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Murder Sheet
John Terrell’s Trials and Tribulations: A Conversation with Author Stephen Terrell
01:10:47
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- [00:00]
A
Fall's pretty much here and I for one am celebrating the cooler temperatures because this means I can finally break out my Quince Mongolian cashmere sweaters. I love sweaters in general and these are two of my all time favorites.
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I'm desperate to have Anya buy another.
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A
Hat maybe, but right now I'm loving my black V neck sweater and dark blue turtleneck sweater. They're so soft and comfortable and easy to maintain. I think they look really stylish, but they're also just easy to sort of throw on with anything. And frankly, that's the kind of high quality, low effort vibe I'm going for this year. So get your Mongolian cashmere sweaters starting at $50 so we can all match.
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- [01:46]
A
Do you have a murder in your family? So many of us do. Sometimes it's a fresh trauma, a relatively recent event, a loss still grieved. Other times it's many generations back, something you stumble across while doing genealogical research.
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B
Well, Steven Turrell has a murder in his family and it's a doozy.
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A
It's also the subject of his excellent book, the Madness of John Revenge and Insanity on Trial in the Heartland.
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B
We recently spoke to Stephen about his nonfiction crime book. In so many ways, he was the perfect person to author this work, and not just because of the family connection. He has worked as a journalist and then spent much of his career as an attorney, sort of a combination of the two of us. So he can tell a story and also analyze trials and court proceedings.
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A
And boy, does this tale have a lot of court proceedings and a whole lot of story to boot. It's a story about a raging father, domestic abuse, mental health, religion, or lack thereof The Indiana of many generations ago, A past that may not be as innocent as it appears on the surface. And the strange ways of fate. My name is Anya Cain. I'm a journalist.
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B
And I'm Kevin Greenlee. I'm an attorney.
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A
And this is the Murder Sheet.
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B
We're a true crime podcast focused on original reporting, interviews and deep dives into murder cases. We're the Murder Sheet.
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A
And this is John Terrell's Trials and Tribulations, a conversation with author Stephen Tirrel.
- [04:01]
C
Okay, Stephen, first of all, thank you so much for joining us today. We really, really appreciate it.
- [04:06]
D
Oh, it's a pleasure to be here.
- [04:08]
C
I guess, to start out with, can you tell us a little bit about your background, your law practice, things like that?
- [04:15]
D
Well, I'm a retired lawyer. I practiced in Indianapolis, was where I was located. I did practice all around the state and in fact around the country at different times in my career. But my practice started out purely civil litigation and I did that. And I was with a big firm for about 13 years and then I left and went to a smaller firm for 13 years or so. And I expanded my practice a little bit, but still primarily centered on civil litigation lawsuits. And then finished the last 13, 14 years of my practice with my own practices solo practitioner.
- [04:58]
C
And tell us a little bit about your career as an author. I know we're going to be talking about one particular book today, but you've written quite a number.
- [05:05]
D
Yeah, I, I've always been a writer. When I got in out of college, I was a journalist for a couple of years, actually for about three and a half years, worked a small town newspaper. And then when I started law school, I worked in a magazine. And you know, in the early years of my career, I didn't do too much writing besides trying to practice law and figure my way around the legal profession and build a practice. But at some point in time, that urge to write, I don't want to say it ever left me, but I finally decided I needed to do something about that. I needed to do some writing. So I started with writing some short stories, writing articles. I wrote a lot of law related articles, some op ed pieces that were published in newspapers in Indiana and down in Louisiana. And finally got to the point I started writing a bigger piece, a novel that I was decided it was time if I was ever going to write, I needed to do that. And I had a cousin who had a very successful novel called Paypal turned into a movie with Kevin Spacey and, and Jeff Bridges. And so I'd written about 70 pages, 80 pages of it, and sent him a draft of it, and he sent me back his comments. He bled red all over it and basically said, this is crap. So I put it away for a while and it was several years later I pulled it out again and decided I need to do it again. And I read through it and he was right, it was crap. I was trying to write like a writer instead of write like a storyteller. And so I went back to that, wrote that book, it was called Stars Fall, ended up self publishing and independently publishing it. And it did very well, actually, for a self published book. And so I followed up that. I've written three novels and continued to write short stories. And then the pandemic came, and I was doing some genealogy research and I stumbled on this story about my great uncle, of which, as I say in the dedication, my family never spoke of.
- [07:52]
C
Tell us about that. Tell us about that moment where you found this really intriguing mention of your great uncle and sort of how that sparked this project.
