Killed for Money He Didn't Have

South Waco Avenue

On Sunday, November 15, 1936, George Washington Wiant had his son and his granddaughter clean his house. His last housekeeper had just walked out. Joe Wiant, an unemployed paper hanger, and his daughter Thelma scrubbed the little clapboard house on South Waco Avenue in Wichita all day while the old man sat and grumbled at them.

When they finally got their coats on, he was chuckling.

Thelma took it. The family had a saying about Grandpa, and the paper printed it: "Be good to Grandpa. He's got money." By seven o'clock on Monday evening the washing was done and ironed, and Thelma carried it back across town and knocked. Nobody answered.

She went back on Tuesday evening. Nobody answered, and there was a folded newspaper on the porch. On Wednesday there were two. Thelma decided he was playing with her: "He's probably peeking through his curtains having fun watching me lug that laundry."

On Thursday evening her father looked up from his own paper. "He could be sick, you know," he said. "I'll go over with Thelma and see."

Three newspapers

There were three newspapers on the porch. In the 1953 telling, Joe pushed against the door latch until it snapped. In the hall the linoleum was streaked with blood, there was blood near the stairway, and a man's handkerchief and a pair of glasses lay on the stairs. In the living room:

The house had been searched. His trouser pockets were turned inside out. An old brown wallet lay empty beside him. The dining-room buffet had been jimmied, the parlor table knocked over, and a manila envelope that had been tacked to the underside of it torn away. Upstairs the bureau drawers had been gone through.

Detective Captain Leroy Bowers came out to the porch, where Joe and Thelma were waiting. "It's a messy job," he said. "Someone cut your dad down—with an ax, I think, although we haven't found it."

Joe told him the Monday-to-Thursday story, and about the housekeepers. There had been eight. "He—he wasn't an easy man to get along with," he said, and then went straight on about how careful and thrifty his father had been. Then he said one more thing: "He wouldn't open the door to anyone he didn't know." The paper says he gulped, "realizing this information narrowed suspicion to a comparatively few people."

A woman's footprint

Bowers came to three conclusions that night. The old man had been attacked in the hall, where the glasses were, and dragged into the next room out of sight of the windows and the door. A Monday paper was on the table and the rest were still on the porch, so he had been attacked between 5 and 7 p.m. on Monday. And since nothing had been forced and Wiant didn't let strangers in, the killer was someone he knew.

In the kitchen there was a bloody footprint on the linoleum. "Look at the shape, chief," said Detective W. O. Lyle. "Narrow sole and small heel; it must be a woman's." They cut it out of the floor and kept it. Bowers asked the coroner, Dr. G. C. Davis, whether a woman could have done this.

Then a detective shouted from another room: "Chief! Look at this!" He had the wallet, the empty one, and under an inside flap he'd found a hidden zipper. In the secret compartment were six $100 bills.

Twelve to fifteen hours

The next morning the coroner gave Bowers the finding that matters most in this whole story.

If the attack came between five and seven on Monday evening, he died sometime between about five and ten o'clock on Tuesday morning. That means that on Monday night, when Thelma stood on the porch with the washing and got no answer, her grandfather was on the other side of the door, and he was still alive. Nobody can say whether he heard her.

That finding isn't only a memory from seventeen years later. The Associated Press report of November 20, 1936, the day after he was found, quoted Coroner Davis as saying Wiant "had been dead since Monday night or early Tuesday," that the skull was "fractured in several places," and that the rooms showed a "terrific struggle."

The fortune

Ruth Reynolds opened her 1953 story with a list:

Wichita believed he didn't trust banks and kept his money in the house. The paper says his estate was reported to be "between $10,000 and $10,000," the same figure printed twice.

So who stood to gain? The county clerk, Claude N. Cartwright, was also the executor of Wiant's will. "Practically nobody," he said. Wiant had left $10 to his son Charles and the rest to six relatives, and each of them already owed him more than their share. Then the total:

The neighbours also told the police that Joe owed his father $600. Joe said that was no secret, and that he was paying it off by doing odd jobs for him.

Eight housekeepers

Detective E. W. O'Connor found all eight housekeepers. Every one had come from the same agency on South Broadway, and he came back with one sentence about them: "Every last one of them was the mousy type—and every one said the old man was a wolf."

The last one had left the Friday before the murder. Wiant had started pawing at her, and when he wouldn't stop she grabbed him by the throat. "She had him on his knees with his tongue hanging out before she realized what she was doing," O'Connor said. But she could account for Monday. "For that matter," he added, "so have the rest of them."

There was also a woman seen going up the front steps at about five on Monday, with a briefcase and a fur coat. A neighbour had taken down the licence number of her coupe. She was from a Wichita real-estate firm, there about a subdivision sale, and Wiant had refused to let her into the house.

