Part 1Cold Open
On a Sunday night in August of 1926, four men stood inside an old log house in the hills of Greene County, Tennessee, holding a search warrant and a lantern. They were looking for a missing girl. A twelve-year-old named Novella Winkle, who had been staying with the couple who lived there, and who had simply... vanished. The woman of the house told everyone the girl had gone home. But the girl had not gone home.
The men searched the whole house. And when one of them asked if there was another cellar, the woman said yes. She walked them to it herself. And then she did something I still cannot get out of my head. She handed them an axe. She handed them the tool to pry up the boards of the very cellar she was standing over. The men pulled up the planks, looked inside, and found nothing. Rags. Rocks. Some dirt. They put the boards back down, and they left, unsatisfied but out of ideas.
Four men. One lantern going dim. A house that was too quiet, and a woman who was a little too helpful. They walked back out into the dark that night sure they had missed something. They were right. And within about thirty-two hours, this quiet little hollow in Greene County was going to become the biggest story in the state of Tennessee.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Because to understand what those four men missed, and what it cost, we have to start somewhere else entirely. We have to start with an old man, and the granddaughter he was only trying to save.
Part 2Show Introduction
Hello everyone, and welcome to Forgotten True Crime, the true crime podcast where we tell the stories of crimes that happened long ago. If you are a true crime fan, make sure you subscribe to the podcast. That way, when we have a new episode, you will be the first to know. And check us out at Section29.com, where I post a lot of the cool things I dig up for each episode, including the original newspaper clippings and photos of the people involved. This episode has some really interesting material for you to look at, so go check it out. The links are all in the description below.
Parts of this story may contain opinions and speculation and should be taken as such. What I am going to do today is tell you this story the way I have come to believe it happened, built out of the newspaper record, the court testimony, and the public documents that survive. But the people who could tell us for certain are almost a hundred years gone, and in places the record contradicts itself. So where I am reading between the lines, I will try to tell you that I am doing it. These stories depict violent crimes of all types and may be a trigger for some listeners. Listener discretion is advised. And I want to say up front: this one involves the murder of a child. If that is not something you can sit with today, I completely understand, and I will see you on the next one.
One more thing before we start. This case pulled me in so deep that I ended up writing an entire book about it — a full account of everything I found, everything I believe, and all the questions the record leaves open. If this story grabs you the way it grabbed me, the book is called Down in the Cellar, and you can find it linked in the description. But you do not need it to follow along today. Let us get into it.
Part 3The Girl Nobody Was Responsible For
I want to start with an old man walking up a wagon track in the Greene County hills, in the summer of 1926, with his granddaughter beside him.
His name was Thomas Winkle. Everybody called him Tom. He was elderly, gray-haired, with the kind of limited schooling that was ordinary for a man of his time and place up in the mountains of East Tennessee. He was not an important man. He did not own much. But he loved the girl walking next to him, and in a family that had been coming apart for two years, he had quietly become the one steady thing she had.
Because this girl — Novella — had already lost more than a child should.
Her mother, Lula, had died in the spring of 1924. Novella was ten. And when a mother dies in a house full of children, the whole shape of that family changes. Her father, John Winkle, did what a lot of widowed men did back then. He remarried. He had a houseful of kids to raise and a living to make, and he needed a wife to do it. But the new woman he brought home and Novella did not take to each other. It happens. A grieving girl and a stepmother who did not choose her, under one roof — it just did not work.
So Novella drifted to her grandfather. Tom took her in, and that is where she was living: with the old man, because there was nowhere better for her to be. And I want you to sit with what that means, because it is the quiet engine underneath this entire story. Novella Winkle was a child that nobody, exactly, was responsible for. Her mother was dead. Her father had a new wife and a pile of other children. Her grandfather was old and poor and doing his best. She was loved — I truly believe she was loved — but she had fallen into that gap that opens up in some families, where a child belongs to everyone a little and no one enough.
