A Car Bombing in Texarkana

There is something particularly sinister about murders that not only go unsolved, but where it is impossible to even find the motive for the killing.  Such an unaccountable act of evil leaves onlookers with the horrified thought, “For all I know, that could have been me…”  The following mystery is one of those cases.

36-year-old Daryl Crouch was president of a successful family-owned pharmaceutical company, the Walsh-Lumpkin Drug Co.,  in Texarkana, Texas.  He and his wife, Jan, appeared to be happily married, and they adored their 10-year-old daughter, Sandy.  Daryl was described as “one of this city’s most promising young businessmen,” a civic leader who was “always a man spreading good will.”  He was a likable fellow who had no known enemies or notable personal problems.  In short, he was among the last people you’d think anyone would want to see dead.

However, as I’m sure you’ve guessed by now, someone did.

On the evening of February 2, 1987, Crouch left his office to have dinner with his wife and daughter.  Afterwards, Jan (whose father founded the company) went to her husband’s office to use the copy machine.  The family then left the building.  Daryl and Sandy got into his Mercedes, while Jan returned to her Lincoln Continental.

Suddenly, there was a massive explosion that could be heard for blocks away, and the Mercedes turned into a fireball.  Sandy Crouch miraculously managed to escape the car with only minor burns, but Daryl was killed instantly.  The blast was powerful enough to destroy three nearby autos.  A 30-inch hole was blown in the floorboard of the Mercedes directly under the driver’s seat.  No one in Texarkana had ever seen anything like it.  Someone had managed to place beneath the vehicle a pipe bomb that was designed to be very, very lethal.  (Police were unable to determine how the bomb was detonated, as Daryl had yet to start the car, but it was thought possible that it was set off by remote control.)

This unusually brutal murder of one of the city’s most well-known and well-liked residents left Texarkanans understandably shocked--and frightened.  People were afraid to leave their parked cars unattended.  Police struggled to determine not just who placed that bomb under Crouch’s car, but why.  Rattled citizens demanded answers that no one seemed able to provide.

Unsurprisingly, the local rumor mill attempted to fill this vacuum.  Some speculated that Crouch was not murdered at all, but staged an unusual suicide.  This theory was fueled by the fact that Crouch had recently resigned his position on the board of Security Savings Association (a major local thrift institution.)  The past December, the institution had posted a $62 million deficit.  However, spokespeople for Security Savings insisted that the timing of Crouch’s resignation and his death was a mere tragic coincidence.  Crouch had planned to retire from the board for some time, in order to concentrate on his other business interests.  They pointed out that the financial institution had options for dealing with the deficit, such as cash infusions or mergers.  Besides, even if Crouch had considered suicide, his friends found it impossible to believe that he would have done so in a way that risked the lives of his wife and daughter.

Police also examined an odd incident that took place the previous summer.  Walsh-Lumpkin received an anonymous phone call saying that the company’s products would be poisoned unless they paid an undisclosed amount of money.  The caller--whoever he or she may have been--was never heard from again, so at the time, the threat was shrugged off as a sick prank.  However, after Crouch’s death, persistent rumors arose that this extortion attempt somehow led Daryl to fear for his family’s safety.  Jan denied such claims.  “He had absolutely no idea something like this was going to happen,” she said.  “If he had, he would have said, ‘Look we need to do so and so.  We need to be real careful.”

The car-bombing is one of those inexplicable crimes where there is very little to report about the matter.  Despite their most diligent efforts, police were utterly unable to find even a remotely plausible suspect, and the motive to blow to bits a seemingly thoroughly respectable and popular businessman remained equally unknown.  To date, the murder of Daryl Crouch remains one of Texarkana’s most unnerving cold cases.

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

The following item was something the editors of the “London Times” did not expect to find advertised in their paper.  May 10, 1861:

Coblentz, April 25, 1861. In an almost impenetrable ravine in the declivity of Mount Rheineck, which is situate immediately on the banks of the Rhine, between Brohl and Nioderbrel (a district of the Tribunal of First Instance of Cobleutz, Rhenish-Prussia), on the 22d of last March, was found the body of some person, a female, from 20 to 30 years of age, or thereabout, concealed in a recess, covered with large stones. The period of decease cannot be precisely determined. Death was caused by a ball shot from a gun, which traversed the breast and back. Description --height 5ft. 2 or 3 inches hair, fair; teeth, sound, small, and somewhat irregularly set in the lower jaw. Chemise, cambric, 3 ft. 6 inches long, the upper hem forming a running string, with two eyelet-holes, two fine and even cords passing through in the centre of the round breast of the chemise, and below the eyelet-holes, the initials " A. E. 36" are embroidered in Gothic characters, in relief, half an inch long.

