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 sinister little ghost story--with hints of murder and spectral vengeance thrown in--appeared in the “Garnett-Journal Plaindealer,” May 6, 1887:

New York, May 2. A New Haven, Conn., special says: Charles L. Beecher, who committed suicide Sunday, is now believed by many to have been driven to his death by a belief that he was haunted by the ghost of his wife.  The fact that he took so much pains in preparing for his death is thought to indicate that his mind had given way. He first shot his pet dog, and then seated himself in an easy chair and took aim through the medium of a hand-mirror, and put a bullet through his head. He had previously told some of his neighbors that he could not live in the house, owing to the frequent appearance of the spirit of his wife, who died about three months ago. He said her figure, increased to twice its natural size, appeared to him on the wall of his room very often.

The vision always seemed to be carrying a baby in its arms, and this, he said, was the figure of an infant that his wife had lost. Corroboration of the ghost story was given by a 16-year-old girl named Collar, who lives in the house adjoining the one occupied by Beecher. This girl, together with a servant employed in the house of L.L. Camp, nearby, went into Beecher's house one evening at his invitation to see the ghost.

Miss Collar says that a huge figure like a shadow did appear on the wall, carrying a babe in its arms. Beecher sat in his chair and pointed to the apparition, exclaiming: "There she is; there's my wife!" Miss Collar says that she ran up to the wall and slapped the vision, but when she did so it moved off to another portion of the wall, and when she repeated the slapping operation the same thing took place. The servant girl who was with her says that she, too, saw the figure. Beecher has been seen moving things out of the house of late. Some say that he did not treat his wife well toward the end of her life.

When she died one of the neighbors went to Medical Examiner White and told him the case would bear investigation, but nothing ever came of it. Beecher was once a very well-to-do boot and shoe dealer here.

Fatal Circumstances: The Shaw Tragedy

The former site for executions at Leith Walk, as it looked in the 1960s

Circumstantial evidence is defined as “indirect evidence that does not, on its face, prove a fact in issue but gives rise to a logical inference that the fact exists.”  It can be extraordinarily convincing to a jury.  After all, so-called “direct evidence,” such as eyewitness testimony, is often incorrect.  But a series of facts which all appear to lead to just one conclusion can be very hard to argue against.  However, a once-notorious murder case taught a valuable lesson: the most obvious solution to a crime is not always the correct one.

In 1721, an upholsterer named William Shaw and his daughter Catherine lived in a tenement flat in Edinburgh, Scotland.  Unfortunately, their little household was far from happy.  Catherine wished to marry a jeweler named John Lawson.  However, William was vehemently opposed to the match.  He believed Lawson was a dissipated wretch who would inevitably make his daughter’s life miserable.  His chosen suitor for Catherine was a young man named Alexander Robertson, the son of a close friend of William’s.  When Catherine stubbornly continued to see Lawson, William confined her to their flat.  Neighbors in their crowded apartment building often heard the two bitterly quarreling over the matter.

One evening, a man named James Morrison, who lived next to the Shaws, heard father and daughter having one of their rows.  Although he could not hear the entire conversation (despite his obvious best efforts to eavesdrop) Morrison heard Catherine spitting out the words, “barbarity,” “cruelty,” and “death.”  Some time later, William stalked out, locking the door after him.  For a while, a welcome silence reigned.  Then, Morrison thought he heard groans coming from the Shaw flat.  Frightened by the thought of what might be going on, Morrison gathered together some neighbors, and they all cautiously approached the Shaw door.  They heard Catherine moan, “Cruel father, thou art the cause of my death.”

The crowd instantly broke the door down.  They found Catherine lying in a pool of blood, with a knife by her side.  The young woman was dying and unable to speak, but when asked if her father had truly been responsible for her injuries, it was thought that she nodded her head.  And then she died.

William arrived home right at this very inopportune moment.  When he saw his daughter lying lifeless, surrounded by the group of neighbors (as well as a constable who had just joined the scene,) he nearly fainted.  The officer instantly placed him under arrest.  Everyone present was interested to note that William’s shirt bore some blood stains, which he lamely explained were from wounds he had recently suffered.

William’s trial for murder was a mere formality.  All the circumstances stated above, including what appeared to be a deathbed accusation from the victim, made his guilty verdict a foregone conclusion.  He was hanged in November 1721.  William’s last words before being dispatched into eternity were, “I am innocent of my daughter’s murder.”  His body was left hanging in chains in Leith Walk.

Edinburghers shrugged.  They all say they didn’t do it, don’t they?

Life went on, and the regrettable matter was soon forgotten.  But not for long.  In August 1722, the man living in what had been the Shaw apartment was doing some light repair work in the room where Catherine had died.  While doing so, he discovered a folded paper that had become wedged into a small cavity on the side of the chimney.  It was a letter reading:  

“Barbarous father, your cruelty in having put it out of my power ever to join my fate to that of the only man I could love, and tyrannically insisting upon my marrying one whom I always hated, has made me form a resolution to put an end to my existence which has now become a burden to me.  I doubt not I shall find mercy in another world; for sure no benevolent being can require that I should any longer live in torment to myself in this!  My death I lay to your charge; when you read this consider yourself as the inhuman wretch that plunged the knife into the bosom of the unhappy--Catherine Shaw.”

Well.  

Friends and relatives of Catherine’s confirmed the handwriting was hers.  The magistrates of Edinburgh, having satisfied themselves of the letter’s authenticity, did what little they could to remedy their embarrassing situation.  William’s body--or whatever was left of it by this time--was removed from the gibbet and given to his family for a proper burial.  Over his grave was placed a banner proclaiming his innocence.  And for many years afterward, criminal defense attorneys recited the Shaw case to juries, as an example of the dangers of placing implicit trust in circumstantial evidence.

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

Sometimes, the briefest ghost stories are the most unsettling ones.  The “Evansville Journal,” March 11, 1873:

A Lebanon Ky. correspondent of the Courier-Journal of the 6th solemnly assures us as follows: 

It is currently reported that Marion is delighting herself and the adjoining counties with the unusual sensation of the appearance of a ghost or a something which none of the "ologies” in these parts has so far satisfactorily explained. 

Our readers will remember the appearance in print some three months ago of the death of Bland Ballard of that county, who committed suicide three days previous to the one that he should have married a Miss Rhodes of the same neighborhood. 

The alleged cause of his self-destruction at the time was his father’s opposition to his marriage. For a time after his burial his remains appeared to rest quietly in the grave, but of late he has made frequent visits to the paternal mansion, at each time of which he was recognized by his father, brother, and sister. 

He comes at night and brings with him a light by which he is distinguished and recognized. He familiarly opens the door, proceeds to his former room, and while there employs himself in rummaging through his trunk. His father has spoken to him, but so far has failed to elicit an answer. He makes no attempt to molest anyone. Of course there are many incredible rumors afloat in regard to it, and hence many speculations.  Of the latter, one is that Thomas Ballard’s farm being a desirable one, some wily speculator has taken this means of personating the son to compel the unhappy father to dispose it at a sacrifice.  Others place it among the occurrences which no one can satisfactorily explain.

