February 26, 2025 • 57 mins
On today’s episode, Paul and Kate travel to 1889 Iowa where a young boy covered in blood is seen by a neighbor. After discovering where the boy had come from, an investigation uncovers some grisly details that lead to an unexpected suspect.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson. I'm a journalist who's spent the
last twenty five years writing about true crime.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I'm Paul Hols, a retired cold case investigator who's
worked some of America's most complicated cases and solve them.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Each week, I present Paul with one of history's most
compelling true crimes.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
And I weigh in using modern forensic techniques to bring
new insights to old mysteries.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Together, using our individual expertise, we're examining historical true crime
cases through a twenty first century lens.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Some are solved and some are cold, very cold.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
This is buried Bones.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Hey Paul, Hey Kate, how's it going.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
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?
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Okay, let's do it.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
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?
Speaker 2 (01:22):
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
(01:46):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
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
(02:53):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
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.
(03:48):
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
(04:10):
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
(04:31):
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
(04:52):
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.
(05:14):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
And no other siblings inside the house. This is the
entirety of the family, the two kids and the parents. Okay, yep.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
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
(05:57):
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?
Speaker 2 (06:06):
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
(06:26):
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.
(06:49):
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?
(07:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
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,
(07:50):
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
(08:10):
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,
(08:30):
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?
Speaker 2 (08:50):
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,
(09:12):
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
(09:32):
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
(09:53):
and possibly never even realized that he was about to die.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
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
(10:23):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
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
(11:04):
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.
(11:26):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
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.
(12:05):
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
(12:25):
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?
Speaker 2 (12:36):
I just I need to clarify. You have the second bedroom,
which it doesn't appear that anybody had slept in that.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
Bed, right, I don't think so?
Speaker 2 (12:44):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
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
(13:17):
is the rifle. Okay, so no action in that second bedroom.
It sounds like a little bit of blood.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
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
(13:43):
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,
(14:05):
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
(14:28):
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
(14:50):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
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
(15:20):
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
(15:43):
this object. And so I can I can you want
to show you that photo or what do you think?
Speaker 2 (15:47):
Absolutely no, this is not a fool.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
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?
Speaker 2 (16:03):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
Like rods, right, we're right, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
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,
(16:42):
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,
(17:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
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?
Speaker 2 (17:45):
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
(18:05):
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
(18:26):
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
(18:46):
add a second offender into the mix, then we have
different dynamics going on.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
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,
(19:14):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
Was this a form of punishment or was this just
getting him out of the house for one reason or another? Right?
Speaker 1 (19:26):
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
(19:49):
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?
Speaker 2 (20:02):
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
(20:24):
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
(20:47):
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,
(21:10):
but different time, different era.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
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
(21:36):
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
(21:58):
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
(22:18):
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,
(22:40):
and then we know the rest of the story.
Speaker 2 (22:42):
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
(23:02):
found the rifle in the homicide room and moved the
rifle into his bedroom.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
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,
(23:51):
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
(24:13):
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
(24:34):
of the murder weapons is left behind. And do we
know the flail was that from the family property as well?
Speaker 1 (24:42):
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.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
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.
Speaker 1 (25:18):
That's true.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
Again, I'm struggling with Wesley's age, but I've got some
concerns about how the evidence is starting to stack.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
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.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
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,
(26:01):
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,
(26:25):
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
(26:48):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
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
(27:32):
about guessing that the route you're going here.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:46):
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
(28:08):
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
(28:28):
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
(28:50):
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.
(29:13):
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.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
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?
(29:53):
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
(30:14):
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
(30:35):
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.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
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.
(31:14):
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
(31:36):
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
(31:57):
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
(32:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
You know the details of Wesley's upbringing, you could see
where Wesley is constantly being rejected.
Speaker 1 (32:46):
By everybody, his grandparents, everybody, sure.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
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
(33:10):
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
(33:32):
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
(33:54):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
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.
(34:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (34:47):
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,
(35:08):
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,
(35:29):
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
(35:50):
was physically capable of being able to kill his parents.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
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.
Speaker 2 (36:07):
To me.
Speaker 1 (36:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (36:20):
Let's say that I am not a big guy.
Speaker 1 (36:23):
Through a compliment in the middle of a murder case
for eighteen hundredth.
Speaker 2 (36:27):
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
(36:48):
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
(37:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (37:33):
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.
(37:55):
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
(38:16):
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
(38:37):
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.
(39:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (39:09):
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
(39:33):
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
(39:54):
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
(40:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (40:31):
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
(40:52):
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.
Speaker 2 (41:05):
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
(41:26):
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
(41:48):
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.
Speaker 1 (42:09):
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
(42:31):
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
(42:53):
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
(43:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (43:23):
Wow. Okay, so now I want to hear what Wesley
said happened.
Speaker 1 (43:29):
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,
(43:53):
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
(44:15):
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.
