Part 1Cold Open: Indiana, 1883
Indiana. June sixteenth, eighteen eighty-three.
A Saturday, early — early enough that the grass beside the rails was still wet.
Half a mile north of town, the Newcastle and Rushville track ran out through farm country, and on that track, that morning, a man named Joe Bever was walking with a woman.
Her name was Minnie Helm. The newspapers, when they got hold of it, would not let you forget what they thought of her. A woman of ill repute, they wrote, every single one of them, like it was part of her name. She and Bever had been together the night before, and now they were walking up the railroad in the early light.
Joe Bever was a farmer. About thirty-eight years old. He lived a couple of miles south of Fayetteville, out where the county line runs, and he had a wife and five children at home.
And somewhere along that stretch of track, they met a third person.
He was a local man. The papers had a phrase for him too — a rather notorious character. He'd been in the penitentiary twice, they said. A justice of the peace had once fired a shot at him while trying to serve a warrant. He was thirty-four or thirty-five years old, he couldn't read or write, and he worked when there was work.
He said he'd walk the woman back to town.
Bever said no.
What happened next took a few minutes. There was a fight, and then another one, and at some point in it a pistol went off and put a bullet through the notorious man's hand. He was losing. That much everybody agrees on. He was on the ground and he was losing.
And this is the part the Rushville Graphic put in an extra edition the next day, in the town where it happened, from people who were close enough to know.
He asked the woman to reach into his own hip pocket and take out his own pistol.
She did.
And he took it out of her hands, and he shot Joe Bever in the face and in the left breast, and Joe Bever died there beside the track.
Then he ran.
Two hundred dollars was posted for him. He was picked up the following evening — thirty-six hours, and he was in a cell in Rushville, and in the fall a jury sent him to the state prison at Jeffersonville.
The county talked about it for years. A farmer with five kids, shot dead over a walk into town.
And thirty miles away, in a rented place in the next county south, there was a sixteen-year-old girl from Kentucky he had married three years before.
They had one child. A little boy. He'd turned two that past Christmas.
Nobody in any of those newspapers thought to write down his name.
It was John.
Part 2Introduction
Welcome to Forgotten True Crime. I'm your host, Trevor Shelby.
Before we get into it, I want to take just a second to tell you what this show is. Forgotten True Crime is an independent podcast — and I mean independent. There's no network, no studio, no staff. It's one man. I do the research, I write the episodes, I record them, I edit them, and I get them out into the world — every step of it. So if you enjoy what you hear today, the single best thing you can do is simple: share it. Tell a friend about the show. Post an episode on your social media. Leave a review wherever you're listening right now. It takes you thirty seconds, and for a show like this one, every little bit helps more than you know. Thank you for that — and thank you for being here.
Now — the usual reminder before we begin.
Everything in this episode comes from the record. Newspapers out of Indiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri. A court opinion. Census sheets, a marriage license, a draft card, a death certificate. And the memory of a family that has been carrying this thing for four generations.
Every one of those has a problem with it. Newspapers chase deadlines. Courts write down what got proven, which is not the same as what happened. A census taker writes down whatever the man standing in the doorway tells him — and the man standing in this doorway lied to the census taker about nearly everything, including his own name for himself.
So when I tell you what I believe happened, understand that is exactly what it is: my honest read of the record. Where the sources fight each other, I'll tell you they're fighting. And where we just plain don't know — I'll tell you that too.
I'll say this now, and it's the closest thing this episode has to a warning. The court opinion in this case runs about two pages. I have read it more times than I can count. It tells you who was convicted, and it tells you the judges agreed, and it uses the phrase "tended to show a motive for the crime."
It never says what the motive was.
Nobody has, for eighty-eight years. It's sitting in a newspaper nobody's opened since Truman was in office, and we're going to get to it.
Now let me set the scene.
August, 1938.
It's the ninth year of the Great Depression, and America had actually started climbing out of it — and then in '37 it fell back in. Oklahoma is coming off the dust years. The book that would tell the rest of the country what that was like, The Grapes of Wrath, was being written that very summer; it wouldn't be in stores for another eight months.
Overseas, a man in Germany had marched into Austria that spring, and all summer long he'd been making noise about Czechoslovakia. In six weeks, the leaders of Europe would fly to Munich and hand it to him and call it peace. That's on the front page all August.
And that June — a hot Wednesday night in New York — Joe Louis knocked out Max Schmeling in a hundred and twenty-four seconds, and something like seventy million Americans heard it live on the radio. If you had a radio in the summer of 1938, that's the summer you had it for.
Now go to the far southeastern corner of Oklahoma, down where the state runs out and Texas starts on the other side of the Red River. Bryan County. The county seat is Durant — seven, eight thousand people, a teachers college, a courthouse square, and cotton in every direction, three or four weeks out from picking.
It is about a hundred degrees. It has been about a hundred degrees for a while.
And on a Tuesday night in the last week of August, at right around eleven o'clock, something happened behind a house on a street in Durant.
The neighbors came out. They stood in the dark and they watched it, and afterward they talked about it, and they came to an agreement about what it was — the way a street does.
