Part 1Cold Open
It is a Thursday evening. December 6th, 1928. The sun has already gone down over Waco, Ohio — a little Stark County hamlet about four miles outside Canton, on the Waynesburg road. Maybe a few hundred people live here. Everybody knows everybody.
A man named Vernard Fearn is home. He is a coal man — runs his own small operation, bought the mining rights to a vein out here, digs the coal, sells it, delivers it himself. He built a new house on this road. His wife's mother lives right next door. His little girl is nine years old.
There is a knock at the door. Or maybe a call from the porch — the details on that are thin. But Vernard Fearn walks to his front door, and when he opens it, there is a woman standing there.
She has a Colt .38 caliber automatic. Gun experts would later call it an unusual type — the kind generally used by professional gunmen. She levels it at him, and she empties it.
Vernard Fearn drops in his own doorway.
And the woman turns around. She does not run. She walks — calmly — down the hill to the bus station, which is a stone's throw from the house. She boards a bus back into Canton. She gets off at the McKinley Hotel, catches another bus to Akron, and checks into a hotel for the night. Like she has all the time in the world.
Nobody knows who she is. The papers start calling her the Phantom Gun Woman.
For eight days, that is all Canton has. A dead coal man and a phantom. But I am going to tell you something right now. When they finally figure out who this woman is — the shooting is going to be the least complicated part of this story.
Part 2Introduction
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 and the public documents that survive — and 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. This one involves a killing, a suicide, and a marriage that may have had violence in it. Listener discretion is advised.
Because here is what makes this case different from almost any other I have told you about. This is not really a whodunit. Within about a week, everyone knew who fired that gun in the doorway. No — the mystery in this one is a man. A quiet, mild-mannered furnace salesman who, before this was over, would become the first person in American history — and, they said, probably the last — to be charged with a crime called "moral murder." A crime you commit not with a gun, not with your hands, but with a single sentence.
All of this happened in and around Canton, Ohio, in the winter of 1928. And almost nobody talks about it today. So let us fix that.
Part 3The Mild Man
I want to introduce you to a man named Wilbur Heldman. And I want you to hold onto the word the newspapers kept using for him, because it is going to matter: mild. Every reporter who met him reached for the same idea. Mild. Soft-spoken. Ordinary. The kind of man you would forget you had met.
In the winter of 1928, Wilbur was twenty-seven years old. He was a furnace salesman — he sold heating systems for a living, going door to door and office to office. He had had a hard start: born over in Massillon, orphaned young, his parents dead before he was grown, raised on a farm outside Greensburg. But he had made himself into something respectable. A working man with a trade. He even held, for a while, a commission as a special deputy sheriff of Lorain County — a little honorary lawman's badge. Remember that badge. We will come back to it.
Back in August of 1927, in Canton, Wilbur met a young woman. Her name was Margaret Hutter. She was working as a clerk at Dellinger's department store, and she had girl friends who worked in the office of the heating company where Wilbur sold furnaces, so she would come around. She was pretty, and she was young — just twenty. Her people were the Hutters, over in District, Pennsylvania. She had been a high school honor student. And that November, after just a few months, Wilbur Heldman and Margaret Hutter got married.
Now, by Wilbur's own telling — and for most of this episode, Wilbur's telling is the story, so keep your guard up — there was one shadow that fell across the marriage almost from the start. And it came in the shape of another man's name. Right around the time of the wedding, a name first came up in connection with a shared dinner, and some dancing. The name was Fearn. Vernard Fearn. The coal man from Waco.
Wilbur said there was no bad feeling about it at the time. Just a name. A man Margaret knew from before. But you already heard how this story opens, so you know that name is not going to stay quiet.
The marriage started to come apart in pieces. By March of 1928, Wilbur said, they were — his word — "spatting." Margaret left for a couple of weeks, went to stay with her sister in Canton, came back. In July, they had a baby, a little boy named Emmett. And somewhere in that first year, the friends started talking.
Because there was a coal truck. Wilbur's friends kept mentioning to him that a coal truck was parked out in front of his house during the day, while he was out working his sales calls. At first Wilbur said he did not think much of it — "I thought maybe the neighbors were getting some coal." But the friends, he said, "sort of smiled when they told me." You know that smile. It is the smile of people who know something about your marriage that you have not let yourself know yet.
And then one day Wilbur came home and there was a man on his porch. A man who got up and left the moment Wilbur arrived. Margaret told him it was a vacuum cleaner salesman. Wilbur did not push it. And here is the line from him that tells you everything about the kind of man he was, or the kind of man he wanted us to think he was. He said: "I had suspicions about this time that there was another man in Margaret's life. But I never mentioned it, because I knew it would only mean another fight."
