The Bizarre Murder of Pauline Amsel

"Indian Citizen," November 12. 1914, via Newspapers.com

A frightening and inexplicable tragedy hit the normally peaceful town of Durant, Oklahoma in 1914.  According to Jake and Celia Amsel, a well-to-do, respectable couple, at about one-thirty a.m. on the night of November 11, they were awakened by screams emanating from their home’s outdoor sleeping porch.  They were horrified to recognize the voice as that of their only child, fourteen year old Pauline.  Jake Amsel leaped out of bed, only to be confronted with an intruder.  The man took out a pistol and fired it into the floor, while pleading with Amsel to let him go.  After his gun jammed, the stranger pulled out a small knife, and began to stab at the father.  The two men struggled for several minutes before the stranger broke away and escaped.

While this fight was going on, Pauline walked into the bedroom and announced that she was sick.  While the mother called for help, the girl walked into her own room, and fell onto the floor.

As it happened, Pauline had good reason to be ill.  The entire right side of her throat had been deeply slashed.  She died half an hour later.

What followed was the usual depressing pattern seen in all hopelessly perplexing murders:  Searches were made for the killer, rewards were offered, private detectives hired, the usual suspects hauled in for questioning and quickly released, with no one left any closer to obtaining justice for the victim.  It probably did not help the inquiry that Pauline was buried before an autopsy could be performed.  (Her family was Jewish, compelling them to bury her before sundown.)

Pauline was buried in Corsicana, Texas, where her mother had family ties, and soon afterwards, her parents left Durant for good.

It is rare that such a violent murder provides so little information, or even speculation, to work with.  No valuables in the house appeared touched, so robbery was ruled out as a motive.  It was as if a phantom had picked a house at random, attacked the first person he saw, and disappeared into a permanent fog.  No one could guess who would have wished to harm the girl.

Well, no one guessed in public, at least.  In private, it was evidently a very different matter.  As is always the case with mysterious crimes, the local rumor mill went into overdrive.  Residents of Durant had little difficulty solving Pauline’s murder.  Chillingly, the top suspects were the only witnesses to the crime, the dead girl’s parents.  Melody Amsel-Arieli, an indirect descendant of Pauline's, began to research the case during the 1980s.  She contacted many locals who still had memories of the shocking crime.  According to some, Pauline had fallen in love with a certain boy, and this youthful romance horrified her parents.  The suggestion is that this family conflict somehow inspired her murder.

One hesitates to take such a theory seriously—if it is false, such claims are a cruel disservice to a couple who had surely suffered enough.  However, there is no getting away from it that the story they gave is decidedly odd.  First of all, why would Pauline be outdoors, in the middle of a frigid Oklahoma winter night?  If her throat was slashed so deeply that—according to some accounts—she was nearly decapitated, how could she walk upstairs, announce that she was “sick,” and then go off to her own room to die?  Didn’t the parents notice she was covered in blood?  And if this intruder had a gun, as well as a knife, why didn’t he use the more efficient weapon on the girl?  And why did it take thirty minutes for help to be summoned?  And would a man who had just fatally wounded a girl and was waving around a gun, ask her father to just let him go?  Why, after attacking Pauline, did the intruder go upstairs and do this pointless and ineffectual wrestling with her father, rather than immediately flee?

According to a doctor who examined Pauline’s corpse, her injuries were made with a razor.  So, this intruder came equipped with a gun, a knife, and a razor?  How could it be that blood was found on the sleeping porch and Pauline’s bedroom, but nowhere in between, assuming that she had actually summoned the superhuman strength to walk upstairs with a fatally slashed throat?

I give the Ansels the benefit of the doubt and assume they were incapable of murdering their own daughter.  But there is no question that what we are told about Pauline’s death is disturbingly illogical…which is undoubtedly why it haunts the town of Durant to this day.