The Strange Death of Nora Smithson

"Arizona Daily Star," January 19, 1932, via Newspapers.com

Every now and then, I find in the old newspapers some case that was little-noticed even at the time and soon forgotten, but which is so hauntingly weird, I feel it deserves a second look.  The following death mystery is one of those stories.

60-year-old Nora Smithson was one of those people who seem fated to aimlessly drift through life without leaving any kind of mark behind them.  Even her relatively few acquaintances could say little about her.  She never married, had no known living relatives, and, although she was apparently a pleasant enough woman, no real friends.  She moved from town to town, working as a cook for various families in exchange for board and lodging.  She once told one of her employers that she had money in the bank and didn’t really need to work, but being a live-in cook gave her “a family.”

In early 1932, Nora was in Tucson, working for a family named Fine.  It was apparently a congenial relationship on both sides.  Nora was an excellent cook, with an amiable disposition, and she seemed fond of the family.  Around noon on January 18, Mrs. Fine left to attend a meeting, leaving Nora alone in the house with Fine's small son.  When Mrs. Fine returned sometime after 6 p.m., she was a bit surprised to find the house unlocked and unlighted.  She was even more surprised that Nora failed to answer her calls.  In the three months that Miss Smithson had lived with the Fines, she rarely left the house during the day, and was always at home in the evenings.  When Mrs. Fine failed to locate Nora anywhere in the house, she took her son to a neighbor’s and drove to a drug store, where she called police.  She told them that she felt very uneasy about her cook’s disappearance, and wished an officer would go to her home.

When three policemen arrived at the home, Mrs. Fine told them what had happened.  She said that the only place in the house she hadn’t looked was the cellar, and she was afraid to go down there by herself.  It turned out that she had reason to be scared.  When the officers went down into the basement, they found, wedged into a corner behind the furnace, the body of Nora Smithson.  The cause of her death seemed obvious.  The upper half of her body was badly charred, although portions of her legs and her shoes were undamaged by the flames.  Although the body had been exposed to an intense heat, there was little, if any fire damage on the wall behind it.  In the extreme corner was a small web containing a spider, alive and quite undamaged.  Examination of the furnace showed that Nora could not have been burned inside of it, and no indications that she fell against it.

Ten burned matches were scattered in front of the body, and between the bent knees was a tin can containing a small quantity of a “sweetish smelling liquid.”  It is not clear if this liquid was ever identified, but it was apparently  not flammable.  A search of the basement uncovered a small bottle that contained the same sort of liquid that was in the can.  The Fines did not recognize either the bottle or the can, and had no idea what the liquid could be.  

The first assumption was that the poor woman had chosen a particularly ghastly method of suicide, but the Fines knew of no possible motive for such an act.  When Mrs. Fine last saw Nora, she was in a cheerful mood, playing cards and checkers with Fine's son, and saying that she wanted to stay in Tucson for a while, because she enjoyed the country and the mountains.

A search of Nora’s few belongings failed to provide any clues about what had happened.  No suicide note was found.  Everything in her room was tidy and well-arranged.  Two of her sweaters had been washed and dried, then spread neatly over the foot of her bed.  The kitchen showed no sign that she had begun dinner, so it was presumed that the gruesome tragedy--however it came about--happened quite some time before Mrs. Fine returned home.

So, did the police have an accident, a suicide, or a murder on their hands?  No one could say.  The coroner remarked to a reporter that at first glance, there was nothing pointing to any of the three possibilities, and nothing to disprove them.

The inquest proved to be an utterly unsatisfying affair.  The coroner’s jury reached the inevitable verdict that Nora had died from burns and carbon monoxide poisoning, but how she had come to such an end remained unknown.  The county attorney threw up his hands and said that unless new information came to light, “we can take no other stand” than that “Miss Smithson put some highly inflammable matter on her clothing and set it afire.”

It was found that Smithson had a total of about $500 in two different bank accounts, with the money going to pay her funeral expenses.  And that, as they say, seems to have been that.