Arlo Whitbeck, 66 years old, was a farmer who had lived for many years near West Union, Iowa. The Whitbeck farm was about halfway between West Union and Ft. Atkinson, which was a smaller town about 17 miles to the north and west. West Union had the county seat; but Ft. Atkinson had the railroad. Whitbeck owned and worked a prosperous farm, abounding in livestock. Mr. and Mrs. Whitbeck lived alone, their six children having all grown up and left the nest. On March 18, 1908, Whitbeck finished his supper about 7:15 or 7:30, took a lantern and a bucket of boiled oats and went to the barn to do his evening chores. He had a sick horse that was in need of some special attention. A short time later his wife heard a peculiar noise, but thought little of it; perhaps the dogs had had a scrap. Minutes later a neighbor, William Strickland, stopped by to deliver a message, something about finding a sawyer who had agreed to saw some logs into lumber; apparently Whitbeck was going to haul the logs to the sawmill.
Strickland saw the light of a lantern emanating from the door of the barn, but the lantern glowed unattended from the driveway through the barn, and no one answered his calls. There was blood on the frame of the lantern. He walked up to the house and asked Mrs. Whitbeck where Arlo was. She said he was in the barn, doing his chores. Strickland walked back toward the barn, about 50 yards away. As he got near the barn he thought he saw a form lying on the ground in the darkness. Fetching the lantern, he found the body of Arlo Whitbeck. Whitbeck had been hit directly on the top of his head at least six times with a heavy wooden stake, described as a sled stake. The stake was 42 inches long and three inches thick, making it a few inches longer and somewhat thicker and heavier than a baseball bat. The stake had been taken from a wagon in the barn, and had been returned to the wagon, bloody, after the murder.
The Whitbecks had a telephone. Strickland attempted to call a man named E. E. Pitts, but failed to reach him, and returned to the body. Mrs. Whitbeck took over phone duty, eventually reaching Pitts. Pitts appears to have been essentially a respected neighbor, rather than any form of lawful authority. Pitts called two more neighbors, and the three of them rushed to the Whitbeck farm. They then called the county sheriff, a man named Culver, and the county coroner, J. F. Cole. Cole arrived at the farm about 2 AM and immediately swore in the three neighbors as a coroner’s jury, legally charged to direct the investigation with the assistance of the sheriff. The sheriff arrived at the farm some hours later, near daylight.
A clump of hair, apparently pulled from the assailant, was found clutched in the victim’s right hand. The bucket of oats was overturned near the body, indicating that Whitbeck had never reached the barn. First reports from the scene stated that Whitbeck had sold some hogs earlier in the day, and had $130 or $135 in his possession before the murder. He was found with one cent in his pocket (or, alternatively, with one penny lying on the ground underneath him.) The crime was thus routinely described in first reports as a robbery, and the newspapers recited the familiar refrain that Whitbeck did not trust banks, and was known to carry large sums of money on his person.
Mr. Whitbeck had in fact sold some hogs earlier in the week, and had also withdrawn $135 from the bank in Ft. Atkinson , intending to go to the county seat on March 19 to pay his taxes. His wife said that she thought he might have had the money on him before the murder. We know from reading these stories that crimes of this nature were immediately assumed to be robberies, and money was always reported missing, even if there was no actual evidence that any money was ever there. The Waterloo Daily Courier (March 20, 1908) reported that Whitbeck’s pocket book "had been carefully restrapped and replaced in the trousers pocket" after the money was taken. This is unusual behavior for a robber, and it is unclear why a thief would take the time to do this. The robber, reports the Courier "first took the pocket book from the pocket of his victim. It was a leather bill book, fastened with straps. The book had been carefully opened, the currency it contained abstracted, the leather straps replaced and the pocket book returned to the victim’s trousers." Really?
Twenty-four hours later the same paper was backtracking. "At first there seemed to be no doubt that robbery inspired the murder," said the Courier on March 21, "but the officers are said to have received information the past twenty-four hours which leads them to think that revenge may have been the inspiring cause."
Police and prosecutors would continue, until the end of the case, to flip out theories of motive that changed regularly apparently on a whim. A man was arrested in Trenton, South Dakota on or about March 21 in connection with the crime.
