Six theories survive the years since disappearance in 1957
Editor’s Note: Camden attorney and civic leader Maud Crawford vanished March 2, 1957. Her disappearance has been researched for decades by Beth Brickell, a filmmaker and former reporter who grew up in the Ouachita County city.
From July to December 1986, the Arkansas Gazette ran “Mystery at Camden,” an 18-part series by Brickell about the mystery. The series was slightly edited and compiled into a book, “The Disappearance of Maud Crawford.” Its chapters are reprinted with permission starting June 19 on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
ARKANSAS GAZETTE Thursday, Aug. 7, 1986
People at Camden have spent 29 years speculating about what happened to Maud Crawford, the most respected title and abstract lawyer in Ouachita County before her mysterious disappearance Saturday night, March 2, 1957.
Crawford’s last activities provided clues for every major theory about the mystery. Many of her activities are well documented in a thorough first investigative report written by State Police investigator Odis A. Henley, now a deputy sheriff at El Dorado. Press clippings and recent interviews fill out the picture.
SIX MAIN THEORIES
There were six main theories of what happened to Maud Crawford:
• Amnesia.
• Suicide.
• Mobsters being investigated by U.S. Senator John L. McClellan and his on-going Senate Labor Rackets committee abducted her.
• She left Camden on her own accord.
• Clyde Crawford, her husband, killed her.
• She “knew too much” about someone’s business and they had her killed.
DAY SEEMED ROUTINE
There was every indication that Maud Crawford was completing a routine workweek that Friday afternoon when she left the offices of Gaughan, McClellan and Laney where she had worked for 41 years.
Carolyn Sanders, who lives at Nashville (Howard County), was Crawford’s secretary from 1955 until that Friday. She recently said, “Miss Maud,” as she was affectionately called by most people who knew her, “seemed in a real good mood the last time I saw her. We often worked on Saturday morning, and she said, ‘don’t come in,’ and we left not to return until Monday.”
Before going home, Crawford went to the courthouse, according to Robert Dodson. “My dad asked me to go down and see Maud Crawford. He was having a well drilled in Stephens, and he wanted a title cured for a piece of land so he could start drilling that night.” Dodson remembers that she didn’t want to go to the courthouse, but said she would do so if he would accompany her and lift the heavy ledgers. Crawford suffered from arthritis in her hands.
Before leaving the courthouse, she talked to her close friend, Kate Garner, the circuit clerk. Lorene (Mrs. A. F.) Thomas, who worked as a deputy clerk, remembers, “Miss Maud and Kate stood up at the front desk talking. I remember she had work in her arms that she was taking home for the weekend.”
VISITS BERG HOME
Friday night, Crawford went across the street to see about Rose Berg, a wealthy widow who had been declared incompetent by Ouachita Chancery Court in 1955. Crawford had been appointed Mrs. Berg’s personal guardian, and she regularly took over paychecks on Friday nights for the cook and nurses who cared for Mrs. Berg.
At 7:30 a.m. Saturday, Crawford was working on an abstract at the kitchen table when her maid, Ida Bell Tidwell, arrived. Tidwell, now deceased, told Henley, “Mrs. Crawford worked on the papers for some time, then went into the front living room and set up her sewing machine and sewed on some skirts.”
Later in the morning, Crawford returned to Mrs. Berg’s home and showed the nurse on duty where her paycheck had been left the night before.
At noon, she prepared and had lunch with her husband, Clyde Crawford.
BAKES PIE FOR BOARDERS
She also baked a pecan pie for four young women who rented the upstairs rooms in the large two-story Crawford home. Three of them had left Camden Friday. Ida Lou Dunn (Mrs. Joe B.) Johnson, now of Little Rock, remembers, “She said she baked the
girls a Karo nut pie. She told Joann about it. She didn’t realize we were all going out of town [for the weekend].”
Joann McClendon (Mrs. Rex G.) Boykin, now of Newport, Tenn., worked as a nurse at the Ouachita County Hospital. “Most of the time,
the other girls went home on the weekend, and I was there. But that was my weekend off, and my parents picked me up right after lunch and took me to Arkadelphia,” she said. “Mrs. Crawford came out on the porch and talked to my mother and me about sewing. She talked to us quite a bit before we left as if she didn’t want us to go.”
Crawford drove the maid home at 1:30 p.m.
Before returning, she stopped at the Piggly Wiggly store and chatted with friends, commented on the difficulty of finding a parking place near the store and bought groceries.
At approximately 2:30 p.m., Mrs. T. V. Sivils went to the Crawford home to take an order for draperies. Crawford was nearing completion of a remodeling and redecorating project on her 50-yearold Colonial-style home for which she had made a bank loan of $7,000 six months before.
