Part 1Cold Open
On the last Sunday of his life, George Washington Wiant sat in a chair in his own house and laughed at his granddaughter.
He was eighty-seven years old. He had come out of Ohio as a boy — Harrison County, the son of a labourer named Solomon Wyant, who died when George was two. He had farmed in Sumner County, Kansas — a farmer of twenty-eight with four children under ten. And he had married Catharine Elliott when he was twenty-two and she was twenty.
And by the autumn of 1936 he was an old man in Wichita, in a little clapboard house on South Waco Avenue, with the doors and the windows locked.
He owned that house. Four thousand dollars, the census taker wrote down in the spring of 1930. A man who had come out of Ohio with nothing had ended up with a deed, a roof, and a reputation — the kind of reputation that made the neighbourhood children run when they saw him coming.
And that same census taker wrote down two more things about him, in two columns, one after the other.
That he could read and write.
And that he had never been to school.
He had hired eight housekeepers over the years. Not one of them stayed.
His son was Joseph. His granddaughter was Thelma.
And on that Sunday — the fifteenth of November, 1936 — Joe and Thelma spent the whole day in that house. They scrubbed it, and they made it tidy, while the old man sat there and grumbled at them.
And when they finally put their coats on to go home, they heard him chuckling.
“You ain't through,” he cackled. “Thelma, you take this laundry home and wash it for me.”
That is the last thing anyone in that family ever heard him say.
She washed it that night. And by seven o'clock on the Monday evening it was washed, and ironed, and ready to go back.
And her mother started to say something to her. “You take this right over and be nice to Grandpa. Remember—”
She never finished the sentence.
“He's got money!”
Because that was the rule in that family. Nobody had to like the old man. Be good to Grandpa. He's got money.
So Thelma carried the bundle across town, up onto the porch, and knocked.
Nothing.
The newspaper's word for how she looked is visibly annoyed. Which means she stood out there in the dark with an armful of somebody else's washing, and got silence, and went home.
Tuesday, she went back. Nothing. And this time there was a folded newspaper lying on the porch.
Wednesday, she went back. Nothing. Two newspapers.
And Thelma stood on that porch and said, out loud:
“He's probably peeking through his curtains having fun watching me lug that laundry.”
She thought he was in there. Behind the glass. Laughing at her.
Thursday evening, her father looked up from his paper.
“He could be sick, you know. I'll go over with Thelma and see.”
There were three newspapers on the porch.
Joe put his shoulder against the door and broke the latch.
And in the living room — on his left side, near the wall, fully clothed — he found his father.
He had been dead for days.
Here is what nobody knew. Not the family. Not the neighbours. Not the police.
George Wiant did not die on Monday.
The coroner found that he had been struck from behind, and hit again and again — and that he had lived for twelve to fifteen hours after the beating.
The attack was between five and seven on the Monday evening.
Twelve to fifteen hours after that is five to ten o'clock on Tuesday morning.
And Thelma knocked on Monday night, with the washing.
He was on the other side of that door.
And he was still alive.
She never knew.
Part 2Show Introduction
Hello everyone, and welcome to Forgotten True Crime. My name is Trevor Shelby — and if you're hearing this on the day it comes out, I am in the Bahamas, on a ship, and I am not thinking about you at all.
That's a lie. I'm thinking about this.
Because this is the second episode we've made out of the same newspaper column.
Four months ago we told you about Sacco and Vanzetti — and about the Sunday paper that looked back at them. A New York tabloid. A weekly feature called “A Justice Story,” running since 1923.
Well. That column ran every Sunday. So there was another one. And this is it.
Sunday, the fifteenth of November, 1953. Same paper, same series, same writer — Ruth Reynolds, who had been on that column since 1942, and would stay on it until the day she died.
And that Sunday, she wrote about a man from Wichita, Kansas — named George Washington Wiant.
“Perfect Candidate for Murder.”
Now — the last case and this one are the same exercise, run twice, and they could not be more different.
Sacco and Vanzetti was a story that everybody already knew. Half the country had an opinion about it before they read a word. And the danger with a story you have told for thirty years is shorthand. You tell it from memory — and memory wears smooth.
This one is the opposite. This is a murder that nobody outside Wichita has thought about since 1937. There's no book about it. There's no monument, no documentary, no argument running anywhere. When that column told this story in 1953, it was the only place most readers would ever meet it.
Which means the danger here isn't shorthand.
It's that there is nothing to check it against.
So we went and found something.
And this turned into a different kind of episode than I expected. Because what we ended up with is not a case file.
It's a life.
We have this man at one year old on an Ohio census page in 1850 — the son of a labourer, in a three-person household in Harrison County.
At twenty-eight, farming in Kansas, with a wife and four children under ten.
At eighty-two, in his own house in Wichita — a house he owned — with the woman he married at twenty-two on the census page beside him, listed as his wife.
And at eighty-seven — on the floor of his own living room, where he had been for days.
Three censuses. And then a death certificate filed a thousand miles away, eight years later — his son's, not his — which is the last document in this whole file that names George Wiant and his wife as living facts.
For once, the paperwork covers the whole man.
And the newspaper got his age wrong by thirteen years.
So here's the shape of this episode. First, we tell the case the way that column told it in 1953 — its words, its pacing, its shorthand. And then we do the thing the column couldn't do.