2. A nightgown of fine white dimity, collar turned down, 2 ft. 3 inches, with white mother-of-pearl buttons; some remains of a fine material, with brown and white stripes (jaconot muslin); in the white stripe is a small winding white line, with red spots. In the vicinity of the body have been found the remnants of a petticoat, 3 feet 2 inches long; it is composed of fine white dimity, striped, the same material as the nightgown. On the upper edge, which is an inch and half broad, with white riband strings, are embroidered in white letters, 2 1/2 lines, in relief, and in large characters of the German printed alphabet, the initials “M. R., 6.” The bottom hem is finished with cord in linen thread.

The fine quality of the materials and the elegant make of all these articles indicate that the victim belonged to a rich class. In consequence of the state of putrefaction and external destruction it is impossible to notice other marks of recognition. I request of any person who can give information concerning this unknown individual, and the circumstances of her death, to be so good as to furnish me with the particulars, else to communicate them to the nearest magistrates. The articles of dress above mentioned, together with the lower jaw, are deposited for inspection at my office. The Crown Prosecutor-General, DE RODENBERG.

I have been unable to find if the mystery of the woman’s identity--let alone who murdered her--was ever solved.

Murder by Toothbrush: The Strange Case of Tita Cristescu

1930s Romania may not have been a paradise for most people, but for a young Bucharest actress named Tita Cristescu, life was pretty darned good.  She was well-connected (her father, Gheorghe Cristescu, was a prominent figure in Romanian politics,) she had a successful theatrical career, and was pretty enough to be named “Miss Romania” of 1933.  Tita was engaged to be married to Hotta Cuza, a young Romanian diplomat.  She seemed perfectly happy, and was full of hope for the future.

One January night in 1936, Tita’s parents came over to her apartment for dinner, leaving about 11:30 p.m.  After her parents left, Tita told her maid, Maria, to go to bed.  As she spoke, she took a capsule from a box and swallowed it.  Maria assumed it was one of the “reducing capsules” Tita took every night.  Maria went to bed, but was awakened half and hour later by Tita’s sister, Mrs. Mikai Gregorian.  Mrs. Gregorian, her voice shaking with fear, told the maid, “Get a doctor, at once.  Tita is very ill.”

Maria hurried from the apartment, but by the time she returned with a physician, Tita was dead.  Mrs. Gregorian told the doctor that, while passing by the apartment building, she noticed that her sister’s light was still on, so dropped by for a brief visit.  Tita was wearing a negligee, and was in her usual high spirits.  However, after chatting for a few minutes, Tita suddenly went silent and stared ahead blankly.  She fell onto a chair and said, “Get me a glass of water.  Something is going on inside me.  I am thirsty all of a sudden and I have a dreadful taste in my mouth which is queer because I have just brushed my teeth.”

She gulped down the water, but then dropped the glass.  She turned very pale and gasped, “I am going to be awfully sick.  Get a doctor.”  By the time Mrs. Gregorian awakened Maria, Tita had fallen unconscious.  Several minutes later, she died.

When the police heard all this, their assumption was that, despite Tita’s seemingly ideal life, the young woman had committed suicide.  Actresses, they nodded sagely, were notoriously unstable, and beauty queens were the worst of the lot.  Besides, who would want to kill her? When the autopsy revealed Tita had died from cyanide poisoning, the authorities believed it was “case closed.”  They were ready to label the death as a tragic self-poisoning, and move on.

Tita’s parents were outraged at this verdict.  They were convinced their daughter had been murdered, and they even had what they believed to be an obvious suspect: a wealthy engineer named Liviu Ciulley.  Ciulley, they declared, had been in love with Tita, and was maddened with jealousy over her plans to marry another man.  Police scoffed at this theory.  They pointed out that Ciulley had been married for ten years, and had shown no signs of wanting a divorce.  Gheorghe Cristescu was unpopular among many circles--a contemporary newspaper described him as “a socialist demagogue of the most radical and spectacular sort”--so few people took his claims seriously.  However, the sudden and mysterious death of a beautiful young actress was like catnip to the newspapers.  Tita’s demise became a genuine public scandal.