I was unable to find any more about this story, so I have no idea for how long young Ballard continued to visit his earthly home--or, for that matter, what he was looking for in that trunk.

Mystery At the Savoy Hotel

In 1902, an Irish-born barrister named Cecil Lincoln built a sprawling hotel in the hills above Mussoorie, India, which he named “the Savoy.” Its flamboyant Edwardian elegance soon made it one of “the” stops for travelers wealthy enough to afford such in-your-face opulence.  The Savoy was also highly popular among British expats seeking a refuge from the heat, dust, and noise of the crowded towns below.  So many authors frequented the hotel that its bar became known as the “Writer’s bar.”  The Savoy would have been the ideal setting for an Agatha Christie tale of mysterious murder among the jet-set.

And according to some, it was.

In the summer of 1911, a 49-year-old Englishwoman named Frances Garnett-Orme came to the Savoy, along with a companion, Eva Mountstephen.  Garnett-Orme had been engaged to a British Army officer who died before the wedding.  This tragedy led her to become deeply involved in spiritualism (in those days, a fashionable form of self-therapy among the bereaved.)  She and Mountstephen spent most of their time at the Savoy holed up in their rooms, crystal-gazing, holding seances, and the other usual activities done to contact the dearly departed.

On September 12th, 1911, Mountstephen left for Lucknow on what she described as “urgent” business.  On the morning of September 19th, Garnett-Orme was found lying on her bed.  Sometime during the night, she had joined the dead souls she had been so anxious to contact.  An empty glass was on the nightstand near her bed.  All the doors and windows were locked from inside, and there were no other signs of any disorder.  The autopsy revealed she had died from a considerable dose of prussic acid.

Suicide does not seem to have been seriously considered.  The dead woman had been in good spirits, and was making various plans for her future.  Authorities believed Garnett-Orme was murdered, and the obvious chief suspect was the dead woman’s companion.  When a woman suddenly skips town soon before her dear friend dies an unnatural death, people will talk.

Mountstephen was easily traced to Lucknow, where she was put under arrest.  She was accused of poisoning the bottle of medicine Garnett-Orme sometimes took for stomach upsets.  Unfortunately for the prosecution, aside from the suspicious nature of it all, there was no conclusive evidence against Mountstephen.  The defense argued that the victim’s spiritualistic experiments had convinced her she had not long to live, leading her to commit suicide.  Given the vague nature of the case, the court had no choice but to return an acquittal.  In another odd turn of events, the doctor who performed the autopsy on Garnett-Orme died of strychnine poisoning just a few months later.  His murder was never solved.  As for the late Miss Garnett-Orme, the Allahabad High Court declared that her death was murder done by person or persons unknown, and that was that.  Unsurprisingly, this pair of mystifying poisonings led to a drastic drop in the Savoy’s popularity for some months afterward.  There are also the inevitable accounts of Garnett-Orme’s ghost still haunting the hotel.

Back to Agatha Christie.  The Garnett-Orme mystery attracted the notice of Rudyard Kipling, who passed the story on to Arthur Conan Doyle.  Doyle, in his turn, shared the case with Christie, who, it was said, used it as inspiration for her first novel, “The Mysterious Affair at Styles.”  Personally, that last statement strikes me as folklore--aside from a woman being fatally poisoned, there is little resemblance between Christie’s novel and the Garnett-Orme case--but the alleged link has kept alive the memory of this enigmatic death.

[Note:  In 1912, Mountstephen applied for probate of her late friend’s will, which left her virtually all of Garnett-Orme's estate.  The trial--Garnett-Orme’s relatives contested her claim--elicited some curious details.  For instance, evidence was presented that Mountstephen had stolen money and jewelry from Garnett-Orme, as well as other wealthy acquaintances.  It was broadly hinted that she had planted the idea in Garnett-Orme’s mind that “the spirits” were saying Frances did not have long to live.  Most startling of all, there was testimony that shortly before Garnett-Orme’s death, a fellow guest at the Savoy went to the authorities declaring that Mountstephen intended to poison her “friend.”  Mountstephen’s application was dismissed on the grounds of “fraud and undue influence in connection with spiritualism and crystal-gazing,”  and Garnett-Orme’s brother was granted probate.]

The Curious Case of the (Allegedly) Murdered Maid

The Scottish-born James Oliphant worked as a surgeon in Newcastle.  In 1755, he married one Margaret Erskine, and the pair went on to have two children.  From all appearances, the family was one of solid 18th century middle-class respectability.

This seemingly ordinary household took a very dark turn in May of 1764.  One of Oliphant’s two maidservants unexpectedly became so ill she had to quit her job.  This sudden turn of events compelled the family to replace her with a young woman named Dinah Armstrong, even though the girl did not provide the usual “character.”  (What we today would call “references.”)

This turned out to be highly unfortunate for all concerned.  It soon emerged that the reason for Armstrong’s lack of “character” was due to her lack of character.  Just a few days before the Oliphants hired Armstrong, she had been dismissed from her previous position on suspicion of being a thief.  However, the Oliphants considered Armstrong’s denials of wrongdoing, as well as her “good countenance” to be sufficient to overlook her alleged transgression.

On June 5, James Oliphant and his wife went to visit relatives, leaving their children in the care of their friend Mrs. Milne, the wife of a Newcastle merchant.  Armstrong accompanied the children to act as their nurse.  When the Oliphants returned on July 10, Mrs. Milne informed them that three of her damask napkins had disappeared, and “from circumstances” she believed Armstrong had stolen them.  When questioned, the maid vigorously protested her innocence, but showed a suspicious reluctance to have her belongings searched.  When Mrs. Oliphant inspected Armstrong’s chest, she found no napkins, but a linen sheet marked with the initials “A.H.”  This proved to be the property of Armstrong’s former employer, Mrs. Heath.  When confronted, Armstrong admitted that she had stolen it, as well as some other items.

Mrs. Oliphant treated her errant maid with unusual mercy.  She told Armstrong that she could keep her position until “her quarter” had expired, and promised that she, Mrs. Oliphant, would put in a good word for her, if only Armstrong would return the napkins to Mrs. Milne.  However, the girl continued to insist that she had not taken anything of Mrs. Milne’s.

Mrs. Milne must have been a woman who dearly loved her napkins, because she now threatened to have Armstrong prosecuted, and urged the Oliphants to immediately dismiss the maid.  For whatever reason--whether through a sense of Christian charity, or a simple reluctance to go to the trouble of finding another servant--Mrs. Oliphant rejected the suggestion.  It occurred to her that if “some person of ingenuity” was to question the girl, Armstrong might be persuaded to admit guilt and turn over those napkins.  Accordingly, a neighbor of “great humanity” named John Green was called in on July 17 to have a chat with the girl.  Armstrong confessed to Green that she had indeed nicked Mrs. Heath’s sheet, but continued to insist she knew nothing about the napkins.  Green--no doubt with a deep sigh--asked her to think things over.  He told her he would return later in the day to see if she had a change of heart.