We open the file.
Real quick, before we start. If you're a first-time listener — hit that subscribe button, so when we have new episodes you'll be the first to know. And then head over to Section29.com, where you'll find my case file on this one and everything we dug up.
A few words before we go, the way we always do. Everything in this episode is a true story, and it's built from the record — the newspapers of the day, the census pages, the death certificates, the court files. Some scenes are recreated the way they must have played out, because that's the best way to live a story. The opinions you hear are my opinions. And this one carries a beating death, a description of a body, and a district court trial — so, listener discretion. It always has been, and this one earns it.
All right.
This is the story of a newspaper that called a man a perfect candidate for murder — and of what the record says when you go and look.
Now let's get on with the show.
Part 3Who George Wiant Was
The first time George Wiant appears in the public record, he is one year old, and he cannot tell the census taker anything.
It's the summer of 1850. Archer Township, Harrison County, Ohio — farm country in the eastern part of the state, out where the roads run between Cadiz and Jewett. District number seventy-one.
And a man walks up to a house, and knocks, and writes down the people who live in it.
He writes down three.
Solomon Wyant. Twenty-six. Male. A labourer.
Margaret Wyant. Twenty. Female. Wife.
George W. Wyant. One. Male.
That's the household. That's all of it — three people, in a labourer's house, in rural Ohio, in the summer of 1850.
And in the column where the census taker is meant to write down where each person was born, he puts down “Ohio” for Solomon. He puts down “Ohio” for the baby.
And for Margaret — the twenty-year-old mother — he writes “unknown.”
Nobody in that house could tell him where she came from.
That is the whole of what the record holds about the first year of George Wiant's life. And it tells you one thing the newspaper never did.
His father was a labourer.
This is the man who would be beaten to death at the age of eighty-seven, in a house that everybody in his neighbourhood believed had a fortune hidden in the walls. And he was born into a labourer's household in Harrison County, Ohio.
The family's own record has Solomon Wyant dead the following year. Which would have made George Wiant two years old when his father died.
Skip thirty years.
The fourteenth of June, 1880. Chikaskia Township, Sumner County, Kansas.
Farm country. South and west of Wichita, out where the towns are called Corbin and Conway Springs and the section roads run straight for a mile and then turn at a right angle, the way they do out there.
And a census taker walks up to another house, and writes down six people.
Wyant, George. Twenty-eight. Farmer.
Wyant, Catharine. Twenty-nine. Wife. Keeping house.
Margret. Nine. Daughter.
Mary. Seven. Daughter.
Charles. Four. Son.
Gertrude. One. Daughter.
Six people. A farmer of twenty-eight, his wife, and four children under ten, on a farm in Sumner County, Kansas.
He was a Kansas farmer for years before he was anything else. He was not born a recluse behind a locked door on South Waco Avenue. He got there.
And the woman in that house — the wife, twenty-nine years old — is the woman the newspaper would eventually call, in the very first sentence of its story, “an estranged wife.”
Catharine Wyant. Matilda Catharine Elliott. Married to him at twenty.
Skip fifty years.
The third of April, 1930. Wichita, Kansas. The Fourth Ward.
A census taker comes up the steps of a house on South Waco Avenue.
Wiant, George W. Head. Owns. Four thousand dollars. Male. White. Eighty-two. Married.
Wiant, Matilda. Wife. Female. White. Seventy-seven. Married.
Same house. Same page. Both of them listed as married — an M, in the column the census keeps for exactly that.
And the same page tells you when. Because there is a column for that too: age at first marriage.
He was twenty-two. She was twenty.
And then there are two more columns on that page. And of everything in this entire case, these are the two that matter most.
The census taker filled them in one after the other.
The first asks whether the person attended school at any time since the first of September, 1929. For George Wiant, the answer is no.
The next one asks whether the person can read and write. For George Wiant, the answer is yes.
He was a farm boy from Harrison County, Ohio, whose father died when he was small. He could read and write. And he had never been to school.
That is the man the newspaper called a perfect candidate for murder.
And the record holds one more thing about him — something the 1953 column never printed at all.
Eleven days after the body was found, the Associated Press filed a report that ran in the Emporia Gazette. And it describes him like this:
“George W. Wiant, 90, Civil War Veteran.”
A Civil War veteran. If that is right, then at the end of that war he was a boy of about sixteen — and the old man who died behind a locked door in Wichita had once worn a uniform.
The newspaper that told his story never mentions it.
So. Three documents.
One year old. Twenty-eight. Eighty-two.
And the newspaper says he was seventy-four.
It was not off by a little. The 1850 census puts his birth in 1848 or '49. The 1930 census, at eighty-two, puts it in 1847 or '48. The family's burial record says the fourth of July, 1849.
Every one of them makes him a man in his late eighties when he died.
And the age isn't really the point.
The point is that it was the first thing the newspaper got wrong about him. And it was not the last.
The paper had a headline for George Wiant.
What it never had was a life.
And on the evening of Monday, the sixteenth of November, 1936, somebody came up the steps of that house on South Waco Avenue.
And he let them in.
Part 4The House on South Waco Avenue
The call went out on the Thursday evening, and by dark the house on South Waco Avenue was full of police.
Detectives. Laboratory technicians. Men going up and down the stairs with equipment. And out on the street, the neighbours — the whole block of them, standing in the road, watching the lights come on in a house that had been dark for four days.