- [08:01]
D
It was a pandemic. I just retired from the practice, and then everybody's stuck at home. And not only that, I was getting used to being retired. And I was working on family genealogy, and I discovered that my great grandfather and I knew about my great grandfather. In fact, he's buried in the same cemetery as my grandfather, as my parents, as one of my siblings, and also my great, great grandfather. They're all in this small country cemetery. But I did not know that he had a first marriage, that he had been married before he married my great grandmother, and he had been married to my great grandmother's first cousin. So I found out they had two children. What happened is they were married in 1849, they had a girl, and then they had a boy in 1852, John Wesley Terrell. And I knew nothing of them. What happened is Rebecca, John's mother, my great grandfather's first wife, died when John was very young and he remarried. And this was in a very rural area of Randolph county, just east of Muncie. And so I had John's name, I had his birth date, I had his death date. And I went on Newspapers.com and typed in his name, his death date, because I had found that one of the best resources in doing genealogy research were obituaries and death notices. Have a lot of information you can't find or have difficulty finding, like the married names of daughters and grandchildren's names and things like that. So. And also occupations. So I typed that in and searched Indiana newspapers and the very first story that popped up was a story on my great grandfather or my great uncles John. And it said something to the effect, oh, John W. Terrell succumbs here. Wells county man who murdered his son in law dies at home of daughter marked death of John Terrell Marks close of noted criminal case. I had never heard of this. My family is actually one that, you know, you. I noted in, in my dedication to my parents that they passed down this love of family stories. We gathered around at family occasions and they would tell all sorts of family stories. In fact, a number of my short stories I've written have been. They're not the story that was passed down, but that story became the genesis of a short story that I wrote. In fact, the first short story that I won an award for was called Visiting Hours was based on one of those family stories. But they never talked about this one. And so I being a writer, being a person with some family story interest, it didn't take me long to jump in and start researching this. And very quickly I thought, oh, this has got to be a. A book.
- [11:44]
E
So how did you begin that process of researching? What, what was that like?
- [11:48]
D
The initial process was basically using newspapers.com to find all the stories. And it did not take long at all. There were, by my last count, there were more than 600 stories published about the shooting in the next day, in the next two days, in newspapers across the United States, including on the front page of the New York Times, in the Boston Globe, in newspapers from Bangor, Maine to Butte, Montana to Austin, Texas to all over. And so I found these stories. A lot of them were variations of the AP story that went out and that started the research process. Then I started reading and researching more about the people who were involved, John's family. Then I did find stumbled on the stumbledon's the wrong term. But I did find the Indiana Supreme Court case that involves this. And when I found that, since I did a lot of appellate work over the years, I practice in state and federal courts, I clerked at the Indiana Court of Appeals. I knew if there was a decision, there had to be a transcript someplace. And so I tracked that down through the Indiana Supreme Court Clerk's office to the Indiana archives. And in the Indiana state archives is where I found the transcript. Now the big surprise came when I went down to the archives to look at it. I called them up in advance and they pulled it. And when they brought it out, it was huge. And in fact, the people at the state archives said that it was the largest by Far, far and away the largest transcript that they had ever seen from that time period. The closest that they had ever seen was one from about a quarter century later, the trial of D.C. stevens, the Klan, the head of the Klan, the power broker for Indiana and the 1920s, who basically ran Indiana and until he happened to make the mistake of murdering a young girl. So it was fascinating. It was a 2,500 page transcript. It still is. It's still there. But because the sheets were so fragile, that transcript, when they brought it out, I'm looking at a transcript that had not been opened in over 100 years and they it was in one volume. Now, currently we went to electronic transcripts a few years ago, but even before that, during the time I was practicing, volumes were limited to 250 pages and so you'd have multiple volumes. This was a single volume. And as I said, the paper was rather delicate, so they could not take it apart and could not make a copy of it for me. So I became friends with the folks at the Indiana State Archives and took out my phone and had to actually buy a supplemental power source for my phone because it would only do this for about half a day at a time. Spent about two weeks taking images, PDF images of every page of that transcript. So then started the process of going through the transcript, going through all those newspaper stories, researching the story of my great uncle and this fascinating murder case and murder trial and the events after that.
- [16:11]
A
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- [19:05]
C
It really is a tour de force of research and I would really encourage people to read the book to get all that detail because it, it's like, it's, it's absolutely amazing. I, I guess maybe to set this up, can you tell us a bit about what you found out about who John Terrell was? You know, where did he live? What was, what was he all about? What was he sort of, what was his life like? I mean, prior incident.
