I'm Kate Winkler Dawson. I'm a journalist who's spent the last twenty five years writing about true crime.
And I'm Paul Hols, a retired cold case investigator who's worked some of America's most complicated cases and solve them.
Each week, I present Paul with one of history's most compelling true crimes.
And I weigh in using modern forensic techniques to bring new insights to old mysteries.
Together, using our individual expertise, we're examining historical true crime cases through a twenty first century lens.
Some are solved and some are cold, very cold.
This is buried Bones.
Hey Paul, Hey Kate, how's it going.
It's going well. Normally we have lots of fun shit chat, but I think we're just going to jump right into this story. What do you think?
Okay, let's do it.
We are in late eighteen hundreds and we're going to be in Iowa and I have never been to Iowa, but I would love to go to Iowa. Have you been to Iowa? Are their murderers in Iowa?
Yeah? I actually did a case in Iowa. Was Williamsburg double homicide of a couple at a holiday inn. They were hatcheted to death in their bed. Oh my gosh, horrible, horrible case. And this was the very first episode of my TV show, The DNA of Murder. And I'm confident that two other cases, one in Illinois and one down in Mississippi, or I think it's Mississippi where there are two single men hatcheted to death in their hotel rooms. I'm confident it's the same offender and pretty confident I
know who that offender is. Just haven't been able to get the evidence to prove the case.
We talk about that all the time with you, where you end up feeling like you have such a strong feeling about it and then there's just not enough evidence. We talked about that with the Golden State killer case too, where you were, you know, you were leaning towards a suspect, and then when the DNA comes back, it doesn't match. So I know how frustrating that can be for you.
It is, but I better pull out a notepad here and start taking notes as you as you tell me about this eighteen hundreds case in Iowa.
Time to head to Iowa. Okay, let's go ahead and set the scene. The center of this story is the Elkins family and they are in Elk Township, which is in northeast Iowa. And they are a farming family, very typical farming family. We're in eighteen eighty nine, summertime, eighteen eighty nine, very rural, and this is our stomping ground eighteen Yes, can you believe you're I've I've been saying this about you. Your stomping ground is eighteen hundreds, rural community.
This is where these are our bread and butter stories. I feel like, don't you feel like we come to these stories sometimes.
They do seem to come up quite a bit, you know. And I think part of it though, is kind of the lack of density with the residents. So, you know, offenders recognize that they have space in order to commit the crimes and relatively low risk for witnesses to see them.
I think that's true. And you know, we end up with very few witnesses. We have some ear witnesses sometimes, but these cases can be pretty frustrating. Okay, well let's get into this one. So this is a very quiet part of the Midwest, as we said before, and this is the morning of Wednesday, July seventeenth, and something really unsettling happens to a farmer who knows the Elkins family. So that morning he sees it's a guy named John Porter, and he sees an eleven year old local boy who
is one of the members of the Elkins family. His name is John Wesley Elkins. His dad's name is John, and he goes by Wesley. So he is driving his family's horse drawn buggy and he's heading down a nearby dirt road totally covered in blood. The driving the buggy part is an alarming at first, I thought, you know, knee jerky action is an eleven year old out there driving on a country road. They absolutely would have known how, of course, how to drive a horse and buggy. He's
down there driving this horse and buggy. He's covered in blood. As Wesley gets closer to John Porter, the neighbor, John can also see that Wesley has a companion. It's his one year old half sister whose name is Nelly, and she's lying on the seat beside him, so she seems to be fine. He is covered in blood and really having a difficult time. He slows down the horse and buggy and John Porter says what's happening, and Wesley says that somebody broke into the family's house and shot his
father John and pounded to death his stepmother Hattie. Okay, so Wesley was on his way with his little sister to his grandfather's house to get help. So there's a lot to unpack here already. You don't have very much information, I know, but just this scene must have been terrifying. Of this little boy covered in blood. He's a small kid. I'll show you a picture of him later. He survives this attack along with his one year old, and he has the presence of mind to take her, put her
in this horse and buggy and get to safety. So that's where we are at this point.
And no other siblings inside the house. This is the entirety of the family, the two kids and the parents. Okay, yep.
Eleven year old, a one year old, and then the parents. So you know this is alarming of course, to John Porter and an intruder. He's very specific, right, I mean, he's saying he shot his dad and then he said that the intruder pounded his stepmother to death. So this is very upsetting, of course, and I think would have been even more unusual than you would think in this area of the Midwest. So you know, do you want to continue or do you have any other thoughts on that?
Well, you know, this description of Wesley being covered in blood, you know, that's the term that's often used. And of course, from my vantage point is I want to see, you know, how much blood, what kinds of patterns are present, you know, under the circumstances as you've told him up to now I'm wondering, well, why does Wesley have any blood on him? It was he close to his step mom when she's being bludgeoned. Absolutely, you know you can get blood spatter
coming up onto the kid. Can you imagine how traumatic this would be for an eleven year old boy? You know, of course you indicate that the dad, John Senior, is shot. You know what is he shot with? If he's just shot, let's say, with a handgun in the chest, that's really not a very bloody scene at all, Versus was he shot in the head with a shotgun? And then now you can see where could have a lot of his father's blood on him? Or after his parents are killed,
does Wesley go up and interact with their bodies? Mom? Are you okay? Something like that? And now he's getting blood on himself, and at this point in time, we don't know if Wesley himself has any bleeding injuries. Obviously I need more information, but right now I'm starting to just kind of figure out the dynamic space on what you've told me.