This story may well have ended very differently if only the Oliphant home had been on dry land.  Their residence was on the south end of Tyne Bridge.  Mr. Oliphant’s shop was on the ground floor, with the kitchen and parlor on the middle floor.  The family’s living quarters were on the top floor.  Underneath the shop were winding stairs leading to a cellar.  The cellar had a door cut into two parts: the upper part could be opened to receive air and light, while the under part was used to load or unload goods into or from the river Tyne.

At one p.m. on July 17, the Oliphants gathered for dinner in the parlor.  Dining with them was Mrs. Oliphant’s father and one Henry Thompson, a patient of Mr. Oliphant’s who had been living with them since the previous month.  Armstrong cooked the meal, while the other servant, Mary Shittleton, waited at the table.  Dinah was in a noticeably sulky mood, which is hardly surprising under the circumstances.

In the kitchen with Armstrong was a staymaker named Margaret French.  She was waiting for the Oliphant’s daughter to come home from school so she could have a fitting for a new pair of stays.  Mrs. French, “amusing herself at the window,” paid little attention to Armstrong, who could not have been a very cheerful companion at the moment.  When Shittleton came into the kitchen to fetch more food, she noticed that Armstrong was not there.  Mrs. French told her that she thought the girl had gone downstairs.

Shittleton called down the stairs.  Getting no reply, she went down to the shop.  Failing to find Armstrong there, she descended into the cellar.  As she went down the stairs, she saw reflected on the east wall of the cellar the shadow of a figure leaping from the lower half-door into the river.  As the tide was out, she heard, not a splash, but a dull thud upon the shore.  When she looked out, she saw Armstrong lying on the sand 13 feet below.  Shittleton rushed upstairs to summon the family.  By the time everyone had gone down to the cellar, Armstrong was gone.

The Oliphants instantly gathered neighbors together to form a search party, but although they found the mark where Armstrong had landed, no other trace of the girl was found, in or out of the river.  It was assumed that the maid had attempted to drown herself, but when she saw the tide was out, she “escap’d undiscover’d by some of the passages leading from the water side into the town,” and her guilty conscience prevented her from contacting either the Oliphants or her own family.

That night, Armstrong’s sister Jane, who lived in Newcastle, was informed of her sister’s disappearance.  Jane replied that she had heard nothing from Dinah.  The following morning, Jane arrived at the Oliphant home.  She told the family that another sister, Tamar, lived in Long Benton, three miles from Newcastle.  She thought Dinah might be there.  

On July 19th, Jane paid another visit to the Oliphants, asking that Dinah’s clothes and chest of personal possessions be turned over to her.  As Jane seemed unconcerned about her sister’s odd disappearance, the Oliphants assumed she knew where Dinah was, and with the threat of prosecution hanging over her head, their maid wished to remain in hiding.

On the morning of the 22nd, a keelman named Joseph Barlow came to the Oliphant’s home.  When Mary Shittleton opened the door, he asked if the family “had a maid that was drowned lately.”  Shittleton replied that they had one that was missing, but she certainly hoped she hadn’t drowned.  When Mr. Oliphant came to speak with Barlow, the keelman told him that he and another man had just “taken up a woman floating in the middle of the river Tyne.”  From Barlow’s description, Oliphant could not be certain if it was Dinah or not.  He recommended that Barlow see Jane Armstrong about the matter.  Oliphant dispatched Shittleton to see the body, which she immediately identified as her former co-worker.

When gawkers examined the corpse, it was noted that Dinah, who always wore a necklace or ribbon on her neck, had a circular mark around her throat, causing these amateur pathologists to surmise that the girl had been strangled.  (However, when the body was first recovered, her cap was hanging behind her head, tied under the chin with a small string.)  Gossipmongers seized on this theory, immediately spreading lurid rumors that the Oliphants had murdered their erring maid.  The day after Dinah’s body was found, Tamar Armstrong went to the Oliphant home in order to issue “the most scurrilous abuse and threats” against the family.

On July 24, John Robson, one of the coroners for the County of Durham, came to Dunston to hold an inquest.  Unfortunately for the Oliphants, Robson, as well as the jurors he empanelled, had heard the tittle-tattle blaming the family for Armstrong’s death, and were all inclined to believe it.  Mary Shittleton was summoned to give evidence.  However, although the Oliphants volunteered to give testimony, the offer was ignored.  Likewise, although John Green attended the inquest, the coroner also refused to take his deposition.  It was clear that Robson saw the inquest as a court of the kangaroo kind.

Five witnesses testified at the inquiry.  Jane Armstrong stated that on July 16, she visited Dinah, who was “very dull and heavy.”  She claimed that when she returned later in the week, Mrs. Oliphant told her that John Green had been sent to “threaten” Dinah about the missing napkins.  She added that Mary Shittleton informed her that after Dinah leaped from the cellar window, Mary saw her “rise up and run.”

One Thomasine Elwell testified that on the day after the body was found, she was in Mr. Oliphant’s surgery.  Mrs. Oliphant told her that Dinah’s death “was the greatest trouble that ever came to her family.”  She added that three sheets and a tablecloth were missing, and “that she had her [Dinah] there [the cellar] from the Friday before to the Tuesday till she did that wicked deed.”

Mary Shittleton gave her account of seeing Dinah’s leap into the river.  A woman named Jane Greeves testified that three weeks before Dinah vanished, she encountered the maidservant on the quayside.  Armstrong told her that she was in Mrs. Oliphant’s service, and was doing very well.  On July 23, Greeves accompanied Jane Armstrong to ask Mrs. Oliphant “What she had to lay to the charge of the said Dinah.”  Mrs. Oliphant told them about finding Mrs. Heath’s sheet, and that she herself was missing some linen, but that Dinah had begged her not to tell any of the Armstrongs about it.

The coroner had requested a surgeon named Robert Somerville to inspect the body.  Somerville testified that he had found “a circular mark on her neck about half an inch in breadth, which has been made (to my judgment) by a rope, or might have been done by a ribband, necklace or the like nature, but there was no such thing found upon her neck when taken up.  Her face was quite black, occasioned by a stagnation of the blood, which is a concomitant of strangling or suffocation.”  He found no other marks of violence.

We do not have a record of how Robson summed up this rather sparse evidence to the jury.  This is a pity, for his oration must have been a humdinger.  It resulted in the jurors making the remarkable declaration that “James Oliphant, Margaret Oliphant, and Mary Shittleton, with force and arms, in the cellar of the dwelling-house of the said James Oliphant at Gateshead in the county of Durham, feloniously, wilfully, and of their malice aforethought did strangle and suffocate Dinah Armstrong with a certain cord of the value of sixpence.”  No motive was offered for why this hitherto law-abiding household dealt with an unsatisfactory servant not by firing her, but by strangling her and dumping the body in the river.  The Oliphants and Mary Shittleton were arrested early the next morning.