The paper says South Waco Avenue was abuzz with excited citizens.
And Captain Leroy Bowers — the head of the Wichita detectives — walked the house.
What he found was a house that had been taken apart.
The old man's trouser pockets had been turned inside out.
An old brown wallet, lying on the floor beside the body, was empty.
The doors of the buffet in the dining room had been jimmied open.
The parlor table had been knocked over.
A manila envelope — which had been tacked to the underside of that table — had been torn away.
And upstairs, the bureau drawers had been pulled out and gone through.
Somebody had been through that house. Somebody had gone through a man's pockets while he lay on the floor, and had got down on their hands and knees to reach an envelope taped under a table, and had torn it off.
Bowers went out onto the porch, where the son and the granddaughter were waiting.
And the paper gives you his first words to them, and they are not gentle:
“It's a messy job.”
Bowers said it moodily, the way a man says something he has been carrying around all day. And then:
“Someone cut your dad down—with an ax, I think, although we haven't found it. Tell me how you found him.”
So Joseph Wiant told him.
He told him the whole thing — Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. The house they had cleaned. The laundry his daughter had carried back and forth. The three newspapers on the porch. The door he had put his shoulder against.
And Bowers asked him whether his father lived alone.
“For the last week or so,” Joe said.
Hmm. For the last week or so.
Then Joe told him about the housekeepers. Eight of them, altogether. One after another, over the years — and every one of them had left.
And then he said something, and the newspaper stops to notice it:
“He—he wasn't an easy man to get along with.”
The paper says: it was the first time in his forty-odd years that Joe Wiant had said anything derogatory about his father.
And he covered it immediately. He went straight on to talk about how thrifty his father was. How careful he was.
A man on a porch, defending his father to a policeman, ten minutes after finding him on the floor.
And then he said the thing that stopped the investigation in its tracks.
He was explaining why nobody could have got into that house. And he said it as a fact about his father — the way you'd say a man was careful with his money, or hard of hearing.
“He wouldn't open the door to anyone he didn't know.”
And then he gulped.
Because he heard himself say it.
He realized, standing on that porch, that he had just narrowed the suspect list to a comparatively few people — to the family, and the housekeepers, and the handful of people in Wichita that George Wiant would have let through that door.
The paper prints that as one sentence. Then he gulped, realizing this information narrowed suspicion to a comparatively few people.
A son, working it out in real time, in front of a detective, on his father's porch.
By the time Bowers left that house, he had reached three conclusions. And the paper gives them in order.
First: the hall. There was a man's handkerchief on the stairs, and a pair of glasses. Which meant — Bowers thought — that the hall was where George Wiant was first attacked. And that he was dragged from there into the next room.
Why the next room?
Because of the windows. The paper's phrase is that it was so his body would be out of the sight of anyone who might peer through the glass of the windows or door.
Somebody moved an old man's body so that the neighbours couldn't see it from the street.
Hmm.
Second: the time. There was a Monday newspaper lying on the table in that house. There were other newspapers out on the porch that had never been brought in. So Bowers fixed the killing between five and seven o'clock on the Monday evening.
And third — the one that mattered:
There was no forced entry. Whoever came into that house did not break anything to get in.
And George Wiant did not open his door to strangers.
So: the murderer was someone known to him.
And then, in the kitchen, they found the clue the whole case would turn on.
A bloody footprint — on the linoleum.
Detective W. O. Lyle crouched over it and called the captain across.
“Look at the shape, chief. Narrow sole and small heel; it must be a woman's.”
They cut it out of the floor. The footprint was taken out of that kitchen as a piece of linoleum, and it went into the case file as an exhibit, and it stayed there for four months.
Bowers took it back to the coroner.
Dr. G. C. Davis, the Sedgwick County coroner, was at the house — ready to move the body to a morgue for an autopsy.
And Bowers asked him one question.
“Could a woman have done this?”
And the coroner gave him an answer that reads, eighty years later, like a door closing:
“A strong woman. A woman strong enough to split a skull with an ax.”
The fingerprint man was packing up his paraphernalia in another room. Bowers asked him if he had anything.
“Smudges — and some good prints made by the old man,” was the answer.
Not the killer's.
And that is where the first page of the newspaper ends. Mid-scene. With one line:
Another detective rushed up.
Part 5Twelve to Fifteen Hours
The morning after the body was found, Captain Bowers went to the coroner's office.
And Dr. G. C. Davis — the man who had stood in that house the night before and said a strong woman, strong enough to split a skull with an ax — gave him the finding that turns this whole case over.
The paper prints it in one sentence.
“Bowers learned from Coroner Davis that Wiant had been struck down from behind, that he had been hit again and again and that he had lived 12 to 15 hours after the beating.”
Take that sentence apart. There are three things in it, and they are not equally important.
The first is: struck down from behind.
He did not see it coming. Whoever it was, George Wiant turned his back on them — in his own house, behind a door he kept locked, in a house he did not open to strangers.
He let this person in. And then he turned around.
The second is: hit again and again.
Not once. Again and again.
Which tells you something the first blow doesn't. A single blow is a decision. “Again and again” is a job somebody had to finish.
And the third is the one that changes everything else.
He lived for twelve to fifteen hours after the beating.
