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| Margaret Hossack (Des Moines Register. February 17, 1903) |
What woman hasn’t pictured it? The ax. The swing.
The sudden silence. Society pretends this thought doesn’t exist, but it does.
It lives in kitchens and bedrooms and long marriages that curdle into private
wars. Margaret Hossack didn’t invent the thought. She just refused to pretend
it wasn’t there.
She talked about killing her husband the way other
people talked about the weather.
John Hossack had been married to Margaret for
thirty-one years. He’d become a domestic dictator—an aging tyrant stomping
around a farmhouse in Iowa, barking orders, threatening his children, ruling
through fear. Neighbors said he was one man in public and another in private,
which is a polite Midwestern way of saying he was a bastard behind closed doors.
Margaret told anyone who would listen that she
hated him. Wanted him dead. Wanted God to take him away if no one else would
step up.
Neil Moninger remembered her saying John was crazy. He pulled a gun on his own son once—would’ve killed him if someone hadn’t grabbed his arm. Margaret told that story more than once, like a warning and a confession rolled into one.
“She wished her husband were dead,” one neighbor said. “That there would never be happiness so long as he lived.”
She said it to W. C. Conrad. She said it to Nora Court. She said it to Mrs. Grant, sometimes crying, sometimes calm, sometimes with a strange clarity that made people uncomfortable. “I wish John was out of the way.”
On Thanksgiving Day, 1899, she spoke to W. F. Haynes and crossed into territory where thoughts turn into plans. She told him that while John was away, she wished he’d gather a few neighbors and “attend to him.”
Haynes balked, saying he wouldn’t touch John Hossack. Margaret just shook her head. She didn’t want him to touch John—unless he finished him.
That sentence sat there, heavy as an ax head, waiting for December.
December 1, 1900. The farm shut down early. Lamps out. Kids in bed. The house settled into that rural silence that feels less like peace and more like a held breath.
John and Margaret slept downstairs. The boys were across the hall. The older kids upstairs. Everyone accounted for. Everyone inside.
Around midnight, Margaret said she heard noises. A sound in the kitchen. Another on the porch. A flash of light outside the window.
She bolted upright and went onto the porch. When she came back, John Hossack’s skull was split open like firewood.
Blood soaked the bed. John groaned. Margaret screamed. The house exploded into motion. Her sons ran downstairs. Cassie, the eldest daughter, ran barefoot through the dark to the Nicholson house, shouting that someone had murdered her father.
By dawn, the gossip engine was roaring. The cops didn’t have to look far. The killer had slept in the same bed as the victim. That alone made people lean forward.
The blood didn’t cooperate either. It soaked the bedding—including the spot where Margaret said she’d been lying—but her clothes were clean. Her body untouched. Not a drop on her.
Then there was the dog. Shep barked at everything. Strangers, shadows, passing ghosts. That night, he was silent. No warning. No chaos. Just sleep.
People whispered. Some wondered if the dog had been drugged, but nobody tested it. The silence lingered anyway.
A bloody ax turned up in the granary south of the house. Tests showed both human and animal blood. Human hairs clung to the blade—but they vanished before the trial, lost somewhere between science and bureaucracy, which is exactly where inconvenient truths like to disappear.
Margaret was arrested. She hired elite lawyers. She had money. John Hossack was rich—300 acres, livestock, assets worth a small fortune. If he died, she inherited everything.
The county attorney said what everyone was thinking: the woman slept next to the victim and claimed ignorance until the body was discovered. That story didn’t pass the smell test.
Doctors testified the blow didn’t kill John instantly. He could’ve lived for thirty minutes, long enough for someone to hide an ax, wash up, and stage a performance.
The prosecution argued the wound itself told the story. A downward stroke. Controlled. Deliberate. A swing they said a woman would make—not a wild overhand blow.
Margaret sat in court, calm as a statue. Fifty-seven years old. Tall. Strong. Reporters stared at her like she were an exotic animal. One said she looked dangerous when stirred to hatred. Another wrote about her steely blue eyes and subtle cunning.
They dragged the murder bed into the courtroom. Bloodstains spread like a map of violence across the sheets. If she were in that bed, why wasn’t she covered in blood?
Witnesses took the stand and repeated her words. The wishes. The anger. The prayers for death. One key witness lost his mind before trial and never testified, which only made the whole thing feel more cursed.
Franklin Kellar said he was there before John died. He suggested giving John a pencil to write his killer’s name. Margaret cried like she’d been stabbed.
On April 11, 1901, the jury convicted her of first-degree murder. Life in prison. Hard labor. Anamosa.
A year later, the Iowa Supreme Court tossed the verdict and ordered a new trial.
The second jury couldn’t agree.
The county ran out of money, patience, and appetite for the entire mess. The prosecutor dropped the charges rather than bleed the treasury dry.
Margaret Hossack walked free.
Officially, the case was over. Unofficially, it never shut up.
People in Indianola kept talking. They remembered what she said. They remembered the bed, the dog, the ax, the blood that didn’t land where it should’ve. They remembered that money—not truth—ended the case.
Susan Glaspell, the young journalist who covered the case, nailed it with a single line that still rattles around the Midwest like a loose bullet:
“If Mrs. Hossack did not murder her husband, she knows who did.”
And that’s an ending that doesn’t end at all.
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