- [19:29]
D
Okay, John is a fascinating character, but I will say if I can say one thing about this, and hopefully you've read the book, so hopefully you can. This doesn't read like a research paper. At least I sure hope it doesn't. It's intended to read like a novel. But I do have. There are 475 endnotes at the end of this. So if you want to see the sourcing on all of this information and if you want to see some of the background information, that's all in the end notes. Now John is an interesting character, if I can give a little background. His grandfather, my great great grandfather, was the first Terrell to come to Indiana in 1827. His name was George Wesley Terrell and he was a farmer and a preacher by all indications. I think his father before him was also a preacher. And that's sort of how the name Wesley came about, which was Wesleyanism. John Wesley, who was basically the founder of the modern Protestant church movement in Europe and in the United States and particularly associated with the Methodist Church. And John's grandfather was George Wesley Terrell. His father, my great grandfather was William Wesley Terrell and he was also a landowner, a preacher and a farmer. And then we have John, John Wesley Terrell, who was a farmer, but he was also an atheist, a very stern devout, if that can be a term used, atheist. But John grew up in Randolph county, right on the edge of Delaware county, as I said, just east of Monc, rural area. But in 1880 he moved with his great uncle, with his family to Wells county, southern Wells County. A little burg called Nottingham, which is nothing more than basically a street sign and a church now at a cemetery. But he moved to Nottingham in southern Wells County. He was a hard working farmer, studious with his work. I mean, he was a very stern person who worked hard, saved his money. And 1892, oil was discovered on his property. It was part of the oil boom in eastern Indiana in 1889, I think in Keystone in Wells county, where they discovered the first well. And by 1896, that was the last day I could find a firm number and six wells that were operating on his property. He became very quickly perhaps the wealthiest man in Wells County. He bought business property, he bought farm property, he bought houses that he leased out, he bought a, eventually erected a stable that he leased out. He loaned money out to people and when he did so, he loaned money with taking mortgages for them and then if they didn't pay on time, he was quick to hire lawyers to evict them from their property, to sue them, to enforce liens, to enforce mortgages. And he was a, as I said, a very successful businessman. And so when all of these events happen that are subject to the, the subject of this story, you have to keep in mind that he was a very wealthy man, not so lucky in personal matters. His wife was very ill. She had an illness that followed her throughout her lifetime. He had three daughters and the two oldest daughters married oilfield roughnecks brothers. And they were married in 1895, 96. And within two years, the daughters became pregnant and their husbands abandoned them. One was abandoned in Indiana, the other was abandoned in Pennsylvania. And she had to sell all of her furniture to be able to afford a ticket to catch the train back to Indiana. And I think that's important because that part of the story, I think, has an impact on how John reacts to what later happened. OVC and Lucy was the youngest child. She was the apple of his eye, as one of the newspapers said at the time. And in 1901, she became pregnant by the local cat of the county, Leo Melvin Wolf. Now, Melvin wasn't an innocent at all because this is the second time he knocked up a young girl. The Other1 was 15 when he got her pregnant. But somehow his dad was able to talk his way out of having to marry her. But John was not to be so easily dissuaded. And there was a forced marriage in December of 1901. Now, I find it interesting. I think there's so much about this time frame that intrigued me. The more I researched it. It is so different than people's perceptions of it. It's not like in the 1960s, my generation, the 1960s, invented sex. They didn't even invent premarital sex. Lucy gets knocked up, there's a forced marriage, and Lucy goes to live with the Wolf family, which is a very prominent family in Wallace County. Melvin Wolf's father was known as a farmer. He was known for as a livestock breeder. Well, retarded. But then we run into Lucy goes to live with the Wolf family, and Melvin and his whole family begin to abuse her terribly, Melvin particularly. And he at one point goes to Lucy, throws money at her, and tells her that she needs to go take the money and get an abortion. So abortions weren't unheard of then either. Lucy refuses. He continues to emotionally, physically abuse Lucy to the point that when she was about six months pregnant, she attempted suicide. She takes laudanum, which is a tincture of opiates and alcohol, which was often used by women. Doctors would tell women to take it for female problems. And it was not a prescription medication. It could be bought at the local drugstore. But Lucy attempted suicide. That failed. Melvin continued to abuse her to the point where Lucy walked in across the hall to Melvin's stepsister's room and walked in and found Melvin and his stepsister in bed. See, this stuff wasn't. Maybe the 1890s and early 1900s weren't nearly as conservative and as buttoned up as we often think it was.
- [27:55]
C
So true.
- [27:56]
D
We didn't invent this stuff?
- [27:58]
C
No, it's like, we didn't start the fire. Right? I mean, it's like, yeah, people have always been people.
- [28:05]
D
Absolutely. Absolutely. And the more you find out about this time period, the more fascinating it is and how wrong a lot of our perceptions are. But at seven months pregnant, Melvin grabbed Lucy, put her in his wagon, took her back to the Tarrell farm, threw her out of the wagon, literally threw her out, and then threw her clothes out where they were scattered all across the barnyard, and left her with the Terrell family when she was seven months pregnant. And two months later, Lucy gave birth to a girl, Mabel Marie. Well, what happens at that point? At John's insistence, Lucy filed a lawsuit against Melvin for fraudulent marriage. Not for divorce, but for fraudulent marriage. And it's an interesting cause of action because I have never heard of it before or since, but it was successful. She received a judgment against him for $500, which doesn't sound like much, but was a lot more money back then. And at that point, Melvin really started harassing the Terrell family and Lucy and continued to do so. He would see them on the road as they were passing in buggies, and he would run them off the road. He would flash a gun at them. He would yell insults at them, including some. Including one that I won't use on the air here, but it's not a word, not. Not a combination of words or a single word, however you describe it, that I even Knew existed in 1902. And he would shove Lucy when he come across her in the local restaurant. He actually had one of his buddies, a sort of a bully type guy, beat up Lucy's younger brother. And it was just a terrible person. And finally, on a Sunday afternoon, early evening in 1903, July 12, 1903, Melvin was going on a buggy ride with his stepsister seated next to him. And there was another buggy with him. It was another couple. And they were riding down the road, Camden Bluffton pike, which is now State Road Highway 1. And they rode along and they were going past the Terrell farm, and John was in the barnyard. His granddaughter Mabel was playing at his feet, as was his other granddaughter. And they were playing in the barnyard. And Melvin pulls the wagon up near the fence and yells out at John, hold up the bastard. So I can see it. And he then took off on his. On the buggy, on down the road. And the two couples went down the road for a mile or two and then turned around and came back. And as they were Coming back past the Taro farm, John was waiting in a roadside ditch and jumped up with his shotgun, a double barrel shotgun. The first shot misfired, went into the road, but the second shot hit Melvin in the leg, in the thigh, and it obliterated his thigh bone, shattered it. He also tore all the arteries that were in his leg and he just started bleeding every place. Della, the stepsister grabs the reins and rushes him into this nearby town of Petroleum. Interesting. Petroleum obviously was formed after the oil boom and was a bustling town back then. It had a grocery store, it had a stable, it had a barber shop that was open past 10 o' clock on Saturday night. It had an ice cream parlor. It was like the John Belushi line from the Blues Brothers. When they're driving through the mall, I don't know if you remember that scene. They have the chase scene through the mall and there's a point, John Belushi's looking around us, that are wrecking carnage through this mall with their cars. He goes, this mall's got everything. Well, that was sort of petroleum in 1903, not so much. Now, a side story, when I was doing this research, I also did some research on my wife and her family a little bit, not much, but a little bit. And I found grade school pictures of my wife and they were in first and second grade and they were from Petroleum Elementary. I had no idea that she, that she ever lived there. And so, yeah, it's just sort of an oddity that you find this story about all these occurrences and you find out your wife went to elementary school there.