The three defendants stood trial at the Durham Assizes on August 17.  The Crown witnesses offered little that had not been heard at the inquest.  The defense called just two people: Henry Thompson and Margaret French.  Thompson asserted that the deceased had always been treated kindly by the family, and that the maid had never been restrained in the cellar, or anywhere else.  Mrs. French stated that she saw Dinah going about her business as usual, although she seemed “very dull.”  She corroborated Mary Shittleton’s account of the subsequent events.

No doubt much to the disappointment of Coroner Robson, the defendants were acquitted, “to the entire satisfaction of the whole court.”  The judge added that he believed they were “as innocent of the crime laid to your charge as myself.”

In September 1764, Mr. Oliphant, naturally anxious for some redress for the financial and emotional trauma his household had experienced, exhibited a complaint against Robson to the Court of King’s Bench.  The Court refused the motion, advising Oliphant to take his troubles to the Grand Jury.  However, Oliphant learned that such a proceeding would be too expensive for his severely diminished funds.  The unhappy man had to settle for publishing a pamphlet detailing his long ordeal.  The Oliphants continued to live in their tragedy-scarred home until the Great Flood of 1771 destroyed the dwelling.  A short time afterward, the family returned to Scotland, for good.  The Oliphants probably spent the rest of their lives earnestly wishing that Mrs. Milne had just forgotten about her damned napkins.

Although it seems most probable that Dinah, having failed in her first attempt at suicide, succeeded with the second, there are still mystifying elements to the case.  While it is natural that Dinah’s relatives would prefer to think she had not committed suicide, it is baffling that the coroner would pursue such a determined persecution of the Oliphants on such extremely scanty evidence.

And, of course, there is the question we are all thinking:  What happened to those napkins, anyway?

Disappearance, Suicide, and Possibly Murder: The Strange Case of Diane Schulte

22-year-old Diane Marie Schulte lived in Nampa, Idaho with her husband of two years, 24-year-old Fred Schulte.  They had moved to Nampa from Iowa in the spring of 1976.  Neither of the Schultes could be described as social butterflies, but Diane possessed an unusually reserved and non-social disposition.  She spent most of her free time at home, where she occupied herself with macrame, reading, and her three cats.   She was described in an official report as “extremely introverted and insecure," and that she “responds antagonistically when approached by strangers, or believes a stranger is encroaching on her psychological territory.” Diane was long estranged from her parents, had no friends in the area, and apart from her husband, the one person she was close to was her grandmother, who lived far away in Flint, Michigan.  Diane and her grandmother only rarely saw each other in person, but they spoke often on the phone.  Most people would find Diane’s life a dull and lonely one, but it suited her.  She seemed quite content with her lot, and neighbors believed that she and her husband, whom co-workers described as “solid and happy,” were extremely devoted to each other.  Diane once wrote to her husband, “I know that I don’t always show it, but I love you with all my heart and soul. Your love is the best thing that ever happened to me.”

On March 25, 1977, the Schultes visited the local library.  Afterwards, Fred suggested that they go for a walk, but Diane declined, saying she wasn’t feeling well.  The following morning, Fred went to his job at a Boise unemployment office.  Later that morning, a neighbor observed Diane outside the house, as if she was preparing to go for a walk.  (Something she often did, with or without Fred.)  When Fred returned home that evening, his wife was gone.

Aside from Diane’s uncharacteristic absence, everything in the house seemed normal.  Her car was in the driveway, and there was mail and a UPS box waiting on the front porch.  All of Diane’s possessions, including her purse, were inside.  The only items missing were the keys to a P.O. box and their rented house.  Her three cats were shut up in a spare bedroom, which is what she always did when about to go somewhere.  However, her watch and wedding ring were on a desk.  She always left them there when she was at home or preparing to leave for just a very brief time.  Fred found the situation weird enough to immediately contact police.

Unfortunately, this was one of those missing-persons cases where investigators were immediately stymied by a lack of clues.  Diane’s grandmother told police that the last time they talked, just the day before Diane disappeared, her granddaughter was “highly upset and emotional”--possibly because Diane’s parents were planning to visit her later that year.  (According to Fred, Diane "hated" her mother, and her father had caused her a great deal of pain.)  Diane was so anxious to avoid this reunion, she asked Fred to persuade them not to come.  On the other hand, Fred stated that when he last saw his wife, she was in an “unusually good mood.”

A friend of Diane’s named Sue Stampe told a reporter that everyone who knew the couple was baffled.  “We’ve all talked to the police and with each other, and we don’t know what to think,” she said.  Stampe added that in the last letter Diane sent her, “I never heard anyone be so happily married.  But sometimes it’s hard to tell about Diane.  She doesn’t always tell you what she really feels.”

On April 1, operating on the (not unreasonable) theory that “It’s usually the spouse who did it,” police asked Fred to take a polygraph test.  He seemed perfectly willing to cooperate, but on April 3--shortly before Fred was to be polygraphed--the mystery took a sudden, shocking turn, when Fred’s corpse was discovered inside Diane’s car.  He had been speeding down Highway 95, when he shot himself in the head.  The car subsequently crashed down into a canyon.

Fred left behind two documents: a will and a suicide note.  In the latter, he stated that he was killing himself because “I have given up hope of Diane’s returning alive…She was always warm and loving and supportive and fun. She was everything I’ve ever wanted and needed in a woman.  In turn, I gave her the strength to cope with a world that terrified her...Having lived with her, I find that I cannot live without her, so by the time you read this, I will have taken my own life.”  

Then, his note took an abrupt turn.  About a month before Diane disappeared, a ten-year-old Nampa boy named Steven White was murdered.  (The case was not solved until 2001.) Fred referenced the crime, stating “I challenge any sane, thinking person to spend one full day really observing this insane, absolutely absurd world we’re living in. Can you honestly say that you’re proud of it? That it makes any sense at all? That there is any justice in it? Diane Schultes and Steven Whites are being cut down left and right while the criminal elements (from the nickel-and-dime shoplifter to the politicians and businessmen that run the world) are free to ply their trades with virtually no fear of punishment.”

“Why does so much of the GNP of the world go into producing ships and war planes that are blown to bits when the same GNP could produce food, clothing, and other niceties of life? That is to say, productive rather than destructive items? Why is there so much war, crime, pollution, injustice, inflation, vandalism, etc.? I say it is because our society is disintegrating and doing so more rapidly each year.”

He gave no hint that he knew where Diane was, or how she had died.