The publicity forced the authorities to reopen the case, which included questioning Liviu Ciulley.  Ciulley told police that for five years, he and Tita had a secret affair, but more than a year ago, he became tired of the her and broke off their relationship.  He added that in recent times, Tita had financial problems, and was always pestering him for loans.  As a result of this harassment, he was positively relieved to hear of her marriage plans.  Furthermore, he could prove that for more than a week before Tita’s death, he had been with his family in Sinaia, a considerable distance from Bucharest.

Ciulley seemed sincere, and police were able to confirm his alibi.  However, investigators also turned up something that seemed to contradict the suicide theory: The night Tita died, she had asked the daughter of her apartment building’s janitor to wake her very early the next morning, as she had a lot of shopping to do.  The police were not yet convinced of Ciulley’s innocence.

A search of Ciulley’s apartment found nothing incriminating.  When police visited the home and office of his brother, a doctor named Alexandra Ciulley, they initially saw nothing suspicious there, either.  Then, a particularly snoopy detective found a glass syringe hidden under a sheaf of bills.

The detective noted that when he found the syringe, a look of fear suddenly crossed Dr. Ciulley’s face.  “What did you hide that for?” the detective asked.  The doctor hesitated, but after a bit of pressing, said that a month before, he had loaned a syringe to his brother, because Liviu said he needed to give injections to his children, who were suffering from sore throats.  Alexandra continued, “When I heard that my brother was charged with having poisoned the actress, I got frightened.  I knew that he was madly in love with Tita Critescu, and I had a terrible suspicion that he might, in point of fact, have committed the murder.  I was afraid that if the police found the syringe in his flat, they might feel justified in their suspicion that my unfortunate brother had injected the poison into the girl’s reducing capsules and would consider the syringe as decisive proof.  I wanted to remove it before the police found it, and on Friday, January 10, I went to my brother’s flat to hide the syringe somehow.”

Alexandra said that when he went to Liviu’s flat, his brother was not there.  He found the syringe in the nursery, but he didn’t know what to do with it.  He finally threw some parts of the syringe down a narrow street, keeping only the glass cylinder.  Detectives went to the place where Alexandra said he had thrown the items, and sure enough, there they were.  When police confronted Liviu, he calmly replied, “My brother is a fool, trying to destroy evidence that is not evidence or I would have destroyed it myself.”  However, after further interrogation, he was forced to admit that he had lied when he said he no longer cared for Tita.  Things became even worse for Liviu when they found witnesses who asserted that the morning before Tita died, he had made a quick trip to Bucharest.  The following day, after the news of Tita’s death hit the papers, Liviu wanted to visit her apartment, but his wife, who knew of his affair with the actress, went into such hysterics at the idea that she threatened to shoot herself.  (I would have thought that her husband would have been the one she wanted to pump full of bullets, but I digress.)

Police assumed that Liviu had wanted to go to Tita’s flat in order to remove something incriminating, but what?  If the “reducing capsule” had been poisoned, Tita had taken the last one in the box.  Then, it occurred to them that right before she died, Tita mentioned that she had just brushed her teeth.  A second, more careful autopsy revealed that her gums were deeply impregnated with cyanide.  Traces of the poison were found on her toothbrush, and her half-empty tube of toothpaste contained a massive dose of it.

The question of how Tita died was finally answered.  Someone had taken off the cap of toothpaste, used a syringe to squirt a fatal dose of cyanide into the tube, and replaced the cap.  

Unfortunately, the question of who did this dreadful deed was not solved so easily.  Liviu Ciulley was put on trial for murder, but although his actions were certainly suspicious, prosecutors were unable to bring an airtight case against him.  Under oath, his servants denied that he had left his house before Tita’s death.  The jury brought in a verdict of “Not guilty.”

After Ciulley’s acquittal, the police half-heartedly continued their investigation for a time before admitting defeat and placing Tita’s poisoning into the cold case file.  The mystery is still discussed in Romanian true-crime circles--in recent years, rumors have emerged that Tita’s maid, Maria, poisoned her employer out of jealousy—but the young actress’s peculiar murder remains as murky as ever.

Death of a Lighthouse Keeper: The Strange Case of Ulman Owens

A lonely, isolated lighthouse.  A raging nighttime thunderstorm.  The lighthouse keeper suffers a violent, mysterious death…

If Ulman Owens isn’t perfect Strange Company material, I don’t know who is.

Since 1911, Owens had been the keeper of the Holland Bar lighthouse, off the Maryland coast.  The 53-year-old widower normally performed his duties with efficiency, so when on the night of March 11, 1931, the lighthouse suddenly went dark--and during a hurricane, at that--the nearby community of Crisfield was naturally alarmed.  As soon as the storm was over, the local Sheriff and a few other law enforcement officers went to the lighthouse to investigate.  They assumed something had gone very wrong, but possibly the little group still wasn’t prepared for what they found.

