Strange Tales of Crime and Murder in Southern Indiana

INTRODUCTION

The study of murder, said true crime author Edmund Pearson, is the study of the human heart in its darkest, strangest moments." Prepare to take a tour of some dark, strange moments. This book includes nine stories of murders that occurred in southern Indiana nearly, or over, a century ago.

Despite our innate need to romanticize the Good Old Days, a perusal of these historical murders will demonstrate that people always have been ready to raise the hatchet or poison the medicine when it seemed in their best interests to do so. Whenever a murder occurs, there is always the question of motive: why did one human decide to deprive another of the right to life? Sometimes the motives of these Hoosier killers from long ago at least are understandable: Mrs. Armstrong wanted her dreary old husband out of the way so she could collect his insurance and gad about with a younger man; Jim Gillespie shot his hated sister because he felt she had been unfairly favored; young Bill Benson wanted to marry so badly that he was willing to remove by violence the people he perceived as blocking his path to matrimonial happiness. The motives in other cases are downright trivial: James Stone murdered an entire family just to get money to pay off farming equipment; Mr. Thurman foolishly shot a stranger in a case of mistaken identity; William Artmann stomped his wife to death because she wouldn’t stop singing an irritating song. In still other cases, motives are completely indiscernible: Mrs. Winstandley murdered because she was a lunatic, and who can say why an apparent serial killer strangled women in Evansville at the turn of the century?

If the purposes of these antique crimes sometimes seem strangely modern, so do the punishments the perpetrators received—or, perhaps it is more accurate to say, the lack of appropriate punishments. Finding clever ways to avoid taking your lumps after committing a murder is nothing new. Only one tale recounted herein ends with a hanging. In two other cases, lucky murderers got the death sentence but were reprieved (one later committed a second murder); in another case, a man was convicted of murder but released on a technicality; the murderer in the chapter A Petrifaction was never punished because he was never caught; Wilbur Sherwell likely was a serial killer but was acquitted due to lack of evidence and a poorly presented prosecution; and as recounted in the final chapter, the poisoner, Mrs. Armstrong, got a lesser punishment thanks to a softhearted jury. The reader will also observe that murderers who are perfectly sound of mind often trot out the insanity defense in these pages, just like their modern counterparts.

It is only too likely that, one hundred years from now, true crime books concerning murders dating from the early twenty-first century will be full of the same motives and the same dodges.

BENSON’S BUTCHERY

One thing everybody agreed upon: Jacob Mottweiler could not have chosen a more isolated location in Indiana in which to live. Specifically, the Mottweiler farm was located in a valley surrounded by almost inaccessible hills—according to a chronicler of the dark deed that unfolded there—two miles from Edwardsville, two miles from the highway and a full mile from the nearest neighbor. A perfect setting for a murder, one might say.

Mottweiler settled there in the 1860s, just after the Civil War. In this lonesome place he chose to call home, he dwelled with his wife, Mary Ellen, and Sallie Snyder. The Mottweilers were a childless couple and had adopted blonde-haired, blue-eyed Sallie, Mrs. Mottweiler’s orphaned little sister. She earned her keep by doing domestic chores, but unfortunately for all concerned, she would turn out to be something of a floozy—if not the town floozy, then at least a hilltop floozy. In the delicate phrasing of a newspaper report, she had a very bad reputation for chastity.

All was invigorating hard work and bucolic pleasures until June 1888, when the Mottweilers took in a sickly, malnourished, illiterate, homeless and friendless eighteen-year-old boy who was living at the county poorhouse. His name was William Benson, and he was so poorly educated and ignorant that he did not even know the name of the county in which he resided. The Mottweilers fed him and nursed him back to health, whereupon he remained at their house as a farmhand. It was one of the farming couple’s pet projects to see that Benson got an education. Benson was well liked by the neighbors—what little they saw of him—and seemed to get along well with his benefactors.

