Unsolved Murders & Disappearances in Northeast Ohio

by Jane Ann Turzillo

  The bricks, feed sack and rope came from Chandler’s farm, so it looked like Charles had been killed on his own property the morning he disappeared.

  Karg was puzzled by the fact that Charles’s body was fully clothed and had on a pair of worn-out shoes, one of which was tied up with cord instead of a shoelace. The deputy remembered that Charles’s son Clyde had said his father left the house wearing only trousers and no shoes. Karg, himself, had found Charles’s only two pairs of shoes, one in the house and one in the woodshed.

  Summit County coroner Milton B. Crafts ordered an autopsy. There was an absence of water in Charles’s lungs, a first indication that the man had been dead when he was placed in the water. Crafts was cautious, however, and told the newspapers that it was possible tissue gases could have pushed water out of the dead man’s lungs. (Modern-day medical examiners recognize that a laryngeal spasm can suddenly seize the vocal chords, blocking the flow of air into the lungs. This is known as dry-drowning.)

  To determine if foul play was the case of death, Dr. Frederick Potter sent lung and kidney samples to Akron Peoples Hospital for testing. The test would also show if he had been poisoned before he was put in the lake.

  Hargreaves was now thinking that Karg was right: Charles Chandler had been murdered. “All of these things indicate that Chandler was the victim of some sort of murder plot,” he said.

  Hougland had already been released but was rearrested at his home near Copley when Charles’s body was found. Hargreaves questioned him all that Friday night and into Saturday morning. There were discrepancies in his story. At first, he said he was fishing alone the night before Charles disappeared. Later, he told the prosecutor he was in bed asleep that night.

  Meanwhile, a story circulated that Charles had $200 on him when he disappeared and that Hougland most likely knew about the money. Assistant Prosecutor Fannelly said to an Akron Beacon Journal reporter, “We are told that following Chandler’s death: the suspect lost more than $100 betting at a race track.” Hougland also allegedly spent $80 on a spree in Akron. There was little evidence to confirm this, and the Chandler family said Charles had only $40.

  “Everyone who ever had domestic dealings with the Chandlers will be questioned,” Hargreaves told the reporters.

  Karg started the questioning with Hougland’s father, who said his son had been coon hunting on the night in question.

  A neighbor told deputies that Hougland had threatened to kill Charles during an argument the two had over the illicit love affair. Charles even sent his brother, James, who lived in Kent, a letter expressing fear. James handed that letter over to authorities.

  Two more men were arrested in the next few days. One was a fifty-one-year-old neighbor who often worked on the farm. He said he had fallen asleep while fishing and did not get home until just before the Chandlers knocked on his door asking for help. The other was a twenty-one-year-old friend of the Chandlers’ sixteen-year-old daughter, Helen. He could not account for his whereabouts at the time of Charles’s disappearance. They were held along with Hougland and questioned aggressively.

  One of these men had bragged that he knew of a murder plot. There was evidence that he had burned a document after Charles’s death. Curiously enough, Jane would later admit that after her husband’s disappearance, she destroyed a paper that was held behind a picture. There was no mention of what that document was. Hargreaves and Karg drew conflicting stories from all the suspects and had to admit they were stumped. None of the three admitted any part in Charles’s death.

  The preliminary pathology came back from Peoples Hospital, revealing the presence of either mercury or arsenic in the tissues. Coroner Crafts was now comfortable saying Charles was not a victim of drowning but was most likely dead when put in the lake. The coroner asked for more tests on the kidney sample because a bottle containing mercury pills was found at the Chandler home. Hougland freely admitted the bottle was his. He said he used it as a medicine and had forgotten it when he left the Chandler household. At the time, mercury was used to treat syphilis, typhoid fever and parasites.

  Hargreaves and Karg concentrated on Jane Chandler. Up until Charles’s disappearance, she had been active and had performed her normal household duties with no problem. Soon after Charles vanished, she took to her bed and claimed to be too sick to answer questions. It was noted that she took her husband’s death with relative calm.