The machine

Joe Wiant gave the police a list of his father's nieces, nephews and in-laws, "as long as your arm." Bowers wanted to put everyone on it through a lie detector. The County Attorney, Eli Eubanks, told him: "Lie detector results are not admissible in Kansas courts."

Bowers did it anyway, as a way to find leads he could then prove some other way. When Joe answered the four questions, the needle "leaped all over the dial." It took a sworn statement from his family doctor about a heart condition to explain it. The nieces and nephews came through. So did the grandchildren, in Kansas and Oklahoma. Then Bowers moved on to the grandchildren's in-laws, "especially the females."

The man was Albert P. Lang, a hired hand on a farm south of Wichita and the father-in-law of Charles Stevens, one of Wiant's grandsons. Each time Lang said he hadn't been in the house that night, the needle veered. When they unstrapped him, he asked if Bowers was convinced he had nothing to do with it.

"I'm not lying," Lang said. "That machine of yours is a phony. Why would I kill the old man? What would I have to gain?"

Bowers looked at Lang's cowboy boots, which had small soles and narrow Cuban heels. In Lang's room they found a blood-stained shirt, and among the farm tools a blood-stained hatchet. His employer, Mrs. Myrtle Buckles, said he had been "killing turkeys at her request in that shirt and with that hatchet." And his farm cronies said Lang had been boasting about a windfall. He had nothing coming to him, the paper says, except what his son-in-law might get from Grandpa Wiant, "had Grandpa possessed the wealth with which rumor endowed him."

Maybe the footprint shrunk

Lang went on trial in April 1937 before Judge I. N. Williams. A high-school girl, Frances Baker, swore she had seen Wiant talking that afternoon to "a man who resembled Lang." The pathologist C. G. Hellwig testified that Wiant's blood was the rare group 4 and Lang's the common group 1, and that the blood on the shirt and hatchet "was group 4—human blood." The paper calls it the first scientific evidence ever given in a Kansas court. A witness showed how the hatchet fitted the wounds. And over the objections of the defence lawyers, George L. Adams and Joe T. Rogers, the jury heard that Lang had been given a truth serum and had "fought" the drug. The State suggested that fighting it showed he was guilty.

Lang's alibi was that on November 16 he drove Mrs. Buckles to the courthouse, "stayed within sight and hearing of her while she registered a deed," and drove her home. The State asked for death.

After six days the jury took the linoleum and Lang's boot into the jury room with them.

That argument brought four more jurors over, and the jury stood six to six for three days until it was discharged as hopelessly deadlocked. Lang stayed in jail through the spring, summer and fall.

The clerk and the cobbler

The second trial opened in December 1937, and the State had one new witness. A clerk from the Register of Deeds office testified that when Mrs. Buckles came in late that afternoon to register her deed, she was not accompanied by a man. The State argued that while she was in the office alone, Lang had time to drive to Wiant's house, kill and rob him, and come back for her. "That joggled Lang's alibi," the paper says.

This time the State did not ask for death. The jury argued for 21 hours, and much of that time went to one juror, a cobbler, showing the others how Lang's boot could have made the print. They found him guilty and recommended mercy. The Associated Press dated the conviction December 11, 1937, and the sentence December 21: life at Lansing.

His lawyer, Joe Rogers, told the AP that an appeal would go to the Kansas Supreme Court. Nothing found so far shows what became of it. The Kansas State Penitentiary's prisoner index lists an Albert P. Lang as prisoner 36098, which fits the dates, but his file hasn't been pulled. No grave for him has been found.

What the 1953 story got wrong

The Daily News feature is the fullest account of this case, but it was written seventeen years later, and the record doesn't always back it up.

It calls Wiant 74. The AP called him 90 in 1936. The 1850 census for Archer Township, Harrison County, Ohio, lists a George W. Wyant aged one, in the household of Solomon Wyant, a labourer. His family's burial record gives July 4, 1849, and the 1880 and 1930 censuses come within a few years of that. So he was about 87, not 74. And the money: he started life in a labourer's house and ended it with $780 in cash.

The 1936 wire calls him a "Civil War Veteran." The 1953 story never mentions it, and nothing in the file confirms it. Born in 1849, he would have been sixteen at most when the war ended.

The AP also says the family found "a front door open," while the 1953 story has Joe breaking the latch. The paper gives Joe's age as 42 and Thelma's as 16, but their own grave records make them about 47 and 19.

Then there's the wife. In the laundry scene the paper writes "Mrs. Wiant," but that is Thelma's mother, Joe's wife. George's own wife is the "estranged wife" of the opening line, and she is never named. His wife of 1880 was Catharine, Matilda Catharine Elliott, whom he married when he was 22. A memorial gives her death as 1908. But the 1930 census, taken in his house in Wichita, lists Matilda Wiant, 77, as his wife, and both of them as married.