Let me tell you who she was, from the little the record gives us, because she deserves that much. Novella was twelve years old. Her birthday was September 10th, which means when this story happens, in August, she was just about three weeks shy of turning thirteen. One newspaper, describing her later, said she had a pretty, olive complexion, bright dark eyes, and dark brown bobbed hair. A slight little figure. A merry face. Somebody who knew her said she had an eager mind — that she wanted to learn. On her death record, under occupation, a clerk wrote two words: "School Girl." That is who we are talking about. A bright, dark-eyed kid who liked to learn and was three weeks from thirteen.
Now. In the last week of July, there was an ice cream supper.
If you do not know what that is, it was one of those community socials — church folks and neighbors gathering on a summer evening, homemade ice cream, everybody in one place. And at this ice cream supper, Novella and her grandfather met a couple.
A husband and wife. Older. The man was in his fifties, a big fellow, a farmer from over on Middle Creek. His wife was a good bit younger. They were childless. And they took an immediate shine to Novella. They got to talking with Tom, and they made him an offer — a generous one, a kind one. Let the girl come stay with us, they said. We have got a farm. We will buy her proper clothes. We will treat her as our own. We always wanted a child around.
And I need you to understand how that offer would have landed on a poor old man who was watching his granddaughter fall through the cracks. Here were church-going people — because they were; they led prayers, they went to services — offering to give this girl the thing he could not: clothes on her back, a real home, somebody with the means to raise her right. It must have felt like an answer to a prayer.
Tom said yes.
And here is the part that I think about the most. He did not just wave her off and forget her. Over the next couple of weeks, everything the family saw told them they had done the right thing. The couple bought Novella four new dresses. A pretty hat. Shoes. Underthings. When her father John came out to visit, they welcomed him warmly, sat him down, invited him to stay the night. They held family prayers in the evening, and both the husband and the wife led them aloud. One Sunday, the man took his wife and Novella to church, and he stood up and led the whole congregation in prayer. Tom came out twice himself to check on her, and both times he went home satisfied.
Two visits. New dresses. Prayers at church. Everybody went home happy.
I am not going to tell you those people’s names yet. Because Tom Winkle did not know who they really were. He knew a kind farmer and his wife who wanted to help a motherless girl. That is all he knew. And for about three weeks, that was the whole story. A rescue. A good thing in a hard year.
Novella had about three good weeks. And then something in that house on Middle Creek began to turn.
Part 4She Went Home
The trouble, as best anyone could ever reconstruct it, started small. It started with sleeping arrangements and a comment about a bath.
You have to understand the house first. It was an old log place, four low rooms, twelve miles out from Greeneville, near a little community called Chuckey, up toward the Unaka Mountains along the North Carolina line. Isolated. The kind of place where the nearest neighbor is a field and a tree line away. The farmer and his wife lived there alone. And here is a detail that seemed ordinary at the time and turned out not to be: the husband slept in a separate room from his wife. Downstairs. On his own.
In that last week, the sleeping arrangements shifted around a couple of times — the wife and Novella moving upstairs, then back down. And on a Wednesday night, the wife and the girl were sitting up in the husband’s room, shelling beans, until about nine o’clock. An ordinary domestic evening. Except that at some point that night, the wife turned to her husband and asked him a question. She said: "Why did you tell Novella to take a bath and put on clean clothes?"
He said he never told the girl any such thing. And then he did something strange for a man who had been leading prayers over this child a week earlier. He got angry at her. He started calling Novella a liar — a bad one. The next morning he would tell a neighbor on the road that the girl was, and I am quoting him, "the biggest liar he ever heard talk."
Now hold onto that little exchange, because we are going to come back to it, and it is going to look very different by the end. For now, just file it away. A jealous-sounding question about a bath. A husband suddenly furious at a twelve-year-old. File it.
The next day was Thursday. And by the husband’s account, he left early — six in the morning, on horseback, off to hunt up some peaches, gone most of the day, stopping at neighbors’ places. When he came home around noon, he said, his wife told him the news.
Novella was gone.
The story the wife told — the story that would hold for four days — was simple. The girl had been sent out to the apple tree for apples. She had complained she was not satisfied with them. And she had run off. Gone home, presumably, back to her people. That was it. She went home.
And for a few days, nobody had any reason to doubt it. Why would they?