Then they went back inside.
By the next afternoon there had been an inquest, and a verdict, and a funeral. All three of them, inside of eighteen hours.
And then, for three hundred and fifty-six days, nothing happened at all.
Hold onto that morning in Indiana. We'll come back to it — I promise you that.
But this is the story of a street that decided it knew exactly what it had seen.
And then, almost a year later, changed its mind.
Part 3The Night
Her name was Ethel.
Ethel Flossie Clements, before she was married. She was born in November of 1887 in Dahlonega, Georgia — up in the north Georgia mountains, in a town that had had a gold rush sixty years before she got there and had been coasting on it ever since. Her father was Joseph. Her mother was Sabra Jane. There were seven children in that house and Ethel was somewhere in the middle of them.
In 1920 she married a traveling salesman and she left Georgia, and she never lived in one place again.
You can follow her by where her children were born. Bill, in 1923, at Texarkana, Texas. Joe, the next year, at Amarillo — that's five hundred miles west. Frank in '26. Tommy in 1928, at De Queen, Arkansas. Roy in 1930, at Ardmore, Oklahoma.
Five boys in seven years and four states. That's not a family that's settling. That's a family following a man to wherever the work is.
In the spring of 1930 a census taker found them at Ardmore, in a house on F Street they said was worth eighteen hundred dollars, and every one of those five boys was in it.
Two years before our story, they moved one more time — sixty miles east, to Durant. Seven thirty-two South Third Avenue.
And by then there were four boys, not five.
Because in March of 1937, at Gainesville, Texas, the middle one — Frank, ten years old — had drowned.
So. Ethel Story. Fifty years old, though the paper would print forty-eight; nobody in this family ever seems to have gotten an age right, and there's a reason for that, and we'll get to it. Eighteen years married. One boy buried in Texas and four boys in the house — Bill, fifteen. Joe, fourteen. Tommy, ten. Roy, eight.
Her husband gone most weeks, selling.
Now, forty feet out the back door, there was a little building.
The paper called it a storeroom. Eight feet by five feet, and seven feet high. I want you to actually picture that, because it is smaller than most bathrooms. Two grown people standing in it would be touching.
What was in it was oil, and the makings of fly poison.
That was the trade. Her husband mixed up fly dope — that's what the family called it, fly dope — and he sold it door to door, along with soap and whatever else was moving that season. And the raw material for it, the inflammable part of it, lived in that eight-by-five building forty feet behind the house where his wife and four sons slept.
And there was one more thing about that door.
The latch was on the outside.
Tuesday, the twenty-third of August, 1938.
It had been around a hundred degrees. There's no air conditioning in Durant in 1938 — there's a fan if you're lucky and a window if you're not. So on a night like this, people are not in bed at eleven o'clock. They're on the porch. They're in the yard. Every window on that street is open as far as it will go.
Which is the only reason anybody heard anything at all.
Around ten o'clock, John Story went downtown. He had a headache, he said, and he was going to get something for it. His oldest boy, Bill, was downtown too.
Ethel was still up. Fourteen-year-old Joe went to sleep about ten with his mother still awake in the house.
And sometime before eleven, Joe woke up.
He woke up because somebody was screaming, and it was coming from outside, from forty feet away, from the little building.
It was his mother.
And what she was screaming was:
"Help — let me out!"
Here is what that fourteen-year-old boy did, in his own words, two days later.
He ran to the door and pulled on it, and it wouldn't come.
"I forgot about the latch on the outside of the door and I tried to pull the door open but couldn't. Then I threw a bucket of water on the house, and remembered the latch and I got the door open but it closed again and lodged."
Read that again slowly, because there is a whole world inside of it.
He pulls. It won't open. In his panic he does the thing you do — he throws water. On the house, not the building; that's a fourteen-year-old's arithmetic in the dark with his mother screaming.
Then he remembers the latch.
He gets it open.
And it closes again. And it lodges.
Down the street, a young man named Shorty Sparger was walking home from the skating rink. He saw the blaze, and at the same moment he heard a voice — a kid's voice — going,
"Help me get my mother out, she's burning up."
A neighbor named Bud Simmons had been asleep. His wife woke him. Simmons said the first thing he heard was a boy crying, "My mother is in there and I can't get her out."
Simmons got to that door first with an axe. He was swinging at it when the axe came down on his own foot, and he dropped it.
Shorty Sparger picked the axe up and kept chopping.
And while he was chopping — this is Sparger's account — John Story came up.
And John Story asked him a question.
"Do you know if she is really in there?"
I'm going to leave that sitting there for a second, because I have turned it over about a hundred times and I can hear it two completely different ways.
A man comes running up to his own back yard. There's fire, there's an axe, there's a neighbor he barely knows swinging at a door and a boy screaming. He can't see anything. And what comes out of his mouth is the most human sentence in the world — is she really in there? Please tell me she isn't in there. That is what shock sounds like.
That's one way.
The other way is that it is a very strange thing to ask.