Owens’ dead body was lying at the top of the circular staircase leading to the lighthouse cubbyhole.  He was wearing only a shirt, and his body was covered in bruises.  The rest of his clothing was in a bloody heap nearby.  A deep gash was on his side, and a large welt was on his forehead.  The lighthouse itself bore witness to what must have been a long and extremely violent struggle.  Furniture was overturned, a chair was smashed to bits, and there were splotches of blood everywhere.  A blood-stained knife was found on top of the stove.

All of this naturally led to the initial assumption that Owens was the victim of an unusually brutal murder.  However, a further search of the lighthouse cast some doubt upon this theory.  Three now-empty bottles of spirits of ammonia were found in the dead man’s bed, causing police to wonder if the lighthouse keeper, driven to madness by his isolated existence, poisoned himself with the ammonia and then tore apart his quarters during his death agonies.

Holland Bar Lighthouse, circa 1950

The coroner, after a casual examination of the corpse, concluded that Owens had died of a heart attack, and the following day the body was buried in a nearby churchyard.  Nothing to see here, move along.

Local residents felt otherwise.  The prevailing opinion was that Owens had been murdered, and people became increasingly noisy about saying so.  Such talk was further amplified when details about Owens’ surprisingly colorful private life began emerging.  It turned out that Owens had been romantically involved with one Minnie Shores.  Minnie was married and the mother of three, but she had been planning to get a divorce and marry her lover.  However, Mrs. Shores may have been unaware that she was far from the only woman in Owens’ life.  As unlikely as it may seem, our supposedly reclusive lightkeeper was quite the ladies’ man, surrounded by an army of infatuated women.  According to the gossips, at least one of them was so jealous of Owens’ relationship with Minnie Shores that she was overheard making threats against his life.  The question was asked:  Did one of his many lady friends get a bloody revenge against Owens?  Or was he murdered by a resentful husband?  (Before you ask, the most obvious suspect, Minnie Shores’ estranged husband, had an unassailable alibi.)

The possible motives for why anyone would want to murder Owens began to grow quite impressively.  His job as a lighthouse sentinel made him the natural enemy of the rum-runners who had to ply their trade literally under his nose.  Furthermore, it was said that Owens had reported a number of these smugglers to Federal agents.  Did one of these lawbreakers decide to shut Owens’ mouth…permanently?

Owens’ two adult daughters were adamant that someone had murdered their father, and insisted that the authorities reopen their investigation into the case.  They pointed out that Owens had never suffered from heart trouble, and the extent of his injuries was so great, it would have been impossible for him to inflict them all on himself.  Enough of a ruckus was raised for two agents from the Department of Justice to involve themselves in the mystery.  Owens’ body was exhumed and a complete autopsy was finally performed.  It showed that he had suffered a head wound brutal enough to crack his skull.  Despite the presence of the bloody knife, Owens had no stab wounds.  No poison was found in his organs, but he had an enlarged heart, which allowed local authorities to stick by their curious assertion that the lightkeeper had died a perfectly natural and unsuspicious death.  All the blood found around the lighthouse?  It was obvious: Owens must have had a nosebleed!

The two Federal agents were less convinced of this.  They nosed around for a while, but wound up shrugging their shoulders and going back to Washington in defeat.  And the Ulman Owens case was--however unsatisfactorily--closed for good.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In Which Edgar Allan Poe Meets a Murderer

[Note: I published this story on my World of Poe blog back in 2012--13 years ago, ye gods, where does the time go?!--but I thought it had enough of a Strange Company vibe to include it here.]

In October of 1845, the corpse of a prostitute named Maria (or Mary Ann) Bickford was found in her Boston boardinghouse lodgings, her throat gruesomely slashed. Her former lover, a wealthy, married man named Albert J. Tirrell, immediately became the prime suspect. Although he made attempts to flee the country, he was soon arrested and brought back for trial. The circumstantial evidence against him seemed overwhelming, and his own personal character had long been an object of public scandal (one observer noted that he and Bickford had, between them, accounted for “a rather high percentage of moral turpitude.”) However, Tirrell had two very important factors in his favor: A high-powered defense attorney, former U. S. Senator Rufus Choate, and a public who had decided the slain “fallen woman” was a mere Jezebel who brought doom upon herself.