Whitbeck was buried on March 22. While the funeral was being conducted Sheriff Culver and at least one deputy drove to the Whitbeck farm and searched the house. After the funeral the widow was taken immediately into custody. The investigation had focused on the dogs that didn’t bark. There were two dogs in the barn, one tied up there and one which had the run of the place, but slept in the barn. The dogs had not sounded any alarm, suggesting that the murderer was someone they knew well. Sheriff Culver thought that Mrs. Whitbeck had not acted appropriately after the murder; in the words of the Waterloo Courier—a quite excellent small-town newspaper—"it was noticed that the wife of the dead man was not grieving as a wife would be expected to grieve over the death of a husband who met death is such manner." Newspapers stated as fact that evidence incriminating Mrs. Whitbeck had been found in the search of the house.
The man arrested in South Dakota was released a few days later. Whatever it was that had prompted his arrest never became known. On March 25, Walter Whitbeck, the 32-year-old son of the murdered man, was arrested in Duluth, Minnesota, where he had gone on vacation. Walter had been at his parents’ farm the previous week, departing by train the day before the murder, but had reportedly been spotted in Ft. Atkinson on the day of the crime.
Whitbeck had no patches of hair pulled out. No problem, said the sheriff; we have decided that that was Arlo Whitbeck’s own hair, pulled out of his own head as he was dying. A man named H. A. Northrup, known to Whitbeck, swore that he had seen Walter Whitbeck get off the train in Ft. Atkinson on the morning of March 18. Whitbeck’s sister, on the other hand, wondered why the sheriff had not arrested Strickland, the neighbor who had discovered the body. She said that as a child and as an adult she had on many occasions seen Strickland prowling around their property after dark. The coroner’s jury issued a report stating that young Whitbeck had murdered his father, and a grand jury, a month later, indicted him with the same. His trial was set for September.
The sensational evidence discovered in the house showing that the wife was involved in the crime, whatever that was, never surfaced during the trial; like the hair found in the victim’s hands, it had dissipated before it reached the courtroom. The prosecution attempted to introduce a valise containing blood-stained clothing. This was thrown out of court by the judge, who ruled that the evidence had not been properly maintained, and thus could have been tampered with. While the blood-stained clothing itself could not be introduced in court, the prosecution was nonetheless allowed to talk about it—a puzzling compromise, from the standpoint of a modern reader. The most damning testimony against Walter Whitbeck was that of Northrup, the man who had seen him on the train, and, more especially, that of the neighbor, Strickland. Strickland now claimed that, arriving at the scene of the murder, he had seen Walter exit the barn just before he discovered the body. He should have said so before, he knew, but he was afraid, afraid that young Whitbeck would kill him as well.
The prosecution introduced a string of witnesses testifying to what might have been hard feelings between the two Whitbeck men. Sam Musser, one of the three men called to the scene of the crime on the night of the murder, testified that he had worked on a thrashing crew at the Whitbeck farm the previous summer, and that he noted at that time that the two Whitbecks never spoke to one another. Another neighbor testified that, days before the murder, he was discussing with Walter Whitbeck a conflict between another father and son, apparently farmers in the area, and that Walter Whitbeck had said that the younger man should knock the old man’s head off with a club. Another neighbor testified to witnessing an argument between the two men in 1906, two years before the murder. Two other men testified that they had been at the Whitbeck farm the week before the murder, sawing some wood, and that the two Whitbeck men never spoke to one another.
When Walter was arrested his gloves were taken from him. The prosecution introduced evidence that small spots cut out of the gloves contained blood. The marvelous Waterloo Courier summarizes some other evidence better than I could: In trying to trace (Walter) step by step to within three miles of the home place they got plenty of half way evidence, somebody of the prisoner’s general description being seen all along the distance, but by children, or by people who did not know him well, or by people who did not get a good look at the man as he passed."
Walter Whitbeck was arrested with $410 in his possession—not, perhaps, a terribly unusual thing for a man on vacation to be carrying money, in the time before credit cards. The defense responded with several witnesses who testified that Arlo and Walter had a close and sunny relationship, and introduced more witnesses who claimed to have seen Walter in St. Paul, Minnesota, on the night of the murder. These were apparently unconvincing.
The widow testified for her son, and tried to implicate Strickland. She was warming some milk on the stove, she said, milk for the calves. She heard a noise from the barn, went to the door, opened it, and heard a kind of moaning sound and then silence. She closed the door and went back to stir the milk. Seconds later there was a knock at the door, and there was Strickland. He was pale and shaking. He asked where Arlo was.
Walter and his father, she said, were close and comfortable with one another. Just before Walter left for St. Paul Arlo had paid Walter $200 for two mules that Arlo had sold on his behalf. More witnesses were called to testify that Walter Whitbeck was in possession of a roll of bills "as thick as your wrist" on May 17, 1908, the day before the murders.