Because everybody else in that yard already knew. His son knew, he'd heard her voice. Sparger knew, he'd heard the boy. Simmons knew, he was chopping at the door. Every single person out there had arrived at that fire and been told, or heard for themselves, that there was a woman inside.
And the man who lived there, who owned that building, who kept his stock in it — the man who walked up last —
is the one asking whether she's really in there.
I don't know which of those it is. I want to be honest with you: I don't know. But I've read a lot of accounts of men arriving at fires, and that is not usually the first thing out of their mouth.
Then he picked up an axe handle and started trying to pry the door.
When they finally got it open, they couldn't get in.
Sparger and Simmons both said the same thing: the heat coming out of that doorway was so intense they could not get close enough to reach her.
She was lying face down, with her head toward the door.
And at her feet was a lantern. Badly burned. With a hole two inches across punched through the glass chimney.
The fire department came — Fire Chief L. L. Moore, a fireman named Bill Sammons — and they put it out, and the walls were falling in while they did it. When they brought her out, the paper said, she was burned beyond recognition.
Eight feet by five feet. Seven feet high. Oil and fly dope stacked in it. A latch on the outside.
Ethel Story was fifty years old, and her fourteen-year-old son got the door open once, and it swung shut again, and she did not come out.
And the whole street stood there in the dark and watched it happen.
Part 4The Inquest
The next afternoon, they held an inquest.
If you don't know what that is, in 1938 in a county like Bryan County, it worked about like this. Somebody dies in a way that isn't obvious — and the local justice of the peace, who doubles as the coroner, rounds up a handful of local men, swears them in as a jury, brings in whoever saw anything, and asks questions until the jury can say what killed the person. It's fast, it's informal, and it happens close to the body.
In this case it happened at the body. They held it at Holmes Funeral Home, on Wednesday afternoon, the twenty-fourth of August. Ethel Story was in that building while they talked about her.
It was run by two men. County Attorney Ben Carter — and Peace Justice H. D. Sparger.
His full name was Harry Dorsett Sparger. He was fifty-six years old, he'd been born down in Bonham, Texas, and he was Durant to the bone; when he died six years after this, the local paper called him one of the most beloved men in town.
And yes — you caught it. Sparger, and Sparger.
The Spargers were a big old Durant family. Judge Sparger had seven children of his own, and two of his boys were exactly the right age to be walking home from a skating rink on a hot Tuesday night. I could not prove that Shorty was one of them, and I'm not going to sit here and tell you he was.
But I'll say this. In a town of eight thousand people, with a family that size, the man running an inquest being kin to a man testifying at it is not a conspiracy. It's arithmetic.
It just tells you what kind of room this was. Everybody in it knew everybody in it.
Now, here's the sentence in the paper that I want you to hold onto, because it changes the color of this whole afternoon:
"A coroner's investigation of the case was asked by officers because of some details of 'mystery' concerning it."
Mystery. In quotation marks, in the newspaper, in August of 1938.
Nobody made them do this. The officers in Durant looked at that back yard, and something about it sat wrong with them, and they asked for an inquest.
And the paper tells us the exact two things they wanted answered.
One: how did Mrs. Story come to be in that storeroom at eleven o'clock at night.
Two: how did the fire start.
Keep both of those. They are the right questions. They are, in fact, the only questions.
So they brought in the witnesses.
Joe Story, fourteen years old, sat in a funeral home the day after his mother burned and told a room full of grown men what he heard, and what he did, and how the door closed again.
Shorty Sparger told about the skating rink and the axe. Bud Simmons told about his wife waking him and the boy crying in the dark. Fire Chief L. L. Moore and a fireman named Bill Sammons testified about putting it out.
And then some new things came out — things nobody in that yard had been in a position to notice at the time.
The first is the lantern.
When they got the door open, there was a kerosene lantern lying at Ethel Story's feet. Badly burned. And punched through the glass chimney of it was a hole two inches across.
The second is a disagreement, and it's a small one, and it's the kind of thing that tells you these men were being asked real questions. Sparger said the body was near the door. Simmons said it was several feet back. They didn't square it up. The paper just prints that they disagreed.
And the third came from Joe.
They asked that boy why his mother would have gone out to that building at eleven at night. And he said he thought she might have gone out there to drink some wine — that there was wine kept in a thermos jug in the storeroom. And he said she apparently carried the lighted lantern out with her.
I want to be careful and I want to be kind here, because there is a real person underneath that sentence.
We do not know if that's true. We don't know where a fourteen-year-old got that idea, whether he'd seen her do it before, whether somebody had said it to him in the last eighteen hours, or whether he was a scared kid being asked a question by the county attorney and reaching for any answer that made sense of the worst night of his life.
What we know is that it's in the paper, and that it came out of her son's mouth, and that it gave everybody in that room something to hold onto.
Because look at what those pieces build.
A fifty-year-old woman walks forty feet across a dark back yard, carrying a lit kerosene lantern, into a room eight feet by five with a can of lamp oil and a stack of fly-poison stock in it. Something goes wrong — she trips, she sets it down badly, it swings against a shelf. The chimney breaks. There's a two-inch hole in the glass to prove it. Open flame, spilled oil, dry wood, closed room.
