Unsolved Murders & Disappearances in Northeast Ohio

by Jane Ann Turzillo

  “The defendants in this case have absolutely no knowledge of the disappearance of the boy,” he hammered. “They do not know who took him or how it was done.” He insisted the Arnolds did not even know Melvin Horst. “Even so,” he said, “they joined in the search for the child.”

  Metz attacked the prosecution for keeping Junior Hanna in seclusion so he could not interview the boy.

  White-haired Elias Arnold sat at the defense table with his hands clasped in front of him, his thumbs slowly circling each other while his deep-set eyes watched every move. His white moustache fringed a frowning mouth.

  Young Arthur, dressed in a three-piece suit, slumped quietly down in his chair throughout the proceedings. He showed little emotion but looked perplexed when Junior testified.

  The state’s case was built primarily on Junior Hanna’s testimony. Mougey spent the morning of the trial with witnesses building up to Junior’s turn on the stand. A couple of young boys testified that they saw Junior and Melvin together right before the latter went missing. Junior’s mother testified that she and her son went to the store, but she lost track of her son after 5:15 p.m. that day.

  Eight-year-old Junior took the stand and told the court he saw Arthur offer Melvin an orange. Melvin took a bite from it but dropped it when Arthur scooped him up and carried him into the house, he said.

  Metz surprised the prosecution with the testimony of Ora C. Watts, a night patrolman in Orrville. Watts had searched Arnold’s backyard two days before the orange was discovered. He was looking for buttons or trinkets that could have belonged to Melvin. He also kept an eye out for blood. “The search I made was so thorough that an orange could not have been there without my seeing it, and I saw none,” he testified. Watts also told the court that he made a careful check of the homes in that area and determined that all neighborhood children, except Melvin, were home by 5:30 p.m.

  The Arnolds both took the stand. Elias’s voice was low and throaty when he admitted to Mougey that he was a bootlegger. He also admitted to having a grudge against Marshal Roy Horst for arresting him for liquor violations but emphatically proclaimed his innocence of child stealing. “If I wanted to get even with Marshal Horst, I’d take it out of his skin.”

  Young Arthur was on the stand for more than an hour while he described his actions on the day Melvin disappeared. His black hair neatly combed, he turned to face the prosecutor and flatly denied seeing Melvin that day. During his testimony, he told jurors that he had never finished school, and since this had happened, his only friend had “deserted me, now.”

  When asked what he did the day of the alleged kidnapping, he said he had been downtown and after that “I was playing the player piano.” He said his father was reading.

  In his closing argument, Metz seized on the fact that Junior Hanna had not come forward with his story for four days. “It has been an entirely reckless manner in which the state has come into court to indict the Arnolds,” the old attorney railed. “They are basing the charge against them on the testimony of an eight-year-old child on a story born in a plastic imaginative mind.” He raised the question of why the state kept Junior in the children’s home after he came forward.

  In spite of Metz’s fiery defense and closing argument, the seven-man and five-woman jury found the Arnolds guilty after deliberating for seven hours and twenty-two minutes. The two men faced from one to twenty years in prison.

  They were taken back to their cells in Wayne County Jail to await sentencing. “I’m not worrying much, though,” Elias said. “I’ll fight the case to the very limit.”

  “We’re innocent, and we’ll prove it.” Arthur chain smoked as he talked. He said Junior Hanna’s story was not logical. “I could pick holes in it myself.”

  The Arnolds asked to speak to Detective Ora Slater. “For God’s sake, find that boy,” they said as they shook his hand.

  Elias Arnold was sentenced to the Ohio State Penitentiary for twenty years. His son Arthur was sentenced to an indeterminate period of time at the Mansfield Reformatory.

  While the Arnolds’ attorneys continued to fight for a new trial, the hunt for Melvin continued. Thousands of circulars describing Melvin were distributed to police departments all over the state.

