Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

This unnerving account of the mysterious deaths of two sisters appeared in the “Patriot News,” March 24, 1968:

A soft sigh, a stare of horror, a piercing scream and death that as yet is unexplained…that was the fate of Beverly Stephens and her sister, Patricia, who died in almost identical circumstances five years apart. Neither girl uttered a word before she died. Neither gave any sign that anything was wrong before the seizure. The only sound either made was a scream. In both cases, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation failed.

Death came almost instantly. Neither girl had a medical history of serious ailments or emotional upsets. Exhaustive autopsies that included microorganisms tests revealed no clue to what killed either girl. Their death certificates read: "Sudden death, natural." Natural, perhaps, but inexplicable. 

Beverly Stephens died in August, 1963.  She had just stepped from a swimming pool in Porterville, Calif., when she sighed, looked about her with horror, uttered a single, high-pitched scream and collapsed. She was 17. Equally inexplicable was the death of Patricia Stephens Rush, who succumbed in her home in Santa Monica, Calif. Suddenly she sat bolt upright in bed ... then came the sigh, the look of fear, the scream and death.

She was 23. What haunts the girls' parents, Everett and Ruth Stephens, who live in San Luis Obispo, Calif., is the thought that whatever killed the sisters might be a hereditary disorder afflicting the female side of the family. The Stephenses have two other daughters, Barbara, 17, and Diana, 11, in addition to sons Larry and Robert. 

The same thought weighs heavily on Staff Sgt. Robert Rush, an Army combat engineer, who had been home from Vietnam just four days when his wife, Patricia, died, leaving him with two girls, Kristen, 1, and Kimberly, 6. 

The family made appointments with Los Angeles heart specialists for the surviving girls. The parents can shed little light on the deaths of the sisters, and neither does their personal background provide a clue. The family moved to California from St. Louis shortly after World War II. By 1954, Everett Stephens was working as a correctional officer for the state, first in Salinas, then in Porterville. He now works in San Luis Obispo at the California Men's Colony. 

The Stephenses were living in Porterville when Beverly, a high school senior, died. Although the autopsy showed nothing, her parents recall that a week before her fatal seizure, Beverly had survived a similar attack.  This occurred at a dance one warm August night. The girl uttered one short, piercing scream and collapsed. Two registered nurses, who happened to be at the dance, said she wasn't breathing when they began giving her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. She regained consciousness in a short time.

Doctors at the Porterville hospital could find nothing wrong with her. Suspecting that she was suffering from fatigue, they sent her home to bed. Beverly didn't remember a thing about what her mother still calls "the fainting spell." 

"She was perfectly normal the next day, and she went to a ball game that night," her mother recalled. "In fact, she went shopping with me the day after that." 

If Beverly had any premonition of death, she gave no sign to her family or friends. She went swimming with her younger brother, Robert, who was 13 at the time, a few days after the incident at the dance. It was Robert, now a high school senior, who described what happened to his sister at Porterville's Sunnyside Pool--the sigh, the terror-stricken look, the scream, and the frantic attempts to revive her. 

Dr. James Sargent, Tulare County autopsy surgeon, said he could find no marks on the body, no heart damage, no brain injury, nothing. Since the couple's other children seemed healthy enough, Beverly's strange death attracted little attention. There wasn't even a story about it in the local paper. All that changed recently when her sister died in almost identical circumstances. Patricia's death freshened coroner Sargent's memory of the original case: 

"Actually, you know as much about what caused the girl to die as we do," he said.  "I'm not satisfied with the explanations that were conjectured at the time. There simply was and is no theory on the subject that makes medical sense." 

One theory was that a sinus reflex had slowed the girl's heart action and ultimately killed her, but Sargent rejected that with the observation that such an explanation is a popular "medical dumping ground." 

Now the conjecture has started all over again. Like Beverly's brother, Patricia's husband, a 10-year army veteran, can't provide a clue even though he, too, was an eyewitness. Rush said he awoke about 6 a.m. to find his wife sitting upright, staring straight ahead and screaming.

He said he had the feeling that the scream was involuntary, that she was unconscious. Rush could detect no pulse. He called for an ambulance and began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but it was too late. Patricia was dead when she reached Valley Community Hospital 27 minutes later.

Again there were tests, the autopsy, the funeral. Her badly shaken father said: "They'll never find out what caused it." 

And Dr. John P. Blanchard, the Santa Barbara coroner, as baffled as Dr. Sargent had been, was forced to agree. "In all probability," he said, "the girl's father is right." 

Dr. Blanchard's autopsy report mentioned "pulmonary edema," a sudden accumulation of fluid in the lungs. "But in truth," the doctor said, "we just don't know what happened to her.  It's an unexplained natural death. I don't even have any theories." 

Dr. Blanchard has said he would continue his post mortem studies into Patricia's death and consult the pathologist who sought to find the cause of her sister’s death.  "Obviously, there is a medical reason for both deaths," he said, "but our science isn't sophisticated enough to find the answers."