But here is what the neighbors would remember later, once they had a reason to. That Thursday morning, two kids who lived nearby — a fifteen-year-old girl and her thirteen-year-old brother — heard hammering coming from the direction of that farm. The sound of nails being driven. And then the sound of nails being pulled back out. Another neighbor, a girl doing her washing a couple hundred yards off, heard a man’s voice calling to a woman, and the knock of a hammer.
And there was one more thing, and it is the detail that should have stopped everyone cold. The very next day — Friday — the husband offered to sell some of Novella’s clothes. Those brand-new dresses they had bought her. He offered them to a sixteen-year-old neighbor girl.
Think about that for one second. If Novella really had just run home to her family, why are you selling off her new clothes the very next morning? You do not do that. Unless you already know she is not coming back for them.
But nobody knew to ask that question yet. The story held. She went home. Until Sunday, when her grandfather came to dinner.
On Sunday, Tom Winkle came out to the farm for a meal. And the couple acted surprised to see him without the girl. Hasn’t Novella made it back to you? they said. She left us Thursday. We figured she was home by now.
And something in that did not sit right with the old man.
I cannot tell you exactly what it was. Maybe it was the ease of it. Maybe it was a look that passed between the husband and wife. But Tom did not let it go. After the meal, the husband took him outside and showed him some tracks near the apple tree — the girl’s bare footprints. See, he was saying. She ran off from right here.
Except Tom Winkle, old and unschooled as he was, could read the ground better than the man showing it to him. He kept looking. And he saw what the husband had not pointed out: the tracks turned back. Back toward the house. Back toward the woodpile. And the prints themselves were wrong. They were pressed deep into the earth and spaced far apart — six, seven feet between them. That is not a child walking to an apple tree. That is not even a child playing. That is a child running. Running as hard as her legs would carry her. Tom said later he knew, looking at those tracks, that the girl had been running for her life — he said he knew it as well as if he had seen it with his own eyes. And he could tell they were hers, because Novella had a peculiar shape to one of her feet, and he knew that print.
And running right alongside those little bare footprints was a second set of tracks. Heavier. The rounded heel of a man’s shoe. Also running.
Tom Winkle turned to the farmer and told him straight out: something bad has happened here. Foul play. And the husband — who up to that point had been so smooth, so helpful, so full of answers — the papers said he "filled up." He hesitated. And then he tried to steer the old man somewhere else, suggesting maybe a neighboring family he had quarreled with had lured the girl off.
Tom did not buy it. He went and checked with that other family. Nothing there. So he did the thing that makes him, to me, the hero of this story. A poor old man with no power and no authority went and swore out a search warrant. He got the law.
And that Sunday evening, right around dark, four men climbed up to that log house with a warrant and a lantern.
You already know what happened, because you heard it at the top of the show. They searched the house. They found the cellar. The wife — helpful as ever — handed them the very axe to pry up the boards. They looked into the dark, and they saw rags and rocks and nothing else, and they put the planks back down, and they left.
They were sure they had missed something. They just could not find it. So they went back down the hill into the night.
And they were right. They had missed something. To find it, they were going to have to come back at four o’clock in the morning.
Part 5Four in the Morning
The man leading that search was a deputy sheriff named Tom Bitner. And whatever it was that Tom Winkle had felt at the dinner table, Bitner was feeling it too now. That wrong kind of quiet. A house that answered every question a little too easily. He and his men had walked out of there unsatisfied, and the feeling only got worse the longer they sat with it. So at four o’clock Monday morning, they turned around and climbed back up that ridge.
And on the road in the dark, they met the husband coming toward them, carrying a lantern of his own.
Bitner asked him where he was headed at four in the morning. And the man said he was going to Greeneville — because his wife was crazy, he said, and he needed to get her some help. He said he had been up with her all night. He said she had told him something that would not keep.
So they all walked back to the house together. And inside, one of the searchers from the night before — a man named Luke Belt — did not bother with any more questions. He walked up to the wife, and he accused her directly. Told her he knew she had done an awful thing.
And the woman threw up her hands.
"I killed her," she said.
Her husband, standing beside her, said: "Mother, this is the officer. They have got me arrested. Just acknowledge it and tell them the truth."