Sivils, who now lives at Benton, recently recalled the afternoon. “It was pouring rain. The bottom dropped out. Mrs. Crawford was so happy with everything she had done with the house. She showed me a new Victorian sofa, two chairs and a table she had bought. Also new carpeting. I matched her colors for new draperies. She said, ‘I’ve never had any pretty draperies.’ She wanted me to fix cornice boards and sheers. She seemed absolutely normal.”
Shortly after 5 p.m., Crawford put a leash on her guard dog, a large dalmatian that she called Dal, and took him for a walk.
RECALL STORE VISIT
At 5:30 p.m., she took the dog into a corner grocery store half a block from her house. Mr. and Mrs. Herbert C. Garner, who owned the store, recently recalled Crawford’s visit that Saturday afternoon.
“She was our last customer that day,” Mattie Garner said. “She bought string beans, and her last words were, ‘When are you going to get in some more of these good green beans? When you do, send me a bunch of them because Clyde just loves them.’”
Herbert Garner added, “The delivery boy tried to get up to her house before she got there with the dog. He was scared of him. One time the dog bit Mrs. Crawford’s maid, and they sent down for bandages. The dog was vicious and wouldn’t let anyone near Maud without her permission, even Clyde.” Doris Jinks (Mrs. Carmon L.) Rushing, of Blytheville, one of the young women who lived in the Crawford home, also remembers the dog. “Dal nipped every one of us girls if we even held out our hand. It bothered her when he would do it. I was handing her a key one day, and he nipped my hand.” Gaye Avant (Mrs. Benny R.) Scroggins, of Little Rock, was another of the renters. “Dal could be vicious. I had a scar for a while. Once she [Crawford] pointed to a house key and said, ‘I’ve made a house key for you.’ And when she pointed at it, he jumped me. She controlled him with a rolled-up newspaper.”
Johnson added, “As long as she said, ‘Behave yourself, Dal Crawford!’ you were all right. But you just didn’t go near Mrs. Crawford without her okay. She loved that dog, and he was good company for her.”
Crawford returned home after leaving the corner grocery store. Henley’s report states, “She dried off the dog as it was raining and spread out her raincoat on the back porch and took off her shoes and overshoes and left them there to dry.”
At 6 p.m., she served her husband a dinner of steak and eggs.
HABITUAL ROUTINE
At 6:30 p.m., Clyde Crawford left the house in his rustand-cream-colored GMC pickup truck as he habitually did in the evenings. He drove downtown and parked in front of Berg Jewelry Store. He visited at Pennington News Stand next door, then walked to the Malco Theatre and went to a movie. He left the movie, returned to Pennington News Stand and talked to Guy Pennington for several minutes. Then he drove to Carter Liquor Store where he drank beer and watched TV.
In the meantime, at 8:30 p.m., Maud Crawford received a telephone call from an out-of-town relative, Martha Robins Carver, who was expected to spend the night. Carver told Crawford that she, her husband, Howard, and young son had stopped at the home of a friend, Edna Hardin, on arrival at Camden from DeQueen. They had decided to spend the night there and would see the Crawfords the following noon for Sunday dinner.
Carver was Maud Crawford’s cousin whose mother had died when she was a baby. Crawford had helped rear her and was her legal guardian.
According to Henley’s report, Carver told him that Crawford was “very short and hung up the phone,” and that Carver turned to her husband and Hardin and said, “Maud is peeved at me.”
Carver, who now lives at Naples, Tex., recently talked about changing her plans that Saturday evening. “I think she was disappointed that we didn’t come on to her house. Her plans were for us to spend the night. At the time, Howard didn’t feel real comfortable over there with cuddin [cousin] Clyde, and that was the reason we stayed at Edna’s. We always felt that cuddin Clyde thought cuddin Maud was doing too much for us. She was always making us clothes and doing a lot of things for us. He never really carried on with us or joked with us—like he just didn’t have time for us. When I went over there I felt uneasy, but I didn’t want to hurt cuddin Maud by not going.”
Between 8:30 and 9:00 p.m., a woman who had worked for Maud Crawford as a maid walked past the Crawford home and saw Crawford sitting in her chair in her living room snapping beans. The woman considered stopping to say hello to her former employer, but didn’t do so.
That was the last anyone saw of Maud Crawford.
When Clyde Crawford returned home, his wife was gone.