Doctors at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation in Oklahoma City, where a foundation grant is financing studies of inexplicable sudden death, may look into the cases of the Stephens sisters. Although their experiments have involved laboratory animals and not humans, a team led by Dr. Stewart Woll is convinced that panic can literally switch off a healthy heart and cause sudden death.

Wolf says that many drowning victims are often found without enough water in their lungs to have drowned them, and snake bite victims are known to have succumbed to an amount of venom that ordinarily would not have been fatal. 

"In such cases, the patient just dies of a turned-off heart as a result of panic," he said. Other members of the research team mentioned the possibility that Patricia might have had a particular vivid nightmare that produced death-dealing panic. But that explanation would not account for the death of her younger sister five years earlier at the swimming pool. The Stephenses have about reconciled themselves to the conviction that the deaths of their daughters will remain a mystery.

"Naturally, we're very concerned now about our older daughters, but we're not going to dwell on it. We can't let it ruin our lives," the father said.

I don’t know what happened to the other Stephens girls, but hopefully they were more fortunate than their sisters.  Still, their lives must have been very very uneasy.

The Case of the Parlous Parlor

"Owensboro Messenger," January 29, 1911, via Newspapers.com

Early in 1910, American newspapers breathlessly carried the story of what appeared to be a particularly shocking double homicide.  This account comes from the "Republican News Item" for January 6:

The mystery of the death of Miss Grace Elosser, of Cumberland, Md., and Charles E. Twigg, of Keyser, W. Va. her fiance, appears as deep as it did shortly after the bodies of the couple were found on the settee in the parlor of the Elosser residence on Saturday, when the mother of the dead girl went in to speak to her.

Twigg and Miss Elosser were to have been married Sunday night. It is suspected that a jealous woman rival was the poisoner, carrying out her plot in a most crafty way.

The mystery begun with the discovery on Saturday afternoon of the pretty girl and her fiance sitting together, hand in hand, on a sofa in the parlor of their home—both dead.

So swift, so instantaneous had been the action of the poison upon them that they sat as if in life.

The girl's mother went into the room, wondering only at the very long silence that she had noted between the couple. She saw her daughter and the young man sitting in apparently the most natural fashion. They were holding hands and looking into each other's eyes.

Then the mother suddenly gasped and stepped back. There was something uncanny, she saw, in the intentness of the gaze the young man and woman had fixed upon each other. There was that which gave a silent, vague alarm in the fixedness of their pose. She spoke to them. They did not answer. She went over to them. She spoke again and received no reply.  Then she put a hand on her daughter's head and spoke again.

"Grace —Grace," she said. And there was still no reply, so she gently shook her daughter by the shoulder. The mother screamed then and ran from the room. The girl's head had lolled to a side and the other woman had seen that the girl's jaw was dropped and her eyes fixed in the piteous gaping of death.

Then when others came it was found that the man, too, was dead; that both had been suddenly and absolutely stricken. The deadliest of poisons had been the medium.

This was established by the autopsy of the coroner's physician, Dr. Thomas W. Koon. They had both taken cyanide of potassium. The man had more of the poison in his system than the girl.  In the holiday season there had been several boxes of candy in the house.  But the medical examination showed conclusively that neither Miss Elosser or her fiance had eaten candy.  He had, however, in his mouth a stick of chewing gum. He had taken scarcely more than two or three bites on it. It had not been masticated into a pulp. In Miss Elosser's mouth was no chewing gum.

The strange likelihood is being considered by the authorities that the stick of chewing gum contained the deadly cyanide. Also that the young man, with the gum in his mouth, had leaned forward to kiss his sweetheart and that the kiss communicated the poison to her lips--a kiss offered in love that was deadly—the kiss of whose tragic character the ardent bestower was in all ignorance.

This is the only evidence that the authorities have so far secured to aid them in the way of solving the amazing mystery.  It has been by no means proven that the chewing gum contained the deadly poison. But it seems to be the only possible source from which the young man and his sweetheart could have taken into their systems the deadly chemical. The candy that was in the Elosser home had been partaken of by all the members of the family without ill effect. Moreover, chemical analysis showed all this confectionery to be harmless.

The tips of the tongues of both Twigg and the girl who was to have been his bride were red and inflamed, quite as if they had been burned or bitten. Cyanide, of course, takes immediate action. The mere touching of a grain of it to the tip of the tongue will cause death instantly.

The newspapers did a great deal of speculating about the tragedy.  Twigg had initially courted the dead woman's sister May before transferring his affections to Grace.  A third sister admitted that May had been "terribly broken up" about losing Charles--so much so that she stopped speaking to Grace.  Could the "scorned woman" have taken this rejection so hard that she poisoned, not just her ex-flame, but her own sister?  The first doctor at the scene of the deaths testified that he also found May Elosser unconscious with "decided symptoms of cyanide poisoning."  It took him fifteen minutes of work to revive her.  Was this evidence that she had planned the deaths of all three members of this love triangle?

Or could Charles Twigg, for some as-yet-unknown reason, have poisoned himself and the woman he was about to marry? Or was it a double suicide?