- [33:45]
C
She's in the mix.
- [33:47]
D
Yeah. So there were two doctors in Petroleum at that time. And so she rushes Melvin into Dr. Saunders office. There were four guys who carried him into the doctor's office. The, the carriage was just full of blood and he was turning gray. And they rush him through the main office into the back room where the operating table is located. And coming up behind them, riding in his buckboard, standing in the the wagon, one handful of the reins, the other hand holding the shotgun, his hair standing up, comes my great uncle, because after all he's the Terrell and Terrell's believe. You know, no job is worth doing unless you do it right. So he comes up to the doctor's office with a shotgun in his hand and there are two men coming out, but he knows both of them and they were coming out. They had helped carry Melvin in. They were just leaving the doctor's office. And John yells out the exact words in the transcript. God damn the man who stands between me and Wolf. I'll kill him as sure as I'm going to kill Wolf. And being the brave, pioneering sort that we expect our Hoosier pioneers to be, they both step aside. So the doctor, having heard the commotion, latches the door into the operating room. But he and the other gentleman who were in the operating room, the other gentleman who was in the operating room with him, being again, the brave, pioneering sort, there was a back door to the operating room, and they both left and took off in different directions out of the operating room, leaving Melvin Wolf on the operating table by himself, effectively bleeding out. John comes up with a shotgun. He takes the barrel of the shotgun. It's a plank door. And he batters the door, knocks down two of the five planks in the door. Inside, Melvin apparently was trying to get up. He could not support himself on that leg. He had lost so much blood. He apparently tried to sit up, and John shot him in the shoulder blade. The pellets went through the lungs and into his heart, and he fell back. And then John stuck the shotgun against his head and pulled the trigger.
- [36:52]
C
Brutal. Yeah.
- [36:54]
D
It made headlines, as I said earlier, across the country, more than 600 newspapers over the next few days, including the front page of the New York Times.
- [37:08]
C
I wanted to ask you about that. What do you think about. I mean, obviously it's a remarkable story and very well told by you right now. But also in the book, just very suspenseful. But why do you think this particular story took off and resonated to the point that it was so widely covered at the time?
- [37:26]
D
I've been doing presentations about this, and one of the things I research, I did a lot of research about different aspects of this besides just the facts of the murder. And it is, like I say, when I give the presentation, the big thing about this that makes the difference between this being a story that you tell at a family reunion and being a story worthy of the book is it's really a story about the people. It's about John. It's about his scorned woman daughter, Mary. Lucy was her name. She's always known as Lucy. About Lucy. It's about Melvin. It's about what happened to the entire family, indeed, to the whole community about this. This was the height of yellow journalism. This was the height of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer and their yellow journalism, their sensational headlines, their newspapers, battles in New York City and across the country. There was one book I picked up or an article that talked about this and described yellow press as the florid bloom of crime and underwear. And I thought it was an apt description. There was another that described William Randolph Hearst's view of his newspapers. And it said he wanted readers to look at page one and say gee whiz and turn to page two and say holy Moses. And then at page three shout God Almighty things. And this story just had everything. It had illicit love, it had a scorned mother, an abandoned child, it had a father's revenge, it had a roadside ambush, a chase to into the small town. They had the unusual nature of breaking into an operating room and putting a shotgun to the head of his son in law. I mean, you know, it's back to the John Belushi line. It had everything. So I think that's why it drew so much attention nationwide. And then within the state of Indiana, it continued to make headlines until John died in 1916.
- [39:57]
E
I imagine one question our listeners would have is that there seemed to been multiple eyewitnesses. The basic facts seem to be pretty well known. What was the issues at the trial?
