In the first days of March, 1908, Mr. and Mrs. Warren Hart were murdered in their home near Frazier, Georgia. Two Negroes, Curry Robertson and John Henry, were seized and lynched the next day. Newspapers report that one of the lynching victims confessed to the murders before he was killed, and said that the motive was robbery.
There is little to link this crime to our story, in general; however, I will note in passing the following things:
1) The "confession" means very little, extorted as it was under the greatest duress. A man who knows he is about to be murdered will say anything, often just to buy himself enough time to say it. Also, the newspapers say that one of the men confessed to the crime, but don’t say which one, which casts doubt on the premise of the confession.
2) The crime was supposedly a robbery; however, the men who were lynched had no money on them at the time they were taken into custody, within hours of the crime.
3) I note that in this case, Mr. Hart was killed with an axe, while Mrs. Hart was bludgeoned to death with a heavy object. In several of our other crimes, a man or several men were killed with an axe, and the woman was then bludgeoned.
4) Frazier, Georgia, no longer exists, it was south of Atlanta, not far from Hawkinsville, about halfway between Atlanta and the Florida state line.
In early February, 1908, there occurred a crime in Corry, Pennsylvania, which is also almost certainly unrelated to our subject, but an interesting enough story that I’m going to tell it to you anyway, since I can’t prove that it is not related.
Corry was at that time a town of seven to eight thousand people (a little smaller now) in the northwest corner of the state, near to Ohio and near to New York. The town was formed at the spot where two main railroad lines intersected.
On February 9 a postman, trying to deliver a parcel to one Albert Damon, discovered Damon dead in his chair, his feet propped up against a cold fireplace, blood having poured freely from his head, neck or face. Damon’s sister, Mrs. Jane Satterlee, was found in her bedroom in the same condition. She was face down in bed, fully dressed, the covers drawn up smoothly around her.
Damon had quarreled with his wife a few weeks earlier, and she had moved out. The wife had been married several times, and appears not to have been too terribly committed to the relationship. Damon had then asked his widowed sister to move in with him, to take care of the house, and she agreed.
The Corry murders became a famous and sensational crime, not a high-level sensation, but a well-known crime story followed coast to coast. The thing is, no one could say for certain how the victims had died. They were older people, and frail. The medical examiner, Dr. Beebe, thought that they had been bludgeoned or stabbed in the throat, but the bodies had de-composed quite a bit before they were found, and he couldn’t say for sure. It never seems to have occurred to the local officials to call in an outside expert. There was no murder weapon at the scene, and money in plain view in the house was left untouched. Some people thought that the old "couple" had deliberately drunk acid in a suicide pact. Dr. Beebe didn’t think so, but there was an empty bottle found next to Damon’s hand, and Dr. Beebe couldn’t say for certain what had happened to them.
Police arrested and questioned vigorously Damon’s 22-year-old stepson, John Silloway. Silloway was the son by a previous husband of Damon’s estranged wife. Held for weeks without access to a lawyer, Silloway began standing on a ladder inside the prison, communicating with his attorney outside the prison by yelling back and forth through a window. A coroner’s jury ruled that the deaths were the result of murder, not suicide, and Silloway was charged with being an accessory to the crime, a somewhat mystifying charge, it being unclear who the principles to the crime might have been or how Silloway had assisted them.
A neighbor now came forward with a tale about hearing screams and people pleading for their lives on the night of February 6-February 7, about 2 o’clock in the morning. She had seen a man leaving the house; he had walked right by her as she latched her door! She appears to have been just an excitable gossip, one of those annoying people who show up in the middle of crime stories with narratives that garble the process of sorting things out.
Silloway’s mother went to the police and claimed knowledge that the murder was committed by Damon’s brother, Alpheus, who was the chief beneficiary of his estate, and by two of his nephews. The nephews were arrested in Erie, Pennsylvania on March 2, the brother the next day.
The relatives were held in custody for almost two weeks, and were released with a statement from the police that there was absolutely nothing to connect them to the crime. There was nothing to connect John Silloway to the crime, either, but the charges against him were upgraded to first-degree murder.
In mid-May there was a sensational development in the case, instructive as to the quality of the investigation. The medical examiner, Dr. Beebe, received a communication of some sort making a general offer of money if Dr. Beebe would, in the vaguely poetic terminology of the time, "swear away the life of young Silloway." Since Silloway’s defense was that the old folks had committed suicide, Dr. Beebe was being offered a bribe to swear that absolutely this was not true; they were bludgeoned or stabbed to death. Dr. Beebe immediately contacted Silloway’s defense attorneys, who arranged to have witnesses sitting in an adjoining room when Dr. Beebe met with his contact. The contact turned out to be a Corry policeman, who offered Dr. Beebe $300 to perjure himself. A deal for the testimony was ostensibly agreed upon.
One might think that Silloway would have been released the next day, but no. What can only be called the fraudulent and abusive prosecution of young Silloway continued on as before. A trial was scheduled for September, and Silloway was forced to go through the financially draining task of preparing to defend himself, although reading through the newspaper stories a hundred years later it seems impossible that the prosecution could have imagined that they were going to convict him. Finally, on the eve of the trial in late September, the charges against Silloway were dropped.
Alpheus Damon, brother of the deceased, filed suit against the city, charging that he had been held for two weeks and his reputation ruined with absolutely no evidence. This led to a trial, which became an occasion for the press to re-hash the story. Once they had done that they lost interest in the lawsuit, coverage of which peters out in mid-trial. The murders—if indeed they were murders—were never solved.
This is the fifth in a series. You can read the fourth article here.