The police finally decided that there was not enough evidence to arrest anyone.  At the inquest, May admitted that she had been jealous of her sister, but vehemently denied that she could even consider murdering her.  There was no evidence of her buying poison.  The coroner's jury returned a verdict that the couple had died from cyanide poisoning, but they could not say how it had been administered.  This ambiguous verdict meant that May Elosser--the only known person with any conceivable motive to kill the pair--was left with a grim cloud of suspicion over her head.  It was looking like she would have to live with it for the rest of her life.

It was a local physician, a Dr. Littlefield, who finally provided a resolution to the case.  He had closely examined the parlor where Twigg and Elosser died.  He noted that there was a small crack in the glass of a gas stove in the room.  He also saw that when all the doors and windows were closed--as they had been when couple died—the parlor had very little air circulation.  He theorized that the couple had died of carbon monoxide poisoning, and he decided to try an experiment.  He placed a cat in the parlor, made sure all the doors and windows were shut, and left the animal there overnight.

By the time he returned the next morning, the cat was dead.  An autopsy found that an accumulation of leaking gas had killed it.  A second cat was left in the room overnight.  This cat also died.  Littlefield pointed out that certain foods create hydrocyanic acid in the stomach, meaning that the traces of "poison" found in Twigg and Elosser's system could have come from natural causes.  The couple's bodies were exhumed, and the subsequent autopsy established that they had indeed died from carbon monoxide, the result of the flue of the parlor stove being choked with an over-accumulation of soot.  He felt that he had proved their deaths were simply a catastrophic accident.

Many townspeople, still stubbornly convinced of May Elosser's guilt, refused to accept that the tragedy could have such a prosaic explanation.  However, in 1913, two women living in the Elosser home were found unconscious from carbon monoxide poisoning in that same parlor.  Fortunately, they were found in time to revive them.  Examination showed that they too had allowed the flue to become choked with soot.

It looked like Littlefield had been vindicated--no one had been murdered, after all.

Except those poor cats, of course.

Accident, Suicide, or Murder? The Aeileen Conway Riddle

When someone is suddenly, inexplicably murdered, such cases can be very difficult to solve.  When law enforcement is unable to decide if a person’s violent death is a result of murder, accident, or even suicide, you generally have a mystery where finding a solution is virtually impossible.  Such was the tragic case of a seemingly normal housewife.

Fifty-year-old Aeileen Conway lived with her husband of 33 years, Pat, in Lawton, Oklahoma.  Although there is little public information about her personal life, she appeared to have led a quiet, ordinary, peaceable existence, which ended in an extremely shocking way on April 29, 1986.

On that day, a farmer working in his fields just outside of Lawton saw smoke coming from a nearby road.  He notified police, and about twenty minutes later, Oklahoma Highway Patrol officers arrived at the scene.  It was a remote, lonely road that for years had seen little activity.  The officers found that the source of the smoke was a car crashed inside a deserted bridge.  The vehicle was burning so fiercely that it had fused with the metal guardrail.  The officers saw that a body was inside the car, although it proved to be burned beyond recognition.  Skid marks on the road indicated that the car had been going 50 to 60 miles an hour when it smashed into the bridge.  The officers assumed that what they were dealing with was a gruesome, but unremarkable accident.

It was soon learned that the car was registered to Pat Conway, and by the next day, the body was identified as his wife Aeileen.  Case closed?  Not as far as Pat was concerned.  He insisted that some sort of foul play had led to his wife’s brutal death.  He pointed out that when he returned home from work on the day Aeileen died, he found their house in a state of rather sinister disorder.  Aeileen’s purse containing her driver’s license and eyeglasses, which she always carried whenever she left the house, was still there.  A garden hose was on, running water into their swimming pool.  The ironing board was set up, with the iron still on.  A bathtub was full of water, and their phone was off the hook, as though Aeileen had been interrupted while trying to make a call.  Some jewelry was missing from the house.  To Pat and his children, this all screamed that Aeileen’s death was no simple accident.

Pat and Ray Anderson, an investigator from the District Attorney’s office, went to the crash site to conduct their own inquiry.  They found a church bulletin on the ground some distance from the scene.  Pat identified it as one that Aeileen kept on her car’s dashboard.  However, his wife always drove with the windows rolled up, so the bulletin could not have flown out of the car.  To Pat and Ray Anderson, this indicated that the car had been stopped.  They theorized that some unknown person had abducted Aeileen from her house and killed her.  The assailant then drove to the crash site, set the accelerator, put it into drive, and fled, hoping that Aeileen’s death would be dismissed as an accident.  

Anderson’s findings were able to persuade authorities to reclassify Aeileen’s death from “accident” to “unexplained,” particularly since the Oklahoma State Fire Marshall could not rule out arson as the cause of the car catching on fire.  He noted that the car was so destroyed by the blaze, it seemed likely that some accelerant was used.  Additionally, the gas cap was missing.  In most cases where a car burns as a result of arson, the cap was removed.

Unfortunately, the investigation into Aeileen’s death virtually ended there.  Law enforcement agreed that it was very possible that Mrs. Conway had been murdered, but who the killer could have been, and why he/she would want Aeileen dead, were questions nobody was able to answer.