- [40:09]
D
Well, the defense, the state actually in the state's initial presentation of its case, it only took basically 24 hours one day, from basically noon one day till early afternoon one day to early afternoon the next day for the state to present a case. There were a dozen witnesses and they testified about seeing the shooting on the roadside, the chase into the doctor's office about seeing John. Gentlemen who were there who he threatened to have step aside testified the people who saw it saw John go in, they heard the gunshots. Nobody was in the room but John and Melvin. But they heard the gunshots, they saw John's actions afterwards. And that was the case, that was the state's case. The defense was based on insanity, temporary insanity, which was actually much more common defense then than it is now and in fact was much more, I want to say lenient, but it certainly permitted. Irresistible impulse was one of the tests for insanity in Indiana. And it was otherwise, it was the McNaughton test. And so the case from the defense standpoint was to present all this evidence about John, his background, head injuries he had had in the past, his family background, the fact that there were people who were, I hate to put it this way because it's my family too, but that there were indecent cousins who were insane and other cousins and their children who were termed idiots. Not in the term that we use idiots today, but the term that was used then meaning truly somebody who could not function in the world. And the idea behind that Was. And the judge permitted that evidence to come in. In today's world, that evidence would never come in. It would be far too remote and not have. And the witnesses would not be allowed to testify based upon their observations that John looked wild and crazy that day, that he was of unsound mind. But there was a lot of testimony of that. The testimony about John's family, quite frankly, probably drove the jury to boredom because it was very, very tedious. Jury selection was also interesting, though. You know, we sort of skipped over that. But the jury selection was fascinating because it was all men. And, you know, we're talking about how the world being different than we think it is. I mean, I think most people, if you ask about the world at that time, rural Indiana, that everybody would be sort of an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, justice type people. And yet it took them three days to select a jury. The biggest reason by far, about half of the men who were called and were 97, took 97 men to be called before they got a jury of four. Well, but the biggest reason men were excused from that jury was because they did not believe in the death penalty. So when you hear people talk maybe being offensive here, but people talk about make America great again, you know, it's tough justice and all that. Well, that's not the way the world was in 1890, 1900, in Wells county, they had never sentenced a person to the death penalty. And in fact, I said half of the jurors were unable to serve, not because of publicity about the case, which was extensive, but because they did not believe in the death penalty.
- [44:26]
C
That's extremely well said. I would always encourage people read about history, read about past. You're going to be really surprised with what you find because the whitewashed, kind of idealistic, nostalgic view of how things used to be is rarely accurate, if you really get down to it and look at the facts.
- [44:46]
D
Yeah. And. And that's one reason why this story so appealed to me. Beyond just the, you know, the outrageous blood and guts murder part of it is it's also a story of the time and the people who lived during that time. It's a different world than I think most of us would have thought it was.
- [45:12]
C
I'm curious for. For you, you know, were there any other things that you. That surprised you about the time period or that you learned that kind of influenced the way you view that time period, Just, you know, through learning about this trial?
- [45:25]
D
Oh, there were a lot of things. For example, the transcript itself, which is remarkable. The Transcript itself could have been done during the first 30 years I practiced. Appellate transcripts look just like the appellate transcript in this. They had the same. Except I don't think we got 31 lines on a page. I think we only got like 26. But the margins were wider too. Today when you get a transcript, it's very narrow. So court reporters have a lot more pages. But it did. It looked just like a transcript. It had the same marginal notations. It had the same little note about the witnesses when they were testifying. The same Q and A as they went through the transcript. It could have been a transcript from 1980 as opposed to 1903. I found the. Of the town, the little town of Petroleum, which is just a shell of itself now. But the stories about. Part of it was the. The story talks about the night before the shooting and what happened in this town. It was thriving. It was a bustling place. It was. People were in the barber shop at 10 o'. Clock. There were the general store, a restaurant. They were all open late. People. It wasn't a town that, you know, the sidewalks rolled up at 6 o'.
- [46:53]
B
Clock.
- [46:54]
D
I found that fascinating. I found the. The trial itself, how it was conducted, how the lawyers conducted themselves to be very interesting. The fact that trial was conducted in evening sessions and on Saturdays, that was to me, fascinating. I did background research, as I said, on yellow journalism. I did background research on mental institutions. The Richmond State Hospital, as it became at that time known as East Haven Mental Asylum. That's getting ahead of the story. But John ends up there. And it was fascinating to read that. I did some research. I even read Nellie Bly's book about her time. I don't know if you know the story where she, as a reporter got into a women's mental institution and wrote about her experience. So I read that and read the. About. Studied the effects of that. I read quite a bit about. Because John was an atheist. And that came out in trial. That came out when the witnesses were asked about John's reputation for being moral, which you could not get away with today in court. But there were a number of witnesses who tested out how John was not moral because he didn't believe in the Bible, he didn't believe in God. And I think it had an impact on the jury. Now, whether it was the deciding impact, I don't know. But it was certainly interesting to read and study some about atheism in the United States during that time period about a gentleman called Robert Ingersoll, who was called the Great Agnostic And John was a big follower of his. And he spoke, he was, it was fascinating because he spoke around the country as this atheist agnostic. And he drew standing room only crowds as he spoke around the country, charging a dollar apiece. So you figure if he goes into a 2,000 seat auditorium, he was doing pretty well. And people love to go to get mad at him. And he was covered in the newspapers. He was. Every one of his appearances would be covered in the news and they'd report about it, and then some wolf creature would write in opposition to it. And it was, as I said, it was as fascinating to read about this because I don't ever recall studying that when I was in school, even though as a history buff.