And the whole thing is over in about ninety seconds.
I want to give that its full weight, because it is not a stupid theory. It fits the lantern. It fits the hole in the glass. It fits the speed of it, and it fits why a woman who was heard screaming from forty feet away still didn't get out — because that building didn't burn, it went up.
Every single physical fact in that yard is consistent with an accident.
Except one.
The headline that ran over this story, in the local paper, reads:
"Coroner's Jury Determines Mrs. Ethel Story Met Her Death in an Accidental Fire Behind Latched Door."
Behind latched door.
They knew. It's in the headline. The men in that room heard about the latch on the outside of that door — Joe told them about it himself, it's the reason he couldn't get her out the first time — and they returned a verdict of accident anyway.
And you can get there. Honestly, you can. Joe said he did get the door open and it "closed again and lodged" — so that door could stick shut on its own. If it can lodge itself once, it can lodge itself twice, and then nobody latched anything and it's just a bad door on the worst possible night.
That's how twelve men — or six, or however many they sat in that funeral home — go home and sleep.
Here's what I notice, though.
The paper lists who spoke. Joe. Shorty Sparger. Bud Simmons. The fire chief. The fireman.
It does not record one word from her husband.
He was in that yard. He owned that building. He mixed his stock in it. He walked up while a neighbor was chopping at the door, and he asked whether she was really in there, and he picked up an axe handle.
And in the newspaper account of the inquest into his wife's death, John Story does not say anything at all.
At three-fifty on Wednesday afternoon, the coroner's jury returned its verdict.
Accidental fire.
The officers had asked two questions — why was she out there, and how did it start — and the answer they got back was wine and a lantern, and that was good enough, and it was over.
And I'll leave you with the clock, because the clock in this story is something else.
The verdict came in at ten minutes till four.
Ethel Story's funeral had started at half past three, at Highland Cemetery, on the north edge of Durant, with a preacher named Jeff Shelton reading over her.
She was already in the ground when they said it was an accident.
And that was the end of it.
For eleven weeks.
Part 5Eleven Weeks
Now I have to tell you something about Durant, and I promise it matters.
For decades — before the war, and long after it — Durant, Oklahoma was known as the marryin' capital of the state.
Here's why. Oklahoma's marriage laws were looser than Texas's, and Durant sits about twenty miles north of the Red River. So couples from Texas who did not want to wait would drive up the highway and come straight up Ninth Street to the Bryan County courthouse.
And in Durant you could get a blood test, a marriage license, and a man to say the words over you — inside of an hour. Any hour. There were brokers working that courthouse who'd find you in the hallway and offer to arrange the whole thing for a small fee. There was a justice of the peace who ran the business out of his house, in between selling used cars. There were doctors on call and court clerks who'd come in from home at two or three o'clock in the morning.
They kept ledgers. Those ledgers still exist, in a museum in Durant, going back to before the Second World War.
So hold that in your head. John Story lived in the one town in Oklahoma where a man could decide to get married and be married before lunch.
On the twelfth of November, 1938, he drove thirty miles west, out of Bryan County entirely, to the town of Madill in Marshall County.
And there, from a court clerk named H. J. Hartin, he took out a marriage license.
Five days later it ran in the Madill Record, in the little column of county business that every small paper printed, right there on page one:
"John O Story 58 and Mrs Emma Mildred Chapman 58, both of Durant."
Both of Durant.
Both of them lived in the town with the one-hour marriage license. And the license is in the next county.
Now — I can give you the innocent version of that, and it's a decent one. The man was a traveling salesman. He worked a territory. Madill is thirty miles up the road and it was very likely on his route, and if you're standing in Marshall County on a Saturday with a woman beside you and a courthouse across the street, you go in.
That's real. I'll allow it.
Here's the other thing it means, though.
It means he did not walk into the Bryan County courthouse in Durant.
Which is the building where County Attorney Ben Carter had his office. The man who, eleven weeks earlier, had stood in a funeral home and asked how that fire started.
I don't know that John Story thought about that for one single second. But I know he'd have had to walk past that door.
He gave his age as fifty-eight. He was fifty-seven. It's a small thing and I'd let it go, except that by the time we're done you'll understand that this man never once, in seventy-one years, told anybody how old he was.
Now. Let me be fair about the eleven weeks, because I think you have to be.
There is no law against remarrying. There is no decent interval written down anywhere. And you cannot convict a man of anything for being lonely.
And in 1938, with four boys in that house — Bill fifteen, Joe fourteen, Tommy ten, and Roy eight years old — and a father on the road five days out of seven selling soap and fly dope? That household needed a woman in it, and every single person in Durant would have understood that. That is not a scandal in 1938. That is Tuesday.
I want to give that its full weight, because I think it's probably part of the truth.
But.
Eighty-one days.
His wife burned to death behind the house on the twenty-third of August, and on the twelfth of November he took out a license to marry a woman named Emma.
