Acting on Mrs. Shaffer’s intuition, the Sheriff made the rounds of Ellwood City dentists. One of them declared that the chart the Sheriff showed him fitted the work done on one of his patients, Jean Fatur. Identification was complete when, a little later, the dentist viewed the body at the morgue and said he was positive it was that of his patient, Jean Fatur.

  Mrs. Shaffer had mentioned several men whom Jean had been seeing, besides Earl Thomas of Pittsburgh. One of them, Irvin Herge, of Ellwood City, she described as “good-for-nothing,” and said she had often warned Jean not to go out with him. Both Herge and Thomas would have to be questioned. But first they must be found.

  Suspicion centered primarily on Earl Thomas when it was learned that the telegram was phoned into the Pittsburgh office on November 2nd by a woman who said she was Jean Thomas. But now, police checking the address she gave found there was no such address. November 2nd was long after the probable date of Jean’s death, October 17th, so the killer must have gotten some woman to telephone the telegraph office for him. Thomas’ boarding house was located, and there the landlady told police that Thomas, a man of about thirty who worked in the steel mills, had left October 17th, in his grey coupe and then left again on November 3rd. After that he had not returned. Police noted that date, November 3rd. It was the day after the sending of the telegram by “Jean Thomas.”

  As for Irvin Herge, he was now under serious suspicion, too. Investigation disclosed that he was 43, married, and known to have a vicious temper. He had been arrested on August 18, 1945, on complaint of his wife, and held for fifty days on suspicion of insanity. After his release on October 8th he had gone away; nobody knew where.

  A case that started with no suspects at all and almost nothing in the way of clues, suddenly had two hot suspects. Before long, however, Thomas’ trail was lost, but Herge’s led police to an uncle in Malinta, Ohio, only ten miles from Napoleon, and very near to the Damascus Bridge.

  Since Herge had been telling everybody that he was going away to the West for his health, police reasoned that he was probably hiding out in the vicinity. He was a radio mechanic, and the most likely place for him to seek employment was Toledo, Ohio. Their reasoning proved correct, and on January 21st Herge’s sedan was seen in front of a house on Jefferson Ave.

  The police closed in on Herge so skilfully and quickly that the vicious-tempered criminal had no opportunity to put up a fight. Herge made not one but a number of confessions, each one a little different, but in the version that seemed closest to the truth he told how he had gotten a woman friend to send the fake telegram, how he had assumed Earl Thomas’ name because he knew Thomas was a friend of Jean’s. Jean, he said, met him near Ellwood City on October 17th and told him she was going to have a baby. She became hysterical and he struck her. Since the head wound was not sufficient to have caused the girl’s death, there remains the gruesome possibility that she suffocated when Herge stuffed her into the trunk of his car, from which he later removed the body and tossed it into the Maumee River.

  Jean was dead when Herge caused the fake telegram to be dispatched, and he did not know that Jean never called her uncle “John,” but always “Uncle John.” But for that slip-up Herge might never have been suspected, and it was a woman’s intuition that spotted it.

  THE SUNSHINE LADY

  Her friends and neighbors in Jefferson, Wisconsin, called her “The Sunshine Lady.” Mrs. Carrie Gill, 59-year-old widow, was famous for her acts of charity and her pleasant nature. She loved flowers, and her pretty little cottage and garden on the banks of the Rock River was a show place in the small town. She was famous for her exquisite crochet work—I still have a doily she made for me during her trial.

  Yet this seemingly gentle lady had as a “boarder” one Earl C. Gentry, who had once been tried with D. S. Stephenson, former governor of Indiana and former Grand Dragon of the Indiana Ku Klux Klan, for the kidnaping and rape murder of Madge Oberholtzer. The kindest thing said about him to me, when I covered the trial, was that “he had a violent temper, especially when drunk.”

  No one was exactly surprised when the badly beaten and bullet-punctured body of Earl Gentry was found grotesquely slumped in his auto which had been parked near a swimming pool on the Rock River. That was on July 2, 1934.

