Dead mom, baby & a troubling conviction
ON A JULY night long ago, an Indiana farmer returned from a buckboard trip to town and discovered his wife and infant daughter missing from their homestead.
Faint cries drew William Starbuck nearly a quarter-mile to a shallow livestock well on his farm near Greensboro, 40 miles east of Indianapolis.
Inside the cistern, Starbuck found his “frenzied” wife, Mollie, standing in water to her armpits. He dove in and sloshed around until he located their 4-monthold baby, Beulah Mae. The child was dead.
Mollie was hoisted out and rushed to a hospital, where Sheriff Charles Christopher implored her to explain what had happened. But she too was lost after two days — a death attributed to lung hemorrhage caused by her wailing in the well.
The details of her trauma seemed to die with her.
“Mrs. Starbuck was delirious,” the Indianapolis Star explained, “and at no time did she recover consciousness sufficiently to give any information as to the identity of her assailants.”
William and Mollie Starbuck, ages 27 and 25, had been married six years. Their older daughter, Olive, 5, had accompanied her father to town that frightful night, July 9, 1904.
William Starbuck revealed that his wife was terrified of being home alone. She kept a pail of scalding-hot water on the stove to turn away intruders.
The horrifying events made Mollie’s paranoia seem portentous. It seemed her nightmare had come to life. The mysterious deaths of a mother and baby in America’s heartland aroused national attention.
And when local officials announced a $500 reward — more than $10,000 today — freelance detective Dan Curry hurried over from Ohio to see about cracking the case and collecting the bounty.
Curry quickly produced a suspect: Haley Gipe, 20.
“Gipe is said to bear a bad reputation,” said the Indy Star.
His father, Henry Gipe, had been to prison for a grocery store stickup committed with a pal, William Lockridge.
The Gipe scion “trembled and stammered” when confronted by prosecutor Ed Jackson.
A New York broadsheet described him as a “cowering, pitiable figure” who had been saved from a jailhouse lynching only because an assembled mob lacked “the spark of leadership.”
Curry wheedled a terse statement in which Gipe said he was not involved but knew something about a robbery scheme that targeted Mrs. Starbuck.
The detective fleshed out the details himself.
Curry proposed that Gipe, his father and Lockridge learned that the Starbucks had just earned $288 from the sale of hogs. The crew made plans to invade the Starbuck home while her husband was away and frighten Mollie into handing over the cash. The robbery went awry and spiraled into murder, according to Curry.
“I do not believe a word of it,” said Gipe’s fiancée, Nellie Shepherd. “Haley is a good boy and it wasn’t him.”
Meanwhile, a parallel narrative gained traction.
Although press reports said the baby had been strangled, an autopsy found that she had drowned. Likewise,kewise, Mollie Starbuck’s ’s body showed nonee of the wounds expected had ad she been dragged a quarter-milee from her house to the well.
Two Indiana coroners s without jurisdicsdiction who studied died the case concludedncluded that Mollie Starbuck probably pitched Beulah and herself into the well during a bout of “puerperal insanity,” or postpartum depression.
The Star said “general opinion” around town leaned toward infanticide and suicide, not murder.
Curry wasn’t buying it. As weeks passed without formal charges, he hinted to scribes about the imminent arrests of f Henry Gipe and Lockridge.
But six weeks after the deaths, local coroner Charles Wright concluded that the casese was a tragic murder-suicide. He griped that his opinion was “supuppressed” by Curry and his allies,es, Sheriff Christopher and prosecucu- tor Jackson.
Jackson rounded up six of Gipe’s friends, threatening to charge them as accomplices unless they squealed. All were soon released.
Gipe was finally indicted in November after a delay of nearly fourou monthso s — highlyg y unusual in that era — an and stood trial for murdermu a few weeks la later. The evidence was thin, centeri tering on Gipe’s sta statement to Cu Curry sugge gesting he kn knew somethin thing about the robbery schem scheme. Pros Prosecutor Jackson poundedpound home a message to ju jury: A woman and her child are d dead; someone must be held responsible.
Jurors took nearly five hours to return a verdict — an eternity in those days. In the end, they seemed to throw up their hands, convicting Gipe of involuntary manslaughter manslaughter, a verdict that made no sense.
The Indiana Supreme Court agreed and overturned the verdict.
Jackson pressed a second trial and got the same result: a manslaughter conviction and a sentence of two years minimum and 22 maximum.
Detective Curry was denied the $500 reward because there was no murder conviction. Popular opinion concluded that the jury got it wrong.
The Indy Star said Gipe was viewed as “a martyr of the detective,” and the case was “as much a mystery as ever.”
Despite Curry’s promises, Henry Gipe and Lockridge were never charged.
Haley Gipe was paroled in 1910, after serving six years.
His sweetheart, Nellie Shepherd, was waiting at the prison gates.
They were married and lived a long life together near Indianapolis. When Gipe died in 1952, his obituary did not mention his strange bout with messy American justice.