Sit with that. A coal truck outside his house. A strange man on his porch who bolts when he pulls up. And Wilbur Heldman decides the thing to do is say nothing. To keep the peace. Because he is mild. That is the picture he paints. Whether it is the true picture — well, that is the whole question of this episode, isn't it.
Part 4The Run to Lorain
Things did not get better. They got worse.
In September, Margaret left again, and this time she took the baby with her. Wilbur went to the sister's house in Canton and took the baby back. Margaret came home the next day. Some judge in Canton — the papers called him a "friendly judge" — told the two of them to go home and patch up their troubles. This is 1928. This is what the system did with a marriage in trouble. It sent you home and told you to try harder.
And in October, the Heldmans made a decision. They decided the problem was Canton itself — that what they needed to get along better was, quote, "a change of location." So they left. They left the baby behind in Canton, in the care of the children's bureau, and they ran. First to Jackson, Michigan. Then Lansing. And finally they landed back in Ohio, up on the lake, in Lorain. Wilbur got a new furnace-selling job with a company called Shamrock Heating. They rented a room from a widow named Lena Zimmerman, on Ninth Street.
They had settled in Lorain about six weeks before the killing.
And by Wilbur's account, Lorain was supposed to be the fresh start. They did not know anybody. "So we took in shows," he said. Margaret sometimes rode along with him on his sales calls, all day and all night. Now — Wilbur framed that as togetherness. But listen to what else he said: that even up here, in a city where they knew no one, Margaret accused him of having girl friends. That she did not want to let him out of her sight.
And this is one of those details that cuts two completely different ways, and I want to be honest that I cannot tell you which way it cuts. Maybe Margaret was jealous and controlling. Or maybe Margaret was a young woman who had learned the hard way that she could not trust the man she was married to. Same behavior. Two completely different stories. Hold that thought too, because we are going to get a very different account of this marriage before we are done.
What we know for certain is this. About three weeks before the end, the scrapping started up again. Wilbur came home one day and found Margaret writing letters. A lot of letters. He picked one up — it was addressed to her sister back in Canton. And in the last days of November, Margaret went back to Canton, to visit that sister. There is a stretch of that visit — three days — that nobody has ever been able to fully account for. A blank.
We know a little of what filled part of that blank. Because on Wednesday, December 5th, Margaret got on a bus in Canton and rode out to Waco. To the neighborhood of the Fearn home. She did not do anything that anyone saw. She just... went and looked. Call it what it was. It was reconnaissance.
And the next evening, she went back.
You already know what happened when she got there.
Part 5The Shells in the Furnace
Now here is where I have to ask you to do something that Wilbur Heldman had to do for real. I have to ask you to slowly realize something terrible about a person you love.
Because after the shooting in Waco, Margaret came home to Lorain. And for seven days, she was — and this is the phrase the papers used — a "contented housewife." She cooked. She kept the room on Ninth Street. She talked about the baby. Seven days.
Meanwhile, the killing of the Waco coal man was in all the papers. The Phantom Gun Woman. A brazen daylight — well, evening — execution in a doorway, and a mystery woman who vanished. It was the biggest story in the region. And Wilbur Heldman was reading it. Same as everyone else.
And something started to itch at him.
He would say later that he began to suspect his own wife. And then suspicion turned into something he could hold in his hand. Because Wilbur found something in the furnace. In his own furnace, in the house, he found spent bullet shells — wrapped in paper. And the paper. Wilbur recognized the paper. He said it matched the description of clothing his wife had been wearing.
Think about the horror of that quiet moment. A furnace salesman, a man whose whole trade is furnaces, crouched at his own furnace, unwrapping a little packet of paper, and finding the shell casings from the gun that killed the man whose coal truck used to park outside his house.
And here is the part that, to me, is either heartbreaking or chilling, and I genuinely cannot decide which. He did not go to the police. Not yet. Instead, he — his word — "chided" her about it. He teased her about the similarity. About how funny it was that the paper looked like her clothes. And Margaret laughed it off. The two of them stood in that rented room and had a little laughing exchange about the shell casings from a murder.
But he could not leave it alone. He kept looking. And he found more — a bundle of papers, and a letter. And finally Wilbur Heldman said the thing out loud. He turned to his wife and he said: "Margaret, I believe you killed this man."
She denied it. At first. And then she stopped denying it. And she confessed to her husband that she was the Phantom Gun Woman. That she had ridden the bus to Waco and called Vernard Fearn to his door and emptied a pistol into him.
