The storeroom

About ten o'clock on the night of Tuesday, August 23, 1938, a fourteen-year-old boy named Joe Story fell asleep at 732 South Third Avenue in Durant, Oklahoma. His mother had not gone to bed yet. His father had gone into town for headache medicine, and his oldest brother Bill was downtown too.

An hour later he was woken by someone crying out. What he heard, he told an inquest the following afternoon, was Help, let me out!

Behind the house, about forty feet back, stood a small building — roughly eight feet by five, seven feet high — where the family stored things, including the oil and the materials his father used to mix the fly poison he sold door to door. The door latched from the outside.

The boy ran to it and forgot that. He pulled at the door and it would not come. He threw a bucket of water on the house. Then he remembered the latch, lifted it, got the door open — and watched it swing shut again and lodge.

A neighbour, Bud Simmons, woken by his wife, took an axe to the door and chopped at it until he dropped the axe with an injured foot. John Story came up while that was still going on, and — according to the testimony — asked: Do you know if she is really in there? Then he took an axe handle and set to prying. Another man coming home from the skating rink, known in the papers only as Shorty Sparger, picked up the axe and forced the door. By then the heat coming out of that doorway was more than anyone could walk into.

She was in there. The two men who got closest did not agree about how she lay: the one who forced the door said face down with her head toward it, the one who had been chopping said several feet further back. They disagreed on the record and it was never resolved. What both of them saw was a badly burned lantern with a two-inch hole in its glass chimney. The firemen put the fire out as the walls came in. The body was burned beyond recognition.

A verdict, twenty minutes late

Her funeral was held at half past three the next afternoon, August 24, at Highland Cemetery in Durant. Rev. Jeff Shelton officiated. Holmes Funeral Home directed it.

At ten minutes to four — twenty minutes after the service began across town — a coroner's jury sitting at that same funeral home returned its verdict. Mrs. Ethel Story had met her death in an accidental fire.

She was already in the ground.

The inquest was not somebody's idle formality. It had been asked for, the paper says, by officers — because of some details of "mystery" concerning it. There were two questions they wanted answered: how she came to be inside that building, and how the fire started.

Peace Justice H. D. Sparger conducted it alongside County Attorney Ben Carter. Four eyewitnesses testified, the fourteen-year-old among them. The inquest report notes that the flames were fed by inflammable liquids stored in the building.

The boy gave them the only answer anyone ever offered to the first one. He thought his mother might have gone out to that building to drink some wine kept there in a thermos jug, and that she had carried the lighted lantern with her. That supposition, and the burned lantern, is the entire physical basis of the accident theory.

It was also all there was. Neither question was ever settled — not that day, and not for a year.

The woman

Ethel Flossie Clements was born in November 1887 at Dahlonega, in Lumpkin County, Georgia — a gold-rush town up in the north Georgia mountains — to Joseph Benjamin Clements and Sabra Jane Beasley Clements. She was one of seven children, four of them still living in 1938. Her Georgia birth and her parents' are confirmed by the 1930 census.

She married John Oliver Story in 1920 and bore five sons between 1923 and 1930, across Texas, Arkansas and Oklahoma. In April 1930 the family owned a house on F Street in Ardmore worth eighteen hundred dollars, with all five boys alive in it. They moved to Durant in 1936. Four of the five were living on the night she died; Frank had drowned in Texas the year before, at ten.

The local paper puts her age at forty-eight. A November 1887 birth makes her fifty. This file carries both.

There is no photograph of her, and her burial plot has never been located — and there is a reason nobody has looked for it. Her Find a Grave memorial gives her burial as Cremated / Body destroyed in a fire. The contemporaneous paper contradicts that: it reported a funeral and an interment at Highland Cemetery. Because the memorial says she has no grave, no one has ever gone looking for the stone. Highland holds ten Story memorials and not one of them is hers — they belong to a different and prominent Durant family with the same surname.

The whole of the biography on her memorial was written by a descendant of the man who killed her. It reads: She was murdered by her husband in Aug., 1938, in Durant, Oklahoma. He burned her alive.

No autopsy appears anywhere in this case.

Eleven weeks

On or about November 12, 1938 — the date itself is approximate — a marriage licence was issued to John O Story 58 and Mrs Emma Mildred Chapman 58, both of Durant. Both stated ages were a year high.

It was issued at Madill, in Marshall County — the next county over, not their own. Why they crossed a county line to do it is nowhere stated in the record, and this archive will not narrate a reason it does not have.

Eighty-one days had passed since the fire — eleven weeks and four days.

Later that year he moved the surviving boys across the state line to De Queen, in Sevier County, Arkansas.