- [49:45]
C
So he was. He got an anti fandom. It's interesting, it reminded me, I remember Kevin was telling me that early, early, early in his career, I think Abraham Lincoln wanted to write some letter, right, Kind of basically saying he was agnostic or kind of maybe a bit criticizing religion. And one of his mentors basically told him, like, do you not want to have a career? Like, don't do that. Don't put that in writing. But it just, it's just funny how back then that was seen as such a controversial thing. I'm curious though, you mentioned some of this stuff coming into trials, and for all the trial buffs who are listening, they're probably thinking like, that was allowed in. What else was different? I'm curious, were there differences between how the attorneys conducted themselves and just how this trial went down in terms of, like, we would never see this today?
- [50:33]
D
Well, there are several things you'd never see today, I'd say, but overall, the trial, the form of the trial and the conduct of the lawyers for the most part, was what you would see. In fact, the one assistant prosecutor, William Eichhorn, was remarkable in his ability to cross examine the expert witnesses. He clearly had studied and almost seemed like he knew more about mental illness than the witnesses who were testifying. And the witnesses were not, you know, country bumpkins. These guys had studied in Europe. They had studied at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. They had experience. And yet Eichhorn clearly had really worked so that he could effectively cross examine them about their opinions. One of the things that is different today is when we have expert witnesses. Expert witnesses were almost unknown then. And in this case, John's lawyers hired a dozen expert witnesses, but they had to testify in a much more stilted format because they used as, you know, hypothetical questions, are questions that are allowed to use to ask expert Witnesses to elicit their opinions that are admissible in court. But at this time, to get those opinions in, the hypothetical question had to contain only facts that had been admitted into evidence, but it had to contain all the facts. So the question to ask the witnesses, the experts that got on standards, was 16 pages long. And these are almost single space, if you look at the pages, and it had to be identical. So every expert witness that got up after his credentials and his background, they would ask the defense attorney, would ask this question and would have to read it. As I said, 16 pages, it took at least 20 minutes to read. I know, because I did it. And that question was asked to each of the expert witnesses, which, if you do the math, as 20 minutes times 12, it ends up being eight hours. That and I said 20 minutes. It could be. Yeah, it could be 40 minutes. It was actually 40 minutes to read a 16 page. These are legal size pages. 16 page question at which the end of which was every one of the witnesses said in one sentence and some variation. My opinion is he was of unsound line. So the jury listens to that question. 40 minutes times 12, and it ends up being eight hours that they. These 12 farmers who were born before the Civil War, who probably had at most a second or third grade education, you know, they got a summer school, they got a school until they were old enough to go out in the fields and work, and they had to listen to this. And there's just no doubt that it had no effect except just to put them to sleep.
- [54:28]
C
Do you have an opinion on whether John was insane or not when he did this?
- [54:35]
D
When he did this? I have an opinion. It's hard not being there to get an opinion from the dry facts. I think based on certainly. I think if the defense would have portrayed the case a little differently and emphasized the act of temporary insanity, that it was an irresistible impulse, which is no longer a defense, by the way, in Indiana. Irresistible. In fact, there is not a single state nor the federal government that recognizes irresistible impulse as a part of the insanity defense. So under today's rules, no, he would have not had that defense available to him under the rules then. I think there was a better argument that then was made that he really was temporarily insane at the time this happened. Yeah, I wasn't there. I can't tell you. But yeah, I think that, Eileen, there certainly was a substantial question that would take the jury more than the 15 minutes. The single vote that it took to convict him.
- [56:03]
C
Yeah, no, I personally reading this book and talking to you I kind of felt Melvin Wolf maybe had it coming as an extreme, because obviously a shotgun blast to the head is pretty bad, but he was a very bad person, and he tormented family.
- [56:19]
D
Yeah, it was like the. The musical Chicago. You remember, if you've seen that, where the. The have the song. Yeah, he had it coming.
- [56:29]
C
Yeah, he. He. If anyone had it coming, it was this guy. But, you know.
- [56:33]
D
But there is the argument that was very forcefully made, particularly by Eichhorn and too, by the prosecutor, John Burns, that you can't take the law into your own hands. That's another aspect you talk about differences between then and today. They had eight hours of closing arguments on each side, 16 hours total. The longest argument I ever. The longest closing argument I ever gave was, I think, about 45 minutes. You know, there's an old saying that no. No souls are saved, nor jurors convinced after 20 minutes. Yeah, but it was a show.
- [57:18]
C
I. That's wild. I. Yeah, it is. It is interesting with the. With the vigilante justice angle. Like, obviously it makes sense that the state would want him to be charged with murder, because, I mean, that's. You can't encourage people to do stuff like that.
