Speaker 1: Welcome to the Great Detectives of Old Time Radio from Boyse, Idaho.
This is your host, Adam Graham. In a moment, we're
going to bring you this week's episode of The Big Story. First, though,
I want to encourage you if you're enjoying the podcast,
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We are nearing the end of our Columbo Killers in
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you can check that at amazing dot Great Detectives dot net.
But now, from April twenty fifth, nineteen fifty one, here
is more tragic than murder.
Speaker 2: The Big Story.
Speaker 3: Well, Missus Stone, mighty nice of you to come.
Speaker 4: I would miss it for the world. You'r Ma's birthday
and her being the oldest person in Seneca.
Speaker 3: How is she? I'll have to ask you not to
come in. Not that she's sick, of course, just a
little indus.
Speaker 4: Oh I'm sorry, Missus. Mayton sends regards of my daughter.
Bake these muffins.
Speaker 3: She'll be delighted and so sorry she can't see.
Speaker 4: You, and give her all our love. Ninety years.
Speaker 3: Oh, the poor dear soul. Well, that was nice of her,
specially to bring the muffins you like so much. Ma.
You have them later with your dinner. It's too bad
you can't enjoy the mother. They look mighty tasty. It's
a shame you've been dead these two and a half years.
Speaker 5: Hiawatha, Kansas. From the front pages of the Hiawatha, Kansas
Daily World comes the story of a small town reporter
who proved there are things more tragic in this world
than murder. Hiawatha, Kansas. The story is it actually happened,
Virgil Hills story as he lived.
Speaker 6: In your paper, Verge Hill.
Speaker 7: The Hiawatha Daily World services a community of maybe seven thousand,
two thousand and Hiawautha itself four thousand, scattered in surrounding
Brown County and the rest scattered in Niemaha County adjacent.
This is the Kansas corn Belt. And you write everything
that goes into the paper, from the leads, through the
golden wedding announcements, through the class of fine ads. And
all the big news there is a has been for
the past two months is the weather one hundred and two,
mine said one hundred and four. And bad jokes about
the weather and the corn crop, the humor of men
and desperation.
Speaker 8: Well, we ought to make a hundred bushels this year.
You're crazy corn a hundred bushels this year? Oh, I
didn't mean a hundred to the acre. I meant a
hundred to the county.
Speaker 7: And those two notes, the temperature and the bad corn,
choke a page one until like a sour hot wind,
the rumor of the story from Seneca, Nimaha County begins
coming in.
Speaker 8: I hear tell the old lady was going on ninety
and she had her laying there like that all the time.
Speaker 9: She kept her partly in the trunk and the rest
of her.
Speaker 7: I can't even talk about it. And since what happens
to anyone in a small town is known by everyone
almost before it happens, this incredible rumor of hideous murder
sends you Verge Hill and your Jalappi thirty miles from
Hiawatham to the beat up Seneca Courthouse and the tight
mouthed Sheriff of Seneca, Kansas, George Bama.
Speaker 10: I, Sheriff, I'm sorry, Hill, now I have nothing to say.
Speaker 11: Come on, Sheriff, after all these years, you can give
me a break.
Speaker 10: Cants now, Hill, The truth is, I don't know my
fact yet. That's the honest truth. Now, some I got
some I ain't. Murder is a pretty serious accusation to make,
and I ain't making it. And a murder charge against
a woman going on fifty five name erda Herkimer, Well,
now that's something I ain't ready to put in words
until I know. Just could I talk to her, Sheriff?
When I know you can see her, I'll make your promise,
H'll you'll be the first one. What not till I know?
Speaker 11: Well, how can I find out what happened?
Speaker 1: Now?
Speaker 6: Hell?
Speaker 10: You know how small town is seem as I do,
going out and mask and look, there ain't much way
to hide what's going on in a small town, now
is there.
Speaker 7: He's right, of course, to protect the woman if it's
just roma this hideous rumor you've heard, and doubly right
that you'll get your story by just walking around and
asking get more, probably than you boggain.
Speaker 4: For my youngster used to come to me and say, Ma,
you better go over to miss Herkimer's where she lives
with her mother and Seey.
Speaker 11: So you went over missus Stone.
Speaker 4: I went over there once the youngster Miami said. It
only happened at night. And I've seen her walking out
in a white nightgown with the moon shining down on her,
walking around in the back of the house, outside the
ship just behind the house, five times in a circle,
walking around, and then just stood stockstill and talked. She
wasn't talking to no gard in the sky. He was
talking to the devil underfoot.
Speaker 11: Or what do you think she did, mister Stone.