Speaker 2 (44:22):
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
(44:43):
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
(45:07):
having to reload it. But it is what it is.
And I want to hear more about about Wesley than
what he's saying.
Speaker 1 (45:13):
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
(45:35):
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?
(45:56):
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.
Speaker 2 (46:04):
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
(46:25):
pretty good shot on her with the flail, and now
she's incapacitated to some extent.
Speaker 1 (46:32):
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
(46:54):
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.
Speaker 2 (47:15):
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
(47:36):
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
(47:56):
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
(48:18):
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.
Speaker 1 (48:34):
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
(48:56):
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,
(49:17):
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
(49:40):
at this point. Can you believe that? I mean, that's unreal,
but better than an insane asylum. I can tell you.
Speaker 2 (49:45):
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
(50:08):
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,
(50:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (50:51):
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
(51:12):
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,
(51:34):
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
(51:55):
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.
(52:18):
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
(52:39):
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,
(53:02):
is this is not self defense. They are not doing
anything to you right now. Isn't that what that argument
would be.
Speaker 2 (53:08):
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
(53:29):
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,
(53:52):
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.
(54:17):
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
(54:37):
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.
(54:58):
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
(55:19):
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
(55:39):
than adults, and usually that age is eighteen here in
the United States.
Speaker 1 (55:45):
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.
Speaker 2 (56:01):
Well even I was struggling with his age for this
type of crime. Yeah, you know, but rage, that's a
real thing.
Speaker 1 (56:08):
It is.
Speaker 2 (56:09):
It is.
Speaker 1 (56:10):
Well, next week we'll have a very different story, I promise. Okay, okay, Well,
I'll see you next week.
Speaker 2 (56:16):
All right, looking forward to it, Kate.
Speaker 1 (56:21):
This has been an exactly right production for.
Speaker 2 (56:24):
Our sources and show notes go to exactlyrightmedia dot com
slash Buried Bones sources.
Speaker 1 (56:29):
Our senior producer is Alexis Emosi.
Speaker 2 (56:32):
Research by Maren mcclashan, Ali Elkin, and Kate Winkler Dawson.
Speaker 1 (56:37):
Our mixing engineer is Ben Tolliday.
Speaker 2 (56:39):
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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
Speaker 1 (57:00):
And Paul's best selling memoir Unmasked, My life Solving America's
Cold Cases is also available now.
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson. I'm a journalist who's spent the
last twenty five years writing about true crime.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I'm Paul Hols, a retired cold case investigator who's
worked some of America's most complicated cases and solve them.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Each week, I present Paul with one of history's most
compelling true crimes.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
And I weigh in using modern forensic techniques to bring
new insights to old mysteries.
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Together, using our individual expertise, we're examining historical true crime
cases through a twenty first century lens.
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Some are solved and some are cold, very cold.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
This is buried Bones.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Hey Paul, Hey Kate, how's it going.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
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?
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Okay, let's do it.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
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?
Speaker 2 (01:22):
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
(01:46):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
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
(02:53):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
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.
(03:48):
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
(04:10):
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
(04:31):
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
(04:52):
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.
(05:14):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
And no other siblings inside the house. This is the
entirety of the family, the two kids and the parents. Okay, yep.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
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
(05:57):
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?
Speaker 2 (06:06):
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
(06:26):
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.
(06:49):
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?
(07:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
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,
(07:50):
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
(08:10):
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,
(08:30):
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?
Speaker 2 (08:50):
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,
(09:12):
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
(09:32):
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
(09:53):
and possibly never even realized that he was about to die.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
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
(10:23):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
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
(11:04):
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.
(11:26):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
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.
(12:05):
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
(12:25):
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?
Speaker 2 (12:36):
I just I need to clarify. You have the second bedroom,
which it doesn't appear that anybody had slept in that.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
Bed, right, I don't think so?
Speaker 2 (12:44):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
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
(13:17):
is the rifle. Okay, so no action in that second bedroom.
It sounds like a little bit of blood.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
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
(13:43):
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,
(14:05):
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
(14:28):
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
(14:50):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
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
(15:20):
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
(15:43):
this object. And so I can I can you want
to show you that photo or what do you think?
Speaker 2 (15:47):
Absolutely no, this is not a fool.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
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?
Speaker 2 (16:03):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
Like rods, right, we're right, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
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,
(16:42):
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,
(17:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
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?
Speaker 2 (17:45):
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
(18:05):
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
(18:26):
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
(18:46):
add a second offender into the mix, then we have
different dynamics going on.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
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,
(19:14):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
Was this a form of punishment or was this just
getting him out of the house for one reason or another? Right?
Speaker 1 (19:26):
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
(19:49):
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?
Speaker 2 (20:02):
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
(20:24):
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
(20:47):
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,
(21:10):
but different time, different era.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
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
(21:36):
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
(21:58):
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
(22:18):
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,
(22:40):
and then we know the rest of the story.
