Volume 17 , Issue 4

December 1909 Crime Is Yet Unsolved

One hundred and five years ago, in Palestine, Texas, the following article appeared on page two of the Palestine Daily Herald, in Palestine, Texas: "Crime Is Yet Unsolved." Mrs. Margaret Shotwell, aged seventy-two years, was brutally murdered in Winfield, Kansas.

Winfield, Kansas, Feb. 2 (1910) -- When the coroner's jury met February 3, 1910, to resume the taking of testimony it was hoped that something might be brought to light that would furnish a clue tot he murderer or murderers of Mrs. Margaret Shotwell, the aged woman whose tragic death shocked the entire section of Kansas a month before. The authorities had been totally at a loss in their efforts to unravel the crime.

It was on the morning of December 18, 1909, that Mrs. Shotwell, who was 72 years of age, was found lying dead on the floor of her room in a pool of blood. It was at first supposed that the woman had died of a hemorrhage of the lungs, but an investigation showed that her death was in all probability due to a wound in the head, caused apparently by some very sharp instrument such as an ice pick.

The fact that the woman had been murdered was kept secret until a week ago in order to give the officers a chance to conclude their investigations. When the details of the outrage were finally made public the entire community was aroused and reward was promptly offered for the arrest and conviction of the murderer.

The fact that the doors and windows were all locked on the inside seemed at first an insurmountable obstacle to the murder theory. A local locksmith made small instrument by which it was shown that a person could have unlocked the door from the outside and then gone out and locked it again after committing the deed.

That the murder was cold blooded and deliberate is evident from eh fact that small drops of blood who's that the woman was sitting on a chair near the stove when attacked and that the fiend must then have held her over the stove, so that at least a quart of blood dripped into the hearth or ash pan, and then carried her to the bedroom and dropped her on the floor, where she was found. From the disordered condition of the rooms robbery evidently furnished the motive for the murder.
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