Book gets story straight about suspected serial killer

Strange how so many people associated with John Kizer, a Pocahontas veterinarian and land owner, ended up dead: his two wives, a pair of in-laws and his stepson among them. And isn’t it curious that Kizer benefited financially from many of these deaths?

The story of Kizer, who died by suicide in 1936 while in police custody, is the subject of “Notorious Arkansas Swindler Dr. John Kizer: Medicine and Murder,” a new book by historian Rodney Harris that will be published Jan. 1 by History Press.

Harris, 49, is chairman of the department of history and political science at Williams Baptist University in Walnut Ridge, a trustee of the Arkansas Historical Association and president and CEO of Five Rivers Historic Preservation in Pocahontas. He’s also a Pocahontas native who is quite familiar with Kizer’s infamy.

“I first heard about John Kizer when I was in the eighth grade,” he says. “My teacher did a unit on it in local history and it has stuck with me ever since.”

An exhibit on Kizer is one of the most popular at the Randolph County Heritage Museum, he says. “It really resonates with people. I think we’re always drawn to murders and mysteries, and this one really takes a life of its own.”

The truth around Kizer has been embellished over the years, Harris says, and his book is an attempt to clarify the record.

In “They Died Like Dogs,” an article published in the April 1957 issue of True Crime magazine, journalist Charles Morehead wrote about Kizer and the deaths that multiplied in his wake. It became the accepted version of events around Kizer, but Harris has found many inaccuracies as well as unsubstantiated accounts in Morehead’s reporting. For instance, Morehead writes that Kizer was responsible for the death of his niece, Katie Riggs, but Harris notes that this wasn’t true and that Riggs lived to be 69 years old. Another death that Morehead claimed was Kizer’s doing, of a man named Elmer Anderson, “may be pure fiction,” Harris writes.

He started working on the book about a year and a half ago after helping others with their research.

“I kept running across things that were of interest, and I’d make copies for myself,” he says. “When I started reading those, I realized that there were things that did not add up.”

Harris found in-depth reports about the case from newspapers outside Randolph County, most notably the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which then led him to census records and other research that disputed some of what Morehead had written.

“There were a lot of questions there, and I’ve tried to answer those questions,” he says.

Kizer was born in Randolph County in 1872, the second oldest of six siblings. The family was poor, and Kizer

was resentful of their poverty though he was a good worker on his father’s farm. He was also skilled in working with animals and would eventually work as a veterinarian, but had a profound dislike of dogs.

“The roots of this hatred are unknown, but the boy would nurse a sick animal for days to restore its health, but he would kill a dog,” Harris writes.

In 1902 he married Birdie Brooks, a divorcee six years his senior with three children. They lived in Pocahontas and the couple became the first county extension agents in Randolph County. Kizer had also invested in the market and bought property in Randolph County.

He urged Birdie to purchase a life insurance policy in 1927 and she soon became ill after Kizer reportedly inoculated her against malaria. She suffered for weeks as Kizer tended to her, treating her with medicine he kept in his bag and refusing her children’s insistence that she be taken to a doctor.

Her children were finally able to take her to a hospital, where she died on Dec. 22, 1927.

Kizer married his second wife, Rosena Arnold, in March 1929. She was also a divorcee and had a young son, Bonner, who stood to inherit a substantial estate when he came of age. On Sept. 16, 1929, Arnold died after a short illness and Kizer collected $33,000 in life insurance following another quick burial.

Kizer was in need of cash, according to Harris. He had been buying land and had also invested in the stock market, but after the market crashed in 1929 and the Great Depression enveloped the nation, he lost $80,000, or about $1,412,000 in today’s dollars.

Kizer adopted Bonner with the blessing of Arnold’s parents, William and Elizabeth Bonner. In 1932, William Bonner collapsed and died while walking through his fields with Kizer, who had apparently taken out a $3,000 life insurance policy on the older man.

Elizabeth Bonner continued to live with Kizer and her grandson in Pocahontas. She died after becoming ill, but not before deeding about 585 acres of prime farmland and parcels of property in Pocahontas worth about $500,000 in today’s dollars to Kizer.

People were finally growing suspicious of Kizer, and things came to a head when Bonner, a popular teenager, died shortly after injuring his shoulder in a Pocahontas High School football game. Unlike in the other cases, Bonner’s body underwent an autopsy and it was ruled that he died of strychnine poisoning. Kizer was charged with murder.

Kizer, who once served as a jailer, was taken first to jail in Walnut Ridge and then Paragould to protect him from a Pocahontas lynch mob. Forever the control freak, he took his fate into his own hands. On the way to a court appearance in Pocahontas, he swallowed three capsules of strychnine that had been smuggled to him while in jail and died.

In all, Harris figures Kizer could be responsible for eight or nine deaths.

“There are a few cases that I just can’t firmly track down and say that they happened,” he says.

“He grew up in quite a bit of poverty, and that takes a toll on people,” the author continues when talking about Kizer’s motivations. “He seemed dead set on becoming rich and never going back to that kind of poverty.”

Harris hopes his book helps clarify facts around the gruesome story and gives a more complete portrait of Kizer.

“We hear a lot about ‘revisionist history’ today. But history is always being revised, and that’s what I’ve done here. I’ve gone through the records and have tried to pull everything together in one place and revise the story to show what was really going on. Part of me hopes that people understand that revisionist history isn’t always a negative. The other thing is that I think the story is more interesting and more complex this way.”