessness by taking "great liberties" and behaving "very cruelly to her."  (It does not take much imagination to guess what these "liberties" might have been.)

Mary had no choice but to submit to Atkinson's abuse, and both of them knew it.  Someone in her position simply did not have the option of handing in her notice and finding work elsewhere.  Go to the local authorities?  What were the chances that they would take the side of a friendless servant over a leading member of the community?  And even if they did, the likely result would still be that Mary would find herself homeless and jobless, with few, if any, options.

After years of this emotional and physical abuse, something snapped in the mind of this hitherto exemplary young woman.  In April 1798, Mary went to Darlington to buy supplies for the household.  Unbeknownst to everyone in the Atkinson household, she also bought something not on her shopping list: a quantity of arsenic powder.  She told the shopkeepers it was needed for washing sheep.

When Mary returned home, she added the arsenic to the flour used to make puddings for John Atkinson--it was his favorite dish, and she knew he commonly asked for one to be prepared when his daily work around the farm was over.  However, on this particular day--just proving that some people have the devil's own luck--Atkinson lost his taste for pudding.  He said he was not hungry, and went straight to bed.

Rather than let the flour go unused, Atkinson's mother, Elizabeth, used it to bake a cake, which was shared by the family at dinner-time.  They all quickly became deathly ill.  The family doctor was able to save the lives of four of them, but Elizabeth Atkinson died two weeks later.

Nicholson was horrified by the dreadful way her murderous little plot had backfired.  She naively confessed to at least three people that she had poisoned the flour, with the intention of punishing John Atkinson for the many "bad deeds" she had suffered at his hands.  Naturally, the Atkinsons had little trouble ascertaining who was responsible for the tragic event.  However, John settled for telling Mary that if she left Little Stainton and never came back, the family would not pursue any charges against her.  (This ready willingness to ignore his mother's murder in return for Mary's silence says much about what the Atkinson patriarch must have done to her.)

Mary may have had her freedom, but there was little she could do with it.  Nicholson literally had no idea where to go or what to do.  For some days, she aimlessly wandered the countryside, surviving by begging or scavenging what food she could.  A Newfield family named Ord finally offered the starving, desperate girl shelter, but when they had heard her story, they insisted that she return to Little Stainton and face the music.  Feeling she had no other choice, Nicholson went back to the Atkinson home and begged for mercy.  They responded by having her arrested.

In the summer of 1798, Nicholson stood trial for murder at the Durham City assizes.  It was hard to imagine a more open-and-shut poisoning case than this one, leaving the jury no options other than to find Mary guilty and sentence her to death.  All very neat and tidy.

All that saved Nicholson from an immediate visit to the gallows was an irregularity in the official indictment.  Mary was charged with intentionally plotting to murder not John Atkinson, but the actual victim, Elizabeth.  This clearly was not the case.  Mary may have freely confessed to poisoning the flour with the expectation that it would kill John, but her actions ended there.  Nicholson had no intention of murdering anyone else in the household, and it was Elizabeth herself who prepared and served the fatal loaf of bread.  It could be argued that Elizabeth Atkinson's death was not premeditated murder, but an appallingly unlucky accident.  In short, a strong legal argument could be made for having the indictment thrown out of court, and the guilty verdict reversed.

Nicholson had no legal representative to make this case for her.  However, her sad story had won her a lot of sympathy, and court officials felt uneasy sending this pitiful girl to her death on dodgy legal grounds.  Her case was kicked upstairs to the Common Law Courts in Westminster to see what these judges made of the matter.

It was known that it would take weeks, probably months, for this higher court to make its ruling on Mary's fate.  In the meantime, Nicholson remained in custody in Durham's prison.

Durham prison, circa 1750

Ironically enough, this turned out to be possibly the happiest time in Mary's life. Her jailer became so fond of the unfortunate girl that he eventually entrusted her with the position of unofficial housekeeper for his family.  She soon impressed the household as amiable, capable and trustworthy.  Eventually, she was given the freedom to run errands throughout the city.  Her many dealings with Durham tradesmen and shopkeepers made her a well-known and popular figure throughout the town.  Mary never made any attempts to escape, and was evidently completely willing to accept her fate--whatever it might be.  The "Caledonian Mercury" reported that she behaved with "the utmost penitence and devotion."

Mary's legal limbo lasted for a full year, until the town's Summer Assizes met again.  The final ruling on Mary's case was the first one before the presiding judge.  The justices of the Common Law Courts had made their decision: Imperfect indictment be damned, Mary was to hang at Framwellgate Moor on the following week, July 22, 1799.

Durham was horrified, and not a little surprised, by this draconian verdict.  No one who knew Mary wanted to see her die.  However, there was no arguing with this higher court: if Westminster said Nicholson must be hanged, hanged she would be, no matter what anyone had to say about the matter.

On the morning of the 22nd, a large crowd gathered around the gallows, not to gawk, or mock, as was generally the case with public executions, but to show what support they could for a young woman they believed was being unjustly put to death.  Mary made a sad, but dignified farewell to her friends.  The last rites were read, the noose put about her neck, and Nicholson was left to hang.

Then something shocking happened.  The rope around her neck suddenly snapped, leaving the still-living woman to fall to the ground.  Everyone there thought this was as clear an example of divine intervention as one could ever hope to see.  They did not want Mary hanged, and now it was looking as if God opposed her execution, as well.

After conferring with each other over this unexpected development, the authorities present decided they had no choice but to carry on with execution.  Someone was sent back to the city to get another rope.  During the hour or so of waiting for this messenger of death to return, Mary, surrounded by her weeping friends, "prayed fervently" and remained calm.  She may have thought that, after all, there were worse things than the gallows: namely, the household of John Atkinson.

The replacement rope arrived, and the macabre performance was re-enacted.  Once again, Mary took her place on the cart and the rope was replaced on her neck.  The cart was pulled out from under her, and within a few minutes, Mary Nicholson's earthly sufferings were finally at an end.   The "Ipswich Journal" reported that the prisoner was "launched into eternity amidst the shrieks and cries of the surrounding spectators."  She would be the last woman hanged in the county of Durham.

Meanwhile, the real villain of our piece, John Atkinson, was left to live out his natural life, as free as a bird to strike terror into the hearts of other servant girls.

Just another day in this strange world of ours.