Fred’s death was all the police needed to close the books on the case.  Investigators reasoned that his premature certainty that his wife was dead, plus his own suicide, were both indicators of guilt.  Nampa Police Detective Robert Shank admitted that his belief that Fred murdered his wife was based on “supposition and intuition,” rather than “factual proof,” but added that “on the little bits of evidence we picked up, we believe he killed her.”  The “bits of evidence,” however, were frustratingly vague: a missing living room rug, a dent in the floor that could have been made by a bullet, and a four-inch hole cut from a drape.

Shank may have been correct.  However, if Fred was entirely innocent, under the circumstances it would not have been illogical for him to conclude that his wife was the victim of foul play, and was never coming back.  Considering that the key to the couple's P.O. box was missing, it is conceivable that Diane went for a walk to check on the box (something she did regularly) and along the way was kidnapped by a passing psychopath.  There is another possibility, one apparently not considered by investigators: suicide.  Perhaps when Fred realized she was mysteriously missing, he guessed she had left to kill herself, but for whatever reason, didn’t want to share his suspicions with authorities.

Diane Schulte’s fate remains a complete mystery, and at this late date, it is a riddle that probably will never be solved.

The Man Who Wanted to Be Murdered

"I lay my head on the railroad track 

And wait for the Double E 

The railroad don't run no more 

Poor poor pitiful me." ~Warren Zevon

 

"Omaha News," September 2, 1908, via Newspapers.com

Dr. Frederick T. Rustin wanted to die.  Although he had wealth and a respected position in Omaha, Nebraska society, he was increasingly depressed and morbid.  He turned to drink, drugs, and “evil companions.”  As a result, his reputation, his finances and his career all began to suffer.  All of this just increased his feelings that he had had enough of this world.  However, he wanted his family to be able to collect on his life insurance policies, so he did not want his death ruled a suicide.

This resulted in some of the most extraordinary attempts at self-destruction on record.  They began in 1903, when Rustin told friends that he had malignant throat cancer.  Apparently, he had injected himself with the cancer cells, but despite his dramatic pronouncement, months went by finding him still alive.

His next step was to obtain through a bacteriological laboratory tubes containing pure tetanus and typhoid cultures.  Two weeks later, he came down with typhoid of the most severe type.  For weeks, he lay on his bed, feverish and suffering, but distressingly alive.  He repeatedly injected more of the culture into his veins until he became too delirious to continue.

Months later, he emerged from what for any normal person would be a deathbed, body bowed but resolution definitely unshaken.  Next, he tried the tetanus.  However, no matter how much of the stuff he injected into his leg, he remained appallingly immune.

He turned to more direct measures.  After a train in which he was a passenger was wrecked, he quickly opened a vein in his wrist, but—never forget the gods have a very strange sense of humor—this man who so ardently pursued death remained indestructible.

By this time, Rustin was getting exasperated with all these artistic touches.  He brushed off the pleas of friends that he should take a hint and forget about suicide, vowing, “The next time I try it there will be no doubt about it.  I will be successful.”

Finally, in one way or another, he was.  On September 2, 1908, Rustin was found on the front porch of his house with a bullet wound to the abdomen.  “A man shot me!” he gasped before dying.  There was no gun found anywhere in the vicinity, and there were no powder burns on his body, which would suggest he had not been shot at close range.  However, his friends, knowing of both his determination and his cunning, assumed he had somehow engineered a diabolically clever way to shoot himself.

It turned out that perhaps he had—but if so, it was not as clever as he had thought.

Nine days after the murder, a Dr. J. P. Lord identified a man named Charles E. Davis as the man he had seen leaving the Rustin house minutes after the murder.  Davis was arrested on charges of first-degree murder.

Meanwhile, a previously unknown woman suddenly entered the story: Abbie Rice, Rustin’s mistress.  When called to the stand at Rustin’s inquest, she claimed that there had been a “triple death compact” between Rustin, Davis, and herself.  Rustin, she explained, had pleaded with her to shoot him, so that his death would not look like suicide.  When she refused, he persuaded Davis to do the job.  Davis had a taste for suicide attempts himself, with equally unsuccessful results.  The deal, Rice said, was that Davis would shoot Rustin, after which he would swallow the poison Rustin had previously given him.  Rice added that she now regretted the promise she had given Rustin to kill herself as soon as he was dead.  She now planned, she said, to become a nurse in a charity hospital, “in the hope of thus expiating her sins.”

At Davis’ trial, Rice’s testimony was, unsurprisingly, battled every step of the way by his lawyer, but her story finally emerged.  For many weeks before his death, she said, Rustin “trained” her to murder him.  He would take her to operations, to numb her to the sight of blood.  He then preached to her of the nobleness of self-sacrifice, giving her books such as “A Tale of Two Cities” where one friend sacrificed his life for another.  Sydney Carton, she said, was his favorite fictional character.  He also impressed upon her the fact that he could not kill himself without his family losing his life insurance.  “I guess I’ll have to get some one to kill me,” he would say to her meaningfully.

She could take a hint.  Unfortunately for all the care the Doctor had put into her training, she found that at the last minute, she couldn’t do it.  They made several attempts to “stage” her murder of him, but to Rustin’s indignation, she just could not bring herself to actually pull the trigger.  “The training had not been complete, and I failed him.”

Then, one day Rustin came to her in unusually good spirits.  He told her he had arranged for a man to kill him, someone who wanted to die as badly as he did:  Charles Edward Davis.  

The best laid plans, etc.  Davis did indeed try to kill himself after Rustin’s shooting, but with the peculiar perversity that characterized this whole saga, he met yet another failure.  He took so much of the poison at one time that it acted as an emetic.  And Rice herself was brought in by the police before she could fulfill her part of this ghoulish bargain.  She kept silent for several days, but when she overheard someone comment, “Well, the doctor’s wife gets the insurance anyhow,” the whole story came out of her like a flood.

Davis’ defense was simply that he had indeed obtained poison from the doctor with the intention of killing himself, but he was not Rustin’s murderer.  He claimed he was in his lodgings at the time of the shooting.  (Davis may have wanted to end his life, but he obviously jibbed at the thought of letting the state do it for him.)

After thirteen hours of deliberation and, it was said, nineteen ballots, the jury brought in a verdict of “not guilty,” and Davis was freed.  It is not known whether the jury believed Davis’ alibi and rejected Rice’s story, or whether they believed the lady and figured that the good doctor had merely gotten what he wanted.

It was announced that no further prosecutions in Rustin’s murder were expected unless new evidence was uncovered.  To no one’s surprise, it never was.

[Note: Rustin's widow did "get the insurance anyhow," but only after many years of litigation against the insurance companies, who insisted, not unreasonably, that Frederick had indeed committed suicide.  All of Rustin's curious efforts to do away with himself without directly doing away with himself were very nearly in vain.]