Choate and the rest of Tirrell’s defense team, as all good attorneys do when faced with a seemingly hopeless client, did their best to put the jury into a state of utter discombobulation. First, they argued Bickford had committed suicide, the “natural death of persons of her character.” Then, they tried insinuating someone else in the boardinghouse was the true culprit. Finally, perhaps unable to convince even themselves of those possibilities, they brought on a parade of witnesses ready to testify that Tirrell had long suffered from somnambulism. If Tirrell killed Bickford, Choate declared, it was when he was in this hypnotic-like state, and thus could not be held accountable for the tragedy.

This was good enough for the judge. His instructions to the jury stressed the victim’s dubious character, and suggested that Tirrell’s alleged sleepwalking could be seen as a form of exculpatory insanity. Tirrell was duly acquitted of murder, although he was forced to spend three years in state prison for “adultery and lascivious cohabitation.” Choate, who subsequently became understandably popular with America’s criminal classes, went on to become the Attorney General of Massachusetts, but the Tirrell trial proved to be his real legacy. After his death, he was remembered as the lawyer who “made it safe to murder."

What does this sordid little story have to do with Edgar Allan Poe, you ask?

Not long before Bickford’s bloody demise, Tirrell was in New York City, nursing dreams of glory. Although he knew nothing of the publishing business, he wished to launch a periodical of national influence, one that would transform the American literary scene. Who better to help him realize this lofty goal, Tirrell reasoned, than Edgar Allan Poe? He called on the author and offered him “exclusive editorship and control” of his planned publication.

Poe has often been unkindly stereotyped as a feckless man with no head for business and little understanding of human nature, but he clearly could read people better than your average Boston juror. He failed to share his would-be colleague’s enthusiasm.

Tirrell’s biographer depicted him as urging the poet to accept his munificent offer, pleading, “The people want knowledge; they thirst for it as the heart [sic] panteth for the water brooks.” ("He seemed to be possessed of a belief that if he brought some doubled sheets of printed paper before the people, and the ladies in particular, an illumination as wonderful as the aurora borealis would be the consequence.")

Poe, after a “cautious and analytical survey of the gentleman,” “propounded divers queries which Tirrell had not the capacity to answer.” Finally, he told his caller, “engagements compel me to decline your generous offers; I have already promised to do more than I can possibly accomplish.” Poe suggested Tirrell bring his proposals to a Silas Estabrook, “a compositor of my acquaintance whose talents are so nearly like your own that he would prove the very person you are seeking.”

Unfortunately, Poe was right in his estimation of Estabrook’s compatibility with Tirrell. The two subsequently collaborated on “The Unexpected Letter: A Truthful Journal of News and Miscellany,” which proved an immediate disaster. The enormous, wildly ambitious initial costs of the venture, coupled with Tirrell’s chronic "rattle-headedness," sank the publication before it even began. (Estabrook, who saw himself as the dupe of his unconventional business partner, found consolation by publishing a tell-all booklet about Tirrell's crimes that included the anecdote above.) Tirrell and Poe apparently never met again while achieving, in their very different ways, memorable places in history.

Researcher Harry Koopman wrote, “[Tirrell’s] offer may be regarded as a tribute to Poe’s prominence in the literary world.” The encounter can also be regarded as even more eloquent tribute to Poe’s underrated prominence as an escape artist.

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

One often hears tales of ghosts returning to try to "solve" their own murder, but in this case the revenant appears to have been wasting his time.  The “Logansport Reporter,” February 18, 1899:

Thornhope, a little village northwest of Logansport on the Chicago division of the Pan Handle, is all agog over a remarkable ghost story, the details of which were made public but yesterday. The most uncanny feature of the affair is the peculiar action of the ghost in binding to secrecy for a certain period the man who is the only person who has held converse with it. At last time has absolved the oath and the facts in the case have been related. In the fall of '65, John Baer, a stockbuyer, established headquarters at Thornhope and engaged extensively in the purchase and sale of stock. He was frequently known to have large sums of money in bis possession, but be scoffed at the idea of possible robbery, He lived with John Wildermuth and on Feb. 16, 1868, he prepared to go to Star City and arrange for the shipment of a carload of cattle.

He had $3,000 in cash on his person to pay for the stock, and before starting to Star City he started to walk to the residence of John Steele, a mile south of Thornhope, to procure a heavy overcoat he had left there a few days previously. That was the last ever seen of Baer. He failed to reach Steele's, and the only clew to the mysterious affair was advanced by Gabriel Fickle, a warm friend of Baer and a resident of Thornhope to this day. Fickle and others heard pistol shots shortly after Baer started for Steele's. When Baer failed to return to Wildermuth's, Fickle associated his disappearance with the shots, but a close search failed to disclose any trace of the missing man and in a few months it came to be generally believed that he was foully murdered for his money.

