The Crouch Family Murders

The murder of Jacob D. Crouch and most of his family was particularly unsettling, not only for the apparently brutal senselessness of the crime, but because the tragedy instigated a subsequent stream of bizarre deaths in a way I’ve never seen in any similar case.

On the night of November 21 1883, in the village of Spring Arbor, Michigan, Jacob Crouch was shot to death in his bed while he slept.  Killed along with him was his pregnant daughter Eunice and her husband, Henry White, as well as an extremely unlucky houseguest, a cattle driver named Moses Polley.  The only residents of the house who survived were three servants.  Two of these domestics claimed to have slept through the massacre.  One, a young boy named George Bolles, testified to having heard shots and groans in the night, which caused him to hide inside a trunk until all was quiet.

"Champaign Daily Gazette," November 23, 1883, via Newspapers.com

Crouch had lived on his farm for fifty-two years.  He was an excellent businessman, and by the time of his death his speculations in horses and cattle had made him an extremely wealthy man.  In 1858, his eldest daughter Susan eloped with one Daniel Holcomb.  Crouch was eventually reconciled to the match, but he never approved of it.  Holcomb seems to have been a poor specimen who never was able to make any decent living.  He and his wife were completely dependent on his father-in-law’s intermittent charity.

Crouch had three other children besides Eunice and Susan: Byron, (who was living in Texas in 1883,) Dayton, (who died a few years before the murders, possibly from being shot to death,) and the youngest, Judd.  Crouch’s wife Anna died while giving birth to Judd.  Sadly, Jacob felt an antipathy to his youngest, whom he seems to have held responsible for his wife’s death.  From the time of his birth, Judd was raised by his sister, Susan Holcomb. Until he was ten years old, Judd thought the Holcombs were his biological parents.

In 1880, Jacob’s favorite child, Eunice, announced her desire to marry Henry White.  Although the marriage met with the full approval of her father, it was strongly opposed by her surviving siblings, for reasons that are not specified in the contemporary accounts.  Whether this dispute had any relation to the subsequent tragedy is unknown.

The inquest failed to find any motive for this mass shooting.  Both Jacob Crouch and Polley had a great deal of money with them in the house, but none of it was touched.  However, certain family papers, including promissory notes and mortgages, were missing, indicating that this was far from an ordinary robbery.  Rumor had it that at the time of his death, Jacob was planning to disinherit Judd and the Holcombs, and leave all his substantial fortune to Eunice and Henry White.

A local merchant testified that he had sold to Daniel Holcomb a gun of the same caliber used to commit the murders, but despite this intriguing clue, no other evidence was found linking Holcomb or anyone else to the shootings.  Holcomb was named administrator of Crouch’s estate, and the unsolved mystery gradually drifted from public attention.

Then some very strange things began to happen.  Susan Holcomb was found dead in her bed one morning.  The official cause of death was heart disease.  However, there were strong rumors that her death really came from ingesting rat poison—suicide, or possibly even murder.

A few days after Mrs. Holcomb’s death, Daniel’s hired man, James Foy, took umbrage at something that had appeared about the Crouch case in a local paper, and went gunning for the editor, D.J. Easton.  While on this mission of revenge,  he mistook a man named Elmer Shules for Easton, and shot him.  Fortunately, Shules survived.

This was more than could be said for James Foy.  An hour after the shooting, he was found dead.  He had been shot through the head.  Although Foy’s hand was found holding a pistol—of the same caliber that had shot the Crouch household—apparently there were other factors surrounding his death that led the inquest to rule his death a homicide “from hands unknown.”  It was generally believed that Foy was murdered because he knew far too much about the Crouch killings.

Shortly after that, Galen Brown, a detective who was working on the Crouch case, was accosted on the highway by two men.  One of them shot him in the thigh.  Both men fled, but Brown—who survived the injury—identified his assailants as Judd Crouch and a local man named Hugh McCallum.  The two men were arrested, along with Daniel Holcomb, and the trio was charged with the Crouch murders.

Three weeks later, a neighboring farmer, Lorenzo Bean,  went insane—from brooding over this string of tragedies, so we are told—and died in agony.  Two weeks after that, another local named Alexander Lee became obsessed with the idea that he himself was the Crouch murderer, and committed suicide.

Ten days after that, Daniel Holcomb’s brother Henry named a man named Joseph Allen as the real killer.  Allen was arrested, but soon released for lack of evidence.  Allen then turned the tables by having Henry Holcomb charged with perjury.  Holcomb was eventually acquitted.

McCallum was discharged soon after his arrest, but Daniel Holcomb and Judd Crouch were formally charged with the Crouch homicides.  During Holcomb’s trial, one of the witnesses, Mrs. Thomas Murphy, was murdered with an ax by her husband.  In January 1885, Holcomb was acquitted.  This result convinced the authorities that it would be hopeless to try Judd, and both men were released.

Judd Crouch subsequently moved to Indiana, but returned to his hometown a number of years later.  He lived quietly as a scrap dealer and landscaper until his death in 1946.  Daniel Holcomb remarried and moved to Wisconsin, where he spent the rest of his days.

Crouch’s farm eventually went to Judd, who soon lost it on foreclosure.  It burned down in 1947, probably by arson.

The spirits of Jacob Crouch and his household were never able to find earthly justice for their deaths, but they certainly got a lot of revenge.