And she said it again, falling toward him, crying. "I killed her."
The deputy asked her why she did it. And she gave an answer that I have not been able to shake since I first read it. She said: "Just because I always wanted to kill somebody. And I thought she was here to part me and my husband."
He asked her how. She said she cut the girl’s throat.
He asked her where Novella was now.
And she led them back to the cellar. The same cellar they had searched the night before. The same boards she had handed them an axe to open. The potato hole under the floor.
This time they cut deeper. Five planks had to be sawed through to open it up. And underneath, laid down in careful layers, they found what the searchers the night before had been standing directly on top of. Soiled rugs. Then chip dirt — the same pale wood debris from the pile out by the woodpile. Then straw pulled from a bed tick. Then rocks. Then more planks. And under all of it, in the shallow dark of that hole, was Novella Winkle.
She had been there for days. She had been there Sunday night, ten feet below the floor, while four men walked the room above her and shone a lantern into the wrong part of the dark and went home. She was face down, one small elbow raised. She was wearing a thin green dress. No shoes, no stockings.
I am not going to read you the full list of what had been done to her. I have it, from the deputy who wrote it all down and later read it aloud in a courtroom so packed that a groan went through the crowd like a wave. What you need to know is this: she had been cut, terribly, with a razor — her throat, her body. And her skull had been struck with an axe. The doctors would argue later about which wound actually killed her, and the awful conclusion they reached was that the throat wound alone had not been enough — that the child had survived the razor. It was the axe that ended it. This was not quick. This was rage.
That is the thing the searchers missed. That is what was under their boots. A twelve-year-old girl, three weeks from her birthday, buried under the floor of the house where she had been sent to be safe.
And the woman who put her there had just confessed. So you would think that is the end of it. Case closed. She said she did it, she said why, she led them to the body.
Except it is not the end. Because we still have not answered the two questions that actually matter. Who was this woman? And — did she really do it alone?
Part 6Who Was Alma Tipton
It is time I told you their names.
The farmer was Robert Tipton. Bob. About fifty-five years old, though he gave reporters three or four different ages depending on the day. A Spanish-American War veteran — he had enlisted back in 1898, volunteered for the fighting in the Philippines, served three years, knocked around out west, even did a stretch on the San Francisco police force. He had worked twenty years in the coal mines before an injury put him in the Soldiers’ Home over in Johnson City. He was on a government pension. He had also, at some point, served time in a penitentiary for something the newspapers never named. And here is the thing about Bob Tipton that changes how you hear everything he ever said: Bob Tipton was afraid of his own wife. That is why he slept in a separate room downstairs. Because of what he called her "crazy spells."
And his wife — the woman who threw up her hands and confessed — was Alma. Alma Clark Tipton. And once you know who Alma was, this whole story tilts under your feet like that cellar floor.
Alma had been a nurse, once, at the Soldiers’ Home in Johnson City. That is where she met Bob. But her history went somewhere much darker than that. Her parents, according to a bank cashier who had known the family for thirty-eight years, were double first cousins. Her mother was in an asylum. Her sister was in an asylum. And Alma herself had been committed — years before — to the Home for Epileptic and Feeble-Minded at Lynchburg, Virginia. A nurse from that very institution would later come to court and confirm it. About a year into her marriage, Alma had a child, born dead in a Knoxville hospital, and around that same time she attempted to take her own life.
But that is not the part that stops your breath. This is. According to her own husband, Novella was not the first girl Alma had gone after.
Bob said that other girls had stayed with them over the years — and that Alma had attacked them. That he had paid money to make indictments disappear. One girl, he said, Alma had come at with a razor. And the reason? Because that girl had kissed him. At the trial, a witness would name one of those earlier victims — another neighborhood girl Alma had allegedly tried to kill.
Now go back to that Wednesday night. The bath comment. "Why did you tell Novella to take a bath and put on clean clothes?" Hear it again, knowing what you know now. That was not really a question about a bath. That was jealousy. That was a mentally ill woman looking at a twelve-year-old child and deciding, in the broken logic of her sickness, that this girl was a rival — that she had come to take her husband. Alma said it herself, in her confession. "I thought she was here to part me and my husband." She had done this before, to other girls, over the same imagined threat. Novella just did not survive it.