Two men were suspected but there was no evidence against them and no arrests were made. Near the water tank, midway between Thornhope and Steele's, was an abandoned well close to the banks of Indian Creek, and a few years after the disappearance of Baer, some school children who were fishing in the creek hooked shreds of clothing and an old boot out of the well. The circumstances of this find were given no consideration by the children's parents, but in the light of recent developments it suggests the truth of a weird and ghastly story of murder. Gabriel Fickle is responsible for the present disturbed condition of Thornhope people in his solemn avowal that he saw and talked with the ghost of John Baer on the night of February 16, 1898, the thirtieth anniversary of the disappearance of Baer.

Fickle explains his silence for the past year by declaring that he was bound to secrecy by an oath under conditions that would have driven many men stark mad. February 16, 1899 removed the seal from his lips and he unburdened himself of a strange account that cannot be disbelieved coming as it does from a man whose standing is unquestioned. His startling tale is substantially to the effect that on the night of February 16, '98, as he was returning from Royal Center to his home via the railroad he dimly descried a form approaching as he neared the old water tank. The figure was walking slowly and as Fickle approached it stopped in front of him.

Fickle crossed to the other side of the track and the figure did likewise at the same time extending a hand and exclaiming. "Why Gabe, don't you know me?" Fickle replied negatively, but put forth his hand to shake hands with the friendly stranger when to his horror he found himself grasping thin air, although in other respects the apparition was life like. Before Fickle could make an effort to speak, the spectre further frightened him by continuing, "I am the ghost of John Baer, murdered on this spot thirty years ago tonight." Fickle declares he was seized with the most abject fear. His hair stood on end, his throat was parched and strive as he would not a sound came from his lips. He tottered past the vision of the dead, but the latter followed, conjuring him not to be afraid and finally Fickle retained his courage sufficiently ask how Baer met his death. The ghost then told of the foul murder, naming as his assassins two men still living, binding Fickle to never reveal the names or tell of his meeting with the ghost until one year from that time. A request for another interview was also made but a compliance was not authoritatively imposed. The ghost detailed minutely the circumstances of the murder. The gruesome recital ended near the abandoned well, and "This is where they put me," said the ghost stepping into the opening and sinking into its black depths.

Quaking in mortal terror, Fickle ran homeward, and for days his peculiar actions occasioned comment. He was tempted to tell of his singular adventure, but the admonition to keep silent was not to be forgotten. For a year he kept the secret and then unable to longer forbear, he told of the turn he experienced in meeting Baer's ghost. On one thing only is he silent and that is in regard to the identity of the murderers. Some night soon he proposes to return to the old tank at night to find if the vision will again appear.

Every man in Thornhope believes every word of Fickle's experience. Not a man has the courage to seek an interview with the ghost and the haunted spot is shunned like the plague. Fickle is one of the most respected citizens in the village. He enjoys the confidence of everybody and is in no sense an idle talker. He is much averse to discussing the affair.

He does not believe in ghosts, is not at all superstitious but says the memory of that fateful night will haunt him to his dying day. He does not attempt to explain the occurrence, it is beyond his understanding. He is positive that the end is not yet and that he will sooner or later be impelled to visit the scene of the crime and submit to another clasp of that shadowy hand from another world.

Fickle saw the ghost at least once more, and several other Thornhope citizens also claimed to have seen Baer’s unhappy spirit, but it seems to have done exactly nothing to help avenge his death.  I suppose the moral of our story is this:  If you are ever murdered, don’t wait thirty years before telling anyone about it.

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

In fictional murder mysteries, sometimes the victim manages to leave behind clues indicating the identity of their killer.  In the following real-life case, that really did happen.  Well, almost.  The “Twice-A-Week Messenger,” November 24, 1903:

Elmira, N. Y., Nov. 20--W. H. Clendenen, a telegraph operator at Brown, Pa., a station fifteen miles north of Williamsport, on the Beech Creek division of the New York Central railroad, was found dead in the telegraph tower shortly after 8 o'clock last night. At 6:50 o'clock the operator at Oak Grove, Pa., on the same road, received this message from Clendenen: "Send switch engine quick to me; I am being murdered by---" The wire opened and not another word came. A switch engine was sent to the scene and reached Brown in a short time.