  It was inevitable that Carrie Gill should be questioned. When District Attorney Harold M. Dakin, and Sheriff T. Lange realized that there was less than the normal amount of blood in the car where the body was found, a search of the Sunshine Lady’s cottage was obviously in order. What appeared to be hastily sponged bloodstains were found.

  There were a few days of confused and confusing statements. Carrie said that Gentry had left her house at 6:30 on the evening of July 1st, and had not returned. Sheriff Lange learned that he had spent the evening with Mrs. Gill’s 17-year-old niece, Josephine Probst. Josephine fainted on viewing the body. Yet Carrie Gill admitted that rugs found covering the body had come from her home.

  The first break came on July 4th, when District Attorney Dakin announced that Carrie Gill had confessed. For six weeks she had plotted the murder and had paid George (Slim) King, an itinerant painter, $60 to shoot him.

  According to the statement, Carrie had declared that for two years Gentry had terrorized her and the night before the killing he had threatened to kill her with a beer bottle.

  “Slim King was at a hotel in Chicago,” she said. “I wired him $60 from Fort Atkinson and he came to my home in Jefferson. After several talks with him we made arrangements for him to kill Earl C. Gentry the night of June 30th. I told him where to find Earl Gentry’s gun and made arrangements where he could find the keys to the house. I next saw George King about 9 o’clock Sunday morning at Ferdinand Probst’s—my brother’s—home. He told me that he had quite a time with Earl’s body and left it on the river road.”

  Several hours earlier, Ferdinand Probst, according to Sheriff Lange, had issued a signed statement telling of how he helped a painter “whom he knew” remove the body from the Gill home.

  But later, Carrie Gill repudiated her confession, claiming that it had been obtained by force and threats. And after her trial, the charge of Accessory after the Fact against Probst was dropped.

  Meantime, the search for “George King,” whose real name turned out to be Carl Church, was on. He was found at last on July 5th, in the attic of a storage warehouse in Fort Atkinson, a town about six miles from Jefferson. The “killer,” whom half Jefferson County had been desperately hunting, turned out to be a pathetic, tubercular, undersized hobo, who probably didn’t weigh a hundred and twenty pounds with an anvil in each hand.

  Carl Church, or “King,” confessed almost immediately after his arrest. He said that he committed the crime because Carrie Gill, the Sunshine Lady, had been abused by Gentry, and because “She was so kind to me when I was sick.”

  Three months later when he told his story of the slaying at Carrie Gill’s trial, where it was accepted as evidence, it varied at almost every point with his original confession. Yet Carl Church was sentenced to life imprisonment.

  But before we get to the trial, let’s have a look at the strange romance between the gray-haired Sunshine Lady and the exbodyguard of D. S. Stephenson.

  Carrie Gill—born Carrie Probst—was a farm girl. Like all Wisconsin farm girls, she worked hard, did her share of the chores and housework, and got what education she could. But Carrie was ambitious. She wanted something better from life than the drab existence of a farmer’s wife. She loved beauty.

  Under other circumstances, she might have been a landscape architect, a designer, or an artist. As things were, she did the best she could. She married Gill, a Jefferson tavern keeper—in those days they were called saloon keepers. From the very beginning she began to plan a home and a garden.

  There were no children, and she lavished her maternal affection on her nephews and nieces, especially smart, pretty, little Josephine Probst, and on everyone who needed her. In the days before the trial, the pastor of her church confided to me, “Carrie Gill’s warm heart wants to mother everyone who is sick or in need.”

  When Earl C. Gentry turned up in Jefferson, Wisconsin, he was alone and in need. He’d come within an inch of his life of conviction when he was jointly tried with Stephenson. Carrie Gill, by then a widow, took him in. She believed his story of how he had been unjustly accused. She was kind to him when he needed kindness, just as, later, she was kind to a homeless little hobo named Carl Church, when he was sick.

  It was rumored that Gentry had become the village bootlegger. That was mentioned, almost in a whisper, at her trial. No one paid much attention to the rumor, or later, to the testimony. Whether it was true or false, in those early postrepeal days, bootlegging was considered a very minor offense—not one-half as serious as illegal parking—or riding bicycles on the sidewalk.