And whether the street read it in the Madill paper, or whether they just looked up one morning and saw a new Mrs. Story carrying groceries into the house on South Third Avenue —
they knew.
And people count. That's the thing about people. Nobody says anything, and everybody counts.
They'd counted eleven weeks.
And still — still — nothing happened.
Part 6The Peddler and the Boy
So who was he?
Ask anybody on South Third Avenue in 1938 and you'd get one word. He was the peddler.
The census called it salesman — toilet articles. That's soap. Tooth powder, cold cream, hair tonic, liniment, salve for whatever's wrong with you. In the Depression that was the job you took when there was no job, and there was an army of those men working every dirt road in America with a sample case and a book of orders.
And by 1939 the papers would add the other half of his line: fly spray.
He didn't just sell it. He made it. That's from his own son, under oath — his father used that building "for storing materials he used in making fly dope."
Think about southeastern Oklahoma in August. Cotton, livestock, a hundred degrees, screens on the windows a luxury item. Flies weren't an annoyance in 1938, flies were a plague. A man who could mix something that killed them had a real product.
And what you mix it out of is oil.
Now — here's the thing about being the peddler. You are the most familiar stranger in the county. He'd been in their kitchens. He knew whose baby was sick and whose husband was drinking and which widow lived alone at the end of the road. That's the job. People tell a salesman things they'd never tell a neighbor, because he'll be gone by Thursday.
And he was gone by Thursday.
I want to show you one page and then move on.
April, 1930. Ardmore, Oklahoma. Seven-oh-one F Street. A census taker walks the block. He gets to the Story place — house owned, not rented, worth eighteen hundred dollars. John Story, salesman, toilet articles. Ethel. Five boys, all alive, the youngest two months old.
And two doors down that same street, the same handwriting, another man.
He sells insurance.
That's all I'm going to say about that right now.
Sometime that winter the Storys left Durant and went east, across the line into Arkansas — back to a little town called De Queen, where their boy Tommy had been born ten years before.
And on the seventh of June, 1939, Joe Story went out hunting rabbits.
He was fourteen. One month short of fifteen.
Somewhere out there he was shot, and he died, and they called it a hunting accident.
I don't want that to go past you as a name.
Joe is the boy who woke up. He's the one who ran forty feet in the dark, and forgot the latch, and threw the bucket on the wrong building, and got that door open and watched it swing shut. He's the boy the neighbors heard screaming my mother is in there and I can't get her out. He's the one who sat in a funeral home the next afternoon and told a room full of grown men what happened.
Everything I've told you about that night, I know because of Joe.
And nine and a half months later he is dead in the woods in Arkansas.
Now — boys hunted. A fourteen-year-old walking out at dawn with a single-shot .22 was the most ordinary thing in the world in 1939, and boys died doing it, regularly. So I'm not going to sit here and tell you Joe Story was murdered.
I'm just going to count.
Charles Oliver Story — a son from an earlier marriage. Killed by a train as a boy.
Frank Dewey Story — ten years old. Drowned at Gainesville, Texas, March of '37.
Ethel — fifty. Durant, Oklahoma, August of '38.
Joe — fourteen. De Queen, Arkansas, June of '39.
Three of those in twenty-seven months.
And here is why nobody saw it. Frank died in Texas. Ethel died in Oklahoma. Joe died in Arkansas.
There was no computer. There was no database. Nothing in 1939 existed that could put a drowning in one state next to a fire in another next to a rabbit hunt in a third. A sheriff in Gainesville had no earthly reason to know what happened in a back yard in Durant.
One at a time, in its own county, every one of those deaths looked exactly like what happens to poor families.
You have to lay them side by side to see anything.
And nobody official was in a position to do that.
Part 7The Talk
Here's the sentence. It moved on the Associated Press wire in August of 1939, and I've read it about two hundred times.
"…after neighborhood gossip called the attention of authorities to other tragic deaths in his family."
Neighborhood gossip.
That's the engine of this entire case. Not a detective. Not a witness coming forward. Not a bloodstain or a letter in a drawer. Nobody cracked anything.
People talked over a fence.
And I want to defend that, because we use the word "gossip" to mean something small and mean. Think about where we just were. Three deaths, three states, and no system on earth that could hold all of it in one place.
There was exactly one thing in 1939 that could.
People's memory. And the only way to search it was to talk.
The gossip was the database.
Some woman in Durant said to another woman, you know, that's not the first one. And the other one said, I know it isn't. And somebody's husband said it at the feed store, and it went around that town all summer the way things go around a town — quietly, constantly, and dead accurate about the one thing that mattered.
That man keeps burying people.
And notice what the wire says they were talking about. Not the fire. Durant had accepted the fire. What Durant could not accept was the pile — and I'd bet the house that the last straw was the boy. Joe died on the seventh of June. They came for his father on the fourteenth of August.
Somebody in that town finally picked up a telephone. And whoever that was, nobody ever wrote their name down. The only reason there's a case at all is a person we can't name.
Two things had changed by then.
There was a new county attorney in Bryan County — a man named Bill Steger, who had nothing invested in a verdict somebody else had signed off on.