Death on Christmas Eve: The Keim Family Mystery

"Pottstown Mercury," July 11, 1967, via Newspapers.com

In 1963, 68-year-old widow Pearl Keim and her son Douglas (whom everyone called “Dougie”) were living a quiet, unremarkable existence in Pottstown, Pennsylvania.  Although Douglas was aged 42, mentally, he remained a child of seven.  However, he was fortunate enough to be a cheerful, affectionate, trusting soul who was well liked in the town.  Neighbors described Douglas as “a most happy child,” and “friendly as a puppy.”  He enjoyed spending his evenings in a local diner, with a newspaper spread out in front of him.  He was completely unable to read it, but pretending he could appeared to give him a sense of being part of the adult world he was destined to never enter.  Douglas had two great loves: his mother and fire engines.  He often visited the local firehouses, where he would spend hours gazing in wonder at the vivid red trucks with their startlingly loud bells, or browsing through stores, admiring the toy trucks on display.

The Keims spent Christmas Eve 1963 alone together.  As a result, we will never know for sure why it proved to be their last Yuletide.  Three days after Christmas, neighbors, who were concerned that no one had seen mother or son since December 24, phoned police to check on the pair.  Officers found the Keim home had all the doors locked, although they were the type which could be locked from the outside.  One window was open.  When the policemen got no response to their repeated knocks on the front door, they broke inside.

What they found was a bloodbath.  Mrs. Keim was found in her bedroom, dead of multiple stab wounds to her neck.  A knife blade was still embedded in her throat, but the handle was missing.  Douglas’ corpse was in the living room.  Lying near his body was his Christmas present--a brightly wrapped toy fire engine--and the handle from the knife which had killed his mother.  Douglas had died in a particularly bizarre fashion: a metal stove poker had been twisted tightly around his neck, strangling him.

This gruesome tragedy was one of those cases where investigators scarcely knew what to say.  The Keims did not have anything approaching an enemy, and they lived too modestly to be worth robbing.  There was no sign of anyone but the Keims having been in the home.  After a bit of floundering helplessly, the authorities announced their conclusion: murder/suicide.  Montgomery County DA Richard Lowe theorized that on Christmas Eve, Douglas had wanted to open his present early.  When his mother refused, he went into a fit of uncontrollable rage and stabbed Pearl to death.  Then, when he realized the enormity of what he had done, he broke down completely and wrapped the poker around his throat.

There were obvious problems with this scenario.  For one thing, Douglas was regarded as a gentle, sweet-natured man who had never shown any signs of violence.  He adored his mother, who was all he had in the world.  Also, Douglas was a small, slight man.  Would he even have the strength to kill himself in such a physically demanding fashion?   And what caused the several bruises found on his head?

Many people were uneasy about the “solution” to the mystery.  However, law enforcement had come up with a quick and easy way to get this troublesome case off their hands, and they stuck with it.  In my true-crime readings, I’ve come across many tragedies that defy any easy explanation, so investigators simply invent one, just to be able to say “case closed,” and move on.  I fear the deaths of Pearl and Douglas Keim may well be among them.

[Note: One would assume that dusting the knife and poker for fingerprints would most likely answer the question of whether Douglas was a murderer or a murder victim.  However, none of the newspaper stories I've found about the case state whether or not this was done.  Very strange.]

The Curious End of M. Syveton

Gabriel Syveton (1864-1904) was one of the more controversial French politicians of his day. The co-founder of the Nationalist group Ligue de la Patrie Francaise was a hero to his allies and a nuisance to just about everyone else. Early in 1904, he got into a public altercation with the war minister Louis Andre over Andre's efforts to purge the army of officers considered to be disloyal to the Republic. The war minister had gone so far as to gather information on officers' religious practices and beliefs, reportedly with the help of the Masonic Grand Orient, which for some time had been keeping dossiers on this subject. Syveton had managed to acquire many of these files, which gave his party everything they needed to promote a full-fledged scandal with all the anti-Masonic trimmings. The uproar over the revelations forced Andre to resign. The anti-government atmosphere became so heated that on November 4, Syveton publicly slapped Andre on the floor of the Chamber of Deputies.

With this act, the triumphant Syveton went too far. This physical attack got Syveton suspended from parliament, and he was ordered to stand trial on December 9. The government was in a tricky position. If they failed to convict Syveton, it would support his charges against the government, and the Ministry would soon find themselves superseded by the Nationalists. But Syveton was a popular figure to much of the nation, and the idol of his party. Many saw him as a martyr, another Dreyfus. The smart money in Paris was betting on an acquittal.

Both publicly and privately, Syveton was unbowed. He showed great confidence that he would ultimately be exonerated, and threatened that he had even more shocking information to reveal. Unfortunately, we will never know if he was correct. For on the eve of his trial, he died.

At about 3 pm on the 8th, Syveton's wife Marie summoned a Dr. Thoimer, Gabriel's friend and doctor, to their home. The doctor found Syveton sprawled on the floor of his study, unconscious from the fumes of gas from the charcoal stove in the room. He died an hour later.

Madame Syveton's story was that during the day, her husband had numerous callers, the last of whom left at about 1 p.m. After not seeing or hearing anything from Syveton for two hours, she went to check on him, and found him dying in this gas-filled room.

However, it was immediately noted that there were several odd things about the death scene. For one thing, by the time the police arrived at the Syveton house, the gas taps were turned off. (Madame Syveton explained that she had automatically turned them off when she first entered the room.) For another, the door to the study was not locked from the inside. There was a freshly-filled pipe and a loaded gun lying near the body. Two friends of Syveton's did a little amateur sleuthing, and discovered that the pipe of the stove was plugged with a copy of that day's newspaper. This was no accidental death. But was it suicide or murder?

An autopsy ruled that Syveton had died of carbon monoxide poisoning, and the death was officially dismissed as a suicide. Despite his outward show of bravado, the police shrugged, he could not face the shame of standing trial, not to mention the permanent disgrace if he were to be convicted, so he took the easy way out.

This statement gained some credence when Marie Syveton, curiously eager to promote the idea that her husband killed himself, shared lurid details about the dead man's personal life. "On the morning of the day of my husband's death," she told authorities, "I discovered cause for leaving him. I mentioned the name of a woman, and he understood. He pleaded for forgiveness, saying that only my love could save him. I announced to him that I should insist on a separation. When I next saw him at 3 o'clock in his study he was dying."

It soon emerged that the woman Marie was referring to was her own daughter from a previous marriage, Marguerite Menard. According to some versions of the story, Syveton and his stepdaughter had been lovers. According to others, Syveton had raped the beautiful young woman. Whatever the truth about their relationship may have been, Marie Syveton made it clear that she believed the threat of his sordid behavior becoming public knowledge led Gabriel to end it all.

It did not seem to occur to Madame Syveton that in seeking to bolster the suicide theory, she was also suggesting an excellent motive for her to murder her husband. Some of the Paris newspapers went even further, alleging that she was part of a circle of wives of rich and important men who were insuring their husband's lives for large amounts of money, and then killing them. One of the inaugural victims, these papers declared, was Marie's first husband. The Widow Syveton, of course, angrily denied these reports--although she had to admit that both her husbands had been heavily insured.