The attack was between five and seven on the Monday evening. Twelve hours after five is five in the morning. Fifteen hours after seven is ten.
George Wiant died on the Tuesday morning — somewhere between five and ten o'clock — on the floor of his own living room.
And now put the three knocks against that.
Monday evening. Thelma carried the washing over, and knocked, and got nothing, and went home annoyed. She was knocking on the door of a house where a man had been beaten an hour or two earlier — and was still alive.
Tuesday evening. She came back, and knocked, and got nothing — and put down the first newspaper on the porch.
She was knocking on the door of a house where her grandfather had died that morning.
Wednesday evening. She came back, and knocked, and got nothing — and put down the second newspaper.
She was knocking on the door of a house where he had been dead for a day and a half.
Three evenings. Three knocks. And a different house behind that door every time.
And on the Wednesday — the one where he had been dead the longest — she stood on that porch and said, out loud, that he was probably in there laughing at her.
Now. There is a phrase in this case that the 1953 newspaper never used, and that nothing has ever been able to explain.
Eleven days after the body was found, the Associated Press put a report on the wire that ran in the Emporia Gazette. And it adds two things the Sunday column leaves out.
The first: the skull was fractured in several places.
And the second — four words, about the house:
The rooms indicated terrific struggle.
An eighty-seven-year-old man.
Struck from behind, in a locked house, by somebody he had let in.
And the rooms showed a terrific struggle.
So this was not a man who went down and stayed down. He fought. He was hit from behind, and he came back at whoever it was, and he kept coming back — for long enough that a room in that house still showed it a day and a half later, when the police finally walked in.
And that is why the blows were “again and again.” Because he would not stop.
George Wiant made his own murder take twelve to fifteen hours.
Every hour of that is an hour his killer had to spend in that house — standing over him, hitting him, waiting for him to die.
The man who locked the world out of his own house fought so hard that his own death took half a day.
And there is one thing nobody will ever know.
Whether he heard the knock.
On the Monday evening, when his granddaughter stood on those steps with a bundle of washing — he was alive. Whether he was conscious, nobody asked. There is no record of it, and there never will be.
It is the one question in this file with no answer at all.
And the finding itself is solid.
It is a coroner's estimate, reported seventeen years later by a Sunday newspaper column — which, on its own, would be worth exactly what a remembered phrase is worth.
But it is not on its own. Eleven days after the killing, a wire reporter sat with that coroner and filed that Wiant had been “dead since Monday night or early Tuesday.”
Monday night or early Tuesday. The same window. Two sources, seventeen years apart, telling the same story about the same twelve hours.
So there are two clocks running in this case, and they are not the same clock.
Four days on the porch — from the Monday evening Thelma first knocked to the Thursday evening her father broke the door in.
Twelve to fifteen hours on the floor.
And they overlap by a single evening: the Monday.
That is the whole case, in one overlap. A girl on the steps, and a man on the other side of the door, and both of them still inside the same night.
Part 6The Fortune That Wasn't
The newspaper's first sentence about George Wiant is the best sentence in the whole piece.
“As a candidate for murder, 74-year-old George Washington Wiant had everything it took — including an estranged wife, a small fortune desired by a flock of relatives, a roving eye, and a terrible temper.”
Four things, in a list, the way you'd list ingredients. And the second one is a small fortune.
Because that was the belief. That was what the whole street knew.
He didn't trust banks. So the money was in the house.
It was “popularly supposed,” the paper says, that he kept his wealth in that little clapboard house on South Waco Avenue because he did not have faith in banks. And so the fortune sat in there somewhere — in the walls, under the floor, behind something — and the old man sat in front of it with the doors locked, waiting.
And the paper gives a number.
“An estate reported to be between $10,000 and $10,000.”
Ten thousand dollars. And ten thousand dollars. The same figure twice — which is a typo in the 1953 newspaper, and the best accident in the whole column. Because nobody ever knew what George Wiant was worth, including the people who wrote it down.
And then somebody picked up a wallet.
The paper gives it to you as a shout, from another room, and it is the only exclamation mark in the entire story.
“Chief! Look at this!”
A detective had the wallet — the wallet the killer left beside the body. The one that had already been logged as empty.
And he pulled back an inside flap, and underneath it there was a hidden zipper.
He opened it.
And in a secret compartment, in the wallet lying on the floor next to a dead man, there were six hundred-dollar bills.
Six hundred dollars.
In a house that had been taken apart. In a wallet that had already been turned over and written off. In a compartment under a flap that a man with his hands on it had somehow not found.
And then Bowers asked the question that any policeman asks, and the answer to it is what this story is actually about.
Who would profit by his death?
The answer came from a man named Claude N. Cartwright — the county clerk, and the executor of the old man's will.
And Cartwright gave him two words.
“Practically nobody.”
The will, read out. George Wiant had left ten dollars to his son Charles. And the balance of his estate to six relatives.
And then the sentence that lands like a dropped plate:
“However, it was noted that each of these relatives owed Wiant money in excess of his share in the old man's estate.”
Six people stood to inherit. And every one of them owed him more than they were going to get.
The will was not a reward. It was a rounding-off.
And then Cartwright gave them the number.
“In spite of the stories of his wealth, Wiant left only $780 in cash and $1,800 in real estate.”
Seven hundred and eighty dollars. In the house. After a lifetime.