CLYDE CRAWFORD’S RETURN
Henley’s report tells in rich detail of Clyde’s return: “Clyde left Carter’s store in his truck at 10:45 p.m. and drove to his home, arriving at approximately 11 p.m. He parked his truck in the rear of his house where a back yard floodlight was on. Clyde states that the front porch light was also on. “He states that he went
in the back door and into the house to the front living room, and the TV was on. He called Maud and got no answer. Maud’s dog was lying in the front hall that leads to the front door. Clyde asked the dog where Maud was, and the dog walked to the front door, wagged his tail, then went back and laid down.
“Clyde states that he turned back to the TV and began watching it. He watched it until it went off at 12 midnight, then he went to his room in the rear of the house. Clyde thought that Maud was out at a drive-in café with one of the four girls that room upstairs. Clyde put on his bedclothes, got a can of beer, and sat down in his large chair and started reading a detective book and drinking the beer.
“At approximately 1:15 a.m., he realized that Maud still hadn’t come home. He went upstairs to see if any of the girls were home. None were home. He then went to his room and put on his khakis over his bedclothes with his house shoes on.
“He left the house, got in his truck, and drove around to all the drive-in cafes to see if he could locate Maud and the girls.
“He returned to his house at approximately 1:50 a.m., and saw that Maud’s car was still parked at the rear of the house where it had been parked all day with the keys in it.
“Clyde then left his house again and drove back around to the drive-in cafes. While he was at the Duck Inn Café, the city police patrol car saw him in his truck.” J. T. Vaughan, one of the patrolmen, recently recalled that night. “Me and Paul Parish, another patrolman, were in a car together that night making our rounds. Clyde stopped us. “’Have you seen Maud?
She hadn’t come in yet. I went to the picture show, and when I went home, she wasn’t there.’ “’Do you want us to look for her?’ “’No, don’t tell anybody ‘till I check with her friends.’”
Parrish also recalls the exchange with Crawford. “Clyde said, ‘She can’t have gone too far because she left her glasses and her purse with her money in it. Mrs. Berg is liable to’ve called her.’”
WENT TO THE POLICE
Henley’s report continues: “Then Clyde went straight to the police station in Camden. He asked if there had been any wrecks. He said that Maud had not come home, and he thought she might be out driving with one of the girls that rooms with them, or maybe some of her friends were sick and had called her to come over and stay with them.
“Clyde left the police, returned home, and stayed there until around 4:30 a.m. Then he made another round in his truck, then returned home, and stayed there until around 7:30 or 8 a.m. Sunday morning. Then he made some phone calls to Maud’s friends to see if she was at their homes.
“As a result of Clyde’s calls, friends began to arrive at the Crawford home. Mr. Ed Pace arrived, then called State Trooper Files of Camden. Files came to the Crawford home, then he in turn called this investigator at my home at 12 noon. This investigator arrived at the Camden sheriff’s office at 1 p.m., picked up Sheriff Linebarier, and went to 430 Clifton Street.
“When we arrived, there were approximately 15 to 20 people standing around in the front and back yard. I met Mr. Clyde Crawford on the front porch of his house. We went into his house. I got him alone in his back bedroom and questioned him for approximately two hours. Then the sheriff and myself made a search of the house. We could not find any evidence of any foul play. We found Mrs. Maud’s purse lying in the front living room with $142 in cash and two checks made out to her, one for $169 and one for $20. “Maud’s sewing machine
was still set up in the living room, and a pan of snapped beans was sitting on the kitchen table, all snapped except for eight or 10 beans, which were lying beside the pan. The pan of beans was sitting on top of two abstracts, which were the Moses & New abstracts, the landowner being Edward Ritchey of Stephens, and Galen J. Davis of Stephens.
“I found that Maud had been snapping the beans in the front living room in a large rest chair. There were bean snappings and bean strings around on the floor by the chair. “We found that the only clothes missing was a green pair of shoes, and a long brown top coat, belt type.”
NO TRACE, CLUE, MOTIVE
When word spread at Camden that one of its leading citizens had vanished, the community was thunderstruck. A search was begun for her by law enforcement officers and hundreds of people in the community.
No trace would be found of her. No clue would be turned up. No motive would be established.
Years later, people are still talking about Miss Maud. The most frequently heard remark about the mystery of her disappearance is, “Before I die, I just hope they find out what happened to Maud Crawford.”
Next: What happened to Maud Crawford?
Beth Brickell recently published “Solving the Maud Crawford Puzzle,” her fourth work on the mystery. The other titles are “The Disappearance of Maud Crawford,” “In Their Own Voice: Interviews from the Maud Crawford Investigation,” and “Most Credible Conclusions from the Maud Crawford Interviews.” The books are available at luminousfilms.net.