The government, for their part, insisted that Syveton had committed suicide not merely because of his disgraceful personal life, but as a result of his professional chicaneries. They claimed that he had embezzled large sums of money entrusted to him by his party. Syveton's supporters heatedly denied these claims, proclaiming that "They have slain Syveton, and would now assassinate his character!"

The pro-Syveton party continued to insist that he had been murdered. To bolster their belief that Syveton had not committed suicide, they pointed to his blithe confidence in being exonerated. They asserted that Syveton's stepdaughter was of very dubious morals, and that she had simply invented the tale of being raped. It was surely suspicious, they noted, that Marguerite and her mother both claimed to have had "premonitions" of his death. There were experts who stated that Syveton could not have died in the room and in the position where he was found. And, of course, there was the fact that Syveton's life had been insured for 150,000 francs, all of which went to his wife.

Syveton's father and brother-in-law publicly accused Marie of murdering her husband, and demanded a second, more impartial investigation. Their pleas were refused, and Syveton's enigmatic end was allowed to fade into history.

So, was Gabriel Syveton's death suicide? A political assassination? A family murder? It says much about this strange case that equally solid arguments have been made for all of these theories.

The Two Catherine Packards

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

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

All this story needs is a talking cat.

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

Catherine Packard

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

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

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

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

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

George and Margaret Packard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Lambert/Orpet Riddle: Who Had the Cyanide?

Eighteen-year-old Marion Lambert could have been Lake Forest, Illinois’ top candidate for All-American Girl. The pretty young woman was vivacious, popular with her peers, doted on by her parents, with a highly promising future ahead of her. To all appearances, she had every reason to be completely happy.

But, as we all know, appearances are very often deceiving.

On February 8th, 1916, she received a mysterious phone call. The next morning, Marion began, as usual, to head to her high school classes. At the train station she stopped and told a friend she would go to the post office to mail letters first, and catch up later.

As far as anyone knew, nothing was amiss until later that day, when her father waited at the train station to pick her up. She never arrived. At their home, her parents waited up all night for her in vain. Around dawn, her increasingly frantic father returned to the station, where in the early morning light he noticed two sets of footprints—one large, the other small—leading into a small clearing in the nearby forest. In that clearing, Frank Lambert finally found his daughter. She was lying on her side, quite cold and dead. Her lips were blistered and frothed with blood, and there was a residue of white powder in one hand. The autopsy would find that she had died from swallowing cyanide.

A search was immediately made for the person—assumed to be a man, by the footprints—who had walked into the clearing with her. Those who knew Marion immediately suspected he was 21-year-old William Orpet.

Orpet had known Marion since childhood. In recent months, after he had enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, their relationship gradually become more serious. They had gone from exchanging friendly letters to passionately romantic ones, and finally, when he was back in town on a visit, they became intimate—exactly how intimate they were is unclear. In any case, Marion was in love and believed they would marry.

Perhaps Orpet had initially felt the same. However, as has so often happened in the course of human history, once he had his “conquest,” the young man’s interest quickly began to dwindle. Back at the University, his letters to Marion became increasingly sparse and unemotional. When the girl wrote of her fears that she was pregnant, that just made him all the more anxious to distance himself from her. He even, behind her back, became engaged to another woman.

When Orpet was contacted at his Madison lodgings, he pronounced himself shocked at news of Marion’s death, but he insisted they had never been anything more than casual friends, thus kicking off a long chain of remarkably stupid lies he would tell regarding Marion Lambert. He admitted sending her what he told her were abortifacient drugs, (they were actually harmless placebos,) but denied he could possibly have made her pregnant. (Marion's autopsy established she was not pregnant—in fact, she was still a virgin when she died.) He said he had written her a “friendly” letter, apologizing for being unable to make it to Lake Forest to see her.


The police did find such a letter in the Post Office. However, they also found in Marion’s room a very different letter from Orpet, promising to come to town and meet her on February 9th. The letter in the Post Office seemed merely a clumsy effort to establish an alibi. The police, figuring they had found the Lambert poisoner, proceeded to grill the young man, as the saying goes, like a cheese sandwich.

Unfortunately for himself, Orpet proved to have about the same brains and backbone of a piece of bread and cheese. Under pressure, he stammered, flailed, tried to stonewall, and lied, lied, lied. In the final version of his story, he finally admitted to a romance with Marion, which, on his side at least, soon ended. Marion began pestering him with messages, threatening to kill herself if he refused to see her. Finally, he agreed to meet her in the woods on February 9th. There was a confrontation where she begged him to return to her. He refused, and told her of his plans to marry another. Finally, he began to walk away from the crying girl. When he heard a sudden scream, he turned back to see her lying on the snow, convulsing. When he realized she was dead, he ran away in fear and took the next train back to Madison.

Pretty flimsy stuff, all in all. And when investigators discovered that Orpet’s father, a caretaker on a local estate, used cyanide in his work, it was easy for a grand jury to indict Orpet for murder. Here was motive, opportunity, and now means, all wrapped up in one extremely unsympathetic package. Before his trial, it took nearly a month to find enough jurymen willing to say they had an open mind about the young man’s guilt.

However, as the trial unfolded, it gradually looked as if Orpet’s culpability was not quite as certain as everyone had thought. Marion’s friends admitted on the stand that she had threatened suicide if Orpet dumped her, and that she admitted knowing she was not pregnant. In fact, the more that was learned about Marion, the more evident it became that this seemingly happy-go-lucky girl had a hidden side that was moody, even neurotic. One of Marion’s teachers revealed that soon before her death, she was found alone in the high school’s chemistry lab, where she would have known cyanide was stored. Orpet himself did not make a good witness—he was, on his own testimony, a dishonest, cowardly scoundrel—but he stubbornly insisted Marion had taken the poison herself.

Finally, three chemists took the stand. They explained that Marion had died as a result of ingesting potassium cyanide—the exact type found in her high school lab. However, what had been found in the greenhouse used by the senior Orpet was sodium cyanide—potentially deadly, yes, but a completely different substance, and in a form where Marion would have had to drink a gallon of the brew for it to kill her.

And with that, the once-airtight case against Will Orpet collapsed like a pricked balloon.

After deliberating five hours, the jury found him “Not Guilty.” Orpet was free, but it was a decidedly mixed blessing. His friends largely turned against him. The University of Wisconsin declined to have him grace their campus any longer. His fiancée publicly declared she wanted nothing to do with him. He may have been innocent in a court of law, but the court of public opinion found him morally, if not literally, culpable in a young woman’s death. Orpet served in World War I, and, as far as history knows, led a quietly uninteresting life until his death in 1948.

Marion Lambert’s death is still usually described as an “unsolved mystery,” but personally, I do not see it that way. William Orpet was certainly a liar. However, I do not believe he was also a murderer.