  Before questioning her, the prosecutor wanted her examined by a doctor to see if she was fit for an interrogation. Dr. Sidney B. Conger examined her at her home and said she was in good health. She was taken into custody and, in the presence of a female probation officer, Greta Footman, grilled for twenty-four hours. Part of that time, she was quizzed in front of two of the suspects.

  During questioning, she retraced her steps on the morning of Charles’s disappearance, starting with turning the alarm clock off at five o’clock. After she and the children searched the property, she sent one of the boys across the street to a neighbor’s house because he often worked on the farm. The neighbor was one of three men in police custody.

  When asked if her husband had enemies, she said, “He liked everyone and never said anything unkind about anyone.”

  She continued to claim that they never argued. “I used to say that it was unusual for two people to live together for fifteen years and be so peaceful. He was easy to get along with.”

  Their only problem was losing their cows in the fall in the tuberculosis test, but Jane said they were “getting everything back in shape.”

  Jane denied the rumor that she told her children their father would never come home.

  The murder case fell apart when the second pathology test came back. Dr. Potter found no conclusive evidence of foul play. This time, he could find no signs of poison in Charles’s system. Although the suspects had to be released, Hargreaves declared the murder probe would not be dropped.

  In August, the family hired two private detectives, and county authorities cooperated. This time, they concentrated their investigation on what they believed was the theft of $200 Charles had when he vanished. But the inquiry came to a standstill. In the end, Crafts, Potter, Hargreaves and Karg felt there was motive for murder, but there was also motive for suicide. Charles’s brothers and sister never accepted the suicide theory.

  One month after her husband died, Jane Chandler gave birth to a baby boy and named him Harold. He died in his crib at only three months. He was buried next to his father. Jane married Hubert Davis, moved to Kent and had two more children. She suffered from heart problems and pneumonia and died on December 23, 1933, at the age of forty-two. She is buried next to Charles and baby Harold in Maple Lawn Cemetery.

  4

  THE DISAPPEARANCE OF MELVIN HORST

  On Thursday, December 27, 1928, a Christmas tree decked out with glittering tinsel and multicolored glass ornaments occupied a corner of the living room in a humble brown house on McGill and Paradise Streets in Orrville. The Christmas presents had been opened and were already scattered about the house—all except for one little toy truck still parked under the tree. It had been a present for Raymond and Zorah’s four-year-old son. It was a toy that the little blue-eyed boy would never play with again.

  The last time family or friends ever laid eyes on Melvin Charles Horst was late on that Thursday afternoon. The lad had bundled up in a homemade dark brown overcoat and a brown hand-knitted cap with earflaps to go out and play with two other boys in the school yard at the south end of the village. The other children were a little older than Melvin, who, at forty-five pounds, was large for his age.

  It was dusk, about 5:15 p.m., when Melvin’s playmates were called in to supper. Melvin was left to walk by himself the block and a half home through a short alley. When he was not home by 5:30 p.m., Zorah began to worry. She said he regularly played with his friends at the school ground, but he always came home for dinner. He never stayed away.

  Raymond Horst and the neighbors searched for two hours befor
e calling his brother, Orrville city marshal Roy E. Horst. Once the marshal became involved, he called up his night marshal and organized search parties, including the local Boy Scouts troop. He alerted police departments and hospitals in the surrounding communities. An Akron radio station, WADC, broadcast Melvin’s description.

  Orrville was a prosperous railroad and manufacturing town of 4,600 residents at the time, and nothing like this had ever happened. Approximately 300 men, women and children turned out to help comb the neighborhoods but with no luck. The search went on throughout the cold, winter night and well into the next day.

  Four-year-old Melvin Horst. Courtesy of the Akron Beacon Journal.