There's a lot more information to come. So John Porter, the neighbor the farmer, gets his adult son and they go to the Elkins home. So they make sure that Wesley and his one year old sister are secured, and they decide they're going to go to the house, which seems like a scary idea to me, but you know what, they need to go investigate. I guess they find Wesley's parents,
just as he said, they're dead in the bedroom. John sends his son to go to the police, and this is what the police eventually find and what John Porter finds. There is John Wesley, Sr. Who is forty three. He is lying on his bed with his head resting on his pillow, and he has been shot once through the left eye. It also looks right now that he's been beaten with some sort of blunt instrument on the left side of his head and on his forehead. Okay, so
we have a good source book that Marin used. It was a woman named Patricia Bryan and her co author Thomas Wolfe, wrote a book called The Plea. In the book, they described his face as destroyed. So it sounds like badly beaten, but right, I mean, we need to know more about the gun to see gosh through his eye. I mean that is just always so gruesome to me.
Is that someone who intentionally did that or missed or when you see that kind of an injury, what does that usually mean the person was the victim was moving around?
No, you know, there's the evaluation of the distance that the gun was at the time of the shot. If it is a more distant shot, did the sh shooter truly intended to shoot through the eye or it's just generally shooting at the at the head and it just
happed the bullet happened to pass through the eye. However, if you have let's say a very close range shot, now you've got let's say stippling from gunpowder, or you have sooting or or even depending on the caliber of the weapon, you can even get gases going into the skull space the orbital space, and now you can get rupture of the skin showing it's a contact wound. Now, if that is what's going on, then yes, I would say the offender, the shooter intentionally shot John through the eye.
So right now, absent that type of information, it's at this point, it's just the shot went through his his left eye. Of course, I'm very interested in the bludgeting because you know what what weapon was used to bludgeon John as he laid there. It sounds like he's asleep and possibly never even realized that he was about to die.
Let me tell you about the other body, which would be Hattie. So she was twenty three, twenty years younger than her husband, his second wife. John's body is partially covered by Hattie's body. So in this book the plea she's described as this is an interesting description, bent backward across the bed in an unnatural position with her face toward the ceiling and her feet on the floor. She had been beaten so violently with this blunt object that her skull and her jawbone were broken, and the backs
of her legs are severely bruised. And then I have information about blood throughout the room. But those are the two things about the victims. So what do you think about that she's kind of laying on top of him.
It sounds like well, the position of her body being on top of her husband, John could suggest a sequence in terms of who was attacked first. And of course, an offender recognizing that there's a male likely is going to go out after the biggest threat first. Patty's position is she also asleep and as her husband is, there's a gunshot. She wakes up. Her husband's getting beat by this guy, and now she's trying to get off the bed, and now the offender turns his attention onto her, and
then ultimately she collapses backwards onto John. I mean, I think that's one possible scenario, but there's many possible scenarios. At this point. This is where now the blood patterns, her actual injuries. Taking a look at things within the bedroom itself can help inform sort of the sequence of how these victims were attacked. And I'm sure you're going to give me more information coming up.
So this is the scene. The rest of the scene in this bedroom, there is blood spatter on the walls and the ceiling pool, blood in the bed sheets and nearby on the floor, and there are small footprints we find out later it's Wesley's footprints because he ran up to see what was going on. He had beer feet that led from the bodies to another bedroom in the house.
So the bed in the second bedroom is unmade, and there are spots of blood in its sheets, and at the foot of the bed there is a single barrel rifle which is determined to be one of the murder weapons, and it belongs to the family and it's usually stored in a bedroom where it hangs on the wall. So anybody who's been in this house would have seen this gun there, or I suppose somebody there looking to rob the house could have seen this gun inexplicably on the wall.
Using them as a weapon seems odd to me. But what do you think about that?
I just I need to clarify. You have the second bedroom, which it doesn't appear that anybody had slept in that.
Bed, right, I don't think so?
Yeah? And what kind of blood staining was seen? That? Is it blood drips that was leading from the homicide room into the second bedroom.
Yes, So there are the footprints that we are later determining our belong to Wesley, that go from the bodies to another bedroom in the house. Where we presume the little girl was, so he was probably checking on her. Then the bed in this second room is unmade, so nobody's slept in there, and there are spots of blood in its sheets, and at the foot of the bed is the rifle. Okay, so no action in that second bedroom. It sounds like a little bit of blood.
So there's also sequence information. You said the rifle is the weapon used to shoot John. They confirmed this, probably through some sort of ballistic analysis, I imagine for the late eighteen hundreds. The blood drips, Now, this could be the offender. I don't know what kind of weapon was
used to do the bludgeoning. Does the offender himself get injured as a result of bludgeoning, because sometimes you're holding on to a victim with your off hand and you're using your other hand to beat that victim, and now you're hitting your own hand, and now you have lacerations that could cause bleeding. So when the offender moves to the second bedroom and dumps the rifle there, you know,
might be the offender's dripped blood. Could it be Wesley, You know, Wesley is at this point, I'm not going to say I have any suspicions of Wesley at this point. But you know, I just want to put that out there. He's an eleven year old boy. You know, he can shoot a rifle. But I have a hard time seeing him beating his mother, you know, being able to physically overpower her, unless he's a very robust eleven year old boy,
right if she's trying to fight back. But Wesley's movements are a form of post offense crime scene contamination that we have to take into account. And so is Wesley bringing some blood into the second bedroom as he's moving through the house. So but right now, that's kind of it's interesting that the offenders going into the second bedroom and is using the family's own rifle in the shooting of the father.