Until his death in 2013, Pat Conway devoted his life to trying to solve the mystery of his wife’s horrifying death.  However, although many theories have been proposed, ranging from burglary-gone-wrong to suicide to “it was an accident after all,” we will probably never know for certain just how Aeileen Conway’s seemingly normal day around the house came to such an abruptly violent end.  This is one of those rare cases where it’s been impossible for anyone to stitch all the known facts together into a completely coherent scenario.

The Weird Death of Joan Norkot

Sir John Maynard (d. 1690) had a long and distinguished career as a lawyer, serjeant-at-arms, and Member of Parliament.  Shortly after his death, discovered among his papers was his account of an unusually eerie and puzzling murder case from Hereford, England, in 1629.  The manuscript evidently languished in obscurity until it was eventually published in the “Gentleman’s Magazine” for July 1851.  It reads like one of the more supernatural-tinged episodes of “Midsomer Murders,” but with an unsatisfactorily enigmatic ending.  Joan Norkot’s death may have been officially “Case Closed,” but it could hardly be called “Case Resolved.”

I write the evidence which was given, which I and many others heard, and I write it exactly according to what was deposed at the Trial at the Bar in the King's Bench. Johan Norkot, the wife of Arthur Norkot, being murdered, the question arose how she came by her death. The coroner's inquest on view of the body and deposition of Mary Norkot, John Okeman and Agnes, his wife, inclined to find Joan Norkot felo de se: for they (i.e. the witnesses before mentioned) informed the coroner and the jury that she was found dead in the bed and her throat cut, the knife sticking in the floor of the room; that the night before she was so found she went to bed with her child (now plaintiff in this appeal), her husband being absent, and that no other person after such time as she was gone to bed came into the house, the examinants lying in the outer room, and they must needs have seen if any stranger had come in. Whereupon the jury gave up to the coroner their verdict that she was felo de se. But afterwards upon rumour in the neighbourhood, and the observation of divers circumstances that manifested she did not, nor according to these circumstances, possibly could, murder herself, thereupon the jury, whose verdict was not drawn into form by the coroner, desired the coroner that the body which was buried might be taken up out of the grave, which the coroner assented to, and thirty days after her death she was taken up, in the presence of the jury and a great number of the people, whereupon the jury changed their verdict. The persons being tried at Hertford Assizes were acquitted, but so much against the evidence that the judge (Harvy) let fall his opinion that it were better an appeal were brought than so foul a murder should escape unpunished.

Anno, paschæ termino, quarto Caroli, [In the year, at the end of Easter, of the fourth year of Charles] they were tried on the appeal which was brought by the young child against his father, the grandfather and aunt, and her husband Okeman. And because the evidence was so strange I took exact and particular notes of it, which was as followeth, of the matters above mentioned and related, an ancient and grave person, the minister of the parish where the fact was committed, being sworn to give evidence according to custom, deposed, that the body being taken out of the grave thirty days after the party's death and lying on the grave and the four defendants present, they were required each of them to touch the dead body. O.'s wife fell on her knees and prayed God to show token of their innocency, or to some such purpose, but her very words I forget. The appellers did touch the dead body, whereupon the brow of the dead, which was all a livid or carrion colour (that was the verbal expression in the terms of the witness) began to have a dew or gentle sweat, which reached down in drops on the face, and the brow turned and changed to a lively and fresh colour, and the dead opened one of her eyes and shut it again, and this opening the eye was done three several times. She likewise thrust out the ring or marriage finger three times and pulled it in again, and the finger dropt blood from it on the grass.

Hyde (Nicholas), Chief Justice, seeming to doubt the evidence, asked the witness : "Who saw this beside yourself?"

Witness: "I cannot swear that others saw it; but, my lord," said he, “I believe the whole company saw it, and if it had been thought a doubt, proof would have been made of it, and many would have attested with me."

Then the witness observing some admiration in the auditors, he spoke further,

"My lord, I am minister of the parish, long knew all the parties, but never had any occasion of displeasure against any of them, nor had to do with them, or they with me, but as their minister. The thing was wonderful to me, but I have no interest in the matter, but am called upon to testify the truth and that I have done."

This witness was a reverend person as I guess about seventy years of age. His testimony was delivered gravely and temperately, but to the good admiration of the auditor. Whereupon, applying himself to the Lord Chief Justice, he said, "My lord, my brother here present is minister of the next parish adjacent, and I am assured saw all done as I have affirmed," whereupon that person was also sworn to give evidence, and he deposed the same in every point, viz., the sweat of the brow, the changes of its colour, the opening of the eye, the thrice motion of the finger and drawing it in again; only the first witness deposed that a man dipped his finger in the blood to examine it, and swore he believed it was real blood. I conferred afterwards with Sir Edmund Vowel, barrister at law, and others who concurred in this observation, and for myself, if I were upon my oath, can depose that these depositions, especially of the first witness, are truly here reported in substance.