The body was found lying under the desk, the head crushed in. A bloody spike maul lay on the floor beside it. Robbery apparently was the motive, the watch and money of the operator being missing. Clendenen evidently recognized his assailant and was about to wire his name when he was struck dead at the key.

In 1904, the wife of a local lowlife named Sherman Jamison told authorities that he was responsible for robbing and murdering a series of telegraph operators--including Clendenen.  When police came to arrest him, he managed to escape.  In 1905, a skeleton was found in the mountains where it was believed Jamison had fled.  It was speculated that these remains were those of the missing bandit, but this was never proven.  In any case, Jamison was apparently never seen again.  Clendenen’s murder was never officially solved.

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

Ghosts may be alarming, but they’re usually not hazardous to your health.  This following tale may be an exception.  The “Altoona Times,” October 27, 1884:

New York, October 25.--Dr. Charles C. King, of Buffalo, who is now here, tells a curious story. A month ago two men entered his office.  One said he was suffering from a physical injury inflicted by a ghostly assailant. The doctor was incredulous, but examined and found a couple of severe bruises on his chest, one round, as if inflicted by a club, and the other long and narrow, like a knife cut. The fourth rib had been broken and the right lung injured. The surface of the body was not injured, beyond discoloration. 

"How the injuries could be inflicted I could not guess," said the doctor. "The patient said he was asleep, felt himself suddenly seized by the throat, struggled to get away, but only succeeded in getting enough liberty to scream.  He was immediately struck in the chest, felt the bones crush and was stabbed. The blade entered his side several times. He was found lying on the floor senseless, the moon shining upon him, the windows and doors all locked on the inside, and nothing disturbed." 

The patient recovered finally, and the doctor went home, thirty miles, with him. He had gone to bed, when he heard a horrible shriek, followed by a heavy, crashing sound. He found the man lying on the floor senseless, bleeding from the mouth, with his rib broken afresh, his body bruised all over, and evidently in a dying condition.  He recovered consciousness a short time before death, and asserted that he had been picked up by an invisible foe, hurled against the wall and then thrown on the floor. 

"I believe he could not have injured himself on either occasion," concluded the doctor.

The Mystery of Flight 23

The Boeing 247 was the first modern passenger airline.  It was considered a wonder in its day.  For the first time, a passenger plane was soundproof, air-conditioned, and so quiet that those onboard could speak to each other without having to yell.  However, what the plane is perhaps best known for was its involvement with an enigmatic tragedy.

At 6:57 p.m. on October 10, 1933, United Flight 23 took off from Cleveland, Ohio for a Chicago-bound flight with seven people on board, including the crew.  It seemed a perfectly routine journey.  The plane carried the pilot, Harold Tarrant, his co-pilot A.T. Ruby, stewardess Alice Scribner, and passengers Dorothy Dwyer, Emil Smith, Warren Burris, and Frederick Schoendorff.  They were average, decent people going about their normal lives.  Tarrant, Scribner, and Dwyer were all engaged to be married.  At 8:46 p.m., Tarrant radioed from North Liberty, Indiana, that the plane was on-track to land in Chicago at 9:47.

This was the last word from anyone on Flight 23.  At around 9:15, when the plane was five miles southeast of Chesterton, Indiana, it exploded so violently it sent shock waves through the normally peaceful farmland below.  The tail end, containing two of the passengers, plummeted straight downwards.  The other half of the plane, in the words of one witness, “shot to earth like a blazing comet” near Jackson Center Township.  Seven souls had just suffered a sudden and horrifying death.

"Vidette-Messenger," October 11, 1933, via Newspapers.com

At first, investigators assumed the explosion had been caused by some tragic, unforeseen accident.  Perhaps a motor or a gas tank ruptured.  Or maybe a passenger’s cigarette ignited gas from a broken fuel line.  Was the plane hit by lightning?  A meteorite?  Some predicted that, considering there were no survivors to explain what had happened, the cause of the catastrophe was fated to remain unknown.

However, Melvin S. Purvis, the head of the FBI’s Chicago office, believed that Flight 23 had been brought down by a bomb, and FBI agents were sent to secure the wreckage.  Dr. Clarence W. Muehlberger, a crime detection expert for Chicago’s coroner’s office, studied the debris.  The shrapnel holes he found on many of the remains caused him to conclude that the plane had been brought down by some sort of very powerful explosive.  (The FBI eventually determined that nitroglycerin had been used.) It became accepted that they were not dealing with a simple freak accident, but the first act of airline terrorism in American history.