And I can identify the weapon that was used to bludgeon the parents to death. So I'm going to show it to you because I've never heard of this before. So the police are searching, they're trying to find this blunt object. They think they found it. It's a wooden German flail which is used to thresh grain and has hairs and dry blood on it, so they think this is the weapon. I have a photo of what it probably looked like but let me just tell you. It's
about two feet long and about three inches wide. And they found it hidden under grass about twenty feet from the home's back entrance. So somebody hid it. So the killer or killers didn't hide the rifle, but did hide this object. And so I can I can you want to show you that photo or what do you think?
Absolutely no, this is not a fool.
If this isn't good enough for you, Paul Holes, then I will find a different photo, but it better be good enough. Okay, there it is. Now that's not a very it doesn't show the full thing, but I mean, is that clear enough for you?
Okay, that's interesting. So in this photograph, yeah, this is very different than what I was expecting. It appears that there are two wooden I'm not sure i'd call them handles.
Like rods, right, we're right, Yeah.
I think rod is a good descriptor. So two wooden rods that are joined together at one end with what appears to be leather strapping that has been secured to each of these rods. Now, I'm not sure how this weapon is. I mean, in some ways, it's it almost approximates you know, your your numb chucks for martial arts, just like a very very old style. I don't know how that's actually used in the threshing operation, but the
offender could use this a variety of ways. He could be holding on to both rods at the same time and it's now just a singular object in some ways being used to bludgeon the parents. Or he could be holding just one rod more like your numb chuck style, and now whipping that second rod, which of course would generate a tremendous amount of velocity. The injuries to the you know, the parents would possibly be able to demonstrate how the offender held this weapon, the fact that they're
finding blood and hair adhering to this. I mean, from my perspective, there's no question that this was the bludgeting weapon.
Why would you use two different weapons? You've got one shot. We're assuming whoever this is tried to take down John first because he's the male. He shoots him through the eye, so why then not shoot Hattie? Or is it this is improvising? I mean, what would have happened here?
Well, first, right now we don't know based on the information. The exact sequence was John initially beat unconscious, and possibly killed, and then the offender found the rifle and decided I needed to shoot him in order to finish him off. But I think another possibility is the offender shoots John and starts to beat him, and now Patty is either trying to escape or is coming to her husband's rescue. Now the offender a rifle is horrible for close quarters combat.
I mean you could see where Let's say the offender shoots John, Patty wakes up and now she's grabbing the rifle and she's now struggling with the offender over the rifle. And right now, I'm just going to assume single offender, this offender has this bludgeoning weapon, this flail, that he has to turn to to start beating Paddy off and then ultimately killing her with the flail. So I think
that that's another possible scenario. Of course, now if we add a second offender into the mix, then we have different dynamics going on.
Well, let me tell you how this investigation goes. There is a coroner's inquest, and Wesley's call up first because he's the only witness. So I'll tell you. I'll lay out what he says happened. He says that on Tuesday night, so the night before, hours before John and Hattie were killed, Wesley had eaten dinner and then his dad told him, don't sleep in the house tonight. You need to sleep in the barn. Wesley was actually happy to do it because it was, you know, late July.
Was this a form of punishment or was this just getting him out of the house for one reason or another? Right?
I think it was an eleven year old boy, you know, let's get out of the house because you know they have a one year old there who probably has trouble sleeping. It didn't seem like a form of punishment, no, And Wesley was happy to do it because he said the barn was a lot cooler at night than being in that house. This is not a massive house. So around eight o'clock that night he heads out to the barn, and the barn is about two hundred and fifty feet
from the house. Should Wesley be able to hear things that are happening, like the sound of a rifle going off or he says later on, he heard a scream? But is this is this? Should can he be an ear witness in this case? Do you think?
Well? I would say, you know, with the gunshot, you know most certainly within two hundred and fifty feet, if you know it's you don't have a storm going on, or it's successively windy. I mean that that type of sound carries a great distance. You know, I always having played sports growing up, you know, when you start talking about these these distances, I kind of relate these distances
to the various sporting activities I've been in. And of course, two hundred and fifty feet, you know, that's close to three hundred feet, which is the length of a football field. Okay, so you know two hundred fifty feet. I mean it is a good distance, but it's not you know, something in which you know, if if a woman were to scream, that scream would fall off before somebody that distance away would would hear it. So you know, then we have you know the structures, right, you have the house where
the homicide occurred. You've got Wesley who is in a barn. You know that's going to impact the acoustics. So it's hard to say if he sure would be an ear witness, but yeah, you know, I mean he's I probably wouldn't let my eleven year old son be sleeping out in a barn, you know, two hundred fifty feet away from me, but different time, different era.