And there was D. C. Robnett.
Robnett was a special detective for the Frisco Railroad, out of Sherman, Texas. Railroad police are a forgotten piece of American law enforcement, and in 1939 they were often the best investigators in the region — because a rail line runs through a hundred jurisdictions and the railroad needed men who could chase a thing across all of them.
And Robnett wore a second hat. He was also a deputy sheriff of Bryan County, Oklahoma.
So after three deaths in three states, in a case that had gone nowhere for a year precisely because nobody could see across a county line — the man who ends up sitting across the table from John Story is a professional whose whole working life was crossing them.
On Monday the fourteenth of August, 1939 — three hundred and fifty-six days after a coroner's jury said accident — they went across the Arkansas line and got him.
Part 8The Money
For a week, nothing came out.
Then on Monday the twenty-first, the AP moved a story datelined Durant, and it ran on front pages all over Oklahoma.
"PEDDLER FACES AIRTIGHT CASE SAYS ATTORNEY — Durant Man Maintains Wife's Death Was Accident."
"County Attorney Bill Steger asserted today he had an airtight case against John O. Story, 60, charged with murdering one of his four wives."
Hold onto that phrase. The AP just dropped something enormous into the middle of a sentence and kept walking.
One of his four wives.
We'll get there.
Because the next line is this one.
"But after protracted grilling the sullen soap peddler held to his statement that the death of his third wife in a burning smokehouse last August 23 was 'just an accident.'"
A week. A fifty-eight-year-old man in a county jail in August in Oklahoma, with a railroad detective and a sheriff and a county attorney working him over for seven days.
And what he gives them, every time, is three words.
Just an accident.
Now hear what he's actually doing there. Because those are not just any three words.
That is the verdict. That is what a coroner's jury said at ten minutes till four, in a funeral home, in that same town, a year earlier.
He isn't arguing with those men. He isn't spinning a story. He's handing Durant back its own piece of paper.
You already decided. It was just an accident.
And then comes the last line of that wire story.
"Steger said Story collected more than $1,000 insurance on each of his sons' deaths and $2,460 on his third wife's death."
Two thousand four hundred and sixty dollars on Ethel.
More than a thousand apiece on three dead boys.
Put something next to that number. Their house in Ardmore, the one they owned outright, was worth eighteen hundred dollars.
He collected more on his wife than his house was worth.
In today's money the whole thing is somewhere around a hundred and twenty thousand dollars, out of one family, collected by a man who sold soap door to door.
And two doors down on F Street in Ardmore, there was a man who sold insurance.
I don't know that he ever wrote a policy for John Story. But I think about him. Because this hit every front page in Oklahoma in August of 1939, and wherever he was by then, he could have picked up a newspaper and read it. And maybe he thought nothing at all. Or maybe he sat there very still and remembered a house two doors down, and a nice man who came around wanting to talk about coverage for the boys.
Somebody wrote those policies. Somebody sat at that kitchen table and filled out the forms and shook that man's hand. And somebody, four separate times, cut him a check.
Here's what gets me. The court opinion in this case — the only official document most people would ever find — says the evidence "tended to show a motive."
It never says what the motive was. Four appeals across eight years, and not one of them names it.
It's the last sentence of a newspaper story from the twenty-first of August, 1939. It's been sitting there, findable, for eighty-seven years.
Nobody looked.
The next day they arraigned him.
"John O. Story, 60-year-old fly spray peddler, pleaded innocent today to a charge he murdered his third wife Ethel by locking her in a smokehouse and setting it on fire."
Locking her in.
Five days after they picked him up, that's the State's public theory. Not she was inside when it burned. Not he set a fire.
He locked her in.
That door. That latch on the outside. The one Joe forgot about, and then remembered, and then got open — and then watched swing shut and lodge.
Part 9Who He Was
One of his four wives.
Pull that thread and the whole man comes apart.
In August the wire called Ethel his third wife. By October the same wire called her his fourth. They couldn't keep it straight, and I don't blame them, because nobody could.
Durant knew about two women. Ethel, and Emma.
Here's what I can put names to.
Eighteen ninety-eight — a girl named Etta Louella Lockhart, in West Virginia.
Nineteen-oh-four — Grace Jackson Frantz.
Nineteen-oh-seven — Maude Esther Biederman.
Nineteen twenty — Ethel Flossie Clements, of Dahlonega, Georgia.
November of nineteen thirty-eight — Emma Mildred Chapman, of Durant.
That's five. His own family says at least six.
He married the first when he was seventeen and the last when he was fifty-seven. Thirteen children that anybody can name.
And four of those five women outlived him. The exception is Ethel.
Now — that census page from Ardmore. The one I said had lies on it.
He told the United States government he was born in Kentucky. He wasn't.
There's a column asking a man's age at his first marriage. He answered forty-two — which would put his first wedding around 1921. Around Ethel. He was seventeen at his first wedding. On one line of a federal form he erased three wives and twenty-two years.