Speaker 4: I've known them both, miss Herkimer and her mother going
on to forty years. She killed her ma. That's what
she done, killed her mother, As God is my witness.
Speaker 7: With minor variations in the horror, the townfolk tell the
same story. And now you go out to the house itself,
which stands as some of the townfolk are described as Herkimer,
like some evil thing against the sky, a house of horror, impenetrable.
Two gods from the Sheriff's office planted there like trees.
I'm not admitting anyone just an unpainted black frame house
shades drawn, a building of mourning, like some evil thing
apart from everything else in this ordinary Kansas landscape. So
back you go to the sheriff's office.
Speaker 11: Now, look sheriff, it's been f I have six hours.
Now you've got to tell me something.
Speaker 10: Well, I'm as good as my promise.
Speaker 11: You mean I can see her?
Speaker 10: No, I don't mean that. I said i'd let you.
You're not it. Now I'm going out the house. And
since I got to take one reporter man with me,
you can be that one.
Speaker 11: You said you were gonna let me see her.
Speaker 10: I said, when I knew something, i'd give you a break.
Speaker 11: What are you so touchy about?
Speaker 10: Well, just come on and you'll see.
Speaker 7: The house stands alone on the outskirts of town. Black
as before, but now that you're close, you see it's
the black of dirt, the black of unpainted wood, the
decay of decades. And the first thing that strikes you
is the odor. There are two rooms apart from the
small kitchen. The first has a death life veil over it,
a mustiness, a moist, musty, untouchable feeling. And only then
do you discover what it is.
Speaker 2: Cats and the canary.
Speaker 10: And look at that floor.
Speaker 7: Almost unconsciously you reach down and touch it.
Speaker 11: Cat fur and canary feathers must have been laying here
for years.
Speaker 7: A carpet, perhaps an inch thick of fur and feathers,
blackened now with grime, blanketed the floor. Lay on the bed,
the double unmade bed, the broken dresser, the ancient pitcher,
and stand the ancient chair, the ancient clothes laid out
as for a birthday, a birthday party, with an inch
layer of feathers and fur overall, and in the midst
of the room on a chair.
Speaker 11: A birthday cake. Happy birthday, mother, dear on your ninetieth birthday.
Speaker 7: The second room is almost no room. No window can
be seen, no walls discerned, no furniture, merely an accumulation
of years of packages arrived and mostly unopened.
Speaker 10: So, Lisita, how do I know? See for yourself a
dozen house dresses, about two dozen bonnets here, six.
Speaker 11: Say, ten pairs of slippers never used.
Speaker 10: About forty cans came mile.
Speaker 11: T Asbury jam whomade, Preserve brand slips shoes Mary Sea
must be half a case of birthday candle. Sheriff, did
you notice, Yes, I saw they're all addressed to her mother,
missus letty herkimerle addressed to the.
Speaker 10: Mother, and all unopened.
Speaker 7: You'll breathe in deeply of the fresh in the six
feet that separates the house from the shed. But if
the air in the house was moist and dank, and
somehow more of it, what can.
Speaker 6: You say about the shed? Just where?
Speaker 10: She said it would be in the trunk.
Speaker 11: But my wood, she must have been laying in here.
Speaker 10: Too, And I half fears was that the hope?
Speaker 11: I mean, it's everything there?
Speaker 10: I mean, no, no, she said, look around the shed
near the trunk, and then she said, you'll find Let's
go back, she said, after you've seen it, ittle be
easier to talk. She says, she wants to confess.
Speaker 11: I should think, so I should think in any kind
of a decent world, she would.
Speaker 12: A This is Cy Harris, returning you to your narrator
and the big story of Virgil Hill as he lived
it and wrote it.
Speaker 7: The temperature outside is one hundred and one, but inside
the cell it must be about one hundred and ten.
And she sits only a part of her face and
little wisps of hair visible. She sits under a huge
blanket shivering. It's Edgar Allan Poe and all the horror
stories you've ever read rolled into one soft spoken, thin,
incredible voice.
Speaker 3: I killed my mo and I gotta die.
Speaker 7: Five gaudy rings are on her fingers. She twists them
with trembling hands as she.
Speaker 13: Took I'm fifty five. Mother was just thirty five years older,
and her last year she wasn't well. There were times
I thought she was losing her mind.
Speaker 7: There's nothing to say. And you and Sheriff Bama, the
only two in the humid room, don't realize that you
stand there shivring as well, expectant, intense feeling. No matter
what is said, it cannot possibly be out of place.
Speaker 3: I thought those things because those were the things she liked.
The came a mild tea and the raspberry jem, the
homemade preserved brand, and the slippers without the heels, and
the canary seed. Always be sure there's enough to feed
the birds, Etta, she said.