So what Wesley says is that he went to sleep, it was nice and cool. He woke up in the middle of the night after hearing what he described as a woman's scream, so this would be his stepmother Hattie. He was petrified, as any eleven year old would be, and he waited. He thought about thirty minutes before he decided to go ahead and check in on the family. He walks over to the house and that's when he sees his parents dead, and that's why his footprints are
in the blood. He says that his little sister, Nelly was in the bed with his parents, and he said she was just wailing, crying as hard as she could, covered in their blood, but that she was not He checked and she was not physically harmed, and later on the doctor said she wasn't harmed. He said that he picked her up and he took her to the second bedroom and he lit the lamp on the nearby chest,
and then he changed her into some clean clothes. I don't know what kind of like, you know, caretaking mode he locked into, but I think that's the explanation for the bits of blood. And that's his bedroom, and that's why the bed was unmade is because he was in the barn. He never slept in that bed. So I'm just trying to help you a little bit with the sequence of why things seemed to be kind of laying
out the way they are. He said that he looked at the clock and it was about three thirty and that's when he decided to go ahead and take the horse and buggy and go find help. And he drove a long way and then he ran into John Porter, and then we know the rest of the story.
Okay, So if Wesley is telling the truth, then what I mentioned before this post offense crime scene contamination, his movements. He's basically detailing movements that are accounting for this blood evidence. It's interesting that did he make a statement that he found the rifle in the homicide room and moved the rifle into his bedroom.
He does not say anything about the rifle, and that could have been just sort of like it got lost in the notes, or he doesn't address it at all. I think he was just so much more maybe he didn't even notice it. He was so traumatized by seeing this bloody scene and trying to deal with his little sister who's screaming. You know, I don't know he didn't notice it.
So him hearing Patty scream that at least tells me that Patty became aware that there was an attack underway, whether it was she screaming when she's being attacked or she's screaming when she's seeing her husband being killed in the bed. So there's a little bit of information there. It appears that John is killed right away, He's taken out, and then the offender and Patty are interacting. She screams. Wesley hears that scream. You know, I just have concerns
about the location of the rifle in Wesley's bedroom. You know that one is that's bugging me a little bit. You know, why is the offender going in there. Let's say this is an outside intruder is checking to see is Wesley in his bed and then seeing where is Wesley and then runs off you Wesley at the same time, And again I'm struggling with Wesley's age to be capable of committing this crime. But what he's his movement patterns, he's putting himself inside the homicide room and he's going
into his bedroom. He's going to wear the murder One of the murder weapons is left behind. And do we know the flail was that from the family property as well?
It sounds like it was, Yeah, it was. It was not brought in, So yeah, these are found weapons. Having it all loaded on the wall I thought was interesting too. This gun, I mean unless the perpetrator found bullets somewhere. I mean that this was a loaded gun on the wall, which doesn't surprise me. For the eighteen hundreds.
Well, no, that's why you do that. Of course you have display weapons, but also you want to have weapons that are readily available, and if you have an urgent need, you're not sitting there trying to get it loaded up. You can just grab and go. But the flail, this sounds like a tool that would be kept out in something like the barn.
That's true.
Again, I'm struggling with Wesley's age, but I've got some concerns about how the evidence is starting to stack.
Up because you're thinking who else would this have been and the sequence of a where everything is available, you are a suspicious man.
Well I have to be, you know, this is where it's like, Okay, Wesley most certainly would know about the rifle. You know, he's out in the barn where it seems like that would be the logical location where the flail would be found. He's putting himself into the homicide room, and he's going into his bedroom where the other murder weapon, the rifle, is found. You know, So there's just some things there that you know, I'm just going, Okay, his
movements are interesting, These circumstances are interesting. Is he capable He most certainly is capable of shooting his dad, you know, with the rifle and once his dad has been shot in the head, and then being able to use the flail and do the bludgeoning. Now I'm very curious about, you know, like if there were crime scene photos and autopsy used to be able to evaluate the offender and
Patty's interactions, and is Wesley capable of doing that? And then all the blood on Wesley, it sounds like it's possible he's scooping up his one year old sister. She's bloody. Yeah, he's transferring parents' blood onto him. But if he's got spatter and he's got hair, you know, you know, this crushed hair that will happen in a bludgeoning on him.
I would have to really evaluate that type of evidence very closely to see is there an innocent explanation for that or does it suggest that he is present at the time his parents are being bludgeoned.
Well, before we get to, you know, any of that kind of evidence and suspicions over Wesley, because you know, I agree with you, you have to look at everybody. Let's talk about other people who have been of interest. If it is Wesley, we should at least figure out what ended up happening, like why would anyone take out this level of anger against someone? And by the way, nothing stolen from the house, which probably doesn't surprise you about guessing that the route you're going here.
Well, I think right now this is just one of what would probably be many investigative paths to take down. And I'm sure you're about to throw me a curveball.
Well, let's talk about the corners in quest a little bit more. Ten of the neighbors testified, and this is not you know, these aren't neighbors who witness the crime or any of the direct aftermath of it, but they do want to talk about the reputation of the Elkins family in the community and the relationship between John and Okay, so this is I think I was wrong here. John was on his third marriage, so Hattie, the woman who
died next to him, was his third wife. So Wesley's mother was a woman named Matilda, and this was John's second wife. So the neighbors say that Matilda had an affair that continued even when she became pregnant with Wesley and hated her husband, hated hated John, and she plotted
his murder on more than one occasion. And the authors of this book said that she wanted to poison him, she wanted to shoot him, but ultimately she ends up just divorcing him, and she runs off with her boyfriend to Waterloo, Iowa, which is about seventy miles away from the family farm, and she gives birth to Wesley. But John gets custody. We don't really know why, but he gets Wesley for the first four years of Wesley's life. Then John married Hattie. You know, ultimately, I won't kind
of drag you through this. Matilda ends up dying before John does. So Matilda is not a suspect in this. His second wife. But I do want to explain a little bit about Wesley and how he I think is going to feel like he's been shifted around quite a bit. But John sounds like this is you know, he's got some enemies. He seems capable of having more enemies than whoever just broke into this house and killed him.