And that is the horror underneath this whole story. It is not just that Alma Tipton killed a child. It is that a poor, loving family, doing the best they could, handed a twelve-year-old girl to a woman with a documented history of attacking girls exactly like her — and nobody warned them. The neighbors seem to have known something was off in that house. The community had whispers. But Tom Winkle, walking his granddaughter up that hill toward what he thought was a rescue, did not know any of it.
There is even a darker whisper I have to mention, though I want to be careful with it, because it was never proven. After the murder made the papers, stories started going around about a nine-year-old orphan boy the Tiptons had supposedly taken in years earlier — a boy who had "run away," people said. After Novella, deputies actually went and searched the property looking for another body. They found nothing. Neighbors said they knew nothing. Bob flatly denied it. So it may be nothing more than the kind of rumor that grows up around a house of horrors once one horror is confirmed. But once you know what Alma was, you understand why people went looking.
So — that is who she was. Which brings us to the second question. The one the confession does not actually settle. Did Alma Tipton kill this child by herself?
Part 7Did One Person Do This?
Here is where I have to be honest with you and lay out the competing versions, because there are several, and they do not fit together. This is exactly the kind of place where I am reading the record and telling you what I believe. You may land somewhere else. That is fair.
Version one is Alma’s own confession: she did it alone, in a fit of jealous madness. She cut the girl’s throat from behind while they worked in a room together, pushed her down into the cellar, and when Novella — still alive — screamed from the hole, Alma took up the axe and finished it. It fits her history. It fits her own words.
But version two belongs to Novella’s father, John Winkle, and John did not believe his daughter died the way Alma said. John pointed straight at Bob Tipton. His theory was that Bob attempted to assault Novella, that she ran, and that a man ran her down and killed her. And John had something physical to stand on: those tracks in the yard. A little girl’s bare feet, running. And a man’s shoes, running right beside them. A woman confessing to a quiet indoor killing does not explain a man’s boot prints chasing a child across the yard. In John’s version, Alma’s confession was a lie — a sick wife falling on the sword to save her husband from the gallows.
Version three came from a young woman named Leona Crum, who testified that on the Wednesday evening — the night before Alma said it happened — she was passing the Tipton place at dusk and saw a girl running from the house, crying out that she had been cut, with a man chasing her. Crum said the man’s voice sounded like Bob’s, and that she heard him shout that he would "cut you for good" when he caught her. If that is true, it puts a man actively hunting this child. But — and this matters — Crum’s credibility got torn apart on the stand. She had been in jail more than once. She had a personal history with Bob Tipton, bad blood, going back years. So was she a real witness, or a woman with every reason to sink him? You have to decide.
And version four is what the prosecutors came to believe: that they were both in it. That one person could not have done all of this alone — killed the girl, cut and sawed and nailed those planks, carried the layers of dirt and rock, hidden the body. That the tracks proved a man pursued her. And they asked the question I keep coming back to: if Bob Tipton was truly innocent, why would he stand there and let his wife hang for a capital crime? Why not fight? One prosecutor said Bob "hid behind his wife’s skirts." His motive, they argued, was the oldest one there is — saving his own neck.
So which is it? I will give you my honest read at the end. But first, all four of those versions had to go in front of twelve men in a courtroom. And that is where this goes next.
Part 8The Reckoning
Feeling in Greene County ran so hot that when Bob Tipton was brought to his first hearing, the papers said flat out that if he had been turned loose, the crowd might have killed him. Reporters came from across the country to little Greeneville, Tennessee. The defense got the trial moved to the next county over, to Rogersville, and it opened in early November of 1926.
Both Tiptons were charged with first-degree murder. And the two of them ran two completely different defenses.
For Alma, the defense was insanity — and honestly, they had the material for it. A doctor qualified as an expert in mental disease examined her twice and testified she was an epileptic and of unsound mind. Add her family history, her time in the Lynchburg institution, and you have a real case that this was a woman who was not in control of herself.