Speaker 7: The gold watch ticks on her throat and its tiny
sound is enormous against her pauses.
Speaker 3: After a while, she was on the bed for a
long time. I put her in the trunk, but she
didn't entirely fit. Why should I talk about it? I
told you what I did. I killed my mother. I
killed her. I gotta die, I gotta die. Why do
you keep me waiting? Only just promise me one thing
when I go, that I have a grave pleace next
to hers.
Speaker 7: Everything she says is thoroughly and completely believable, and yet
not really so. She was devoted that you know? Then,
how could she have killed her?
Speaker 6: This was a small.
Speaker 7: Town, smaller even than Hiawatha. How could she have kept
hidden for so long? The fact of death, of murder
of a body kept two and a half years in
a shed. Weird yes, hideous, yes, But something else, something more,
And that sends you out of the stifling room and
under the quiet Kansas town. First to the postman, the
man who brought her daily mail, the man who first
discovered it.
Speaker 14: Queer always knew she was Queer, her and her mother.
But then I began to get my suspicions.
Speaker 11: Why was that?
Speaker 14: Well? She her mother, missus herkamilad is. She was a
widow from the Civil War. She was one of the
few in the county as gets the Civil War pension.
So I always made a fuss deliver it.
Speaker 1: You know what I mean?
Speaker 14: Yeah, yeah, Well you gotta sign for that pension the
check that is the party getting it, that.
Speaker 7: Is for her.
Speaker 14: That is well, I would bring it and generally she'd
sign it, but starting a while back, mama's too sick now,
mister Hilliard. Mama's laying down. Now, mister Hilliard, you just
leave it and when you come back next time, I'll
have it signed for you. And sure enough it would be.
Speaker 11: You mean she gave out her mother was a lie
in order to cast the pension check.
Speaker 14: Could be there's a lot of money in the check,
like how much twenty two dollars and seventy five cents.
Speaker 11: She'd always come and buy her groceries in general merchandise here.
Speaker 15: That's right, never went nowheares else, matter of fact, nearest
teller general stores over mile away.
Speaker 11: Well then what did she buy?
Speaker 15: Well, she was to buy that cameramele tea. You'd say,
you keep a good stock of that camera male tea,
because that's kind my mother likes.
Speaker 10: And I thirty eight house dress couldn't keep enough.
Speaker 15: I had thirty eight house dresses for her and jam
nothing but raspberry and strawberry preserves kept saying as how
our ma wouldn't need no other jam. Imagine that poor
old lady laying dead there for two and a half years.
Speaker 7: Why why had she maintained this fantastic, this elaborate pretense.
So the twenty two seventy five a month, so folks
would in gossip.
Speaker 11: It doesn't that up.
Speaker 7: Why there was something about a fire in the house.
Check the fireman, the fire chief.
Speaker 15: Well it was going on last January. I guess she
had a neighbor call me up. She didn't have no phone,
says there's a fire in the house. Well, I go
in there, and have you ever been in there?
Speaker 11: Yeah, I've been in there. Well, it's a wonder to me.
Speaker 15: The whole place didn't go up like that, all those
feathers and dust around. Well, there was this truck and
it got sensed, and she says to me, would you
please take it out into the shed? I says yes, ma'am.
She says, on account of something very precious of mother's
is inside.
Speaker 11: That's what she said. That's right. See what was inside?
Don't you know? No, blone, just tell me one thing.
Where was the trunk when you moved it?
Speaker 15: Let me see? Oh, laying at the foot of the bed. Hey,
what was in it?
Speaker 7: The next there's an item in the paper inserted two
days before the confession. This item ran in the Seneca paper.
Speaker 11: Next Sunday will be the ninetieth birthday of missus Letty Herkimer.
Her friends are invited to send her a postcard shower.
Missus Herkimer is unable to walk, but sits up each
day in her chair and eats all their meals with
her daughter.
Speaker 7: And the next day the following announcement inserted in the
same paper.
Speaker 11: Missus Leeddy Herkimer, who was ninety yesterday, received many postcards
and other gifts, including a bouquet, two homemade cakes, and
her favorite brand of strawberry preserves and muffins. Missus Herkimer
was great lately pleased. Thanks all her friends. You were
the last person to call it her home.
Speaker 4: Missus Stone, well, when she told me that the poor
soul wasn't fit to receive people, wasn't feeling up to it,
she said, I walked away, but I kind of walked
back and looked in and I saw her Ella that is,
standing in the shed and talking with a cup of
tea in her hand. To the trunk. Well, I said
to myself, Oh, the poor souls lost her mind entirely.