The other evidence was given against the prisoners, viz., against the grandmother of the plaintiff and against Okeman and his wife, that they lay in the next room to the dead person that night, and that none came into the house till they found her dead next morning, therefore if she did not murther herself, they must be the murtherers, and to that end further proof was made. First she lay in a composed manner in her bed, the bed cloaths nothing at all disturbed, and her child by her in the bed. Secondly, her throat was cut from ear to ear and her neck broken, and if she first cut her throat, she could not break her neck in the bed, nor e contra. Thirdly, there was no blood in the bed, saving that there was a tincture of blood upon the bolster whereupon her head lay, but no other substance of blood at all. Fourthly, from the bed's head on there was a stream of blood on the floor, till it ponded on the bending of the floor to a very great quantity and there was also another stream of blood on the floor at the bed's feet, which ponded also on the floor to another great quantity but no other communication of blood on either of these places, the one from the other, neither upon the bed, so that she bled in two places severely, and it was deposed that turning up the matte of the bed, there were clotes of congealed blood in the straw of the matte underneath. Fifthly, the bloody knife in the morning was found clinging in the floor a good distance from the bed, but the point of the knife as it stuck in the floor was towards the bed and the haft towards the door. Sixthly, lastly, there was the brand of a thumb and four fingers of a left hand on the dead person's left hand.

Hyde, Chief Justice: "How can you know the print of a left hand from the print of a right hand in such a case?"

Witness: "My lord, it is hard to describe it, but if it please the honourable judge (i.e. the judge sitting on the bench beside the Chief Justice) to put his left hand on your left hand, you cannot possibly place your right hand in the same posture."

It being done, and appearing so, the defendants had time to make their defence, but gave no evidence to that purpose.

The jury departing from the bar and returning, acquitted Okeman and found the other three guilty; who, being severally demanded why judgment should not be pronounced, sayd nothing, but each of them said, "I did not do it." "I did not do it." Judgment was made and the grandmother and the husband executed, but the aunt had the privilege to be spared execution, being with child. I enquired if they confessed anything at execution, but did not as I was told.

The Body in the Mine Shaft and a Strange Miscarriage of Justice

This week, we look at the case of a murder victim who turned out to not be a murder victim.  Even though a murder had definitely been committed.  Throw in a murderer who turned out to not be a murderer, and about all you can say is that Life Gets Complicated.

In January 1925, a 31-year-old man named Condy Dabney left his home in Coal Creek, Tennessee to look for work.  His wife and two children stayed behind in Coal Creek until he was able to resettle.  Fortunately, he found employment in a mine near Coxton, Kentucky.  He impressed everyone as a quiet, amiable, law-abiding man.

Soon after Dabney arrived in Coxton, a 16-year-old girl named Roxy Baker disappeared, under circumstances considered mysterious enough for a Grand Jury to be called in.  Just before the jurors met, three Coxton men also inexplicably vanished.  The Grand Jury found nothing connecting the four disappearances, but they were unable to come to any conclusions about Coxton’s sudden depopulation.

In early July, Dabney gave up his mining job to start a taxi service.  A month later, Coxton was rocked by further disappearing acts:  Two married women and a 14-year-old girl named Mary Vickery.  Although no clue was ever found about the whereabouts of the adult women, two Coxton men--William Middleton and Condy Dabney--had been seen taking Mary for automobile rides, which made them the obvious--indeed, only--suspects in her disappearance.  However, the Grand Jury was unable to find any other incriminating evidence against the men, so they were released from custody.

In September, Dabney heard that one of his children was sick, so he left Coxton to find work closer to home.  The following month, United States Marshal Adrian Metcalf got a tip that an illegal still was operating in an abandoned mine shaft on Ivy Hill, just outside of Coxton, so he went to investigate.

In the course of his search, he found something far worse than moonshine.  In yet another abandoned shaft, he found some women’s clothing and an ominous-looking pile of stones.  He brought in some backup, and the men began digging.  Before long, they unearthed a body.  The corpse was too decomposed to allow identification to be possible, but they believed it was of a girl in her early teens.  This led to the obvious presumption that these were the remains of the still-missing Mary Vickery.  Townspeople--particularly a young woman named Marie Jackson--immediately began gossiping that Condy Dabney was responsible for the girl’s murder.  The stories told about Dabney were considered damming enough for authorities to visit his home in Coal Creek to question him, but apparently he was able to convince them of his innocence.  Unfortunately for him, the Grand Jury felt otherwise.  On March 18, 1926, they returned an indictment charging Dabney with Mary Vickery’s murder.

At Dabney’s trial, Mary’s father testified that he was certain the body found in the old shaft was that of his daughter, largely on the basis of a ring he found in the shaft after the corpse was discovered.  He also claimed that a stocking found at the scene was identical to one Mary owned, and that the “sandy like and bobbed” hair on the corpse matched that of his daughter.  On cross-examination, Vickery stated that Mary had never run away from home before, and denied rumors that she had a bad relationship with her stepmother.  Defense lawyers got Vickery to admit that he had not attended the corpse’s funeral, and allowed the county to take charge of the burial.  When asked about this seeming neglect, he hesitated, which caused Dabney’s attorney, G.G. Rawlings, to declare, “You did not know that was your girl, that is what you started to say, wasn’t it?”