Yeah, the second relationship with Matilda, I mean, the fact that she hated John so much that she was plotting to kill him on multiple occasions. This may provide some victimology about John, you know, in terms of his personality. You know, is there anything about Matilda's second husband because she ended up this boyfriend, she ends up marrying him, yep? Could Matilda's husband have had any type of motive to
go in and kill John and Hattie? You know? So this is just a a little bit more about you know, John's past and did it come back and haunt him. I don't know if I have any more. You know, it's really because it when when you start taking a look at this double homicide. You know, of course you've got John's past, You've got his work environment, Who are in his social circles, what kinds of activities is he involved? With that could potentially cause somebody to get upset with him.
Of course you have to take a look at Hattie and you know, is there any reason for somebody to have motive to kill her? You know, and John just happens to be eliminated as in that process. So those are all parts of the early part of the investigation is fleshing out the victimology. So you could figure out, well, where is this investigation going to go, and then there's still Wesley.
Well there is still Wesley, and that is eventually where we're going to head because you know, if we're looking at suspects. So all this seems like a great one, except she ended up dying. Wesley was about seven when she died, so Wesley went from being born to being sent to his dad for four years back to Matilda. So Matilda and her husband had him for three years. When Matilda died, not surprisingly, the stepfather ships Wesley back over to John and now his new wife Hattie. So
they didn't want him. They did not want Wesley. He was sent to live with John's parents. So Wesley was sent with his grandparents. Two years later, when Wesley is nine, the grandparents said, you guys, need to take him back. So John and Hattie get him back. And at this point, you know, he had been enrolled in school. His teachers said he was incredibly intelligent. But when John and Hattie took him back, he had to stop his education and he was put to work at us sawmill, a nine
year old at a sawmill that his dad owned. So this sounds like a bad household, to be honest, It sounds abusive. It sounds like John and Hattie, our victims, were not very nice to this kid, and I'm not going to sugarcoat that. They sound like they were pretty cruel.
And so that's what we're setting up here, is investigators start to think that, based on everything and the evidence that you're talking about, that they have on their hands an eleven year old who is capable of shooting his father and beating both his father and his stepmother to death, which is incredible. I can't even believe I'm saying that an eleven year old.
You know the details of Wesley's upbringing, you could see where Wesley is constantly being rejected.
By everybody, his grandparents, everybody, sure.
And the night that Tuesday night, Wesley is told to go sleep in the barn. Does he perceive that as just another reject the one year old you know, who's his half sister, I guess, you know, she comes into his life and he sees John and Hattie care for this one year old, and he's having to labor at a sawmill. So now I can see where there could be some hostility within Wesley. He goes out to the barn,
the flail is out there. He is mad, and he goes into the house in the middle of the night, grabs the rifle, has the flail, shoots Dad, and then ends up beating Dad and Mom. You know, this is where it's you know, what is Wesley's physical capabilities relative to Mom? Because Mom's positioning the way I'm envisioning it, she at least gets up out of the bed. Maybe, you know, i'd have to, I'd really want to be able to evaluate that is Wesley capable with the flail
of overpowering and ultimately killing Hattie. You know, I think it's an eleven year old boy. I mean, he's doing hard labor. In essence, he's probably very physically fit and strong for his age. So right now, you know, I think things are pointing pretty dramatically at Wesley.
So listen, I'm going to show you some photos and I normally would not do this this early. I want to show you photo of Wesley. It's undated Wesley as a young boy, and then there is a photo of him when he's a little bit older. I will say that this does not look like a big kid to me. I know he has functional strength, but this is him as a boy. Photo of Wesley Elkins as a young boy, published in the newspapers at the time of the crime. I don't know how old he is here. Maybe what
do you think, like six or seven? It's hard to tell. Maybe older. I don't know.
Yeah, you know this is a I mean I can't really because all I'm seeing really is his face, and he does look like a young boy here, right. I don't you know whether he's six or he's ten in this photograph. Can't tell. I mean, he's got some sort of coat on, and it's hard to get to really assess, you know, what his physique is. You know how mature his physique is at this point in time, because I'm imagining the eleven year old boy who is doing some
hard labor. You can see some of these kids, you know, with the boys, you can see them at that age developing some upper body muscles and they're starting to you know, grow, whereas other boys at age still look like they're you know, five or six years old from a physical physique standpoint. So that's where you know, I keep going back and forth about Wesley's age and his physical capability. It's just everything right now, you know, seems to point that he
possibly is responsible. And if he is, and he obviously was physically capable of being able to kill his parents.
Let me show you this. This is when he is probably about thirty, could be in his twenties. I know this is not a good representation. This is a chair he's sitting. I mean, you know, he does not look like a big person.
To me.