There was a letter — she had written it out. A letter that said Vernard Fearn had made her life, quote, "a hell on earth." That he had threatened to expose her, and to destroy their home. Expose her for what? Destroy the home how? The letter, as it was printed, does not fully say. And that missing piece — what exactly Vernard Fearn had done to Margaret Heldman — is one of the black holes at the center of this case. The newspapers called it an "eternal triangle." But whether Margaret and Fearn had been lovers, or whether Fearn was a man who would not take no for an answer and was tormenting a married woman — the record does not clearly tell us. Two very different stories. And the only two people who knew the truth were both about to be dead.
So that is the first reveal. The phantom is Margaret. Wilbur's own wife. Case basically solved — the shooter is known, she has confessed, there is physical evidence in the furnace.
Except the story does not end with the confession. It ends in a car. On the road to Canton.
Part 6The Drive to Canton
Once Margaret confessed, something had to be done. And what they decided — or what Wilbur decided, and again, this is Wilbur's account — was that he would drive her to Canton to surrender to the authorities. On Thursday, December 13th, 1928, about half past five in the evening, exactly one week after the shooting in the doorway, Wilbur Heldman put his wife in the car and started the drive south from Lorain toward Canton.
I want to give you the small human details from that drive, because they are almost unbearable. Margaret, in the passenger seat, kept asking Wilbur the same thing, over and over. She kept asking him to be good to the baby. To be good to little Emmett. Again and again on that dark road — be good to the baby.
And at some point, Margaret asked her husband a direct question. She asked what they were going to do to her.
And Wilbur answered her. He said: "They might give you the electric chair."
The electric chair.
They were close now. Right at the edge of Canton. The record is specific about the geography, and it is chillingly ordinary — they were passing a machine station and a lunch counter, and there was a road sign that said "Canton" maybe a hundred yards ahead. The city limit. The end of the drive. And Margaret Heldman reached into her blouse and pulled out the Colt .38. The same gun. The same gun that killed Fearn, that she had apparently carried this whole time. And she shot herself in the left side.
The bullet went through the apex of her heart. It cut the spleen. It passed out through her back and lodged in the upholstery of the car. And Margaret slumped over against her husband's shoulder.
Wilbur Heldman drove the rest of the way one-armed, his dying wife against his shoulder, to the sheriff's office. The sheriff, a man named Edward Gibson, came running out in his shirt sleeves. They rushed her to the hospital. And Margaret Heldman died on the operating table. A young doctor in white came out and shook his head, and that was that.
She was twenty-one years old. She had been a high school honor student. She had a baby boy five months old back in Canton. She had killed a man in a doorway eight days before. And now she was gone too, and the only living witness to her last hour on earth was her husband. The mild man. The man who said the words "electric chair."
Part 7The Man Telling the Story
Here is where this stops being the story of Margaret, and becomes the story of Wilbur.
Because a prosecutor in Canton — a man named Henry W. Harter, Jr. — heard how Margaret Heldman died. He heard that her husband, in the final minutes of her life, told her she was going to the electric chair, and that she killed herself right after. And Harter made a decision that had, as far as anyone could tell, never been made before in the history of American law.
He charged Wilbur Heldman with murder. Not for shooting anyone. Not for laying a hand on anyone. He charged him with what the papers called "moral murder" — the theory that Wilbur's words, that one brutal sentence about the electric chair, had driven Margaret to kill herself. That you could commit murder with a sentence.
And Wilbur, reportedly, gave the authorities a statement that did not help him at all. He was said to have admitted the remark, and to have added: "I don't know what made me say such a brutal thing."
Now, on its face, "moral murder" sounds like a stretch. A grieving husband says one terrible, thoughtless thing on the worst night of his life, and you are going to call that murder? If that were the whole story, I would tell you it was a prosecutor overreaching in a sensational case.
But it was not the whole story. Because once investigators started actually pulling on the threads of Wilbur Heldman's life, the mild man started to look a little different.
First — the sister. Margaret had a sister in Canton, Mrs. Roy Pierce. And Mrs. Pierce did not believe a word of the gentle, grieving-husband story. She flatly refused to believe her sister had killed herself at all. And she painted a portrait of Wilbur that was the exact opposite of "mild." She said he was intensely jealous. She said he was mean to Margaret — that he hit her. She said he was far from a good provider, that he had thrown Margaret out of the house many times. She said that after one of their separations, Wilbur had snatched the baby — little Emmett — while the child was still wet from his bath, and that Margaret had had to go to Juvenile Court to get her own son back. This is not a mild man. This is, if the sister is telling the truth, a violent and controlling one.
Second — the gun. After Margaret was dead, Wilbur went to the coroner, a man named McQuate, and he asked for the pistol back. The gun that killed Fearn, the gun that killed his wife. He wanted it returned to him. As, quote, "a keepsake." I have turned that word over and over. Keepsake. Who asks for the murder weapon back as a memento?