Speaker 11: What did you do?
Speaker 3: Well?
Speaker 4: I ran back quick as I could, you can be sure,
and I got the sheriff and we both came back,
and not too soon either, because there she was with
a bottle half to her lips already, and the sheriff
ran in and took it away from her, and it
was a half pint of chloroform. She was trying to
do away with herself.
Speaker 7: Why why a woman kills her mother, keeps the body
in the house for two and a half years? Why
is clothing for her shoes?
Speaker 6: Canary?
Speaker 7: See insert's notices and the paper thanks guests for calling
not only the lie, but the extent of the lie.
Why And so you go back to the house to find,
if possible, the answer, And there on the bed, under
the pillow, you'll find scraps of paper written on the pencil,
bound together with a rusty safety pin, a diary, something
not even an Edgar Allan Poe would ever have dreamed up.
And then back to ourselves, why.
Speaker 3: Do you torture me? Why do you keep me waiting?
I said, I killed her, and I've got to die
why why.
Speaker 11: Let me read you something. Mother is so sick, poor mother.
Her pain is terrible. Mother is so sick. If only
something happens, please let it happen.
Speaker 3: Yes, she was, She suffered, so I prayed that it
would come quick. But it didn't.
Speaker 11: Last night I put mother to bed at about eleven o'clock,
but she couldn't sleep, and she said she was frightened.
And she said, Darling, stay with me to night. I'm frightened.
Speaker 3: Yes, she was very frightened.
Speaker 11: I said, Mother, I've not slept in so long. Let
me into the other room to sleep.
Speaker 3: Yes, that's right, that's what I said.
Speaker 11: And then about twelve I looked in to see how
she was, and she was sleeping on her left side,
and the doctor said she shouldn't sleep on her left side.
And I said to myself, if I don't turn her over,
maybe she'll maybe the pain will go away, maybe she
won't ever have pain again.
Speaker 3: But I didn't go in and turn her over. I
let her lay like that, and it killed her.
Speaker 11: But it didn't. It didn't miss Herkimer. I spoke to
the doctor. I spoke to more than one doctor. They
all said it didn't make any difference. Which side she
lay on, she had come to her natural end.
Speaker 3: I killed her. I left her like that, and I
killed her.
Speaker 11: And the reason you signed the checks with her name
was to get the money for her things she'd have wanted,
just things your mother would want. Yes, yes, you never
spend any of the money for yourself, but only on
things that's your wanted.
Speaker 3: That's right. Never said.
Speaker 11: And then when you started it pretending that she was
still alive, you couldn't stop. And at night you used
to walk out at night because you didn't want to
leave your mother alone in the shed. Isn't that right? Yes? Yes,
And you talked to her, You told her what you
were going to get for her, and you did it
because it was the only way you knew to make
up to her, because you thought you killed her.
Speaker 3: As God is my witness, that's the truth.
Speaker 11: Miss Herkimer. You didn't kill anyone. Your mother died a
natural death, and all you did was act that way
because your conscience bothered you so because you felt you
neglected her. You hadn't. You didn't kill anyone. I didn't
know you didn't kill anyone.
Speaker 3: What you say is the truth. If only I had
been able to say it. I wouldn't have had to
do what I did, would I. No, you wouldn't, young man.
I'm sorry for all the trouble I've caused you and
the others. I only hope the people in Seneca won't
go on saying what they're saying about me now that
I'm a horror woman.
Speaker 11: I hope they won't.
Speaker 3: And if I had known you were going to be
so nice, I would have made you a cup of
tea and put on my shoes.
Speaker 7: And only then you notice looking down that she's been
sitting there with a blanket around her thin, emaciated body
and her feet. There's the day she was born.
Speaker 5: Now we read you that telegram from Virgil Hill of Ohiowa,
the Kansas Daily World.
Speaker 11: Edda Herkimer, a broken woman when released rejected by her townspeople,
was never able to live down her reputation as a
horror woman. She died broken hearted, a little less than
four years.
Speaker 16: Later, and so ends another Big Story.
Speaker 17: In order to protect the names of people actually involved
into Night's authentic Big Story, the names of all characters
and the dramatization were changed, with the exception of the
newspaper reporter, This is the United States Armed Forces Radio Service,
the Voice of Information and Education.