He looks like and I know what you're gonna say, doesn't matter, especially when you've got a drilline and you're you know, a farm boy throwing hal over the place. But this looks to me like a slight guy, a guy who is not particularly big. He's no Paul Holes.
Let's say that I am not a big guy.
Through a compliment in the middle of a murder case for eighteen hundredth.
Oh good guy. No, you know, he he looks like I mean, yeah, he's relatively kind of slight to frame. He's not a huge man at all, you know, but it's so hard to say from a photo of him and as an adult, you know, backtracking to him as an eleven year old boy, you know, what is his physical capabilities? And you know part of this is you've got the flail as a as a bludgeoning weapon that an eleven year old boy can inflict fatal injuries with that type of weapon. It's just now, what are the dynamics?
How does he do that to Hattie, who appears to at least start to engage with him. Yeah, so you know, it could just be a lucky blow. You know, she pulls the rifle away and gets into you know, maybe hand to hand combat with her her son, and Wesley is able to just hit her on the head with the flail and she ends up falling backwards and now he's on top of her beating her. You know, it's possible.
Well, let me tell you a little bit more, just sort of a general overtone about the family. You know, all the neighbors basically said Hattie can be incredibly overbearing when she wanted him around. Of course, we know that they yanked him out of school and put him in a sawmill, which is I'm sure, I mean, such a disappointment for him. And they also said that John is very strict, very quick tempered, that Wesley was treated harshly. So there was a twenty one year old that John had.
A guy named Mark was his son. He moved out of the house and this was I think earlier in the year because he didn't like his parents either. He had had enough. They were really working him too hard. They weren't pleasant to be around. Mark is investigated. He has a solid alibi, Okay, so it's clear that Wesley has been incredibly unhappy. He ran away a couple of weeks before the murders. He went to a neighbor's house and he said, please take me to Waterloo, Iowa, which
is where the stepfather had been. Please just let me go. I've got to get out of here. And his dad shows up and was incredibly angry and dragged him back to the farm. So this is a very bleak picture, Paul of this kid's home life. But the result was that the Corners in quest still couldn't come up with a suspect, even though we are talking about Wesley. You know, the sheriff hires a Pinkerton detective. They put up a
huge reward five hundred dollars, which was massive. In this time period, things are not becoming more clear to anyone. And certainly no one thinks an eleven year old is capable of this. Nobody in this community thinks he's capable of this. This is like a beaten dog, essentially, is the way people look at this kid.
Sure, you know, at this point in the case, I would say Wesley is a suspect. And I bet if you know, we had all the you know, the evidence, all the photographs that possibly could illuminate whether Wesley is the actual killer or not. But I do think it's it's it's responsible of those original investigators to continue to
pursue other potential suspects, you know. And and part of this is, you know, interviewing an eleven year old boy in this day and age, we know that that has to be done in a certain way in order to not influence Wesley, because you know, younger children are very susceptible to being swayed with their statements, and so there's people, you know, professionals that are trained to actually interview children.
Wesley's right in that range where, yeah, maybe the primary homicide investigator you know, could sit down with him and get truthful statements. But also it's possible that a proper forensic interview of an eleven year old may have elicited more information, such as let's say Wesley's inner hostility towards his parents, potentially providing well, here's a motive.
Well, people start to really become suspicious of Wesley, they say after the funerals, because a neighbor said that he seemed to be strange. He was unaffected, indifferent, he had no sorrow, no emotion. I mean, you know, if you're treated like total shit by your parents, and you know, then they're taken out of the picture, don't I don't know if I would be crying. It sounded like they were not great parents. And you and I have talked about you cannot look at somebody's you know, assume somebody's
guilty just based on the reaction they're having. That might not have been the reaction you would have.
You know, no, for sure, you know, and I think you know Wesley's upbringing, as horrible as it sounds, you know, of course this from an investigative assessment. You know, this is where okay, here's here's a kid that potentially has animosity towards his parents. But it's not something where you can make a case on that, right, you still have to prove the crime occurred. I would say something like
Wesley's upbringing, I mean his age. Of course, in the justice system, he's going to be treated so differently if he were an adult, his upbringing would be something that would be put into you know, the court during sentencing, right, try to get leniency for people feel sorry for that as an eleven year old boy. If he ends up
being the killer. I don't know what they were doing back in the eighteen hundreds with what juveniles, but you know, fundamentally, you know he would in this day and age, he would be in custody at juvenile hall, but probably released at age twenty five, you know, for a double homicide. But that's just the way it goes.
So let me go through a little bit. Essentially, he's acting strange after these funerals, which I don't think is actually strange considering what's happening number one and number two. I'm sure that he's grown up to be stoic about everything. I mean, that would be the kind of farm wife in this time period. And also he is described as really small, just as small kid. People said, Okay, if this was Wesley, then an adult helped him. There's just no way, you know that physically he would be able
to unleash this sort of rage on his parents. We know differently there, but he had been staying with a relative for a while, but the relative didn't want to either have him any longer, or you know, he wanted to leave something. So the sheriff takes him. And that's a guy named JJ Kahn, and the sheriff says, come and stay with my family. Sheriff seems nice, and he spends time with Wesley and probably shows quite a bit of care. And Wesley confesses. Oh, Wesley confesses, And the
sheriff says, who worked with you on this? What adult was it? And he said it wasn't anybody. I've been planning this. I did it myself. I'll tell you all the details. Tired of hiding it. No adult, I did it all by myself.