  Earl Gentry lived in the pleasant little cottage for a number of years. Carrie was good to him. She made the home comfortable, bought him cars, provided him with clothes.

  In return, he was continually in trouble, became the town bully, got into brawls in speakeasies, and ran around with other women. Finally, he began to “court” Josephine Probst, who had grown up to be a lovely and intelligent girl. District Attorney Dakin’s theory was that this was the last straw for Carrie Gill.

  Carrie’s attorney’s theory was that Gentry’s brutality and mistreatment had driven the Sunshine Lady temporarily insane.

  The jury’s theory was—but let’s get to that.

  The trial of Carrie Gill, as Accessory before the Fact, opened October 1, 1934, in the pleasant, sunlit, old-fashioned Courthouse in Jefferson, Wisconsin. There must have been many among the spectators who remembered how Carrie Gill had brought flowers from her garden to houses where there was illness, or unobtrusively placed a freshly-baked pie or cake, or casserole of macaroni on the kitchen table in a home where there had been a death.

  Carrie Gill’s lawyer, Don V. Malone, a brilliant defense attorney, had entered a plea of Not Guilty, and Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity.

  The prosecutor’s case was that Carrie Gill’s motive had been jealousy of her niece, Josephine.

  A trio of alienists was called in.

  The evidence, speaking from a reporter’s point of view, was fascinating, but not much of it matched up and most of it was politely ignored.

  The coroner—a local undertaker—testified that one of Gentry’s legs had been broken, and that his body was a mass of bruises.

  No one seemed to care.

  An out-of-town crime expert testified that he had made the Gonzales test (a skin test to determine whether or not a suspect has fired a gun within a given length of time) on both Carrie Gill and Carl Church shortly after the murder. According to his tests, Carl Church had not fired a gun, and Carrie Gill had.

  No one ever mentioned that again.

  Came testimony of Carl Church, brought from Waupon, looking very frail and ill. Ignoring what he had stated in his confession, he told of having been hired to frighten Earl Gentry away from the neighborhood, told it in a voice that was hardly more than a whisper. He had taken possession of Gentry’s gun for his own protection. When Gentry had threatened him—“I shot him dead. He fell down.”

  Gentry had been over six feet tall. Carl Church was scarcely five feet five. The bullet had entered Gentry’s forehead and emerged at the back of his neck.

  No one seemed to care about that either.

  When Don Malone took over, he placed the Sunshine Lady on the stand, solely to carry his point that she had been driven temporarily insane by Earl C. Gentry’s brutality.

  He then retried the Madge Oberholtzer case, with all its hideous details, right there in the Jefferson County courtroom. Or perhaps I exaggerate. Let’s say, he revived it.

  Finally, the court-appointed sanity commission gave testimony that seemed, definitely, to back up Don Malone’s plea of “insanity.”

  Both closing arguments were dramatic.

  Betting ran high among the reporters on the case. We were about evenly divided as to “Guilty” or “Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity.” (Though there was one hold-out betting on a hung jury.) Most of us had stories filed to cover both verdicts. I’ll confess, I was betting on the latter—not only because of the evidence, but because of Malone’s dramatic arguments.

  The jury, composed of good solid citizens, farmers, tradesmen, businessmen and housewives, crossed us all up by bringing in a verdict of just plain Not Guilty, after only a few hours.

  Was it because of the evidence?

  Was it because they knew Carrie Gill as the Sunshine Lady? Was it because they considered Earl Gentry’s murder an act of justice?

  In 1942, Carl Church’s sentence was commuted by the Governor of Wisconsin, making him eligible for parole. Two years later, in 1944, he was set free and went to California.

  Carrie Gill, the Sunshine Lady, is still living in Jefferson, Wisconsin, among her friends and neighbors. It’s a safe guess that she is raising flowers, and turning out exquisite crocheting.

  My last memory of Carrie Gill is when a few of us interviewed her the day after the verdict. One reporter’s mother was sick.