  Rumors and tips were brought to the authority’s attention. One tipster said a boy fitting Melvin’s description had been seen with an older woman coming from a train in Columbus. Another informant claimed that Melvin had been hit by a Columbus bootlegger’s car and his body was either thrown in the Scioto River or buried somewhere. None of this could be substantiated.

  Some of the neighbors told Stevens they had seen a green car cruising the area. This time, someone claimed to have seen two men, a woman and a child in the car, and the child was in distress. The car was never found. Detectives were called to Gnadenhutten to investigate a headless body the size of a child wedged in a tree trunk. It turned out to be a rag doll. The bootlegger angle surfaced again and again. One story described the car as a green Hudson with wire wheels. The owner of that car was a rumrunner, but he had an airtight alibi.

  Although the common pleas court judge denied the Arnolds a new trial, the Ninth District Court of Appeals reversed the common pleas court decision on the weight of the evidence presented by new defense attorneys Nathan E. Cook and William F. Marsteller of Cleveland. The court found the admission of Junior Hanna’s testimony to be in error. Two of the three appellate judges favored discharging the Arnolds all together, but exoneration required a unanimous consent from the court. Wayne County prosecutors Mougey and Graven tried to get the state Supreme Court to deny a new trial, but the high court upheld the district court’s finding.

  The new trial was set for December 1929. Elias Arnold was freed on $10,000 bond. Arthur Arnold was kept in the Mansfield Reformatory.

  Cook and Marsteller of Cleveland were certain the evidence had been trumped up and took the fight forward from that position. They scored points in the new trial when they introduced two differing written statements by Junior Hanna.

  The state tried to keep the statements out of the proceedings and almost succeeded when the judge declared them to be personal property of the prosecution. Marsteller countered by calling Prosecutor Mougey to the stand and asked for Junior’s statements. This time, the judge ordered the statements to be produced. The defense then set out to prove that Junior had made five statements altogether and no two were alike.

  Although Junior had testified in the first trial that he saw Arthur take Melvin into the Arnolds’ house, in the two written statements, he made no such assertion. Instead, he wrote that he left for home before Melvin went into the alleyway. In another statement, he said he had seen Arthur and Bascom McHenry in the window of the Arnold house.

  Marsteller wanted to know: When was Junior telling the truth? When he was on the witness stand? Or when he made the written statements days after the disappearance? One of Junior’s statements said Bascom McHenry was Arthur’s accomplice in stealing Melvin. In another statement, Junior said Elias was Arthur’s accomplice. The defense attorney asked why he waited four days after Melvin went missing to tell his story. “Nobody asked me,” Junior said. Previously he had said he was afraid to tell.

  Marsteller extracted from Junior that one of the statements was written when Stevens and Mougey visited him at the Children’s Detention Home, where he had been held as a material witness. Before that, Junior had written that Bascom McHenry took Melvin in the house instead of Elias. Marsteller contended that Stevens and Mougey had already found out through the investigation that McHenry had an alibi, so they wanted Junior to name Elias as Arthur’s accomplice. Marsteller also accused Stevens of being after the reward money.

  In the first trial, Junior testified that he met up with two of his friends at 5:15 p.m. just as he was leaving Melvin Horst. Marsteller put a railroad freight agent on the stand to discredit that. The agent had seen the two named boys at the depot putting out a fire. The agent looked at the railroad clock, whi
ch said 5:12 p.m. The depot was blocks away from where Junior claimed to have met his friends.

  The defense lawyers produced witnesses who saw the Arnolds at different times during the day of Melvin’s disappearance. Mougey was quick to point out the time gap between 4:50 p.m. and 5:30 p.m.—a gap, he argued, that was time enough for the defendants to grab Melvin.

  Both Arnolds took the stand again and carefully went through their day. When it came right down to it, they were each other’s alibis during that short period of time. Under cross-examination, the prosecutor grilled Elias about his criminal record, trying to prove a motive for vengeance against Roy Horst. Elias admitted having a record but denied seeking revenge.

  Mougey took a different tack this time and attempted to establish a motive for abducting Melvin. He questioned Marshal Roy Horst for several hours, trying to bring out how many times he had arrested one of the Arnolds. The judge allowed Mougey to count up the arrests but not to tell what the arrests were for.