But there was something the Mottweilers did not know: their charge, Benson, had fallen madly in love—or, at least, in lust—with Sallie Snyder. He did everything he could think of to get her to marry him, which was generous on his part since she was very, very pregnant and he wasn’t the father. He promised to provide for the offspring of her shame, but Sallie refused each time he offered. She did not love him, she said, and she did not want to leave the comfortable home made for her by her sister and brother-in-law.

On Sunday, December 9, 1888, Benson told Mr. Mottweiler of his heart’s burning desire to marry Sallie Snyder; he asked if the farmer would let Benson live in a cottage on the farm if he could persuade her to tie the knot. I would do almost anything for you, said Mottweiler. But I cannot afford to build a house for you since the fruit crop failed last summer. Despite all the good things the generous Mottweiler had done for him, Benson did not take well to this thwarting of his fondest dreams. It appears that this was the catalyst for the violence that followed. The farmhand brooded over his ill fortune until, somehow, a very poorly thought out and deeply ungrateful plan formed in his mind: if the Mottweilers were dead, Sallie would have little choice but to tie her fortune to his because then she would be homeless and what other man would have her? Benson convinced himself that if the farmer and his wife met with an untimely death, he could legally take possession of the land. Before the day was finished, Benson had made a fateful, foolish decision.

Just before dusk, Mr. Mottweiler went out to round up the cows for the evening milking; his wife went to the barn to await the coming of the cows; and Sallie Snyder was preparing supper in the farmhouse kitchen. Benson was nowhere to be seen, having wandered away with his old-fashioned rifle, which required oversized bullets, on the pretext of going squirrel hunting. Sallie went out to draw water from the well; when she returned, Benson was at the house looking confused and frightened. Sallie, assuming Benson was drunk, requested that he cease his fruitless marriage proposals. He replied that he had just shot Uncle Jake by accident. Somehow, he had been so unhinged by this mistake that he had also beaten Mary Ellen Mottweiler over the head with a hatchet. Then, he told the woman whom he wanted so badly to marry that he was going to return to the barn to finish off Mary. You’ll have to kill me first, said Sallie, who ran to the barn and found her older sister lying on the ground. The pail of milk had been overturned and was mingled with her life’s blood from a great wound on the left side of the head near the ear. The hatchet was near her and covered with blood, Sallie explained to the authorities in more detail than probably was necessary.

Sallie demanded that her admirer help carry her fallen sister home. He refused, so despite her advanced pregnancy, Sallie dragged Mary Ellen fifty yards back to the house as William Benson watched with the most fiendish looks upon his face. Afterward, Sallie managed to slip away from William and alert some neighbors, the George Gresham family. Mr. Gresham investigated and found Jake Mottweiler dead with a bullet hole in the back of his head and the top of the same removed to a new location. He had died instantly in the act of reaching for a plug of tobacco in his pocket; at least he was spared the knowledge, in the last moments of his life, of how his kindness had been repaid by his desperate farmhand.

Gresham’s sons spread the word; shortly thereafter, many neighbors were at the Mottweiler farm, standing vigil over Jake’s corpse and tending to the wounded Mary Ellen. Contradicting the story that he had told Sallie, Benson told everyone that he was innocent and had no idea who would have performed such horrible deeds. They believed him—luckily for Benson, because later the neighbors said that if they had known the truth they would have killed him on the spot. Emboldened, Benson also told the story to the New Albany police, but had to give it up after Sallie told the truth. He confessed to everything with one exception: he told the authorities that he was engaged to Sallie, which was a flagrant lie. As was standard procedure in those days, there was much caloric talk of stringing Benson up without benefit of a trial. He survived the night only due to the swiftness of the law in getting him to the safety of the Jeffersonville Penitentiary.

A Louisville Courier-Journal reporter who visited the Mottweiler house on December 10 found the small building so crowded with mourners and gawkers that there was hardly enough space for the murdered man’s coffin in the front room. Poor Mrs. Mottweiler was alive, barely, and did not realize that she had been struck twice in the head with a hatchet. She was convinced that she had come down with a case of neuralgia. She