The Two Catherine Packards

So, what do you get when you add together bigamy, adultery, disappearances, suspected murder, insurance fraud, and Mystery Corpses?

That's right: the ultimate Strange Company blog post!

All this story needs is a talking cat.

Our story centers around a Rutland, Vermont couple: George and Catherine Packard, both aged 21. Unfortunately, their marriage was not a happy one, and the relationship came to a startling and abrupt end when Catherine suddenly disappeared in April 1929. George did not seem particularly perturbed.

Catherine Packard

No further developments occurred until August 20, 1929. On that date, Robert Field, a farmer in Chester Township found something unexpected in his pasture: a woman's badly decomposed corpse. Medical authorities were able to determine that this had been a woman in her early or mid-twenties. She was 5' 4", had long brown hair, and weighed about 110 pounds. The woman had a distinctive and unfortunate dental history: two teeth were gold-capped, and no less than twelve of them had been removed. She had been wearing a tan coat, a sweater, a pink silk dress, silk underwear, rolled stockings, and black shoes, along with a couple of pieces of cheap costume jewelry. A purse was nearby, but all it contained was 38 cents, an unopened bottle of iodine, and a note reading, "I am sick of life and I am going where I will be happy." The cause of death seemed sadly obvious: she was lying next to a half-empty bottle of chloroform.

Local officials had little difficulty ruling the woman's death a suicide. But who was she? Although the case received wide publicity throughout the state, no one offered any clues to the dead woman's identity, and the corpse remained unclaimed. After a week, Chester officials gave up and had her buried in the local potter's field.

The third act of our little tale came in June 1930, when George Packard paid a visit to Chester's sheriff, Ernest Schoenfield. Packard explained that he had only recently heard of this unidentified corpse, and he suspected it might be his long-missing wife. He showed Schoenfield a photograph of Catherine. After examining photographs of the body and the items found at the scene, he declared that the dead woman was indeed Catherine Packard. However, he insisted that she must have been murdered, as she was a deeply religious woman who would never have resorted to suicide.

It soon emerged that George had some very practical reasons for wanting his wife declared dead. His mother, Mary Agnes Packard, had insured Catherine's life for $459, and she now wanted the John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company to pay up. Unfortunately for the Packards, John Hancock showed a dishearteningly cynical attitude. The company refused the claim, on the grounds that there was a "reasonable belief" the body was not that of Catherine Packard.

George found a romantic compensation for this financial blow. Three weeks after he declared himself a widower, he married one Margaret MacFarland.

George and Margaret Packard

At this point, a new figure entered the story: Mabel Abbott, a woman who had known Catherine for years. She was as skeptical as the insurance company that the woman who lay in the potter's field was the first Mrs. Packard, and she was determined to prove it. In August 1930, this amateur sleuth received information that Catherine was in Manchester, New Hampshire. When Abbott went to this city, she quickly tracked down the missing woman, who was now working as a housemaid. Catherine professed astonishment to learn that she was considered to be long dead and buried, and readily agreed to return to Vermont.

Unsurprisingly, the newly-married George was less than pleased to see Catherine return from the grave. He prudently hired an attorney. This domestic dilemma was rapidly settled in a Vermont courtroom: it was agreed that George and Catherine would divorce. At the same time, Margaret would annul her now-bigamous marriage, she and George would legally remarry, and the trio would all go on to live happily ever after.

Well, not quite. The newspapers were not nearly as eager to drop the story, especially when Mary Agnes Packard--understandably peeved over the loss of her four hundred bucks--began to dish the dirt on her former daughter-in-law. It turned out that Catherine had been on quite the road trip. In April 1929, she had abandoned her husband (not to mention their two children) and went to Cleveland, Ohio. There, she met up with a "friend" of George, an ex-con named Robert King, who evidently amply deserved his nickname of "Romeo."

The illicit pair settled briefly in Erie, Pennsylvania, but after Robert lost his job there, they hit the road, a journey that was sadly interrupted when Romeo's truck was repossessed. After that episode, the lovers had a falling-out. Catherine--who appears to have developed a taste for walking out on her men--dumped King and hitchhiked to Manchester, where she found domestic employment.