Wow. Okay, so now I want to hear what Wesley said happened.
Okay, so he said, like I said, he planned everything. He even knew where he was going to put the weapon, the bludgeting weapon that you know he hit it so that he knew he could have access to it, right, and then he hit it after he used it. He said that he had planned the murders a few days beforehand. On the night of the murders, he waited for his parents to fall asleep, and then he gets the family's rifle, which we know was hanging on the wall in the
second bedroom. He shoots his dad at close range. We know that hits him in the eye. This wakes up Hattie, his stepmother, so he panics. This is a It sounds like a single shot rifle, which means what you have to put a bullet This is a stupid question, but one shot, single shot, one shot. So he has to put a bullet in, right, I mean, this doesn't seem like the smartest weapon. When you've got two victims, right, two intended victims, you have to reload.
Yes, So it sounds like I mean, this could be like a bolt action rifle that doesn't have a you know, a built in magazine. So, yeah, you see this like with sniper rifles where you see them put one round in, lock the bolt, shoot, and then now they have to, you know, extract the cartridge case and put another round in because it's not intended to be a like a semi auto where you're just pulling the trigger and getting
multiple shots. Now, there's so many different makes and models and designs of rifles out there, doesn't surprise me at all that they have some a rifle like this. Think for home defense on a farm, you probably would want to have something that you know has greater capacity without having to reload it. But it is what it is. And I want to hear more about about Wesley than what he's saying.
So, like I said, the shot wakes up his stepmother. He runs to the second bedroom and tosses the gun on the bed, which we know. He picks up the wooden flail, which he had hidden there so he thought he might need a second weapon. I guess he assumed he was not going to be able to get in a second shot. He picks up this flail. He says,
this is what he says, word for word. I struck her Hattie, I struck her several times more until I was sure she was dead, and then father kind of groaned, so I struck him once or twice to be sure that he was dead. Cold. I mean, that's cold the way he's saying this. He said, I had wanted to leave home and be at Liberty to do so for myself for a long time. Sheriff said, what about Nelly? Why didn't you take her out? And he said, I liked her? Okay, I didn't want to hurt her. Why
would I hurt her? She didn't do anything wrong to me. There you go.
So yet you know the debate, You know, could an eleven year old boy commit this homicide? Well that's settled. He did. He doesn't provide any details about maybe a struggle between him and Hattie at all, because I'm kind of curious to see how he overcame her and maybe what I speculated before. You know, he got in a pretty good shot on her with the flail, and now she's incapacitated to some extent.
And also the theory was because I just kept thinking, well, how would he even have time to run into the second bedroom, drop the gun, pick up the flail, and come back if Hattie's already getting up. But there's the theory that she was trying to lie a light. I mean, we're in the middle of the night and there's no like flick a switch. You have to light the lantern. She was, I'm sure, completely discombobulated and stunned by all of this. So he definitely had the upper hand here.
It's hard to believe that the little sister was laying in between the two of them when all of this is happening, and she didn't get hurt with all of the beating in the dark and everything, because I don't think she got the light turned on. But that's what he says, that she was there, you know, but I don't know. Everybody's covered in blood at this point.
Well, John is shot and he's incapacitated. It sounds like you get shot through the left eye. That bullet's in all likelihood going through some pretty significant brain structures. He's gone, even though Wesley hears him. Grown father's incapacitated, laying still. The timing of Wesley having to go and get the flail out of the second bedroom. You imagine you're sleeping,
you hear a gunshot, you wake up. The shooter possibly is already out of the room, and I can see where Hattie is, you know, shaking her husband, going hey, and he's not responding. And next thing, Hattie knows, now Wesley's in there with the flail, you know, and that would be happening. I mean we're talking on the order of ten seconds. I mean, unless this bedroom is all the way across a large house. Sounds like the bedroom is right next door. In essence, he could go in.
He knows exactly where that flails in and he's going right into that bedroom. And now Hattie's up and he's just right on top of her, and she's like, what is going on? You know, she may not have even recognized that he had the flail, and you know, he runs into this dark room and just strikes Hattie and now she is incapacitated, falls backward on the bed, and he climbs on top and makes sure she's dead and then finishes john Off.
Yeah, well, it's awful what he's describing. He says, Nobody helped me. I knew exactly what I was doing. I wanted to leave. I had had enough. The community, first of all, doesn't believe it. Nobody else is involved. But then eventually he says, okay, well he was abused. But they feel like this is a I mean, they would not say mental illness, but they said an unnatural disposition inherited from his depraved mother, who was who died, so
basically she was crazy. The prosecutor says that Wesley is irredeemable, he's a threat, he must go away. And the criminal defense attorney that represented Wesley did not say, you're eleven, let's argue that your brain hasn't been developed enough. He instead, he said you need to plead guilty. So they picked the murder of John and in January of eighteen ninety, Wesley, you know, has plugged guilty and he sentenced to life in prison. At twelve, he enters the state penitentiary at Anamosa.
So there's a twelve year old in a state penitentiary at this point. Can you believe that? I mean, that's unreal, but better than an insane asylum. I can tell you.
That relatively speaking. But you know, a twelve year old boy in a penitentiary, You've got all these men that are probably going to sectually abuse him. You know, it is an ugly, ugly situation and this is where it gets tough because obviously, I mean, this is a horrific crime. Two people are dead, and yet there's almost a level of sympathy for the killer under this this set of circumstances.