And his age, which is the strange one, because it runs backwards. Most men shave years off. He added them. Twenty-one when he was seventeen. Fifty-eight at Madill. Sixty in the papers. He was born on the twenty-second of December, 1880, and as far as I can tell he never told a living soul the truth about it.
A man who is always a little older than he is, is a man who is never quite where you left him.
So if he wasn't from Kentucky — where was he from?
Indiana.
Decatur County, right on the Rush County line, in December of 1880.
Which is about thirty miles from a stretch of railroad track a half mile north of Rushville.
Go back to the beginning of this episode with me.
June of 1883. The farmer walking up the Newcastle and Rushville track with a woman named Minnie Helm. The third man who came along and said he'd walk her back to town. The fight. The pistol out of his own hip pocket, out of the woman's hands. Joe Bever shot in the face and the left breast, dead beside the rails, thirty-eight years old, a wife and five children at home.
A rather notorious character.
His name was James Story.
And the two-year-old boy back in the next county — the one nobody wrote down —
is the man sitting in the Bryan County jail in August of 1939, charged with burning his wife alive.
John Oliver Story was the son of a murderer.
And here's the whole thing, by the boy's age, because the arithmetic is what got me.
Two years and eleven months old when a jury convicts his father and sends him to the state prison at Jeffersonville. Retried on a change of venue that December — voluntary manslaughter. Ten years. His father is in a cell before John Story turns three.
Nine years old when his mother finally divorces the man. The Rushville paper ran two lines in the court notes: "Lilly Story obtained a divorce from James Story last Friday, on the ground of the defendant's conviction of the crime of killing Joe Beaver some years ago."
Ten years old when his father gets out.
Ten years and four months old when his father is back in a jail cell in Rushville. A girl named Flora Carmichael was dead. That June they sentenced him again — fourteen years.
Between his third birthday and his mid-twenties, John Story's father was a free man for a matter of months.
At seventeen he went to West Virginia and told a county clerk he was twenty-one and married a girl named Etta.
His father was in prison the day he got married.
Like father, like son.
That's the title, and I want to take it apart, because sayings are lazy and this one is doing something more complicated than it looks.
Most sons of violent men don't become violent men. That's not sentiment, that's true, and a boy is not doomed by his father.
But look at what changed between the two of them.
James Story killed hot. A fistfight on a railroad track over a woman. He was losing, he reached for a pistol, he fired twice, and he ran — and thirty-six hours later a detective had him in a cell with two hundred dollars on his head and the whole county talking about it.
John Story killed cold.
A building his wife had no reason to be in. A latch on the outside of a door. A lantern with a hole in it. A story about wine in a thermos jug. A jury that went home satisfied in eighteen hours, and a funeral before the verdict was even read.
And a check.
The father was caught in a day and a half. The son buried her, remarried in eleven weeks, and went eleven months without anybody asking him a single question.
Like father, like son?
Not a copy. Not an echo.
A refinement.
And nobody in Oklahoma knew one word of it. Not Steger, not Robnett, not the judge, not the twelve men about to sit in that jury box. Indiana was fifty-six years and six hundred miles away.
They convicted him of the only one they could prove.
Part 10The Reckoning
October, 1939.
His lawyers tried to get the trial moved out of Bryan County — filed affidavits saying the town had already made up its mind. The county attorney filed ten times as many saying it hadn't. Judge Roy Paul denied the motion.
And then he ordered the jury drawn from a part of the county outside the city of Durant.
A judge who actually believes there's no prejudice doesn't move the jury pool.
Durant wanted him.
Then John Story did something I didn't expect. He took the witness stand in his own defense. And he told that jury he came home, found the building on fire, and tried to break in a door to save his wife.
And here's the part that unsettles me. That was true. A neighbor said the same thing under oath fourteen months earlier — Story came up while he was chopping, picked up an axe handle, tried to pry that door.
It just didn't go very far. Because the State said he locked her in, and he said he tried to break in, and both sides in that courtroom were describing the same closed door.
What he would not explain — under oath, from the stand — was how his wife got in there at all.
They took the jury out to see the place. Then the jury went out at four in the afternoon, and came back the next day.
Guilty. Life.
The wire got the last picture of him:
"The stooped, sandy-haired Storey, his head bowed but showing no emotion."
He didn't react. Not to guilty, and not to life.
He appealed four times over eight years, and after the first one he wrote them himself, alone, in his own hand, from a cell.
Every one of them was denied.
Part 11What Became of Them
Six months later the census takers went out again, and you can find those boys on three different sheets, in three different places.
Akron, Ohio. Nine hundred miles from Durant. Thomas Story, twelve. Roy Story, ten. And in the column for relationship to the head of house, one word: nephew.
The woman running that house was Callie Reid, forty-nine, born in Georgia — Ethel's sister. The Reids didn't move to Oklahoma; they were already in Ohio. Which means somebody put those two little boys on something and sent them nine hundred miles.
Tommy was twelve years old and in the third grade. Three years behind. He was ten when his mother burned, eleven when his brother was shot, eleven when they took his father. Nobody in that stretch was thinking about his schoolwork.
Bill went the other way.
Seventeen years old, living in McAlester with his stepmother Emma.