“At the present time I wasn’t perfectly sure,” Vickery admitted.

It turned out that there was a great deal of confusion about the body’s identity.  Witnesses were produced who testified to Vickery’s uncertainty about whether the corpse was Mary’s or not.  Nobody could agree on the color of the corpse’s hair--some described it as brown and fine, others said it was black and coarse.

The chief witness against Dabney was Marie Jackson.  She testified that on the morning that Mary disappeared, she and Mary hailed a ride from Dabney’s taxi.  He drove them to a Coxton restaurant, where Marie got out.  Dabney drove off with Mary still in his car.  Dabney and Mary came back at about 1 p.m., after which the trio drove out to Ivy Hill.  They got out of the car and sat in a clearing, where they talked for a while.  Then Dabney asked Marie to go off behind the hill for a while, so he could talk to Mary alone.  Marie claimed that she obeyed, although she could still see the two of them.  According to Marie, she saw Dabney embrace Mary.  When the girl objected, Dabney repeatedly beat her with a stick.  After the attack, Dabney walked over to Marie, warning her that if she ever told a soul about what she had seen, he would “burn her at the stake.”  As she fled, she saw Dabney carrying Mary’s body into the mine shaft.  Curiously, she willingly got another ride from Dabney the following day.  The topic of Mary’s murder, she said, never came up.

Three young women--two sisters named Stewart and a “Miss Smith”--testified that on the afternoon of Mary’s disappearance, the Stewart sisters and Mary were walking along a road, when Dabney drove by, offering them a lift. They declined, but after they were joined by William Middleton and one Otis King, the three girls rode with them for a short time, after which the Stewarts left, leaving Mary in the car with Middleton and King.  These two men substantiated this story.  All this took place between two and four p.m., which contradicted Marie Jackson’s claim that she had been with Mary and Dabney on Ivy Hill from one p.m. until dusk.

The state brought out a “jailhouse witness”--one Claude Scott, who had been imprisoned with Dabney for a short time before the trial.  He was an old friend of Marie Jackson.  He claimed that he had given Marie a letter from Dabney, and that Dabney had offered him fifteen dollars to testify in his favor.  Claude said that Dabney “tried to make me remember stuff that Marie Jackson should have said through that window to me; while he was sitting there he tried to make me remember stuff I never heard her say and she never said to me.”

When Dabney himself took the stand, he stated that he did not remember ever having Mary Vickery in his taxi, although he admitted that it might have happened, as he often gave rides to people he did not know.  He did, however, occasionally taxi Marie Jackson.  He declared that he had never been on Ivy Hill, and had no idea in the world what had happened to Mary Vickery.

Unfortunately for Dabney, the jurors obviously found Marie Jackson’s lurid tale more convincing than his protestations of innocence.  On March 31, 1926, they delivered a guilty verdict, with a recommendation for life imprisonment.  Dabney faced the prospect of spending the rest of his days doing hard labor at the state penitentiary in Frankfort.

Dabney’s lawyer immediately appealed the verdict.  While the appeal was still pending, a policeman named George Davis checked into a hotel in Williamsburg, Kentucky.  He happened to notice the name “Mary Vickery” on the register.  The name rang a bell with him, although he could not remember why.  When he asked hotel workers about it, he learned that someone by that name had once lived in the hotel, but she went across the Cumberland River to visit friends.  Davis--who had, by then, remembered that Mary Vickery was supposed to be dead--managed to track her down.

Marie Jackson

Mary told him that she had left Coxton on August 23, 1925, because she couldn’t get on with her stepmother.  She took a taxi to the train station.  The driver was a stranger, but the description she gave of him matched that of Dabney.  She said she didn’t even know Marie Jackson.  Mary went to various cities, finally settling in Cincinnati, where she worked in a woolen mill.  She admitted that while there, she heard that a man had been convicted of her murder.  When asked why she hadn’t let anyone know that she was very much alive, Mary replied, “I just never thought about that.”

After Mary was persuaded to return to Coxton, embarrassed officials immediately pardoned Dabney, and appointed a special prosecutor, G.J. Jarvis, to investigate Marie Jackson.  The young woman obviously had some explaining to do.  Despite this official inquiry, it remains uncertain why Marie was so eager to ruin an innocent man’s life.  Jarvis was of the opinion that she concocted her testimony to get the $500 reward that had been offered for information about Mary’s disappearance.  However, Dabney himself said that Marie had accused him of murder out of revenge because “I refused to desert my family for her.”  In any case, Marie was convicted of perjury on March 27, 1927.  Coincidentally enough, on that very same day Mary Vickery was married to a C.E. Dempsey.

After this coda, everyone involved went on with their lives, leaving behind one rather obvious question:  Who was the body in the mine shaft, and who killed her?   It was speculated that the corpse was that of a young woman named Leslie (or Letitia) Cole, who vanished around the same time as Mary Vickery.  Interestingly, Mrs. Cole’s estranged husband Carlo was said to have been romantically involved with none other than Marie Jackson.