- [57:32]
D
Yeah, you asked my opinion. But what was interesting for me is at the time this divided the county, divided the state about John, both with regard to his guilt for killing Melvin Wolf. There were. There was a petition with 5,000 signatures sent to the governor to pardon Johnson. There were petitions not with not as many signatures, but there were petitions filed the other way with the judge or with the governor not to pardon John.
- [58:11]
C
Tell us about John Speed.
- [58:12]
D
The interesting thing is the trial is just sort of the beginning of the story. John, within a month of the. Oh, can I tell one side story just for a second before we get to this? You were asking about how the community was divided and how they felt about John. There was a glove factory in Bluffton and it was occupied by. Or all the workers were women. And this trial ended. The verdict came in on December 20th. So we're just before Christmas, and every year, this glove factory, the girls, as they referred to them in the newspaper, the women there at the glove factory made a Christmas dinner. And they would have. Invite people from the town, not everyone, but they would invite prominent people to come in and share their Christmas dinner that these women had made. They made that Christmas dinner, like the 21st, 22nd, couple of days after the trial was over, and they put together a big food basket for John and took it over to him in the jail because they thought enough of him and killing the guy who was abusing her as daughter. Even though he had been convicted. They took over a big Christmas dinner for John and his family in the jail. Stuff back to what happens with John is in January, you know, just less than a month after the verdict had been rendered. He's still not been formally sentenced to that was to be set later, as happens today. But John, as the newspaper said, became a maniac. He was pounding his fists on the bars in the jail cell. He was pounding his head, he was climbing the bars. He ceased to know people who came in to see him that he knew. He started talking about getting this railroad on a paying basis. He had no interest, no ownership. And any railroad had no connection to any railroad. And he is bodily habits or his body functions. He did not go to the bathroom for nine days. He would urinate on himself. He would not sleep at night. All of the inmates were complaining about this. And the doctors saw him. Several doctors came to see him, local doctors. And he basically became insane. But the question was, was he faking it or not? There was a trial held. The judge actually convened another jury, a second jury. And not to deal with the issue of whether John was insane during the before at the time of the shooting. That had already been determined by the first jury. But this jury was to decide whether or not John had gone insane. And they deliberated for five minutes and came back with a judgment that he had gone insane. Lucy filed a guardianship proceedings. Again, another jury listened to all the evidence and that included inmates at the jail, included the sheriff, included four or five local doctors, all of them testifying that he had gone insane. And again, in Lucy's guardianship case, they found he was insane and needed a guardian. The question facing the judge, Judge Smith, was can I sentence him when he's gone insane? And the issue was briefed, the issue was argued. It was briefed a second time. And finally the judge and John, when it came time for sentencing, actually had to be physically carried into the courtroom. And there were a lot of people who did not think he was going to be living much longer. But the judge decided he didn't have another option and sentenced John to life in prison. That very same day, the sheriff received a handwritten note from Governor Winfield Durbin, who was a very progressive governor in the state of Indiana. He was a Republican, but he had done a lot of work with state highway system, he anti lynching laws, reformation of the state penal system and particularly the state prison at Michigan City so that he could announce that Indiana no longer had insane inmates that they had been otherwise taken care of by another facility. And then this case comes along. And so he sent this letter to the sheriff directing the sheriff not to take John to the state prison. And then the next day received a typed order. And I have both of those. I found these again in the Indiana State archives in Governor Winfield Durbin's papers. And there's a typed order that was rushed up to the judge or to the sheriff telling him that to take John instead of to the state prison, to take him to the East Haven Mental Asylum, which later became known as the Richmond State Hospital, and that he was being paroled there until cured, at which time he would be returned to the Indiana State Prison. In other words, he didn't want an insane inmate in the state prison. So that's where John was sent and where he stayed for almost five years. But the next big step in this, by the way, the debate over whether John was really insane or if he was just faking it just tore apart the community and the state. There were people, you know, that was people were arguing on both sides. Was he just. Was he really insane or was he faking it? Then on November 5th of 1905, about three years after the trial, shockwaves went through the legal system because John's conviction was overturned. It was based, reversed on the basis of a single typographical error in the indictment, where instead of saying the crime took place on July 12, 1903, somebody typing had entered a typo, and I guess they didn't have white out yet. So it ended up as looking like 18903. And the Supreme Court said, that is an impossible date. And so consequently, the indictment was invalid, and therefore the conviction was reversed. Brutal. But John wasn't a free man because he was still in the mental institution. He was very quickly re indicted. And he stayed in the mental institution until 1908, till late 1908, at which time the superintendent, by the way, during. Throughout this entire period, stories about John and whether he was insane or not insane or whether he was improving or not improving all appeared regularly in the state's newspapers. And then in 1908, the superintendent there, out of the blue, released John. He didn't announce that he was cured. He just said, we can't do anything more for him. But he had been re indicted. So instead of being released to be free, he was released into the custody of the Wells county sheriff, who took him back to Wells county, where he continued to be held in the jail there. But there's another aspect of that, where that jail was sitting. But he stayed in the jail for another six months while the judges and the lawyers argued his fate, while the family kept trying to get the help for him and in the form of a nurse in the jail and the nurse that the county commissioners would not approve, a nurse, but they did still have to keep paying for his food and keep him there in the jail cell. And as disruptive as he was, and the lawyers involved, the judge involved, really reached the conclusion that he was insane and was not showing any signs of gaining his sanity. And so they released him on bond to the family. $15,000 bond. That doesn't sound like a lot of money, but in Today's World, that $15,000 would be equivalent of half a million dollars. And he was released to his family. His family. He continued to live with family members. They would. He would go visit other family members and stay with them for a while to lessen the burden on the family. And then in 1916, at age 63, he was visiting his daughter Lucy, the one that was involved in Muncie, where she was living at the time. And he had a heart attack and died. And it was only then that. That the newspaper stories stopped.