Three hundred and fifty-six days

On June 7, 1939, Joseph Cecil Story — fourteen years old, the son who had testified at his mother's inquest — died of a gunshot at De Queen. It was reported as a hunting accident. The county attorney would later say publicly that more than a thousand dollars in insurance was collected on him.

That is the sequence, and the sequence is all it is: no charge was ever brought over Joe's death, and no court ever tested it.

Ten weeks after that, the thing that had not happened for a year happened. The Associated Press put it about as plainly as it can be put: Story was arrested at De Queen, Arkansas after neighborhood gossip called the attention of authorities to other tragic deaths in his family.

Not a detective. Not the coroner. Not a witness who came forward. The neighbours started counting.

The arrest was August 14, 1939 — three hundred and fifty-six days after the fire.

The airtight case

A week later County Attorney Bill Steger gave the Associated Press his figures.

Story had collected $2,460 on Ethel's own death — the wire called her his third wife — and more than $1,000 on each of his sons who had died. In today's money that is roughly fifty-five to fifty-eight thousand dollars, and about twenty-three thousand apiece.

Steger said he had an airtight case. The wire story adds — in the Associated Press writer's words, not the county attorney's — that after protracted grilling the sullen soap peddler held to his statement that his wife's death was just an accident.

On August 22 he pleaded not guilty, bearded and held without bond, before Justice Sparger — the same justice who had run the inquest a year earlier — to a charge of murdering his wife by locking her in a smokehouse and setting it on fire.

That was the State's public wording. The charging information quoted in the appellate opinion says something materially different: placing her in a certain outhouse. Locking and placing are two different crimes in a reader's ear, and both are in the record.

The justice who ran the inquest and the man who forced the door with an axe shared a surname. They were in all likelihood kin — in a town of eight thousand with a family that size that is arithmetic, not corruption, and it does not make the verdict crooked. Which Sparger carried that axe has never been established, and this archive does not name him.

Indiana, 1883

There is a reason the episode is called what it is called, and it starts fifty-five years earlier.

On June 16, 1883, on the Newcastle & Rushville railroad track about half a mile north of Rushville, Indiana, a day labourer named James M. Story shot a man named Joe Bever dead in a quarrel over a woman. John Oliver Story was two years old.

Whose pistol it was is contested and stays that way here: the local account says Story told the woman to take his own pistol out of his own hip pocket and then snatched it back from her; the Indianapolis wire says the gun belonged to Bever.

He fled under a two-hundred-dollar reward and was caught the next evening. In October he was convicted at Rushville and given sixteen years. On December 1 he was tried again at New Castle, in Henry County, apparently on a change of venue, and convicted of voluntary manslaughter — ten years. Both verdicts are on the record; ten years appears to be what he served.

In June 1890 his wife Lilly obtained a divorce at Rushville on the ground of his conviction for killing Joe Bever. Their son was nine.

He came out in early 1891. In April of that year he was back in the Rushville jail on a charge of criminal assault and procuring an abortion. Her name was Flora Carmichael. She had been raped twice at gunpoint and she was dying of the forced abortion. In June he was given fourteen years and a two-hundred-dollar fine — the same figure as the reward for catching him eight years before. His son was ten.

The boy who swore he was twenty-one

On October 28, 1898, in Jackson County, West Virginia, Clerk Geo. B. Crow wrote down what the couple in front of him said. John Oliver Story swore he was twenty-one years old, born in Rush County, Indiana, and living there.

He was seventeen. Twenty-one was the age of majority, and a seventeen-year-old needed a parent's consent — and his father was in prison.

He married Etta Louella Lockhart, nineteen, the next day — October 29 by the register, though his own sworn complaint two years later gave the date as November 2, and this file keeps both. Their son Charles was born in West Virginia about a year later. By June 1900 they had separated.

That summer the census taker found him back in Indiana — "Oliver," nineteen, a day labourer, married two years, living in his grandparents' rented house on Shiell Street in Rushville, with neither his wife nor his infant son. That his elderly grandparents were the ones raising him is documented for 1900 and a reasonable inference for the years before it. His father was in the penitentiary. His mother had divorced and remarried.

In August he filed for divorce in Rush Circuit Court, cause No. 8243, and asked for custody of his nine-month-old son. Etta was out of state, so the suit was set to be heard and determined in her absence.

Whether the divorce was ever granted is unknown — which leaves the question of what his later marriages legally were open rather than answered. The number of times he married is not settled either. The 1939 press said four. The family account says at least six. Five are named in this file, and no count is asserted.

The trial

He was tried in the District Court of Bryan County in October 1939, before Judge Roy Paul.