It is possible that Marie knew much more about this unsolved murder than she ever let on.

The Questionable Death of Walter Huntington

"Flint Journal," May 11, 1929, via Newspapers.com

Around eleven o’clock on the night of May 7, 1929, a wealthy twenty-one year old Harvard student named Walter Treadway Huntington left his family’s mansion in Windsor, Connecticut to buy cigarettes.  He never returned.

Early the next morning, a laborer found his body in a swampy field about a mile and a half from his home.  He had been shot through the head, but the gun that killed him was never found.  The circumstances of his death remained a matter of dispute.  The Medical Examiner, after some wrangling, finally ruled that Huntington’s death was a homicide.  The Chief of Police, however, insisted the young man had killed himself, and his will prevailed.  The case was officially closed.

The site where Huntington's body was found.

There is a peculiar postscript to Huntington’s mysterious death.  Every year until 1952, an unknown man would call or write the “Bridgeport [CT] Herald” to say that the young man had been murdered.  According to this source, Huntington had been beaten, then shot in the center of town, after which his body was dumped where it had been found.  “Look for a girl in the village,” the informant said.  “Why was the case closed as suicide after two weeks?” he asked rhetorically, hinting that organized crime was somehow involved.

There were many other unexplained oddities about his death.  Huntington had left Harvard on a Saturday night, but he did not reach his family home until Sunday evening.  Where was he all that time?  When his body was found, it was still warm, indicating that he had been alive for a few hours after he left home.  Again, what was he doing during this gap in the timeline?  Yet another puzzle is the fact that no fewer than six handkerchiefs, including one that appeared to belong to a woman, were found in his clothing.  If it was suicide, where was the gun?  Why were there no powder burns around his fatal wound?  How to explain the fact that just before his death, he had been given a black eye?  Why did Huntington’s family completely clear out his room at Harvard before it could be searched by the police?

Rumor provided no shortage of possible motives for murder.  According to local talk, Huntington’s widowed mother had become romantically involved with her chauffeur, a liaison to which her son strongly objected.  Could that have been a reason to kill him?  Alternatively, did the victim’s own love life lead to his death?  There was reason to believe that during his time in Boston, he became mixed up with women of “questionable character.”  However, no evidence was ever made public linking any of them to his demise.  Although this is one of those cases where the authorities undoubtedly knew more than they ever revealed, for the rest of us, Walter Huntington’s death remains an enigma.

“This is the perfect crime,” wrote the anonymous informant.  He was quite right.

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.

The Enigmatic Death of a Diplomat

On June 14, 1904, Kent Loomis, the brother of Assistant Secretary of State Francis R. Loomis, sailed from New York aboard the Kaiser Wilhelm II.  His mission was to travel to Addis Ababa in order to deliver an important trade treaty between the United States and the Ethiopian King Menelik.  This treaty had, for some time, been a matter of intense interest among the European powers.  His traveling companion was a wealthy, flamboyant entrepreneur named William H. Ellis.  Ellis was a frequent visitor to Ethiopia, and had campaigned to be given this mission himself, but the State Department declined to entrust him with the task.  This was a bitter disappointment for Ellis.  He had hoped to use delivery of the treaty as a signal to King Menelik that Ellis had the backing of the American government in his various ambitious business ventures in Ethiopia.  There are even suggestions that he hoped Menelik would appoint him as heir to his throne.

Loomis never made it to his destination.  Sometime on June 20th, he vanished from the ship.  There was conflicting evidence for what had happened to him.  Soon after he disappeared, the Kaiser Wilhelm made a stop at Plymouth, England.  One passenger swore later that he saw a dazed-looking Loomis go ashore at that time.  The captain and head steward, however, were equally positive that Loomis could not have disembarked.  Ellis claimed that Loomis had been drinking heavily during the voyage, and had an unfortunate habit of sitting precariously on the ship’s railings.  (This was not corroborated by any of the other passengers.)  Ellis expressed his opinion that his cabin-mate, while in a state of intoxication, had accidentally fallen overboard.  A further oddity was when it was noted that the tags on Loomis’ luggage had all been altered.  They showed the initial “E” instead of “L,” and the first name had been erased.  In Loomis’ mysterious absence, Ellis was given possession of the treaty, enabling him to complete the diplomatic mission after all.

Loomis’ whereabouts remained a complete mystery until a month later, when his body was found washed up on a beach fifteen miles from Plymouth, with an ugly wound on the back of his skull.  An autopsy found that this blow on the head had killed Loomis before he entered the water, but they were uncertain whether this injury came from an attack, or from striking his head on some part of the ship’s ironwork when he fell overboard.

The mystery of Loomis’ death has remained unsolved.  Ellis died in 1923 in Mexico City.  His obituary in Time magazine called him “one of the most remarkable men who ever acted as agent for the State Department.”

One certainly cannot argue that.

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.

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.

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.

Fake Telegrams and a Genuine Death: The Elizabeth Cook Mystery

In February 1932, a twenty-year-old Bostonian named Elizabeth Barrett Cook was sailing in the steamer Chinese Prince from Naples to Gibraltar.  However, when she received a cablegram from a Helen James, announcing the death of Cook’s fiancé, St. George Arnold, the young woman naturally planned to head home as soon as possible, although the message, rather oddly, told her “on no account” to return to America.