Third — and this is the one that genuinely unsettles me. The authorities did not entirely trust Wilbur's account of the shooting in that car. So Margaret's body was sent back to her hometown of District, Pennsylvania, for a second autopsy. Three physicians examined her — including her own family doctor from nearby Dubois. And when they were finished, those three doctors were asked whether they agreed with the ruling that Margaret had shot herself.
And they refused to say.
They would not confirm it was a suicide. Three doctors, one of whom had known this young woman her whole life, re-opened the question of how Margaret Heldman really died in that car — and then declined to sign off on the answer everyone had been given. Around the same time, the coroner and a Stark County detective said they were pursuing what they called "a new angle" in the case. And deputies were quietly sent up to Lorain — not to check on Wilbur's grief, but to verify whether he had really never left the city during the week that Vernard Fearn was shot.
Do you see what that means? For a moment there, the investigators of Stark County, Ohio, were circling a much darker possibility than "moral murder." They were quietly asking whether the mild furnace salesman had had a hand in one killing — or both.
Part 8The Verdict That Wasn't
So all of this went to a grand jury. The prosecutor, Harter, brought in outside help — a Cincinnati criminal investigator named Ora Slater, a man with a real reputation, brought in specifically to take charge of the case and evaluate whether Wilbur Heldman's story held together.
And in early January of 1929, the grand jury sat down to consider whether to formally charge Wilbur Heldman with moral murder. They heard from something like forty witnesses. Two score of people, walked through everything — the marriage, the coal truck, the shells in the furnace, the car, the electric chair, the sister's accusations, the doctors who would not sign.
And the grand jury did something quietly remarkable. They ignored it.
That is the legal term — they "ignored" the case. They declined to indict. They returned no charge at all. Whatever Ora Slater concluded, whatever the doctors would not say, whatever the sister believed — the grand jury heard all of it and decided there was not a case they could bring. And just like that, Wilbur Heldman was a free man. The newspapers called him what he would remain in history: the first, and probably the last, person ever charged with "moral murder." A charge that was invented for him, and that died with his case.
He walked out of Canton and went back to his life. And the record, as it so often does, simply closes over him.
Part 9Closing Thoughts
So what do we do with this one?
Let me start by being honest about how strange it is. Two people are dead. A coal man shot in his doorway in front of his own home, with his wife's mother next door and his nine-year-old daughter's world about to come apart. And a twenty-one-year-old woman dead by her own hand in a car at the edge of Canton, a five-month-old baby left behind. Two deaths. And in the end, the law punished exactly no one. Margaret was beyond punishment. Wilbur was never indicted. The case just... dissolved.
And I keep circling the same question the grand jury circled: who was Wilbur Heldman? Because there are two of him. There is the mild man — the gentle, ordinary husband who kept the peace, who was too soft to even confront his cheating wife, who said one thoughtless, brutal thing in a moment of grief and has regretted it ever since. And there is the other Wilbur — the jealous, violent man his sister-in-law described, who beat Margaret and threw her out and snatched her baby from the bath, who asked for the murder weapon back as a keepsake, and whose account of how his wife died in that car three doctors quietly refused to sign off on.
I have gone back and forth. Here is where I land, and you are free to land somewhere else — that is the whole point. I think the grand jury probably got the legal question right. I do not think you can, or should, convict a man of murder for a cruel sentence spoken in grief. "Moral murder" was never going to hold, and it never has since. But do I think Wilbur Heldman was simply the mild, hapless bystander he played in the newspapers? No. I do not. I think the truth of that marriage was uglier than the version he told, and I think there are questions about that car ride that never got answered because the only other person in the car was dead.
And there is one more thread I cannot tie off, because the record never did. The people of Waco could not believe anything bad about Vernard Fearn — model citizen, self-made man, war veteran, ideal husband. And yet the reporting hints, without ever explaining, at a "hidden chapter" in his life. Something that shocked the town. Whatever Fearn did to Margaret — whatever made her write that he had turned her life into a hell on earth and ride a bus out to his door with a professional's pistol — that, too, is buried with all three of them.
Three people at the center of this. Vernard Fearn, Margaret Heldman, and the marriage between Margaret and Wilbur. And every single one of them kept a secret that went into the ground unspoken. That is what this case really is. Not a whodunit. A story about how much a person can hide, even from the people closest to them — and how, sometimes, the law looks straight at all of it and simply lets it go.
If you know anything about the Heldman, Hutter, or Fearn families — whatever became of Wilbur, or of little Emmett, the baby who survived all of this — 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.
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.