The defence moved for a change of venue on three affidavits from Durant citizens swearing to local prejudice. The county attorney answered with thirty saying there was none. Judge Paul denied the motion — and then drew the jury from a part of the county outside the city of Durant. The insurance figures had been in papers across the state since August.

Story testified in his own defence. He denied from the witness stand any knowledge of how his wife had got into the burning building, and said he had come home to find it ablaze and had tried to break in a door to save her.

Then a Frisco Railroad special detective, who was also a Bryan County deputy, testified that Story had admitted he was responsible for her death — and, asked whether anyone else was involved, had said there was not.

The jury visited the scene of the death, retired at four o'clock on the afternoon of October 12, and came back the next day, Friday, October 13. Guilty of murder. Punishment fixed at life imprisonment. He showed no reaction as it was read.

Judge Paul had instructed the jury that its choice, on conviction, was death or life imprisonment. Bill Steger — who had told the wire service two months earlier that his case was airtight — did not ask for death. Nothing in the record says why, and this file treats that as an open question rather than a solved one.

Judgment and sentence were entered on October 18, five days after the verdict. That is the date in all four appellate opinions, and the gap between the two is a correction the newspaper record forced on this file.

The rule that saved it from vanishing

The appeal was filed in April 1940 and decided on December 17, 1941. Affirmed.

The opinion records that Story was seen in close proximity and at the home just before the burning, was present while it burned, and made statements in the presence of others and to members of his family at the time of the fire — and that the evidence tended to show a motive for the crime. It never names the motive. None of the four opinions in this case ever names it.

What the court did say, and the reason any of this is still readable eighty-five years later, is this: an extrajudicial confession is not enough to convict a man without additional proof that the crime charged was actually committed. The corpus delicti here had been established independently, by circumstantial evidence, which is what made his statements admissible. They could not have convicted him on the confession alone — and they did not have to.

Lawyers kept citing that rule. That citation is the only reason this case was not lost completely. There is no book about it, no blog post, no podcast, and no indexed writing of any kind.

He went back three more times, in 1942, 1945 and 1947, and each time he filed alone, without a lawyer. Presiding Judge Barefoot wrote all four opinions. On the last one the court sent his papers over to the Pardon and Parole Board with an observation:

What became of them

Emma, who took out a licence with him eleven weeks after Ethel burned, followed him to the prison town and died at McAlester in June 1943.

Tommy and Roy, twelve and ten, were sent nine hundred miles to Akron, Ohio, to their mother's sister Callie Reid — entered on the 1940 census as nephews in the household of her husband, William L. Reid, a rubber worker. Tommy was twelve and in the third grade.

Bill, seventeen, was in McAlester itself in 1940, at 729 South C Street, living with his stepmother in the town where his father was serving life. He had finished the sixth grade and was not in school. Emma is entered as head of household and gives her marital status as single; the next line down calls Bill her stepson.

In June 1942 Bill registered for the draft at Newcastle, Wyoming. He was working at the Castle Cafe and had no telephone. On the line asking for the person who would always know his address, he named his father — in the Oklahoma State Penitentiary at McAlester.

On the night of May 23, 1952 he was found on a retaining wall on Kersey Coates Drive in Kansas City, about thirty feet below the dead end of Thirteenth Street, on the bluff above the rail yards. He had no identification but a social security card. The police said he had apparently fallen.

He gave his address, said he had fallen, and was reported in fair condition with a broken back. He died on May 25, aged twenty-nine, of a fractured spine and head injuries.

His body went unclaimed for ten days and was released to a college of osteopathy. John Oliver Story died at McAlester on September 13, 1952, aged seventy-one, thirteen years into his sentence — three months and nineteen days after his eldest son. He is buried in the prison cemetery, plot #141.

Tommy died in Ohio in 1970, Roy in Michigan in 1984. Both were Army veterans, both are buried under government headstones, and neither ever married. Callie Reid, the aunt who took the two of them in, died in 1987 at about ninety-eight, having outlived both boys she raised.

What the file still won't say

Whether the divorce in 1900 was granted, and therefore what his later marriages legally were. How many times he married. Where in Indiana he was born. Why the licence was taken out in Marshall County instead of his own. Why a county attorney holding what he called an airtight case did not ask for the death penalty. What the mark on Bill's death certificate was meant to be. Which of the three sons' deaths, if any, was what the neighbours were actually talking about.

And the two questions the officers asked for an inquest to answer in August 1938 — how she came to be inside that building, and how the fire started. A jury heard four witnesses, took a fourteen-year-old's guess about a thermos jug of wine, and returned accident. The court that convicted her husband thirteen months later never named his motive, and the county attorney who read the insurance figures to a wire service never had to prove them.

Ethel Story is somewhere in Highland Cemetery, in a plot nobody has been able to find.