  Prosecutor Mougey stated to the jury that Melvin’s disappearance would have been the “perfect crime” except that Arthur employed Junior Hanna “as his cat’s paw” to entice Melvin. He told the twelve jurors to find the Arnolds guilty so that “children will be safe in their homes.”

  According to a Plain Dealer article, Mougey brought his final argument to a dramatic close by saying, “It is a crime against motherhood to go down through the valley of death to bring forth a child to be used in a revenge plot.”

  During Marsteller’s final argument, he told the jury that without Junior Hanna’s testimony, there was not one iota of evidence that the Arnolds had anything to do with Melvin Horst’s disappearance. “He [Junior Hanna] had made himself the hero of one of the strangest cases ever tried in Ohio,” Harriet Parsons of the Plain Dealer reported the defense attorney saying.

  For the second time in nine months, Elias and Arthur Arnold’s futures were in the hands of a Wayne County jury. It took the eight men and five women less than six hours to come back with a verdict of not guilty.

  After the trial, a frail-looking Zorah Horst went home to be with her other children and her husband. Asked about the verdict, she said she could not give up hope. “The jury’s verdict knocked all the breath out of me. I don’t know what to think.”

  Mail sacks full of letters kept coming into the prosecutor’s office offering sightings and neighborhood suspicions and clues. There was a tangle of rumors, counter rumors, hearsay and tips within the pile. One of those letters was mailed to William G. Heebah, editor of the Courier Crescent. The writer said he and Melvin and would deliver “the boy alive, to the arms of his mother,” in exchange for immunity and “$100 as expense money.” The letter went on to read, “Providing we are not arrested or prosecuted, because we know nothing of the disappearance of the boy, only we have him now.” It, too, was a cruel hoax.

  Digging for the body of Melvin Horst beside a fence seen in a vision by an Akron woman. Courtesy of the Akron Beacon Journal.

  The same Christmas tree from the year before still stood in the corner of the Horsts’ living room, brown needles fallen on the carpet, bare limbs holding up colored balls and silver tinsel. Zorah insisted that the tree and the little truck would stay there until Melvin came home. She said there would be no celebration and no presents until he did. But Melvin never came home to play with that truck that Christmas or any other Christmas.

  Wayne County sheriff Glenn Rike looks over bones buried in the East Union Evangelic Lutheran Church yard. Courtesy of the Akron Beacon Journal.

  Twelve years later, Ohio governor John W. Bricker ordered an investigation into the disappearance, but it came to naught.

  In 1962, an elderly woman contacted Akron Beacon Journal reporter Ken Nichols and told him she had “persistent visions” of what happened to the Horst boy. She claimed to see three men burying the boy’s blanket-wrapped body at night somewhere in the yard of a small white church by a fence corner and a nearby field. The woman also heard voices, telling her the church yard was in Wayne County between Orville and Wooster. The woman told Nichols that the men did not know the boy. They had hit him with their car at night. It was an accident, she said. They had no insurance, and they did not know what else to do.

  Nichols’s interest was piqued. When he was not working, he drove through the Wayne County countryside looking for a spot that matched her description. He finally found the East Union Evangelical Lutheran Church on Route 30 heading toward Wooster. The church was small and white, just like she described. There was a fence corner and a field close by.

  The church council gave permission to dig as long as the Wayne County sheriff Glenn Rike and the Pastor Robert Niemiller were there. A small leg bone, spine and jaw bone turned up under the second post, but nothing else. Rike believed the bones belonged to a dog or cat. Just to be sure, he sent them to Wayne County coroner L.A. Adair, who confirmed that they belonged to a small animal. They were not human. Still, there were no answers.

  What happened to the little blue-eyed boy named Melvin Horst? Someone knew, but that someone is most likely already dead.