The accused took the stand. In a calm, cool voice Whitbeck accounted for every hour of his life between the time he boarded the train and the time he was arrested. There was blood on his gloves, he acknowledged. He was a hunter. It was rabbit blood. He had purchased a ring at a St. Paul jewelry store on the 17th of March; he had the receipt, and the jeweler would testify that Whitbeck had made the purchase.
Up until this point it appeared that Whitbeck was headed for acquittal. Under cross examination a hole of several hours appeared to open up in his timeline. He could not explain why, having missed a midnight train from St. Paul to another Minnesota town, he had passed the night of the 18th in a train station in St. Paul, rather than walking a hundred yards back to the hotel where he had spent the previous night. He had spent a long time walking around seeing the sights of St. Paul, but he couldn’t say specifically what sights he had seen.
On September 29, 1908, Walter Whitbeck was convicted of murdering his father, and sentenced immediately to life in prison. His poor performance on cross examination had done him in.
In May, 1913, a note was found in a bottle on a bridge near New Orleans. The note had apparently been left by a man about to leap to his death; this, at least, was the impression that the note conveyed, although no one actually saw anyone jump. The note, signed "Jesse Miller" claimed that he (Miller) had murdered someone named "Fishbeck" or with a name similar to that somewhere in Iowa on March 16 or March 17, 1908. "I took what money he had left after I knocked him down," said the letter, "and I walked the whole night long. Another man came into the yard just after I struck the old man, and I suppose he is the man suffering for the crime I committed." No body was recovered from the river, and it was generally supposed that the letter was planted by a prison buddy of Whitbeck’s, in an effort to re-open the case.
In January, 1931, Whitbeck’s life sentence was commuted to 60 years in prison, making him eligible for parole. He was paroled in April of the same year. The sensation of the event had cooled to such an extent that his release was not even mentioned in newspapers which had covered the case at great length. The Whitbeck family had relocated to Illinois, and Walter joined his family in Illinois. I was unable to find the time or place of his death.
Did Walter Whitbeck, indeed, murder his father? Respecting the fact that the persons on the scene could have picked up a million signals which are lost to us now, it is impossible to have any confidence in the outcome of a process of justice which reveals such gross and obvious flaws. I mark it down against the prosecution when they introduce BS witnesses. If the prosecution had an actual case against Walter, why did they call to the stand a neighbor who had witnessed a minor argument between the two men almost two years before the murder?
While there is something of a hole in Walter’s alibi, there is also a gaping hole in the prosecution’s case, which is their failure to establish how Walter got back to St. Paul, Minnesota, within a day of the crime. He could not have purchased a ticket in Ft. Atkinson, where he was well known, so he would have had to jump a freight car. But when you jump a freight train, you don’t know where the train is heading; it is a very useful way to get out of town quickly, but not a good way to reach a specific destination. At some point he would have had to get off the freight car and buy a ticket. No evidence was produced to this effect. He could have ridden the rails west to Sioux City and bought a ticket in Sioux City, but if this was the case the prosecution should have been able to pinpoint almost exactly the time and place where the ticket was purchased. They either failed to do so, or made no effort to do so.
There would seem to be three reasonable possibilities: 1) That Whitbeck murdered his father, 2) That the crime was committed by William Strickland, who successfully pushed the blame off onto Whitbeck, and 3) that the murder was committed by The Man From The Train.
Of these three possibilities, Strickland seems like the best bet to me. My immediate reaction, reading the first accounts, was that Strickland showing up at the barn apparently moments after the murder seemed like a hell of a coincidence. The dogs might not have barked at Strickland, since he was a neighbor and well known to them, and his action in attempting to jump into bed with the prosecution once Walter Whitbeck had been nominated for the crime seems highly suspicious.
Strickland’s account of the crime—his revised version, in which he saw Walter Whitbeck emerging from the barn—seems less than credible. Finding the body, he saw Walter Whitbeck emerging from the barn, and commenced immediately on a pattern of deception to cover up Walter’s involvement. After attempting to phone the neighbors for help, Strickland returned to the body and stood watch over the body while waiting for help to arrive. Think about it. By now it is totally dark, and it’s an overcast, moonless, starless night, even spitting a little bit from time to time. There is no electricity on the farm, thus no light at all other than the lantern. You’re alone, unarmed, in total darkness in a rural area except for the lamp light, standing over a dead body, its head bashed in, and you have every reason to believe that the murderer is lurking in the darkness. You know who that murderer is, and you may have reason to believe that he knows that you have seen him there, and yet you stay there, fearlessly, and guard that body. If you did that, Mr. Strickland, congratulations to you; you have got some world-class cajones.