McAlester is the town with the penitentiary in it. His father was inside it that year, a few blocks away.
And on Emma's line, in the column for marital status, she told the census taker she was single.
Two years later, June of 1942. Bill Story is nineteen and a long way from all of it — up in Newcastle, Wyoming, working in a café. And he goes and registers for the draft, like every other young man in America that summer.
There's a box on that card. It's on all of them.
"Name and address of person who will always know your address."
That's the box for your anchor. The fixed point. Your mother, usually.
Bill Story wrote: John Oliver Story. McAlester, Oklahoma.
His father. Three years into a life sentence for burning his mother alive.
You can hear that two ways, and I've never settled which. Either a nineteen-year-old alone in Wyoming reached for the only family he had left — or he did the arithmetic, and worked out that there is exactly one man on earth whose address is guaranteed never to change.
Ten years later, Kansas City, Missouri. The twenty-fourth of May, 1952.
A man is found at the foot of a bluff, down where Thirteenth Street runs to a dead end. Badly hurt. Unconscious. Nobody knows who he is. The police put his age at about forty.
He was twenty-nine.
Between the morning paper and the evening paper, he woke up. He gave them his name.
And they asked him what happened, and he said he fell.
He died the next day.
On his death certificate, in the box for his mother's maiden name, somebody wrote: unknown.
Her name was Ethel Flossie Clements, of Dahlonega, Georgia, and she was murdered when he was fifteen, and in 1952 there was nobody in that room who could tell a clerk what she was called.
Nobody claimed him. After ten days they released the body to a medical college.
His father was alive, in a cell at McAlester, a hundred and fifty miles away.
The person who would always know his address.
One hundred and eleven days later, on the thirteenth of September, 1952, John Oliver Story died in the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. Seventy-one years old. Thirteen years inside.
They buried him in the prison cemetery. Plot number one forty-one.
And the two little boys in Ohio? Tommy and Roy both went into the Army. Both of them are buried in national cemeteries — Dayton, and Fort Custer. Neither one of them ever married.
Callie — Ethel's sister, the woman who took in two nephews she had every right to say no to — lived to be about ninety-eight.
She outlived her sister by forty-nine years. And she outlived both of the boys she raised.
Part 12Closing
Here's where I come down.
I think John Oliver Story put his wife in that building and fastened the door and set his own merchandise on fire, and I think he did it for two thousand four hundred and sixty dollars. I think the headache was on purpose. I think he came back up that street knowing exactly what he was going to find — and I think the first thing out of his mouth, do you know if she is really in there, was the first line of an alibi.
A jury that got to look at all of it thought so too.
Let me count them one time, all the way through. Two men, a father and a son.
Joe Bever, a farmer, thirty-eight, with a wife and five children. Flora Carmichael. Charles Oliver Story. Frank Dewey Story, ten. Ethel, fifty. Joseph Cecil Story, fourteen. And William Eugene Story, twenty-nine, at the bottom of a bluff in Kansas City with nobody to claim him.
One of those two men ever went to prison for any of it. And he went for exactly one.
I want to finish with her.
Because all of this — the fire, the trial, Indiana, every bit of it — happened because a fifty-year-old woman from the north Georgia mountains walked out of her house on a hot night and didn't come back.
Her name was Ethel.
And I found something this week I can't shake.
The public memorial that exists for Ethel Story says her body was destroyed in the fire. It says she has no grave.
That's wrong.
Because the local paper, printed the very next day, says her funeral was held at half past three that Wednesday afternoon at Highland Cemetery in Durant, with a preacher named Jeff Shelton reading over her. Burial was in Highland cemetery. Plain as that.
The coroner's jury said the word accident at ten minutes till four.
She was already in the ground.
So Ethel Story is out there. In an eighty-acre cemetery on the edge of Durant, Oklahoma, tonight, while you're listening to this — and for eighty-eight years the only public record of her has told the world there's nothing to find.
And there's one more person buried in that same cemetery.
Judge Harry Dorsett Sparger. The justice of the peace who sat in a funeral home on the twenty-fourth of August, 1938 and ran the inquest that called it an accident — and who, thirteen months later, ordered the same man held without bond for her murder.
He died in 1944. They buried him at Highland.
So the two of them are out there in the same eighty acres. The woman who burned, and the man who signed the paper.
I don't have anything clever to say about that. It's just true, and it's the last true thing I've got.
Part 13Outro
If you know anything about the Story family — if you're in Bryan County, if you're kin, if you've got a photograph or a story — I'd love to hear from you. And if you're ever in Durant, out at Highland Cemetery, go look for her. Her name was Ethel Story, and hardly anybody has ever come.
Until next time, I'm Trevor with Forgotten True Crime. Stay safe out there.
Just know you are unique, you are special and you are loved.
And hey — if this one got you, subscribe, leave a review, and share it with somebody who loves true crime. Everything I dug up for this episode is on the blog at Section29.com — the newspaper pages, the records, the 1898 wedding photograph, and a whole lot I didn't have room for tonight. Links are in the description.