Carlisle Straw Stack Murder

Man running from straw stack
murder scene

The straw stack murder mystery broke in Des Moines in early August 1925. A red-haired woman was clubbed her to death and then burned in a straw stack on the George Patterson farm near Carlisle.

Investigators had little evidence to go on—a pile of bones, an expensive brooch, a string of pearls, and a tuft of red hair.

Earl Leverich and Harlan Cain found the charred skeleton at the top of Watts Hill. Leverich was driving home when he saw a skull in a pile of ashes in the field.

“Harlan thought I was seeing things,” said Leverich. He stopped the truck a couple of hundred feet down the road and walked back to investigate. “As we got closer to the skull, we could make out the rest of the body, which was badly burned.

“It looked to me as if someone was having a party that ended in murder.” He saw a partial bottle of ginger ale, alcohol, and some sandwiches nearby.

Coroner J. Elmer Ford took the remains back to his drugstore, where he placed them on display so anxious relatives could see if it was their missing daughter, mother, or sister. Thousands of spectators poured in, but no one could identify the remains, although many took a stab at it.

Wadia Huckleberry drove by the straw stack at about 10:30 p.m. on July 24. She saw a car sitting by the twenty-foot-high straw stack with its engine running and the lights on.

There were two people in the car. The driver was a man. She couldn’t say if the passenger was a man or a woman. She was afraid and didn’t stick around long enough to find out.

When she got to town, she learned the stack was on fire. “We could see the blaze from Carlisle,” she said.

Walter Fleming saw four men standing by a Model T Ford at about the same time. Ross Kerr saw a man run out of the field at about 11:15 p.m. The man got in his Ford roadster and drove away as the straw stack exploded into flames.

Kerr went to George Patterson’s house and told him about the fire, but Patterson let it burn itself out. There was no danger of it spreading.

The girl’s head had four large bashes, possibly made by a hammer. Hugh Patterson found an ice pick when he visited the site of the murder. Coroner DeFord said the butt of the pick fit the indentations in the girl’s skull, so he assumed it was the murder weapon. A bloodstained hammer turned up about two miles away, and detectives thought it could have been used in the murder, too.

Investigators found a path through the weeds where the killers dragged the body to the stack, so they assumed she was killed closer to the road or in an automobile.

Two days after the charred remains were discovered, Mrs. Arthur Hodge of Des Moines told the authorities it must be her daughter, Ruby Hodge. She’d disappeared the same night the straw stack burned. Ruby turned up alive not long after that, and suspicions shifted to Grace Wolf, a Des Moines waitress who went missing at about the same time.

Maggie Harmon believed the victim was her granddaughter Clara Thompson. Clara’s husband, Earl Thompson, was picked up for murder, then released a short time later when Clara was found alive and well in Kansas City. Clara told detectives she learned about her husband’s arrest in the St. Joseph papers and hurried to Kansas City to set the record straight.

Jeanette Miller was locked up in jail in Dubuque when she learned of her murder in a straw pile near Carlisle. She had been locked up since July 27, but Matron Brennan brought her the paper daily.

 One day, she read about her murder.

She’d followed the case for a week, watching it unravel as detectives tried to identify the body. The article mentioned Jeanette Miller had gone missing, but it didn’t ring any bells. They said the missing girl was from Lucerne, Minnesota, and she was from Stout, Iowa, so there was no connection.

Then, Jeanette read that Russel Vogel was suspected of killing the girl. That was crazy! Russell was an old friend, and Jeanette was pretty sure she wasn’t dead.

She wanted to tell the jailer it was a case of mistaken identity, but there was a catch. She gave her name as Mabel Mattison when she was arrested. She would have to fess up to her lie to straighten things out.

Jeanette kept the secret that night even though she was going insane, wondering what her family was thinking. She could almost hear them say, “If it isn’t Jeanette, why doesn’t she let us know she is alive?”

Several days later, Chief Giellis confronted her with a Waterloo paper with her picture on it. Jeanette Miller was alive but received a five-year sentence in the Rockwell City Reformatory for shoplifting three dresses and assorted accessories.

The police arrested Oliver Dawson early in the investigation, mainly because he stopped at the Victoria Hotel and asked for information on Jeanette Miller. When questioned, he told Sheriff Anderson he thought she was his friend, Nettie Miller. After he learned he was a suspect, Dawson clammed up and denied making inquiries about the girl. Unfortunately, that made him look guiltier.

Sheriff Rich Anderson located Nettie Miller a few days later. She was a dime-store clerk who had the same name as the missing girl from the Victoria Hotel. That cleared Dawson.

Jeanette Miller from the hotel went missing on July 25. Her key was found in the gutter at Fifth and Chestnut Street a week later, all rusty from exposure to the rain.

The hotel clerk described the girl as thin, medium height, with dark brown hair and stooped shoulders. A bellboy saw her ride off with a man in a Ford.

If the body wasn’t Jeanette Miller, the authorities suspected it might be Irene Lapham. She was a waitress at the California Catering Company who went missing just before the straw stack burned. One piece of evidence favoring that theory was that the corpse had a fractured arm, and Lapham had recently broken hers. But it wasn’t her either. A friend showed detectives a letter Irene had mailed her from a hotel in Brookfield, Missouri, on August 13.

After that, the case went dead for many years. Not knowing who the victim was made it next to impossible to get a line on the killer.

The case got reopened twelve years later when Ida Gift of Salinas, California, told the police her husband, Clarence Gift, told her he killed a young woman near Des Moines and burned the body in a straw stack. He called her Esther and said she had been living at the Good Shepherd Home in Omaha, Nebraska. Gift posed as a relative to get her out of the home.

The police released Clarence Gift in early March 1937 after questioning him with truth serum. “They gave me that truth serum, which sort of knocks you out,” said Gift. “My stories checked out [and] they bought me a ticket [home] on the new streamlined train, which hits 95 miles an hour.”

Gift made it sound like a fun trip; except he lost his job as a lettuce shed foreman in all the commotion. Ironically, Gift got arrested again the next week in Salinas, California, for threatening to kill his wife.

As with any famous murder, the psychos crawled out of the woodwork. One man visited the authorities in Adel and tried to claim the body, saying it was his wife. When that attempt failed, he went to Carlisle and tried again. All it got him was a trip to the insane asylum in Clarinda.

Leads dried up after that. To this day, we don’t know who was cremated in the straw stack or why she was killed. The best guess is that it was a love affair gone wrong. Area kids used to gather in the area for pop-up drinking and necking parties, which is why it is sometimes called the “jazz” murder.