And the neighbours had believed he had ten thousand in there.
So here it is. The whole thing, in one piece.
The newspaper called George Wiant a perfect candidate for murder because he was rich.
He was murdered because everybody thought he was rich.
And he was not rich at all.
The estate was $780. The wills went to a man who got ten dollars and six people who came out behind. The house he had locked himself inside was worth less than the car in the driveway next door.
Whatever anybody killed George Wiant for, it was never in that house.
And here is the part that has stayed with me.
The killer had the wallet.
They took it out of his pocket or off the floor. They turned it over. They went through the ordinary part of it and found nothing, and they put it down, or dropped it, or left it in their hurry — and it had six hundred dollars in it.
In a house they had torn apart looking for money. Pockets inside out. The buffet jimmied. A table upended. An envelope torn off the underside of that table. Drawers pulled out upstairs.
They went through everything. And they were holding the money.
Which tells you something about the person who did this that nothing else in the file does: they were in a hurry, and they were frightened, and whatever they had planned for that evening — it had already gone wrong.
They had come to that house expecting a fortune, and they left with nothing, from a wallet that had six hundred dollars in it.
That is the shape of this murder. A man died for money that was not there, and the money that was there went into the ground with him.
And Bowers, standing in that house with a will in one hand and a wallet in the other, did the only thing there was left to do.
He sent two men out into the city.
To Detective Lyle: “Concentrate on the Wiant relatives. Find out who they are and where they are. Find out where each was between 5 and 7 o'clock last Monday night.”
To Detective O'Connor: “Track down those eight housekeepers. Find out why they left. Pay special attention to where they say they were last Monday.”
The relatives, and the women who had worked in that house.
One of those two lists had the answer on it.
Part 7Eight Housekeepers and a Footprint
Detective O'Connor came back with the housekeepers.
Eight of them. All of them lived in Wichita. All of them had been sent out to that house by the same employment agency on South Broadway — the one that supplied domestic help to that part of the city.
And he had talked to every single one.
And the paper gives you his report in one sentence.
“Every last one of them was the mousy type — and every one said the old man was a wolf.”
Eight women. Every last one of them.
The mousy type. And every one of them said the same thing about George Wiant.
And then O'Connor told Bowers about the last one — the one who had walked out a week before the murder, the one who had left that house empty and started the whole week of cleaning in the first place.
She had a story.
The Friday before the killing — three days before somebody else came up those steps — she was finishing her work for the day. And Wiant started pawing at her.
She told him to stop.
He didn't stop.
“When he wouldn't stop, she grabbed him by the throat.”
And the paper does not soften it:
“She had him on his knees with his tongue hanging out before she realized what she was doing.”
She said she left, and she never went back.
Bowers heard that, and he asked the obvious question.
“You mean she slugged him?”
O'Connor nodded.
“Something like that.”
And then O'Connor closed the door on it.
“Don't. She has a good alibi for last Monday. For that matter, so have the rest of them.”
All eight of them. Alibis.
Now — that is all the newspaper ever tells you about those eight women.
One sentence and one anecdote.
No names. Not one. Eight women who worked in that house, over how many years nobody says, and the only thing the record preserves about them is that they were mousy, and that they said the old man was a wolf, and that the last one put him on his knees.
They are in the file as a type, not as people. They are not in the will. They are not among the six relatives. And they are not in any document this case has been able to find.
Eight women. And we cannot tell you what a single one of them was called.
And here is what those eight women did to the investigation, without ever knowing it.
They made it look for a woman.
Because the theory had a shape now, and every part of it fit:
A woman's footprint — cut out of the kitchen linoleum and kept as an exhibit.
A woman's strength — “a strong woman,” the coroner had said, “strong enough to split a skull with an ax.”
And a woman known to him — because there was no forced entry, and George Wiant did not open his door to strangers.
Put those three things together and you have a very specific suspect: a woman he knew well enough to let inside, who lost her temper with him.
And there were eight women in Wichita who fit that description exactly — and every one of them had walked out of that house angry, and every one of them could say where she was on the Monday night.
So the investigation went looking, and the looking took four months.
There was one more woman in the file, and she was the last person anybody saw going up those steps.
The woman with the briefcase and the fur coat.
She had been seen — by a boy on the street, and by a neighbour — walking up the front steps of that house at about five o'clock on the Monday evening, just as George Wiant was picking up his newspaper off the porch.
It was the neighbour who found her. She had parked her coupe down the street, and the neighbour had been curious, and had written down the licence number.
After that, it was easy.
And when they ran it: a Wichita real-estate firm. She had come to talk to Wiant about a subdivision sale he had shown an interest in.
And he had refused to let her into the house.
Which is why she was standing on the porch with a briefcase and a fur coat, at five o'clock on the evening George Wiant was attacked, and never got past the door.
So by the time Bowers was done, he had cleared the relatives, and he had cleared the housekeepers, and he had cleared the woman on the steps.
And he had one conclusion left, and it was the one he had reached on the first night, standing in that house.
The murderer was someone known to him.
Someone George Wiant let in.
Someone he knew.
And Bowers had now been through everyone the old man knew — the sons, the grandchildren, the relatives, the eight housekeepers, the woman from the real-estate firm.
Everybody on the list had an alibi.
Which left the thing that every policeman eventually has to look at, and nobody ever wants to.