  The Sunshine Lady’s eyes warmed.

  “You’ll want to take her some flowers,” she said. “There’s some early chrysanthemums in bloom.” And she walked out into the garden.

  THE DEADLY DEW

  It is an axiom of crime detection that the criminal never fails to leave a calling card behind him—well, almost never. Sometimes the calling card is a fingerprint or a footprint. Sometimes it’s a torn scrap of clothing, a cigarette butt, or that most personal of engraved calling cards, the fatal bullet. Even the quickly vanishing scent of perfume has sometimes served the purpose.

  But my nomination for the most novel calling card of all time goes to the homicidal visitor of Connecticut who left behind him an imprint of—the seat of his pants!

  And a vanishing imprint, at that. Imprinted in the most vanishing of all mediums, the foggy, foggy dew.

  The Connecticut State Police of Ridgefield Barracks did not expect to find murder when they drove out to the peaceful Redding district to investigate the burning down of a humble lakeside cabin. At worst, perhaps, a case of arson.

  The occupant of the cabin, 72-year-old George Hultz, was known to be a recluse who had not left the vicinity in years, and he was missing. There was no trace of his body in the cooling embers. But an acquaintance of his, who worked with him on a nearby farm, had picked up a bloodstained vest near the burning house.

  A quick examination of the site revealed more blood. Blood-spots on the grass near the back porch of the fire-ravaged house. More bloodstains near an old well, a short distance away. A human tooth. A deep impression of a man’s head in the grass, as if it had been pounded into the ground with a heavy club. Then, more impressions in the grass, as if a body had been dragged across it. The trail of bloodstains and grass impressions led down to the water’s edge, and there stood a boat.

  It was a rowboat and, on this early morning in May, it was covered with dew. The dew had been heavy that night, but on two spots the dew was light. The two lightly-spotted areas formed two distinct patterns. On the floorboard of the boat was a pattern that could have been made by a body. On the seat was a pattern that could have been made only one way—by a seated figure. If the rowboat had not been used that night the dew would have settled uniformly all over it; but if a man had deposited a body on the floorboards and seated himself on the seat …

  The officer looked out on the lake with new interest. The beaten and bloodied body of George Hultz, he decided, was somewhere at the bottom of that lake. And the murderer had left, as his calling card, a dewy imprint of the seat of his pants.

  The officer hurried away to call his associates to the spot so that they too would see the evidence. That took a little while, and by the time they got back to the boat the sun was high in the heavens. It must have been an embarrassing moment for the luckless officer, for what the dew had done the sun had undone. The evidence had vanished into thin air.

  A crew was brought in to drag the lake, and while this was going on detectives busied themselves checking up on George Hultz.

  The charred remains of the cabin yielded nothing further in the way of clues except a fire-scarred old shotgun which examination showed had been recently discharged, but the skin of a woodchuck drying on a rock nearby led the police to conclude that the gun had been used by Hultz himself.

  From all indications, this was the theory of what happened that night. Some person, intent on robbery, had found Hultz alone in his cabin. Hultz offered resistance and was clubbed to death. Then the killer dragged his body over the grass to the water’s edge, rowed out and dumped the body into the lake.

  For six days the lake was dragged without results. The draggers were ready to call the whole thing off when, suddenly, on the sixth night, they felt a tug at their grappling irons.

  It was the body of the old hermit, and, as it lay on the shore a little later, the police officer’s surmise was seen to have been correct. The old man had been clubbed to death.

  Police were convinced the killer was somebody who lived in the locality and was familiar with the rumors about the old man’s wealth. The man they wanted, police reasoned, was somebody who had been in desperate need of money, desperate enough to torture and kill for it. And there were three principal goads that might make a man desperate enough:

  Dope. Gambling. Women.

  Officers were assigned to scour the countryside, make casual conversation with people, and try to find a man to fit into one or more of these theories of motivation for the crime. They found two.

  The first was a 31-year-old mill worker who was known to be heavily in debt to certain gambling joints in Danbury. However, he had a perfect alibi.

 

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