Speaker 2 (22:42):
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
(23:02):
found the rifle in the homicide room and moved the
rifle into his bedroom.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
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,
(23:51):
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
(24:13):
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
(24:34):
of the murder weapons is left behind. And do we
know the flail was that from the family property as well?
Speaker 1 (24:42):
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.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
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.
Speaker 1 (25:18):
That's true.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
Again, I'm struggling with Wesley's age, but I've got some
concerns about how the evidence is starting to stack.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
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.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
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,
(26:01):
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,
(26:25):
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
(26:48):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
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
(27:32):
about guessing that the route you're going here.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:46):
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
(28:08):
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
(28:28):
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
(28:50):
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.
(29:13):
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.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
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?
(29:53):
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
(30:14):
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
(30:35):
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.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
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.
(31:14):
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
(31:36):
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
(31:57):
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
(32:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
You know the details of Wesley's upbringing, you could see
where Wesley is constantly being rejected.
Speaker 1 (32:46):
By everybody, his grandparents, everybody, sure.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
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
(33:10):
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
(33:32):
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
(33:54):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
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.
(34:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (34:47):
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,
(35:08):
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,
(35:29):
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
(35:50):
was physically capable of being able to kill his parents.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
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.
Speaker 2 (36:07):
To me.
Speaker 1 (36:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (36:20):
Let's say that I am not a big guy.
Speaker 1 (36:23):
Through a compliment in the middle of a murder case
for eighteen hundredth.
Speaker 2 (36:27):
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
(36:48):
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
(37:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (37:33):
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.
(37:55):
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
(38:16):
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
(38:37):
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.
(39:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (39:09):
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
(39:33):
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
(39:54):
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
(40:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (40:31):
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
(40:52):
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.
Speaker 2 (41:05):
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
(41:26):
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
(41:48):
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.
Speaker 1 (42:09):
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
(42:31):
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
(42:53):
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
(43:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (43:23):
Wow. Okay, so now I want to hear what Wesley
said happened.
Speaker 1 (43:29):
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,
(43:53):
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
(44:15):
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.
Speaker 2 (44:22):
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
(44:43):
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
(45:07):
having to reload it. But it is what it is.
And I want to hear more about about Wesley than
what he's saying.
Speaker 1 (45:13):
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
(45:35):
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?
(45:56):
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.
Speaker 2 (46:04):
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
(46:25):
pretty good shot on her with the flail, and now
she's incapacitated to some extent.
Speaker 1 (46:32):
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
(46:54):
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.
Speaker 2 (47:15):
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
(47:36):
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
(47:56):
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
(48:18):
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.
Speaker 1 (48:34):
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
(48:56):
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,
(49:17):
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
(49:40):
at this point. Can you believe that? I mean, that's unreal,
but better than an insane asylum. I can tell you.
Speaker 2 (49:45):
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
(50:08):
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,
(50:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (50:51):
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
(51:12):
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,
(51:34):
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
(51:55):
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.
(52:18):
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
(52:39):
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,
(53:02):
is this is not self defense. They are not doing
anything to you right now. Isn't that what that argument
would be.
Speaker 2 (53:08):
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
(53:29):
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,
(53:52):
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.
(54:17):
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
(54:37):
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.
(54:58):
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
(55:19):
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
(55:39):
than adults, and usually that age is eighteen here in
the United States.
Speaker 1 (55:45):
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.
Speaker 2 (56:01):
Well even I was struggling with his age for this
type of crime. Yeah, you know, but rage, that's a
real thing.
Speaker 1 (56:08):
It is.
Speaker 2 (56:09):
It is.
Speaker 1 (56:10):
Well, next week we'll have a very different story, I promise. Okay, okay, Well,
I'll see you next week.
Speaker 2 (56:16):
All right, looking forward to it, Kate.
Speaker 1 (56:21):
This has been an exactly right production for.
Speaker 2 (56:24):
Our sources and show notes go to exactlyrightmedia dot com
slash Buried Bones sources.
Speaker 1 (56:29):
Our senior producer is Alexis Emosi.
Speaker 2 (56:32):
Research by Maren mcclashan, Ali Elkin, and Kate Winkler Dawson.
Speaker 1 (56:37):
Our mixing engineer is Ben Tolliday.
Speaker 2 (56:39):
Our theme song is by Tom Bryfogel.
Speaker 1 (56:42):
Our artwork is by Vanessa Lilac.
Speaker 2 (56:44):
Executive produced by Karen Kilgarriff, Georgia hard Stark and Danielle Kramer.
Speaker 1 (56:48):
You can follow Buried Bones on Instagram and Facebook at
Barry Bones Pod.
Speaker 2 (56:54):
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
Speaker 1 (57:00):
And Paul's best selling memoir Unmasked, My life Solving America's
Cold Cases is also available now.
Hosts And Creators
Kate Winkler Dawson
Paul Holes
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