The edge of the list.
Part 8The Machine and the Man
By the winter of 1936, Captain Leroy Bowers had a lie detector, a list of names, and a problem.
The list was George Wiant's relatives — “as long as your arm,” the paper says. He had taken it to the county attorney, Eli Eubanks, and offered to test every name on it.
And Eubanks shook his head.
“Lie detector results are not admissible in Kansas courts.”
So Bowers did something that tells you a great deal about the man.
He decided to use the machine anyway. He invited every relative on the list to come in and take the test — and if the tests threw up a promising lead, he would go and gather evidence a court could actually use.
The machine wasn't the proof. The machine was the sieve.
And the four questions he asked everybody — every relative, and every housekeeper — were these.
“Were you at George Wiant's home the night of Nov. 16?”
“Did you employ anyone to kill him?”
“Do you know the whereabouts of the weapon that killed Wiant?”
“Do you know what weapon was used?”
Four questions. And George Wiant's son Joseph answered all four of them — and the needle went crazy.
“The lie detector needle leaped all over the dial.”
The son of the murdered man sat in a chair with a machine telling a policeman he was lying.
And it took the sworn statement of his own family doctor to make it stop — a doctor who could testify that Joe Wiant had “a peculiar heart condition which caused the machine to behave in this way.”
He had to produce medical evidence that his heart was irregular, to stop a machine from calling him a liar about his father's death.
And then it just went on. For months.
By the middle of December, the nieces and nephews had come through it unscathed. And so had various relatives of the housekeepers.
And then Bowers went a step further out, to the grandchildren — and then, past them, to the last people anybody would think to ask:
The grandchildren's in-laws. “Especially the females.”
And that is where it finally broke.
“Not until then did the lie detector indicate that a man — not a woman — lied.”
A man.
After four months of looking for a woman.
And the man was this.
Albert P. Lang.
A hired hand on a farm south of Wichita. And the father-in-law of Charles Stevens — one of George Wiant's grandsons.
That is why it had taken four months.
Albert Lang was not a relative of George Wiant. He was a relative of a relative — the father of a grandson's wife. He was not in the will. He was not on the list of people who hoped to inherit. Nobody had thought to ask him anything, because as far as the family was concerned, he was nobody.
He was standing at the very edge of the list.
They brought him in and put him in a chair.
“Were you in Wiant's home the night of Nov. 16?”
“No.”
And the needle veered off its course.
They asked him again. “No.” The needle veered.
And again. The same.
“Do you know what weapon was used?”
“No.”
The needle veered.
And then Bowers had had enough.
“That's enough. Unstrap him.”
At long last, the paper says, his faith in the lie detector seemed to be paying off.
And the band came off Lang's left arm.
And Albert Lang — a gentle-mannered, rather nice-looking fellow, the paper calls him — asked a question, with what the newspaper describes as the innocence of a lamb.
“Are you convinced I had nothing to do with it?”
And Bowers gave him the answer that is the reason this story is worth telling.
“I'm convinced you're the killer. Why are you lying?”
Lang showed white beneath his sun-tanned skin.
“I'm not lying. That machine of yours is a phony. Why would I kill the old man? What would I have to gain?”
And Bowers said:
“I'll answer that after I've done—”
And that is where page two of the newspaper ends.
And the caption under Lang's photograph — printed on the page before the reader gets to any of this — tells you how it turns out.
“After many months of painstaking work police thought they had a real prospect in Al (Cowboy) Lang. His lie detector test said he was guilty but he produced what appeared to be an airtight alibi.”
What appeared to be.
Those three words are doing an enormous amount of work.
And the machine was not the only thing pointing at him.
The boots first. “The detective captain's eyes fell to Lang's cowboy boots” — small soles, and narrow Cuban heels — and they were taken away and compared with a footprint that had been cut out of a kitchen floor and kept for four months.
Then the clothes. In Lang's room they found a blood-stained shirt. Among the farm tools, a blood-stained hatchet.
Which looked like the end of the case — until the detectives went and spoke to his employer, Mrs. Myrtle Buckles.
She told them her hired hand had been killing turkeys at her request in that shirt, and with that hatchet.
And then there was the thing he had been saying.
O'Connor had been out talking to Lang's friends and neighbours on the farms around Wichita — his “farm cronies” — and he came back with this:
Lang had been boasting about an expected windfall.
An inheritance. Money that was coming to him. And he had no possible inheritance in the world — except for whatever his son-in-law might one day receive from Grandpa Wiant.
“Had Grandpa possessed the wealth with which rumor endowed him.”
There it is.
Lang had been going around telling people he was about to come into money.
And the money was never there.
Which is the same story the wallet tells. Somebody came into that house on the Monday evening expecting a fortune — and went through the pockets, and the buffet, and the drawers, and an envelope torn off the underside of a table, and found nothing.
And then they walked out with a wallet in their hand that had six hundred dollars in it.
A man who tells everybody he is about to inherit, and a man who tears a house apart looking for money, are describing the same evening from two different ends.
Part 9Maybe the Footprint Shrunk
April 1937. Albert Lang went on trial for his life.
Judge I. N. Williams presiding. And the State — through the county attorney, Eli Eubanks — asked the jury for the death penalty.
The State's case came in pieces.