- [69:08]
E
It's such an amazing story. I just want to stress there's a lot more detail in the book.
- [69:13]
C
Yeah.
- [69:13]
E
And so I really recommend.
- [69:15]
C
Yeah, you're going to get so much out of, like, listen to this, but then read the book because it is. It is a journey, and it really takes you back to that time period and you. I felt like I learned a lot about society at the time and how people used to care for those who were considered mentally ill and whatnot. Like, it really kind of touches on so many things in addition to being an interesting human. I mean, what did it feel like to, like, learn about this sort of wild story in your family's past? Like, I mean, it's pretty extraordinary.
- [69:45]
D
I did strike me as extraordinary. Not just your average finding a murderer in your family tree story. It was a journey for me as well, to travel back to that time. To give you a small idea. In the trial, in the transcript, they had the testimony of my great grandmother and my great grandfather. And so I got a chance. These were people who I only knew from the fact that I know where they're buried. They're buried in the same cemetery with my mother and father. But she knew a little bit. But I'd never heard their voice. I never heard them speak, see their actual words. And that was really an important moment. For me when I found their testimony. Keeping in mind William, my great grandfather, William Wesley Terrell was born in 1827. And to find his words as they're going through this, one of the great challenges in their life in the same arena where I made my living. Yeah, it impacted me a great deal.
- [71:04]
E
One question we always like to ask writers is, what are you working on next?
- [71:10]
D
I don't know. Right now I write a column for the American Bar association. And so I do that regularly for Experience magazine, which is sort of the AARP for lawyers. And I have written a couple of short stories. I do write short stories periodically. I'm in a group called Sisters in Crime and I've written probably six, seven, eight stories that have been published in the Sisters in Crime anthologies. So I'm doing that. But I don't have a big writing project right in front of me at this time. I'm still doing a lot of speaking about this, this book. I talk at libraries. I've talked with some civic groups. I have two events coming up. One for a group called Ends of Fort, which is a group of trial lawyers and judges in Fort Wayne. And then I have a presentation at the State Bar Association Sole and Small Firm Conference, which I actually started about 25 years ago. So I'm giving presentations there about comparing the procedures and the practice and the evidence and the trial in 1903 versus what the rules are and what it would be like today. So those are. That's keeping me pretty busy right now. And I have a couple of projects spinning around in my head, but nothing firmed up right now.
- [72:46]
E
Yeah, it sounds like you have a pretty full plate. Is there anything we didn't ask you about this story that you think our audience should be aware of?
- [72:55]
D
Well, I think that there are. I think you covered it when you said there's a lot more to this than just that story and that there's a lot that's in the book that is other than just that John got mad at his son in law and put a shotgun against him head, blew his brains out. That's maybe the bones of the story, but there's a lot more to it.
- [73:24]
C
Absolutely. Well, Stephen, it's been delightful to talk to you. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing the story of your family and sharing your insights on this wonderful book with us.
- [73:34]
D
Thank you very much for having me.
- [73:36]
A
Definitely check out this book. I think our Murder Sheet listeners are going to love it. We'll include a link in our show notes, but I would also recommend checking out Steven's other wonderful books. I was fortunate enough to read his novel Last Train to Stratton, and I read it with a lot of interest. I loved it. It's a tale of intrigue and journalism and even some romance. And you know, I love the books with the journalist protagonists, so I'm biased, but check it out. And if you're doing some family research and you uncover a murder or a murderer, let us know. We love hearing these stories.
- [74:05]
B
Thanks so much for listening to the Murder Sheet. If you have a tip concerning one of the cases we cover, please email us@murdersheetmail.com if you have actionable information about an unsolved crime, please report it to the appropriate authorities.
- [74:26]
A
If you're interested in joining our Patreon, that's available at www.patreon.com murdersheet if you want to tip us a bit of money for records requests, you can do so at www. Buymeacoffee.com murdersheet. We very much appreciate any support.
- [74:49]
B
Special thanks to Kevin Tyler Greenlee, who composed the music for the Murder Sheet and who you can find on the web@kevintg.com if you're looking to talk with.
- [75:01]
A
Other listeners about a case we've covered, you can join the Murder Sheet discussion group on Facebook. We mostly focus our time on research and reporting, so we're not on social media much. We do try to check our email account, but we ask for patience as we often receive a lot of messages. Thanks again for listening.