Rural community torn apart
Ypsilanti torch murders of teens stunned Michigan and the Midwest
When his motion for a new trial was heard, Frank Oliver was dressed in an ill-fitting herringbone suit rather than the prison uniform he had worn since a judge gave him and his two co-defendants life sentences almost two decades earlier. The draconian punishment matched the notoriety of the crime. The “torch murders,” as headline writers dubbed the slayings, were big news far beyond the rural area near Ypsilanti, Michigan, where the charred bodies of two teen girls and two teen boys were found on Aug. 11, 1931.
Residents recalled the Tribune sending four staffers to cover the trial.
“Folks, the Chicago Tribune needs your telephone,” one told a local store owner. He laid four $20 bills on the counter as an enticement to keeping a line open to Tribune Tower.
Walter Trohan, the Tribune’s lead staffer on the case, reported that Oliver and two accomplices “were brought to Ann Arbor, and in a record breaking trial, in which they pleaded guilty, were sentenced four hours later to life imprisonment on four charges of murder each.”
Yet the odds were against Oliver in 1950 when he claimed to be the victim of “quick justice.” Judges hearing an appeal are reluctant to second-guess a trial judge, who can assess the believability of witnesses he or she has seen and heard. Judges who review a case have only a transcript.
But Oliver’s lawyer had what he believed was an ace up his sleeve: He had found a witness who indicated that Oliver’s confession was beaten out of him.
In an affidavit, W.S. Bailey, who had gone to the courthouse to witness the 1931 arraignment, recalled climbing up a drainpipe and entering through a window to get around National Guardsmen who were posted at the building to ward off mob justice. He said that in the courtroom, Oliver “appeared to be in the condition to be expected from severe assault and battery, shock and fright.”
Orlando Stephenson, an associate professor from a local school, also attended the trial because the judge was in such a “distraught and excited condition” that he requested the presence of friends to help him get through the proceedings, a local paper reported.
Stephenson recalled that when Oliver was brought into the courtroom, the “left side of his face was bruised and swollen and his left eye blackened and nearly swollen shut. … His shirt had been torn in shreds.”
Meanwhile, the threat of violence was brewing outside. The Tribune reported that authorities had to use tear gas to repulse a crowd of thousands of people who shouted, “Lynch them!” Oliver and another suspect were white; the third was Black.
The county prosecutor tried calming the crowd. “I am your neighbor and I am appealing to you to abide by the law of Michigan,” he shouted. “There has been enough bloodshed.”
The tragic tale began on a Monday evening in 1931. Thomas Wheatley told his parents he was going to a youth group meeting in Ypsilanti. Instead, the 16-year old picked up a buddy, Harry Lore, 17, and two girls from Cleveland, across the Ohio border.
Ann Harrison, 16, and Vivian Gold, 15, who was Lore’s cousin, met up with the Michigan boys for a double date while claiming they were going to a movie. The four drove in Wheatley’s car to Peninsular Grove, a popular lovers’ lane near Ypsilanti.
Oliver, 19, Fred Smith, 23, and David Blackstone, 33, were drinking in an Ypsilanti speak-easy, a Prohibition-era underground bar.
“I ... got disorderly on hootch and didn’t know what I was about and while I was out David Blackstone suggested we go out and stick up somebody,” Smith testified at trial.
From that point, Smith’s version of events diverged from what Oliver claimed in his appeal.
Smith said the three of them encountered the Ohio girls and the Michigan boys parked at lovers’ lane. Wheatley and Lore recognized Smith as the men approached, he said. Smith was an ex-convict, and Blackstone was a former inmate, too, freshly paroled. They would need to cover their tracks.
The men took the teens to another location, where they raped and bludgeoned Harrison and Gold and beat and shot Wheatley and Lore.
“Then we took them down the County Line Road and set fire to them,” Smith testified.
A farmer found the grisly sight, and a posse quickly formed. Smith panicked and told his landlord he had to leave town right away. He gave the landlord his gun in lieu of the rent he owed.
After reading a newspaper account of the killings, the landlord gave the weapon to police. A ballistics expert in Detroit determined a bullet removed from Lore’s body came from the gun.
Because Oliver and Blackstone had been seen with Smith, they became suspects, too. As did Catherine Keller, Smith’s girlfriend. She was found washing a bloody shirt of Smith’s when police took her into custody. She admitted to hanging out with the three men at the bar that night.
The law enforcement officers hunting the suspects received assistance from Harry Bennett, automobile magnate Henry Ford’s chief security officer, who lived near Ypsilanti. Bennett was Ford’s strongman and union buster, and police knew to tread lightly around him.
In his affidavit, Stephenson recalled learning from Bennett that Oliver’s trip to jail included a stop at Bennett’s fortresslike home. Presumably, that detour was why Oliver showed up at court bruised and battered.
Notably, the professor’s affidavit was written only at the time of Oliver’s appeal. But even if it had been introduced at the 1931 trial, Judge George Sample likely wouldn’t have changed his decision. His priority was sending the defendants to prison — alive.
“I don’t wonder that the crowd is howling for vengeance,” he told them.
As the convicted men were whisked off to prison, Keller was arrested and later charged with being an accessory to her boyfriend’s crime. She was found guilty, but an appellate court later threw out the conviction. There is no evidence that Keller, who came from a prominent family, went through a retrial.
Oliver’s 1950 motion for a new trial was denied. Judge James Breakey ruled that Oliver made his confession freely. He called it a candid admission of guilt and read a part of the 18-page transcript into the record.
“A man who can do what he did, and see what he saw and go out and paint a house the next day. Well, I needn’t comment on it,” Breakey said.
Smith and Blackstone died in prison. At the courthouse in 1931, Smith acknowledged having brought that fate on himself.
“I guess I’ve always been wild,” Smith told a local newspaper. “I wanted to stick up somebody just for the thrill. Never realized it would come to this. I got nobody to blame but myself.”
In his remarks to the reporter, Blackstone owned up to his actions, too: “I wish the crowd could have its way. I’d rather be lynched than be sent to prison. I realize now what a crime I committed.”
Oliver also came clean. “I’m sorry and have been ever since the crime was committed,” he said. “I don’t know why I did it.”
Oliver, though, defied the trial judge’s prediction for the killers: “If you live 1,000 years, you will not be fit to come back into society.” He walked out of prison on parole in 1967.
“Oliver has compiled an outstanding record while serving over 36 years on (his) sentence,” parole officials explained.