  Marshal Horst’s first thought was that the self-reliant little Melvin could have wandered away and gotten lost, perhaps met with an accident. When daylight came, the search party investigated every abandoned structure, barn, outbuilding and garage and pulled up every cistern and well cover. They checked every manhole and examined every sewer pipe in Orrville. The fire department found a small hole in the ice in Dye’s pond at the edge of town. There were no tracks around it, but the firemen dragged a portion of it anyway. Fireman later dragged the entire pond. Searchers beat through snowy thickets and rooted through every ravine. Every inch of a 175-acre field of railroad ties at a creosoting plant just east of town was scoured. But there was no trace of the boy.

  An estimated seven hundred residents took part in the forty-hour search. It was one of the most extensive manhunts in all of Wayne County history. Not so much as a shoelace was found.

  Raymond and Zorah were afraid someone had kidnapped Melvin. Zorah said he had no fear of strangers and would talk with anyone. At first, the police rejected the kidnapping idea because the Horsts had no money to pay a ransom demand. Raymond was a roofer at Nuroy Roofing. The family lived a few blocks from the center of town in a rented, story-anda-half house with their other two children, Ralph, who was eight, and Elzia Dora, who was one. They had no enemies.

  Zorah made a tearful plea over the radio for the return of her little boy. “Bring back my son…Our home is marked with sadness at this season of the year,” she cried. “Please, oh, please, bring my son back to his mother.”

  Mayor A.U. Weygandt told Canton Repository reporter C.W. Howard, “We hope that if the boy has been kidnapped, no one in Orrville is implicated.” If any resident was involved, he said, he hoped that person would be found out and appropriate action would be taken.

  Melvin always took that shortcut on his way home from the school yard. It was a one-thousand-foot alley that passed garages and other outbuildings. It could be quite dark after the sun went down. Toward the end was an unpaved, narrow path through weeds grown up around tire tracks. Somewhere in this section, Melvin had vanished. While a witness claimed to have seen him start down the alleyway, no one saw him emerge from it.

  As the hours ticked away with no trace of the little brown-haired boy, police started to look at sex offenders, known as “perverts” at that time. Marshal Horst had knowledge of three such people in Orrville who might be capable of abducting a child. All three of these men had alibis, and police did a thorough search of their homes. Nothing suspicious came out of those searches.

  A citizen’s committee raised $1,000 for a reward. The Rotary and Kiwanis added $100. A short time later, an Orrville businessman donated $500. Other businesses gave another $1,400.

  Marshal Horst’s resources were slim. He had led the hunt for his nephew with only a handful of patrolmen, and he had gone without sleep for days. He finally collapsed with a severe case of influenza.

  Surprisingly, Wayne County sheriff Albert Jacot declined any help. He was told of the disappearance at the onset of the search, but he wanted no part of what might become a long-standing case because he wanted to retire from office.

  At this point, it probably became apparent to Mayor Weygandt and Prosecutor Walter J. Mougey that Marshal Horst and his patrolmen could not handle the investigation by themselves.

  Mougey called in famed detective Ora Slater of Cincinnati to help. A well-known detective from Millersburg, John “Peggy” Stevens was hired by a citizens group. Both answered to Prosecutor Mougey.

  Four days into the investigation, detectives found an eight-year-old boy who had a story to tell. He was a fair-skinned, bright lad named Junior Hanna who was related to the Arnold family, a name synonymous with trouble in Orrville. Elias, sometimes known as Nul, was Junior’s uncle; William, Arthur and Dora were his cousins; and Bascom McHenry was married to Dora. Coincidentally, their house backed up to the alleyway where Melvin was last seen.

  Junior claimed to be playing with Melvin until the boys were called to supper. According to Junior, sometime previously, one of the Arnolds told him he was “looking for Melvin Horst to give him something.” During another interview with one of the detectives, Junior said he saw Melvin go into the Arnold house and a few minutes later come out with Bascom McHenry. They got in a car and drove off. Junior changed his story often, always saying that he “wanted to do the right thing” and that an angel appeared to him and “urged him to tell the truth.”

  Junior’s father said his son could not possibly have been with Melvin right before he disappeared because he was home eating his supper. He recanted that statement later, giving no reason.