But the judge told the jury something important. The question was not whether Alma had a history of mental illness. The question was whether she was legally insane at the moment she killed Novella — whether, right then, she knew that what she was doing was wrong. And here is what a jury could look at: she covered up the crime in careful layers. She told a calm, consistent cover story for four straight days. She handed a search party an axe and watched them look in the wrong place. Does that sound like a woman who did not know what she had done?
For Bob, the defense was simpler. He did not do it. He was not even home. He only learned the truth when he finally got his wife to confess in the middle of the night. On the stand, his own lawyer asked him point blank whether he had anything to do with killing the child, and Bob broke down and said, "Lord, no. I had no reason on earth to do so. I liked the child." He wept. He had wept at the first hearing too.
The jury got the case on the evening of November 5th and was locked up for the night. About twelve hours later, on the morning of the 6th, they came back.
Guilty. Both of them. Murder in the first degree — with mitigating circumstances. That last part, the mitigating circumstances, is almost certainly what kept them off the gallows. The sentence was twenty-three years each in the state penitentiary.
When it was read out, Bob Tipton raised his head and looked, the papers said, relieved. And Alma? Alma heard that she would spend twenty-three years in prison for butchering a child with the same blank, empty stillness she had shown through the entire trial. She never took the stand. Through all of it, the only time anyone saw her lips so much as tremble was during the testimony about the wounds she had put on that little girl.
The defense appealed. And that December, doctors who had been watching Alma daily formally declared her insane, and she was moved out of jail and into Lyons View, the state asylum over in Knoxville.
Part 9Closing Thoughts
So what do we do with this one?
Let me start with the detail that I cannot get out of my head — and it is not the cellar. On the very day Novella’s body was found and put in the ground, an aunt of hers arrived in Greeneville, all the way from Atlanta. She had come to take Novella home with her. To raise her. To educate that eager mind somebody had noticed. She stepped off ready to give this girl the whole rest of her life — and learned that she was already buried. One day. Novella had people coming to save her, coming from another state, and they missed her by a single day. She never knew they were coming. That is the part that guts me.
Now, did Alma act alone? I have gone back and forth on this more times than I can count. Alma confessed, in detail, more than once, and the confession fits everything we know about her. That is powerful. But those tracks bother me — the bare feet and the man’s shoes, running together. The neighbors who heard a man’s voice bother me. The nailing and un-nailing bothers me. And the prosecutor’s question bothers me most of all: if you are innocent, do you really stand silent and let your wife hang for you? The jury did not fully believe Bob was just a bystander — they convicted him too. But they also did not call him the killer. They landed somewhere in the middle. And honestly, so do I. If you want to hear exactly where I come down, and why, that is a big part of what the book gets into — I lay out all four versions and walk through the evidence piece by piece. It is called Down in the Cellar, and it is linked in the description.
Because there is a lot the record never answers. Whatever really happened to that orphan boy, if he existed at all. Whether Bob served his full sentence. How long Alma stayed at Lyons View — because here is the last strange fact of this case: Alma Tipton was not executed. She went to an asylum. And she lived until 1965. Nearly forty more years, after what she did in that house.
Novella Winkle got twelve years, and three weeks. She is buried at Union Chapel Cemetery, in the Horse Creek area of Greene County, under a name half the newspapers of the day could not even spell right. Wovella. Leola. Louella. They kept getting it wrong. It was Novella.
They hid her down in a cellar and they hoped she would never be found. And an old man who loved her — a poor, gray-haired grandfather reading tracks in a yard — would not let that happen. He is the reason there was a trial at all. He is the reason we can sit here almost a hundred years later and say her name. Which is the whole reason I do this show.
If you know anything about the Winkle or Tipton families — what became of Bob, how long Alma was at Lyons View, anything about Novella herself — I would truly love to hear from you. Reach me at Section29.com, where you can also see the original newspaper clippings and photos from this case. And if this story got its hooks in you, the full book, Down in the Cellar, is linked in the description.
Thank you all for listening to this episode of Forgotten True Crime. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who loves true crime.
Until next time, this is Trevor with Forgotten True Crime. Stay safe out there. And just know — you are unique, you are special, and you are loved.