A schoolgirl named Frances Baker, who swore that on the afternoon of the murder, walking home from school, she had seen George Wiant talking to a man who resembled Lang.
Resembled. Not identified. Not recognised. Resembled.
A pathologist. C. G. Hellwig had tested the blood, and had two findings. Wiant's was group 4 — a rare classification. Lang's was group 1 — a very common one. And the blood on Lang's shirt, and on the hatchet taken out of his room, was not turkey blood.
“It was group 4 — human blood.”
The paper calls it the first scientific evidence ever presented in a Kansas court. And the jurors, listening to it, looked — the paper's word — interested, but unimpressed.
A hatchet. They showed the jury exactly how Lang's turkey hatchet fitted the wounds in the victim's head.
A boot. And the footprint that had been cut out of a kitchen floor four months earlier.
And then something that should never have been allowed. Over the protests of the defence lawyers, George L. Adams and Joe T. Rogers — the State put in evidence that Lang had been given a truth serum test. No complete statement was ever obtained, because the defendant “fought” the drug.
And the State's implication — the paper says it plainly — was that the fighting was evidence of his guilt.
A man's body resisting a drug, offered to a jury as proof that he was a killer.
And then the defence stood up and produced the alibi.
Lang's story was simple. On the afternoon of the sixteenth of November, 1936, he had driven his employer — Mrs. Myrtle Buckles — into Wichita, stayed within sight and hearing of her while she registered a deed, and driven her home.
That was it. He was with his boss, in a public building, all afternoon. He could not have been on South Waco Avenue.
And the caption the paper had already printed under his photograph — on a page the reader passed an hour earlier — said it:
“His lie detector test said he was guilty but he produced what appeared to be an airtight alibi.”
What appeared to be.
The trial took six full days.
And when the jurors filed out to decide, the paper says they were “completely befuddled by the scientific data.”
And they took the evidence into the jury room with them. The linoleum, with the bloodstain and the print still in it — and beside it, Lang's cowboy boot.
And in that room, with the actual objects in front of them, they did what twelve people do.
Somebody put the boot on the print.
And the print was entirely covered.
The boot was too big for it.
So they took a ballot.
And they came back ten to two — for acquittal.
Ten of the twelve jurors looked at the boot on the print, saw that it covered it, and decided Albert Lang could not have made that mark.
And then it turned.
“But the two holdouts argued…”
And this is the sentence this whole episode is named after. This is what two men said, in a jury room in Wichita, Kansas, in April 1937, to talk four of their colleagues out of an acquittal:
“Maybe the footprint shrunk.”
Four of them changed their minds.
On the second ballot, the jury stood six to six.
And there they stayed — six to six — for three long days.
And then they reported themselves hopelessly deadlocked, and the judge had to let them go.
The boot covered the print. And the footprint shrank.
And so Albert Lang stayed in jail. For the rest of that spring, and through the summer, and into the fall.
Eight months, with an alibi that appeared to be airtight.
In December, 1937, he went on trial again.
Same judge. Same county attorney. Most of the State's testimony was exactly what it had been the first time.
But Eubanks had one new witness.
A clerk — from the Register of Deeds office.
And the clerk testified to something very small, and very specific.
He said that at the late afternoon hour when Mrs. Buckles was in his office registering her deed — she was not accompanied by a man.
She came in alone.
Which meant that for the length of that errand, Albert Lang was not with his employer at all.
And it was then shown — the paper's phrase — that during the hour Mrs. Buckles was alone in that office, Lang had ample time to drive to Wiant's house, kill and rob him, and come back to the courthouse to pick her up.
“That joggled Lang's alibi.”
Eight months of airtight, undone by a clerk who remembered who came through his office alone.
The second trial took three days. The State — profiting by experience — did not ask for the death penalty this time.
And the second jury, as befuddled as the first by the science and the boot, argued for twenty-one hours.
Much of that time was taken up by one of their own members — a cobbler — who showed the others how the bloody print could have been made by Lang's boot.
On their final ballot, they found the farm hand guilty — but recommended mercy.
And on the twenty-first of December, 1937:
“And so Al (Cowboy) Lang, still protesting his innocence, was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in the state penitentiary.”
His lawyer announced that an appeal would be carried to the Kansas Supreme Court.
So: Leroy Bowers' machine had said Albert Lang was guilty — in a room in Wichita, in the winter of 1936.
It took two trials, six ballots, three deadlocked days, twenty-one hours of argument, and a cobbler with a boot to make that stick in a Kansas courtroom.
And when it finally stuck, it stuck because one clerk remembered one thing about one afternoon in November.
That she came in alone.
Part 10What the Paper Never Said
The newspaper called him a perfect candidate for murder.
“74-year-old George Washington Wiant had everything it took.”
And here is what the record says instead.
He was eighty-seven years old.
The 1850 census has him at one — an infant in a labourer's house in Harrison County, Ohio. The 1880 census has him at twenty-eight — a farmer in Sumner County, Kansas, with four children under ten. The 1930 census has him at eighty-two — in his own house in Wichita, which he owned, worth four thousand dollars.
Four records, in fact, if you count the family's own burial record, which gives his birthday as the fourth of July, 1849.
And every one of them puts his birth between 1847 and 1852.
The newspaper said 1862. It was off by thirteen years — and it got the arithmetic of his whole life wrong with it.
And the money the paper was so sure about?