And I can think of one case in which a son came up and shot his sleeping dad in the back of the head because he had been abusing his mom. You know, the entire relationship, the family dynamics are real. You know, there's a lot of emotions. And with Wesley, obviously, that lifetime of rejection sounds like possibly most early verbal abuse and possibly physical abuse by Hattie and John, you know,
is also going to increase that level of animosity. And he just ultimately, you know, kind of said I'm done, I've had enough.
Yeah. Well, he ends up in prison. He is there, and when he's eighteen, he starts really pushing to be released. He writes a letter to a local journalist and says, you've got to tell my story. And he does. And Wesley is ahead of his time. He says, I was abused. I act impulsively. My brain was still developing. I was eleven years old, and now you put me in a penitentiary.
I mean I can be reformed. And these, of course are the arguments that we talk about today, the brain development as someone that age, and can they really understand the decisions that they're making. He wrote with this journalist and the journalist's publishing parts in the newspaper, and it really impresses the community. This is around nineteen oh one, nineteen oh two. He says, I'm not much given to heart outpourings. I see myself that as a boy who
had not reached an age of reason. I feel like my crime, terrible as it was, has been punished as far as necessary for the benefit of good morals. My position here is a strange one. I'm practically alone in my sympathies and hopes. I've cultivated self reliance, and somebody might deem me cold, but my distant demeanor is the result of necessity, which I mean, I think essentially means
he was in self preservation mode. He says this whole time, right, he has a great reputation in prison, and I think you can see where we're heading in nineteen oh two. Eventually he is paroled. So he hasn't been pardoned, but he's been paroled, and eventually he gets a full pardon. So he's out in his twenties or so, and by all accounts, he led a great life. He got his education, he left Iowa, never went back. He finds work at the railroad, He gets married, he ends up settling down.
He has a small chicken farm until he dies. And nineteen sixty one, at the age of eighty three, we don't know. He doesn't sound like he's ever committed another murder. These are confusing stories for me. You know, this is someone who went on to do a lot of good. It sounds like he led a great life that we know of, but he did a terrible thing. And would the argument, Paul, for any prosecutor when you were killing two people who are in bed and asleep at the time,
is this is not self defense. They are not doing anything to you right now. Isn't that what that argument would be.
Well, that's part of it, that's all, you know, sort of the evaluation of, well, what crime has actually been committed, right, you know, And that's there's a reason why you have different degrees of murder. You also have manslaughter. That's the role of the you know, the prosecutor evaluating the crimes
as to well what am I dealing with here? And one of the first things is is there a reason for the suspect or now the you know, the arrestee, to have have used lethal force for self preservation, your self defense thing, you know, And of course prosecutors do
look for that, and that often is the defense. You know, if the prosecutor says, hey, I've got I've got murder, you know, whether it be second degree, first degree murder, oftentimes, you know, the defense attorneys will try to show that no, they acted, the defendant acted in self defense, try to mitigate that murder charge. With Wesley, part of the evaluation of what of the crime he committed, he admits to planning ahead of time. He's positioning the flail in his bedroom.
He's waiting for his parents to fall asleep. You know. So now you've got this, you've got the pre planning, You've got this what's called malice, a forethought. It's not in a heat of the moment type of scenario, you know, where Dad is verbally lashing at him and things are getting heated, and now Wesley grabs a gun and shoots
him in a spontaneous act. This was something that he planned and so that now elevates this to a first degree murder at least the way you know, I'm understanding things about this crime and how the murder is defined in California. You know, so this is a very serious offense. But he's eleven years old, Yeah, right, you know, and this is where you know, you start talking about, you know, the debate of you know, criminals that commit to this level of violent crime, can they be reformed or not?
What depends on the type of crime. It depends on, you know, in Wessey's case, his age, you know, and what he was being subjected to. I think there's a lot of factors that go into play and assessing you know, this particular offender. Yeah, and you know there's a reason why, you know, typically nowadays, you know, juveniles, you know, from a criminal standpoint, are treated in a different justice process than adults, and usually that age is eighteen here in the United States.
Well, what a story. When I read it, I couldn't believe in an eleven year old doing this. A more small kid too, But you know, as always, we learned something from these stories. Thank you, Paul, telling me an eleven year old is capable of doing this awful by gosh.
Well even I was struggling with his age for this type of crime. Yeah, you know, but rage, that's a real thing.
It is.
It is.
Well, next week we'll have a very different story, I promise. Okay, okay, Well, I'll see you next week.
All right, looking forward to it, Kate.
This has been an exactly right production for.
Our sources and show notes go to exactlyrightmedia dot com slash Buried Bones sources.
Our senior producer is Alexis Emosi.
Research by Maren mcclashan, Ali Elkin, and Kate Winkler Dawson.
Our mixing engineer is Ben Tolliday.
Our theme song is by Tom Bryfogel.
Our artwork is by Vanessa Lilac.
Executive produced by Karen Kilgarriff, Georgia hard Stark and Danielle Kramer.
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Kate's most recent book, All That Is Wicked, a Gilded Age story of murder and the race to decode the criminal mind, is available now
And Paul's best selling memoir Unmasked, My life Solving America's Cold Cases is also available now.