She never made it.  Soon after she received the tragic news, she fell ill, and soon afterward was found dead in her cabin, with the cable lying beside her.

And here the story turns from mere tragedy to dizzying insanity.  It soon transpired that the cable was a hoax.  No one in the Cook family had ever heard of any “Helen James.”  And Mr. Arnold was alive and in perfect health.  It was also discovered that this was not the first time Miss Cook had been the target of such a cruel stunt.  Found among her papers was another cable she had received the previous June, alerting her to the serious illness of her mother.  That statement had been another ghoulish fiction.

How did this young woman die so suddenly, you may be wondering?  Good question.  Some reports said traces of a sleeping drug were found in her system, indicating either accidental or deliberate overdose.  Other reports discount this, saying she died of pneumonia.  An autopsy was performed, but it was unable to show the cause of Cook's death.  However, no sign of drugs were found in her organs.

Who sent the sadistic “joke” cablegrams?  You tell me.  A theory was floated at the time that, out of a peculiar sense for the dramatic, Miss Cook sent the messages to herself.  The Boston Post ran a story alleging that on a previous cruise, Cook had sent herself a fake telegram announcing the death of her mythical sweetheart, “Malcolm,” after which she staged a melodramatic scene threatening suicide.  

Many people are fond of hoaxing others, but hoaxing yourself would be something of a first.  

"Sheboygan Press," February 24, 1932, via Newspapers.com

The “Post” alluded to reports that sleeping pills had been found in her cabin, and hinted that Cook had used them to stage what she intended to be a fake suicide attempt that, unfortunately, proved to be more realistic than she had expected.  According to one story, it was discovered that the bogus messages were not cablegrams, but telegrams that had been sent from Italy, which suggested she had sent them from Naples just before boarding the “Chinese Prince.”  However, as far as I can tell this was never corroborated.  Having only the conflicting contemporary news stories to go by, it is hard to tell how much of what they printed was solid fact or fanciful fiction.

An intriguing detail was that it was well-known that Cook was an heiress.  The very next year, she was due to receive two legacies that would have made her an extremely wealthy young woman.  It was never made clear who would receive this money in the event of her death.  It is impossible to tell what, if any, connection this had to her strange demise.

If there was any solid resolution to this peculiar case, it evidently was never disclosed.

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

It's "Mini Mysteries" time again, where I present an intriguing crime case from the past that doesn't provide enough information for a full blog post.  The "Richmond Palladium-Item," April 21, 1910:

Hagerstown, Ind., April 21. Interest has been revived in an unsolved murder mystery by the discovery of a sign nailed to a telephone post near the place where the body of an unidentified man was found six years ago. 

The sign reads: "The man who was found dead in these woods six years ago was murdered in the Hindman Hotel." Another sign has been added, reading: "It won't do any good to tear this sign down, as it will be put back as often as it is torn down." Six years ago a body was found in a woods west of town and near the German Baptist church. It was so badly decomposed that identification was impossible. It was presumed by the coroner that death had resulted from a bullet wound in the head. The Hindman hotel was operated by Mr. and Mrs. Arch Hindman at the time the murder is alleged to have occurred there and the citizens of Hagerstown think they do not know anything about the case and that the posting of the signs is a hoax. The authorities are investigating.

The signs found on the telephone post near the German-Baptist church, west of Hagerstown, recalls one of the most mysterious murder cases in the criminal history of Indiana. The authorities have never been able to identify the victim, learn who his slayer was, or why the crime was committed.

The man, so the records of former coroner, Dr. S. C. Markley show, had been dead at least five months before the body was accidentally discovered by a young farmer's boy. Before the grewsome discovery people in the neighborhood had complained of an offensive odor.

It is thought that the man was shot, but the authorities were never able to substantiate this theory. The man's body, at his back near the spine, showed a puncture the size of a bean, but probes made for the bullet were fruitless. The outer shirt and the undershirt worn by the man were also punctured, but his coat had no hole in it.

When the body was found the flesh on the skull had nearly all dropped off.  There was one small patch of black hair remaining. The man apparently weighed about 135 pounds but owing to the badly decomposed condition of the body, his color or nationality could not be ascertained. He wore a dark suit of clothes. 

Deputy Prosecutor Sells at Hagerstown this morning stated he had inspected the signs and would make an investigation of the case but that he had no hopes of unraveling the mystery. He said that in his opinion the signs had been posted by some enemies of Mr. Hindman, one of the most respected citizens of Hagerstown and who, for years, managed the Hindman house. He said that Mr. Hindman was positive that no murder had ever been committed in his hotel. Mr. Hindman has also inspected the signs. 

From the coroner's report it is learned that the only papers found on the murdered man's person were some lottery tickets on a hotel in Florence, Italy, and a couple of letters which offered no clue as to the identity of the man on whom they were found. 

As far as I can tell, that was the last word on the mystery.