Seven hundred and eighty dollars. In cash. Plus eighteen hundred in real estate.
The fortune in the walls was never there. And if the man who killed him went looking for it, then he killed a man for a rumour.
Now. There is a branch of this family that the 1953 newspaper never mentions, and that nothing has ever followed.
George and Cathrine Wiant's son — George Delmar Wiant — left Kansas.
He was born on the twenty-sixth of December, 1883, at Corbin, in Sumner County, Kansas. The same country his father had farmed.
And he died on the eighteenth of November, 1944 — at Centralia, in Lewis County, Washington. He was sixty years old. He is buried at Claquato Cemetery, in Chehalis, Washington.
A thousand miles from the house on South Waco Avenue.
His wife was named Ruby Alice Potter, and she was still living in Centralia thirteen years after the murder story ran. A woman who married into this family after it had already been torn apart by it.
And it is his death certificate — filed in Washington State in 1944 — that gives us the last piece of the paper trail.
Because on it, eight years after George Wiant was killed, somebody sat down and gave a clerk the names of his parents.
Father: George W. Wiant.
Mother: Cathrine Elliott.
That is the last document in this entire file that names those two people as living facts.
And there is a date in that, if you want it. The father was beaten on the sixteenth of November. His son died on the eighteenth of November, eight years later.
Two days apart, eight years apart.
And that certificate does something else, because Cathrine Elliott is a name that has been in this story all along — and it has never been said out loud.
She appears in three places.
On her son's death certificate, in 1944 — “Cathrine Elliott.”
In the 1880 census, when she was twenty-nine years old, in a farmhouse in Sumner County, Kansas, listed as George Wyant's wife.
And on a grave in Prairie Lawn Cemetery, in Wellington, Kansas — as Matilda Catherine Elliott Wiant, 1851 to 1908.
She was the woman he married when he was twenty-two and she was twenty. She bore his children. And in 1936 the newspaper called her, in its very first sentence, “an estranged wife.”
And here the file has to be honest with you, because there is something in it that does not fit.
Find a Grave says Matilda Catherine Elliott Wiant died in 1908.
The 1930 census has her alive, in his house, aged seventy-seven, listed as married to him.
Both of those cannot be true.
It is a memorial's date against a federal census — and the census is the better document. But they cannot both be right, and the record that would settle it is her death certificate, which we do not have.
And it matters more than it sounds, because of what it changes.
If she was alive in November 1936, then the woman the newspaper lists among the reasons George Wiant was “a candidate for murder” — the estranged wife — is the woman he had been married to for sixty-six years.
Not a second wife. His wife.
Sixty-six years, and at the end of them he was behind a locked door in a house on South Waco Avenue, and she was somewhere else in the same city.
And Albert Lang?
Kansas State Penitentiary prisoner number 36098. Volume W of the admission ledger, page 420.
Life. For the murder of George Washington Wiant.
And if you go looking for him now — in any cemetery in Kansas, under any spelling of his name — there is nothing. No stone. No memorial. Nobody put one up.
“Still protesting his innocence,” the paper says, on the day they took him away.
And the eight women.
Eight housekeepers worked in that house. Every one of them left. Every one of them said the old man was a wolf. One of them had him on his knees with his tongue hanging out, three days before somebody else finished the job.
And we cannot tell you the name of a single one of them. The newspaper gave them one sentence and a category, and the record gives them nothing at all.
Eight women at the centre of this story, and history kept the word “mousy.”
And then there is the one who has been standing in this episode since the fourth minute.
Gertrude.
Gertrude Wyant.
One year old.
A daughter.
On a census page for Chikaskia Township, Sumner County, Kansas, taken on the fourteenth of June, 1880.
She is in that census. And she is nowhere else.
Find a Grave lists five children for George Washington Wiant. Margaret Jane, Mollie Matilda, Charles Adam, George Delmar, and Joseph.
The 1880 census shows four children already born — Margret, Mary, Charles, and Gertrude.
And Gertrude is not on that list of five.
She is not in the 1953 newspaper. The column names Joseph, and Thelma, and Charles Wiant, and the six relatives who inherited.
She is not among the six. She is not on any memorial anywhere. She is not in any record this case has been able to reach.
She would have been about fifty-seven years old when her father was beaten to death on South Waco Avenue.
And we cannot tell you what became of her. Whether she lived. Whether she married. Whether she was in Wichita in 1936, or in Kansas at all.
A girl of one, in a farmhouse in Sumner County, in June 1880 — and then nothing.
So this is where the file closes.
Not on a mystery. On a gap.
The newspaper called George Wiant a perfect candidate for murder, and gave him a hoard of money he did not have, and an age he never reached, and a wife it would not name.
And what the record says is this:
He was born in Ohio to a labourer who died when he was two. He could read and write, and he had never been to school. He farmed in Kansas. He married Catharine Elliott at twenty-two. He outlived most of what he built, and he ended up alone behind a door he had locked himself, with seven hundred and eighty dollars in cash and eighteen hundred in real estate to his name.
He was beaten from behind and hit again and again. And it took him twelve to fifteen hours to die.
And on the first night of that — the Monday, between seven and eight, on the sixteenth of November, 1936 — his granddaughter stood on the other side of that door with a bundle of his washing, and knocked, and got no answer, and went home annoyed.
She never knew.
Neither did he.