Speaker 1: Welcome back. Here is the cast list again. We're going
from archive dot org and the original script pages posted
by the old time radio researchers. And starred as Virgil
was Bill Lipton and also in the cast Agnes Young,
ethel Owen, James Stevens, Bill Smith, Charles Eggleston, Bill Griffiths,
and Jason Johnson. There is no stories behind the Big
Story details on this case other than that the details
have been located and will be updated soon. But it's
not been added, and this would be a tricky story
to track down. You would probably have to go to
a physical location. I was able to find some of
these on newspapers dot com, but The Big Story didn't
take the position that these type of stories necessarily have
to come from lord cities. How Watha is and was
actually the big town in brown Own County, Kansas. Three thousand,
two hundred and ninety four people that lived there in
nineteen fifty and the number is pretty much the same today,
although the population did peak after the nineteen eighty census.
Seneca is also a small town in Kansas. Population in
nineteen fifty was under two thousand, and now it's slightly
above two thousand. The Wikipedia pays for Seneca boast that
it once had a baseball team, a Class D minor
league team that played a single season in nineteen ten
and had no team nickname, and there have been no
team since. So for a series that featured stories about
Dorothy Kilgaron, and this is about as rural a story
as you'll get in old time radio, and it's a
very different story. There's a definite mental health angle that
would be focused on a lot today.
Speaker 10: But this also.
Speaker 1: Gives us another side of small towns. I think that
there was back then, and to a degree still is now,
a bit of an aura around small towns of representing
this sort of innocence and the idea that they represent
real community, a place where everyone knows everyone else. And
I think that is true of quite a few small
towns in America, but not every small town. I've lived
in small towns where everything was very cliquish, and there
are also some weird small towns, and this gives us
a perspective of what life can be like in a
small town when you're kind of on the front of
the town. People know of you, but they don't really
know you, and so they'll do things that are social nasties,
like bringing a birthday present. They don't really look closer.
You know, it's a cliche. You can't hide anything in
a small town, and you just have to say, Okay,
this lady, not even a professional criminal or somebody particularly sneaky,
hit a dead body for two and a half years now.
I do not want to offend any rural listeners. I
am in no way anti small town. What I am saying, though,
is the size of the population doesn't determine whether it's
a good place to live. It depends very much on
the individual in question and the way that the community operates. Well,
now it's time to thank our Patreon supporter of the day.
Thank you so much to Stewart, Patreon supporter since November
twenty twenty two, currently supporting the podcast at the shawmus
level of four dollars or more per month. Thanks so
much for your support, Stuart, and that'll do it for today.
If you're enjoying the podcast, please follow us using your
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the podcast wherever you download it from. We'll be back
next Tuesday with another episode of The Big story. But
join us back here tomorrow for broadways my beat where.
Speaker 18: Except what I told I see it might have take place.
I reported common decency.
Speaker 19: I figured what you call it murder took place over
a week ago.
Speaker 11: How come it took you so long to give in
to the call of decency.
Speaker 18: You've got to point them, mister clo. Tell me see
if I can explain it to try hard with all
my money. I was a bookie, was like, I told you, you
told me, look, let me readcap it hunh. So maybe
it'll make sense to you. It takes me a week
plus to confess I saw a man push another man
off a roof.
Speaker 19: You were a book You take it from there.
Speaker 18: Yeah, a book, I'd tell you. Boys came up with
a thing to trotle, initiative, dull, a pioneer impulse of it.
So I pitted my brain against society. Try to come
up with a respectable die to earn my nut, waffles
and juice. But my mind has been in such a
tight rep with twelve years of making books.
Speaker 9: All I can come up with is buglery.
Speaker 19: That's when you saw it happen when you were robbing
an apartment in the east thirties.
Speaker 18: You got a woman says I robbed. I didn't I
tell you this murder made such an impact.
Speaker 9: On my conscience. I didn't rob and I never will.
Speaker 19: According to our books, what you saw was a suicide
suicide of a man named John Elgin.
Speaker 9: Her books can be mistaken as me.
Speaker 19: I know you could identify the man if we found him.
The man you say porstealgient off the roof, the man
you say is a murderer.
Speaker 9: Identify him.
Speaker 18: I would draw my eyes into slits, pretend I was
in the emotional tumboil of over a week ago, witnessing
event from a fire escape across the airway, and I
would try to identify him.
Speaker 9: You find him, and I sure would try. But I
make no promises.
Speaker 19: Yeah, ask your pardon, mistery. It's okay, But for one,
I didn't let you finish telling me why it took
you this long to come.
Speaker 11: To us with what you saw.
Speaker 7: Forgetted kid.
Speaker 1: Hope you'll be with us then in the meantime. Send
your comments to Box thirteen at Great Detectives dot net,
follow us on Twitter at Radio Detectives, and check us
out on Instagram, Instagram, dot com, slash Great detectives from Boise, Idaho.
This is your host, Adam graham Son and off.