The Packard gang soon learned that their legal troubles were far from over. Catherine's reemergence naturally led police to reopen the investigation into that dead woman, and the authorities treated all the Packards as material witnesses. Although George and Catherine stoutly denied knowing who the woman was, there was the tricky fact that the "suicide note" found with the corpse was in Catherine's handwriting. Catherine reluctantly admitted writing the note--being married to George drove her to frequently contemplate killing herself--but she stubbornly stated that she had no idea in the world how it wound up in this stranger's purse. Law enforcement eyebrows were also raised by the fact that the photograph of "Catherine" George had shown Sheriff Schoenfield was not of his wife at all, but an entirely different woman, one of Catherine's former co-workers.

In September 1930, George and Catherine's divorce was granted, which was speedily followed by his remarriage to Margaret. Despite this nod to respectability, George and Catherine were charged with adultery. Catherine was sentenced to six months, while her ex-husband received one-to-three years. It sounds very much like the authorities strongly suspected that the Packards knew more about the mysterious dead woman than they were willing to admit. As the law did not have sufficient evidence to charge the pair with more serious crimes, police settled for the consolation prize of jailing them for these lesser charges.

You will perhaps not be shocked to learn that while George's second marriage was lengthier than his first, it was no happier. In 1953, Margaret divorced him on the grounds of "intolerable severity." Soon after serving her sentence, Catherine also remarried...to none other than George's father, 64-year-old Horace Packard. It was a fitting coda to this odd slice of Vermont Gothic.

As for the dead body who had so briefly impersonated Catherine Packard, dozens of people came forward, suggesting the woman was some long-lost female relative, but proof was lacking of any of these claims. The state attorney, Lawrence Edgerton, was convinced that the corpse was that of Ruby Chickering Green, a nurse who had disappeared in November of 1926. Green matched the woman's physical description, right down to the many missing teeth, and her handwriting bore a striking resemblance to Catherine Packard's. She had even once worked in Chester. Ruby's life had been a sad one: after her husband was jailed on a morals charge, their children became wards of the state, leaving Ruby to drift aimlessly from one low-level job to another. Given her history, it was not implausible that Ruby had sought to escape her dismal existence by committing suicide. On the other hand, Sheriff Schoenfield believed the woman was Charlotte Moore Buswell. Buswell had become involved in drug-dealing and bootlegging--two professions not conducive to a long and peaceful life--before her unsolved disappearance in 1925.

These theories, however, went unproven. Nowadays, DNA analysis would help to solve the riddle, but lacking such tools, the authorities did not think it was worthwhile to even exhume the corpse for further examination. The woman's identity--not to mention the question of how she came to lie in Robert Field's pasture--seems destined to remain a mystery.

Murder and the Mystic Mine

Taos, New Mexico, is in an area of the world that has hosted many strange happenings. One of the eeriest involves the so-called “Mystic Gold Mine” and the impressive body count associated with the site. The mine was in an area long believed by the native population to be cursed. As events were to prove, they very well may have been right.

The Mystic was found in 1863 by a man named Stone, who, two years later, took a John C. Ferguson as his partner. In 1882, Stone disappeared from the scene. Whether he left on his own free will, or, as seems more likely, he was murdered, is unknown.  Several of the mine's employees died in bizarre and unexplained ways.  One particularly luckless worker was found at the bottom of the mine shaft, decapitated.

However, The Weird only really kicked into high gear when, in 1895, an English mining promoter named Arthur Rockfort Manby entered into a gold-hunting syndicate with Ferguson and another miner named James Wilkinson.

The Mystic proved extremely profitable. It was only five miles away from the Aztec, then one of the richest gold mines in the world, and it was suspected that Manby—who seems to have been one of Nature’s born grifters—had somehow found a way of stealing nuggets from this other site. In any case, the trio quickly became exceedingly wealthy. And then in 1915, Wilkinson vanished. Although ominous rumors circulated about his disappearance, no one knew for sure what became of him. Not long after this, Ferguson ended his days in a mental hospital, tormented by visions of angry ghosts and decapitated bodies. His daughter Teresita inherited his share of the mine.

In 1921, Wilkinson, who had long been given up for dead, suddenly reappeared on the scene, only to quickly vanish again—this time for good.

In 1929, it was Manby’s turn to meet his fate. On June 30, a deputy sheriff came to Manby’s home to serve a judgment in a breach of promise suit filed against him. When he was unable to contact Manby, he returned three days later with backup and broke down the front door. When this search party broke into the house, they made a dreadful discovery. Manby’s decapitated corpse was discovered in a bedroom of his home. His brutally mutilated head was discovered in an adjoining room. The front door of the house, it was noted, had been locked from the inside.