In the 1950s, chemist and author Otto Eisenschiml formulated a “third way” theory about the case, arguing that Marion did not die as the result of murder or deliberate suicide. He suggested that this “impetuous” girl “given to dramatic acts,” stole the potassium cyanide as a ploy. Without realizing just how deadly the poison was, she took a gulp of the crystals in front of Orpet as a “final dramatic effort” to scare him into agreeing to marry her. She unwittingly took enough to instantly kill her. His theory is well-argued, but I don’t find it convincing. While she may have obtained the cyanide in an effort to force Orpet’s hand, when she saw it wasn’t going to work, I suspect that in her anger and humiliation--and no one feels more anger and humiliation than a teenager who has been jilted for the first time--Marion’s “impetuous” nature caused her to impulsively commit suicide. If she had given herself even a moment of reflection, she may well have changed her mind about wanting to die—but cyanide does not allow for second thoughts.

In Deep Water: The Last Dive of the Lonergans

On Sunday, January 25, 1998, 34-year-old Tom Lonergan and his 29-year-old wife Eileen were part of a group of 26 passengers who set out in the scuba boat "Outer Edge" for a day of snorkeling at St. Crispin's Reef, a popular dive site off Australia's Queensland coast. The two Peace Corps volunteers had been working as teachers in Tuvalu and Fiji, and were giving themselves a holiday before returning to their home in America.

The Lonergans had both trained as military pilots (although Eileen was a geologist by profession,) and excelled in outdoor activities, particularly scuba diving. They appeared to be happily married, and entirely content with their active and productive lives. In short, they seemed unlikely candidates for either bizarre misadventure or deliberate hoax.

At about 2:30 pm, the owner and skipper of the "Outer Edge," Geoffrey Nairn, stopped the boat at the tip of St. Crispin's, and his passengers all happily dove into the still, beautiful waters. The Lonergans, being fearless and expert scuba divers, told another diver on the trip that they would "go off and do their own thing." The couple swam away on their own, becoming lost to view.

About an hour later, the passengers came back onboard, and the boat headed back to Port Douglas. No one bothered to do a head-count, so it went unnoticed that they were returning with two fewer people than when they left. Tom and Eileen Lonergan had vanished. Incredibly, it was not until the following Tuesday, when Nairn found the pair's belongings--including Tom's eyeglasses and wallet--in his boat's lost property bin, that anyone realized that something was amiss with the Lonergans. Nairn called the hostel where the couple had been staying. The manager said the Lonergans weren't there. He had not seen them for several days, and had no idea where they could be. Nairn immediately called the police, and the investigation into this strangest of missing-persons cases was finally underway.

Sixty hours after anyone had last seen the Lonergans, an air and sea search, which eventually covered 8,000 nautical miles, was begun. No trace of the couple could be found. Of course, after that long a period of time, the Lonergans could have been anywhere--no matter what had happened to them.

It was at this point that things really began to get weird. Two buoyancy vests in perfect condition, a fin, a wetsuit hood, and a diving tank were found on a beach about six miles from Cooktown. The vests were marked with the Lonergans' names.

This find only deepened the mystery. Did the couple remove their equipment in order to commit a joint suicide? Could they have been murdered? And in any case, how likely was it that all these items should just happen to wash up on the same remote beach? Were these items planted--by the Lonergans, or someone else?

At the inquest into the couple's disappearance, one witness suggested that the Lonergans had been killed by a pack of tiger sharks. Others disputed this idea, pointing out that the sharks would have eaten them whole, without leaving any of their equipment behind.

An odd detail was provided by Tom Colrain, the operations manager of the "Outer Edge's" company. He stated that on the night before the ill-fated diving expedition, Tom Lonergan phoned him to ask if the diving boat would be visiting Agincourt Reef. Colrain replied that it would.

Lonergan seemed unaccountably dissatisfied by the news. He repeated the question. Several times, to the point where Colrain became highly exasperated. Gail McLean, who worked for the Cairns Visitors Information Center, testified that Lonergan had called her with a similar question. He asked about a charter vessel called "Quicksilver V." Would it be visiting Agincourt Reef?

When McLean replied in the affirmative, Lonergan showed the same peculiar insistence about this seemingly trivial point. Was she sure the boat would sail to Agincourt Reef? He kept pressing her on the matter until, McLean recalled, "I got my back up and said I didn't care what anyone else had told him, it was Agincourt Reef that 'Quicksilver' visited."

Could it be that the Lonergans had a plan to break away from their group and, for whatever reason, secretly board "Quicksilver?" No one could say.

The strangest testimony of all was given by Jeanette Brentnall, the owner of a Port Douglas bookstore. She was certain that the Lonergans came into her shop...two days after the couple disappeared from the "Outer Edge." Brentnall said they bought maps of the area, as well as postcards. She chatted briefly with the couple, who told her they were from Fiji. She recalled that "The man dominated the conversation...his wife looked pretty subdued."

The inquest heard some ominous-sounding testimony about Tom Lonergan's state of mind before his disappearance. Some acquaintances asserted that he had been suffering from depression and anxiety about the future. On August 3, 1997, he wrote in his diary that he wanted to die. On January 9, 1998, Eileen wrote in her diary that her husband was "ready to die...he hope it happens soon." Elsewhere, she wrote, "Our lives are so entwined now and we are hardly individuals. I am still Eileen but I am mostly Eileen and Tom. Where we are now goes beyond dependence, beyond love." Her diary entries indicate that she did not share Tom's longing for death, and feared he might somehow force her to get "caught up" in it.

The attorney for the "Outer Edge"company--facing quite a bit of heat over Nairn's carelessness about the head-counts--pushed the murder-suicide theory hard. Relatives of the Lonergans, who were calling for Nairn to be charged with manslaughter, were outraged at this line of attack, calling it "wild, unsubstantiated speculation." Family members described the couple as too essentially positive in their thinking to actually act on any suicidal thoughts. Eileen's father insisted that "They were happy young people traveling the world."

The coroner obviously agreed with the relatives. He ordered that Nairn should stand trial. In November 1999, the skipper was acquitted. The issue of just what had happened to the Lonergans was so murky that the jury recoiled from making any definitive ruling on the matter. However, the following year Nairn's company was fined $27,000 for failing to keep careful records of the boat's passengers. Nairn was forced to sell the company in order to pay the fine and his several hundred thousand dollars of legal bills.

Over five months after the Lonergans were last seen, a dive slate was found on a beach south of Cooktown. It contained a handwritten message stating that they had been "abandoned," and pleading for help. The note was dated January 26. Investigators believed it was "more than likely" in Tom Lonergan's writing, but they could not be certain.

That proved to be the "last word"--if last word it truly was--from Tom and Eileen Lonergan. To date, their true fate remains eerily uncertain. Was it a murder-suicide? Double suicide? If Jeanette Brentnall's testimony can be believed, did the couple fake their own deaths in order to start new lives for themselves?

Or was it a case of the simplest, most haunting scenario of all? Did a careless boat captain leave the Lonergans stranded in the middle of the ocean, condemning them to die a lonely and frightening death?