  5

  DEADLY DEALS

  During the Roaring Twenties, Republican councilman William E. Potter was one of the most flamboyant and powerful politicians ever to hit Cleveland City Hall. Talkative, witty and sometimes charming, his fiery red hair and round glasses were his trademark. He served for ten years, earning the nickname “Rarin’ Bill” for his ambition and aggressiveness.

  “You always knew where Potter stood,” city council clerk Fred Thomas said. “If he was against you, he didn’t keep that a secret.” It was well known that if you wanted something done in Cleveland, you went to Bill. His story is that of scandal, political greed, legal entanglements and, finally, murder in 1931.

  Some of his scrappiness and talent for deal-making was attributed to his roots on the streets of Chicago as a “newsy,” according to some contemporary newspaper accounts. After all, it made a better story than what the 1930 census revealed—that he was actually born in Ohio in 1885 to parents who came from Pennsylvania. There’s no documentation that he ever made any effort to change that perception. Instead, he often told a tale about a wealthy old man who picked him off the streets and took him home. When the old man’s wife got a look at the ragged youth, she screamed so loud that the young Bill ran from the house.

  In later years, Plain Dealer reporter Ralph J. Donaldson wrote that Potter was born on Oregon Street in Cleveland, one of nine children. His parents died when he was quite young, and he and his siblings were separated.

  Rarin’ Bill got his first taste of politics during his teens when he attempted to become a unionized bricklayer. At the time, he was an apprentice in Rochester, Pennsylvania, helping to rebuild a burned-out glass factory where he had been working. The union turned down young Bill because of its rule that did not allow apprentices to join the union unless their fathers were bricklayers. Not one to take no for an answer, Potter lobbied all the traveling bricklayers to go to the union meeting and vote to let him in. It worked.

  As a young man, Rarin’ Bill moved to the Collinwood district in Cleveland. He made his living as a bricklayer and was voted an officer in the bricklayers’ union. Well liked by his neighbors, he caught the attention of Republican mayor Herman C. Baehr. Around 1910–11, Baehr appointed him chief inspector of masonry in the city’s building department, a job he held for about eight years.

  Cleveland councilman William “Rarin’ Bill” Potter. Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library.

  After two unsuccessful bids for minor political offices, Potter ran a winning campaign in 1919 for the city council seat from the Collinwood Fourth District, Twenty-sixth Ward. As councilman, he quickly became the darling of Maurice Maschke’s Republican Party for helping to turn three wards in his district red.

  During Rarin’ Bill’s tenure on the council, he served on the public utilities, police and fire standing committees, but most importantly, he held the pos
ition of chairman on both the building code committee and the board of appeals on building code regulations. At the same time, he was personally involved in real estate and was the president of Union Builder Supply & Brick Company.

  Rarin’ Bill’s dual roles did not sit well with the Citizens’ League of Cleveland and made enemies of his business competitors. In late February 1925, the league cried foul in a letter to city council. Signed by its director, Mayo Fesler, the letter demanded Potter’s resignation from any committee that oversaw construction. It claimed it was a conflict of interest for Potter to have authority over contractors who bought their building supplies from his company, then turned around and appeared before him to ask for building and zoning permits or plan modifications. While most of the council ignored the letter, the council president challenged the league to show evidence to back up its accusations or apologize to Potter.

  The league was not about to apologize and told the council in its second letter to find its own evidence. The league offered to employ legal council to facilitate an investigation and to subpoena a list of witnesses.

  Councilman John D. Marshall introduced a resolution to address Potter’s role as the chairman of both the building codes committee and the board of appeals in relationship to his presidency of the Union Builder Supply & Brick Company.

  By this time, Rarin’ Bill’s temper was beginning to fester. “It’s just a lot of politics,” he cried. He called Mayo Fesler “a $10,000 a year snooper” and accused his largest business competitors of ganging together with the Citizens’ League to attack him.

  The judicial committee decided Fesler or other members of the league would have to show reasonable proof that there was a need for an investigation. The league produced evidence for twenty-two cases put before the building code committee or board of appeals where Potter had sold materials to applicants. The judiciary committee exonerated Potter.