Manby and his mansion had a sinister reputation long before his gruesome death. He had become a strange recluse who lived in great fear of something—fears that were certainly eventually justified. His 20-room estate had bars on every window and multiple locks on every door. He insisted on cooking all his own food, to guard against poisoning. His only companionship in the sprawling, lavishly-decorated hacienda was a pair of fierce Alsatian dogs who guarded him everywhere he went. He was periodically seen on his roof, using colored flags to send who-knows-what signals to who-knows-whom. All in all, his neighbors were quite happy to leave him to his own devices.

The coroner’s jury, faced with this grim and puzzling demise, responded with one of the most astonishing verdicts on record. They decreed that Manby died of natural causes. One of his dogs, crazed with hunger, then chewed off his head and carried the body to the other room.

This bit of absurdity was just too much for anyone to stomach. Manby’s brother back in England put pressure on Washington to arrange a less deranged investigation into Manby’s death, with the result that a detective, Henri Martin, was dispatched to Taos. When he had the body exhumed, he discovered that the gold tycoon was riddled with shotgun bullets. The assassin then, for some unknown reason, carefully removed the head. The mystery of who shot and decapitated Manby—not to mention the puzzle of what that coroner’s jury was thinking—remains unsolved to this day.

Martin received some interesting, if ultimately unhelpful, information about the other peculiar deaths associated with the Mystic Mine. He discovered that over the years, at least half a dozen men associated with Manby had been mysteriously murdered--with several of them being decapitated.  A woman who had been Wilkinson’s housekeeper told the detective that her employer had been killed by his business partners. She claimed the body—like Manby, full of bullets and decapitated—had been placed in her room one night. She directed Martin to a certain place where she said Wilkinson was secretly buried. The spot was exhumed, and a skeleton was found, but it was uncertain if it really was the vanished Wilkinson. At least nine other beheaded bodies were found in that area. Martin also heard from locals that Ferguson, who had become a drug addict, was so terrified of…something…that he killed himself in the asylum.

It also came out that a few years before, Manby and Teresita Ferguson—who had a very close relationship until, so she said, he cheated her out of all her money--organized a shadowy organization known as the “United States Civil Secret Service Society.” Men were persuaded—or, more often, compelled--to invest in this group, which was presented as a clandestine society working with the U.S. Secret Service. In return, investors would share in the reward money earned when the organization captured criminals. In reality, of course, it was one of Manby’s many swindles. However, the general fear that the group was Manby’s private criminal gang, responsible for many unsolved robberies and murders, scared many people from seeking justice against him. (The hints that the "society" also practiced black magic undoubtedly added to the general unease.)  Perhaps, it was suggested, one of the men he had defrauded with this scheme finally got his bloody revenge.

Or perhaps the killer was one of the many other people Manby had cheated during his astonishingly busy career? Or did Teresita Ferguson, the one person to come away from the Mystic alive, have something to do with the death of her former business partner/lover? And what of Margaret Waddell, the Los Angeles woman who successfully brought the breach-of-promise suit against Manby? Through his typically shady, complex business maneuvers, he engineered it so she would be unable to collect her $12,000 damages. Did she obtain a less lawful payback?

Or was this mutilated body really Manby’s? Some observers insisted the skull found in his house was far too small to be his. The body was too decomposed to permit a positive identification. Many were convinced that the old crook, ever fearful for his safety, staged his own “murder,” and escaped to a new life. This idea has been largely ignored, but with a story like this, it’s hard to believe anything is impossible.

What was it that reduced both Manby and John Ferguson to such a state of mortal terror?

The knowledge we have about the long, twisted history surrounding the Mystic Mine is bad enough. It seems likely that the details hidden from us were far, far worse.

[A footnote: The strange goings-on of the Mystic crowd did not end with Manby’s death—or, if you prefer, “death.” In 1930, not content with looting Manby’s mansion, Teresita Ferguson, her common-law husband Carmel Durand, and her nephew George Ferguson, were tried and convicted for committing  a series of burglaries (and at least one arson) in Taos. The trio got four to six years in prison.  After her release, Teresita was, for whatever reason, given a full pardon by the Governor.  In 1955, she was charged with witchcraft and fraud.  She had obtained $100 from a Santa Fe couple on the claim they were "bewitched" and she could cure them.  She also told them that--for additional funds--she would lead them to $25 million worth of buried treasure hidden on their property.  Her run of peculiarly good luck continued when she was acquitted.  Perhaps the fact that her son, Columbus, was a former Taos sheriff (!) had its influence.  Teresita Ferguson died at the age of 91 in 1979.  And, oh, the stories that must have died with her.]