Of course, if he had the world-class cajones, then why was he too frightened to confess that he had seen the murderer emerging from the barn, too frightened to confess this even after the sheriff and the county coroner had arrived on the scene, too frightened to confess it even when he learned that the younger Whitbeck was hundreds of miles away in Minnesota? It makes perfect sense, on the other hand, if Strickland committed the crime. If he committed the crime, then he knew that he was in no danger from the murderer. Returning to the body gave him the opportunity to clean up the crime scene; he would, for example, have had plenty of time to remove the pocket book from the trousers, take out the money, re-fasten the straps, and place the empty pocket book back in the dead man’s trousers. He was alone with the body for at least a half an hour. He would have had time to return the sled stake to the wagon where he had gotten it.
Strickland knew that Whitbeck had sold the hogs earlier in the week. By his own testimony, he had ridden in the wagon with the Whitbecks when they took the hogs to market. Just after he committed the murder (if he committed the murder), the door of the house opened, and Mrs. Whitbeck looked out to see what was going on. Standing in the small circle of light or rushing away from it, Strickland could have been seen by Mrs. Whitbeck, although he wasn’t. Since he knew that there was a telephone in the house, it would have been imperative for him to rush to the house and find out what Mrs. Whitbeck had seen. Having assured himself that she had seen nothing, he then "discovered" the body, returned to the house to make a phone call—not to the police, we will note—and then returned to the body, put the pocket book back in the dead man’s trousers, put the murder weapon back in the wagon, and policed up anything that he might have dropped during the assault.
Strickland said that he remained at the Whitbeck farm all night, except that he did return to his own home briefly just after ten o’clock. That would have given him the opportunity to hide the money taken from the dead man, and also to look himself over and see if he had any blood on his shoes or on his clothes, to re-comb his hair to hide the place where Whitbeck had grabbed at him, to look himself over in the mirror before the police arrived, before anyone saw him in anything other than the lantern’s light.
We can’t discount the possibility that young Whitbeck did commit the murder for which he served 22 years in prison; some of the evidence against him seems not entirely unsubstantial. It is curious that Whitbeck failed to return to Iowa for his father’s funeral, sending instead a note of sorrow or condolence to his mother, post marked St. Paul. There seems to be an absence of real evidence of a motive, particularly since it is well established that Whitbeck (son) was in possession of a good amount of money before the murder.
The allegation against young Whitbeck postulates an unusual scenario, a murder carefully planned in advance to create the impression that Whitbeck was hundreds of miles away while he snuck back into town to commit the crime. The prosecution scenario presumes that a man who had hundreds of dollars in his pocket had constructed an elaborate ruse to commit a small-time robbery—or else that it was not a robbery, but a result of his hatred of his father, a hatred poorly documented by a long list of witnesses.
The Strickland scenario seems more common, more natural. $130 was not much money to the Whitbecks, but it could have seemed like a small fortune to Strickland, and, if Mrs. Whitbeck didn’t know exactly how much money was in the pocket book, Strickland certainly did not know, either. It could have been $500. The murder, if committed by Strickland, seems hasty, careless and very awkward; if committed by Whitbeck, it seems elaborate, contrived, and extremely difficult. The former attributes are more common in crime stories.
Regarding the possibility that this murder was committed by The Man From the Train, I will note the following:
1) That the murder was committed within walking distance of the railroad (about six miles),
2) That a large man with a baggy coat was reported in the vicinity by numerous witnesses,
3) That the crime was committed with a weapon of opportunity left in the barn, as were the other crimes in this series,
4) That the victim was hit directly on the top of his head, as were many other victims in this series of crimes,
5) That the crime was committed in Iowa, as were numerous others of the crimes that we have discussed and will discuss,
6) That the motive for the murder is unclear,
7) That the crime was gratuitously bloody as a result of pointless overkill,
8) That a farmer over 50 years in age was murdered in (or near) his barn just after dark and just as he began his evening chores, exactly as happened in several of our other cases.
Markers that distinguish this case from the others include
1) That the crime was committed about two years before the series of crimes could definitely be said to have begun,
2) That the walk from the railroad was longer than in most of the other cases,
3) That the weapon of opportunity was not an axe,
4) That there may well have been a robbery of more than $100,
5) That there was a single victim in the case, rather than a number of victims as in the other cases, and
6) That there are other good candidates to have committed the crime.