  Prosecutor Mougey got permission from the common pleas court judge to hold Junior on a substantial bond in the Children’s Detention Home as a material witness. Material witnesses were sometimes held in seclusion, and bond was usually reserved for someone who was a flight risk.

  Junior’s revelations caused investigators to focus their suspicions entirely on the Arnold family because of the past run-ins with Marshal Roy Horst, Melvin’s uncle. White-haired, sixty-year-old Elias Arnold was a bricklayer by legal trade. By illegal trade, he was a bootlegger who had been arrested by Roy Horst multiple times. His son, thirty-year-old William, served time in the Ohio State Penitentiary for complicity in a robbery. He lived in Akron. Another son, seventeen-year-old Arthur, had a record of misdemeanors. Described as looking like a sheik in a Plain Dealer article, he spent much of his time hanging around the pool hall. Elias Arnold’s daughter, twenty-two-year-old Dorothy McHenry, had no record, but her husband Bascom had been in trouble for disturbing the peace.

  Acting on Junior Hanna’s information, the detectives started rounding up the Arnolds and McHenrys at three o’clock in the morning on January 2. They were charged with child stealing rather than kidnapping and held on $10,000 each. The penalties for kidnapping and child stealing were different. Under Ohio State law, kidnapping carried a sentence of one to twenty years and involved the abducted victim being taken out of state. Child stealing involved anyone who lured, enticed or stole a child under the age of twelve and carried a lighter sentence.

  The Arnolds were held in separate jail cells. They were also questioned separately in hopes that one of the family members might break down and admit to snatching little Melvin. Under interrogation, Elias Arnold answered only the questions he wanted to and smiled to evade others. He did confess that he “had it in” for Roy Horst and had made threats against him in the past.

  Prosecutor Mougey acknowledged the case against the Arnolds and McHenrys was completely circumstantial, even flimsy, but he figured it was enough to take before a grand jury. Mougey claimed Arnold’s motive was revenge against Marshal Horst because Horst had arrested members of the Arnold family several times. Mougey further tried to convince the grand jury that Elias thought Melvin was the marshal’s son.

  William Arnold and the McHenrys’ alibi of eating supper at an aunt’s house, then going to a basketball game in Fredericksburg held up, so Mougey had to drop his case against them. But Elias and Arthur could only vouch for each other.

  Detective John Stevens looked for clues in the alleyway where Melvin was last seen and came upon a niche where someone could have hidden in wait. The spot was between the Arnolds’ house and the alley’s entrance. Stevens also claim
ed to have found a frozen orange with one bite gone out of it and a pint of whiskey on the ground nearby.

  One of Detective Ora Slater’s first acts was to sift through the ashes in the Arnolds’ furnace. He did not disclose what led him to be suspicious of the furnace contents until those ashes revealed some good-sized bone fragments, as well as something that looked like a button. However, when the fragments were analyzed by local physicians, they were deemed to be chicken, beef, rabbit and pork bones. What Slater thought might be a button turned out to be a piece of metal, and Zorah told him that her son’s buttons were not metal.

  The Horsts left lights burning every night in belief that little Melvin would come home. “We know that Melvin will come back, all right,” Zorah told a staff reporter for the Plain Dealer, “and if it’s in the night time, we want the lights to be lit so Sonny won’t be afraid. But anytime, night or day, the door will be unlocked so that he can walk in.”

  Christmas was well past, but the gaily decorated tree still stood in the Horsts’ house. Melvin’s toy car had not moved. Ralph and Elzia Dora watched out the window everyday for their brother, too young to understand why he did not come home.

  Mougey went out of office on January 7, and Marion Graven became the new prosecutor. Graven appointed Mougey as the special prosecutor for the case because he was so familiar with its details.

  Elias and Arthur Arnold’s trial took place in March 1929. They were defended by A.D. Metz, a diminutive old attorney with a combative style. In his opening statement, he declared his clients had been framed by Detective John Stevens so he could collect the reward money.