But what was the motive?  Did someone on the plane commit an act of suicide/mass murder?  Did unions or gangsters sabotage Flight 23 for some as-yet unknown reason?  Did one of the passengers or crew have a very, very deadly enemy?  Did a passenger, unwittingly or not, carry the bomb aboard, or was it secretly placed in the plane when it made a routine refueling stop in Cleveland?

The FBI first turned their attention to Emil Smith, who had boarded the flight when it made a stop in Newark.  Their suspicions were aroused by the fact that the day before, Smith had purchased life insurance promising a payout of $10,000 if his plane should crash.  Witnesses said Smith had brought on to the plane a handgun and a brown paper sack, which they thought was odd.  However, Smith, a WWI veteran who lived with his aunt, appeared to be a quiet, prosperous man completely incapable of any sort of evil.  Eventually, the paper sack was located, and although its contents were never made public, the FBI announced that Smith was clearly an innocent victim.

The investigation dragged on until September 20, 1935, when J. Edgar Hoover announced that “all undeveloped leads in this case have been exhausted,” and therefore, the Bureau was closing the books on the crime.  Since that day, no new information in the case has surfaced.  It is likely we will never know who planted a bomb on Flight 23, let alone why they did so.

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Ludgvan Parish Church, final resting place of our Mystery Bones. Photo: Sheila Russell

I always say, it’s unsettling to find human remains where they shouldn’t be.  The “West Briton,” May 4, 1871 (via Newspapers.com):

Mr. F. Hosking, of Tregender, Ludgvan, purchased recently some land and a cot not far from his house, called Garter's Gravelane. Rather more than 20 years ago Mr. and Mrs. Curnow occupied the cot. Before he married Mr. Curnow had to contribute towards the maintenance of an illegitimate daughter. After his marriage the child was brought to his home, and brought up there.

Rumor said that this child, in girlhood and early womanhood, led an unhappy life, and that more especially was this the case as between her stepmother and herself. Twenty or twenty-one years ago the daughter suddenly disappeared. Mr. and Mrs. Curnow said she had gone off with a tramp, and, gradually, the remembrance of the unhappy step-daughter faded away in the neighbourhood.

Mr. and Mrs. Curnow are both dead, and leave children, Mr. Hosking having resolved to build a hedge on his newly acquired property, his men were digging across the "town-place," or farmyard of the house at Garter's Grave, and were engaged on a spot over which, time out of mind, a rick of furze stood, when, at from 18 inches to two feet beneath the soil, they came on a skull and bones. Proceeding carefully with their excavation, they disclosed a well-formed shallow grave, about 5ft. 6in. long. The skeleton of a short person was disinterred, but not a shred of clothing or aught else gave a clue to the age, sex, or identification of the body buried in so strange a piece. A boxful of bones and dust has been deposited in Ludgvan churchyard. 

Of course, the disappearance of young Mary Green is now the subject of mysterious speculation, as well as all that is known of her and the deceased Curnows; in justice to whose memory it should be said that two or three of their near relations assert that, 15 or 16 years since, and again nine years ago, she was seen by them in the company of the tramp with whom she suddenly left home.

The curiosity of hundreds has stimulated them to inspect the remains, and the theme at as many hundreds of places is--If not the remains of Green, whose are they?

The “West Briton” had a brief follow-up story on May 11:

The relatives of Mr and Mrs Curnow, who once lived in the cot in Ludgvan, in the townplace of which human bones were recently found state that this singularly-named place was at one time known as Clark’s Croft but that a tenant (so runs the village story) hung himself by his garters and was buried in the Three Lanes’ End 20 yards from his house. They ask whether it is possible that the remains recently found were those of the unfortunate suicide? Of one thing they express themselves perfectly satisfied—that Mary Green, the late Mr. Curnow’s daughter and his wife’s step-daughter was alive two years ago. It is true that Mary Green was the illegitimate child of Mr. Curnow, but they say it is untrue that she was ever treated differently from her step-brothers and sisters. Her father “never gave her the weight of his hand.'’ 

This young woman, say her step-brothers, came to Penzance in service, did not conduct herself creditably, and finally started off with a tramp. 13 years ago she was seen at Hayle, nine years since in Lelant, and only two years back at Wendron by a neighbour who knew her very well. Therefore, state her step-brothers, whose bones soever be ones may be found at Garter's Grave, they cannot be those of their wandering step-sister. Of this they are most positive as well as of the perfect innocence of their father and mother of hurting her by word or deed. Satisfactory as this may be, we have still the unsolved mystery—whose were the bones found under the turf-rick in the townplace?

That question was apparently never answered.