Lore - REMASTERED – Episode 39: Take the Stand

Episode Date: November 28, 2022

In this remastered episode, we return to the courtroom for a look at a most unusual case. This classic episode has been completely re-recorded and re-produced, along with a brand new bonus story at the end. Enjoy! Researched, written, and produced by Aaron Mahnke, with additional help from GennaRose Nethercott and Harry Marks. ———————— Lore Resources:  Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music  Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources  All the shows from Grim & Mild: www.grimandmild.com ©2022 Aaron Mahnke. All rights reserved. Access premium content!: https://www.lorepodcast.com/support To advertise on our podcast, please reach out to [e-mail], or visit our listing here.

On the 24th of June of 1408, a French court sentenced a murderer to death by execution. She had entered the home of a neighbor and found a four-month-old child inside, alone and unattended. Although she never disclosed her reason for doing so, she killed the child right there in the house. After her trial, she was moved to the prison to be held until her execution. The others who were in prison there were most certainly jeering at her. They called her names.

Yes, they were hardened criminals, but to kill a child, even they were appalled. The prison however treated her the same as those men by charging her family the same rate for her daily meals. The quality was a rare thing for her, you see. On July 17, she was guided to the platform and a rope was placed around her neck. A crowd was most likely gathered that day to watch the spectacle. Like the criminals inside the prison, they too must have mocked her and shouted insults. And then, after the trapdoor snapped open and she plummeted to her death, it was over.

History is full of these stories. A criminal goes to trial and justice wins the day. What was odd about that trial in 1408, though, was the suspect, because she wasn't a local woman or even a relative of the child she killed. She wasn't even human, you see. She was a pig, literally a farm animal, tried in a court of law, sentenced to be put to death and then executed on the gallows three weeks later. In the long history of criminal trials spanning cultures and centuries, all manner of oddities

have entered the courtroom. As unusual as it might sound to put livestock on trial, humans have been guilty of worse. You see, sometimes even the dead get to testify. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore. Edward was a stranger when he rolled into town in the autumn of 1896. He claimed to have come from Pocahontas County to the north. Whether or not he was a mystery to everyone in town, he brought a necessary skill. Edward was a blacksmith, and he quickly found work in a local shop owned by James Crookshanks.

Within days of arriving, one of the local women caught his eye, and so Edward set his sights on winning her affection. Elva was young and beautiful, and the locals couldn't really blame the newcomer for falling head over heels for her. For her part, though, the feeling was mutual, despite the fact that Edward was at least a decade older than Elva. Within a matter of weeks, the couple were married. The first few months of their marriage were mostly uneventful, although it was later said

that the young bride had become pregnant shortly after the wedding. The local physician had been treating her for slight complications with her pregnancy since the new year, but most of the people in town had no idea. It seems Elva was good at keeping secrets. On the afternoon of January 23rd of 1897, with snow on the ground and a chill in the air, Andy Jones stepped into the warmth of the blacksmith shop. He was just 11 years old, but he worked for the newlyweds as an errand boy and a housekeeper when they needed him.

It was a common thing to see his small shape darting up and down the road, running messages from husband to wife, and back again. Edward told Andy that he was going to stop by the market before coming home at the end of the day, and so he instructed the boy to go and ask Elva if there was anything else that she needed him to purchase. This was before text messaging, before the telephone, before email, so Andy in his own way was a pre-modern SMS service. The boy ran off, and when he arrived at the couple's house, he let himself in.

When he did, he was horrified to find Elva lying face down on the floor at the foot of the stairs. One hand was pinned beneath her chest, while the other arm was stretched out and away. The house was deathly quiet. At first he thought she was sleeping. He called out to her as he approached, but stopped when he noticed the odd bend in her neck. Even to this young immature mind, something seemed wrong.

Rather than moving closer, he backed slowly away and then turned and bolted home. Once there, he told his mother everything he saw. Just have a way of knowing what to do, it seems. She quickly headed out the door to call to the town doctor, George Knapp, and took Andy with her. It took them nearly an hour to track him down and bring him back to the blacksmith's home, but when they arrived, there was no body on the floor of the hall. It might have been easy to write it all off as a prank.

Certainly in our own day and age, with tales of the boy who cried wolf, there's always a small suspicion that unbelievable stories might actually just be lies. Thankfully though, they heard the sound of sobbing from the second floor of the home. Andy and his mom politely let themselves out, but Dr. Knapp headed upstairs. He entered a main bedroom to find Elva's lifeless body laid out on the bed, with Edward seated beside her. He had apparently come home after Andy left and discovered his dead wife on the floor. After carrying her up to their room, he had changed her into a dark formal dress with a

high collar and long sleeves, and then arranged her for burial. He was in tears, cradling her head and sobbing. When Dr. Knapp entered the room, Edward didn't even look up. Attempting to be as respectful as he could of the man's loss, the doctor quietly inspected Elva's body for anything that might hint at the cause of her death. Having recently helped her with some other medical issues, he was familiar with her current state of health. At first glance, he felt that nothing seemed out of the ordinary, but he wanted to be thorough.

It was only when he reached for her head and neck that Edward stirred. He pushed the doctor's hands away and continued to gently run his fingers through her hair, sobbing deeply the entire time. It was clear to Dr. Knapp that the man simply needed to mourn. Picking up his things, he let himself out and exited the house. While Edward grieved the loss of his young bride, Dr. Knapp went back to his office and recorded what little information he had been able to ascertain. He listed her cause of death as, and I quote, everlasting faint, before amending it to add

the phrase, complications from pregnancy. Life was hard in rural West Virginia at the end of the 19th century. That much was certain. What Dr. Knapp didn't know, however, was just how much harder it had been for Elva Shoe. The burial didn't go as planned. It began with Edward's rather unorthodox appearance at the undertaker hours before the graveside service.

He insisted on helping the undertaker position his wife in the coffin and then placed one of her favorite scarves around her neck. He added two other items of clothing as well, pressing them in on either side of her head. He said it was just so that she would rest easier. At the funeral, he continued to act in odd ways. He paced beside the casket the entire time. He stooped low every now and then to adjust her clothing to make things perfect. And he continuously wept as he did this.

It was the sort of panicked, nervous fussing you might expect from a distraught parent. The man was clearly grieved. He and Elva had been newlyweds after all. This loss, so close to the emotional high of their wedding, well it must have been crippling. And everyone seemed to understand that. Everyone that is, except for Mary Hester, Elva's mother. Mary did not trust Edward, and maybe that distrust was simply fueled by her dislike of the man.

After all, he had rolled into town, a total stranger, an older man, a mysterious past, and taken her daughter from her. Maybe she just had issues of her own to deal with. Or maybe mother's intuition is always right. No one knew for sure. They just knew that she hated the guy. Mary Hester wrestled with this uneasy feeling for weeks. She had trouble sleeping, and understandably, she found it difficult to move on, to take

a much needed deep breath and press forward through life. And according to her testimony, she also prayed. It was a source of solace for her, and probably one of the ways she was grieving the loss of her daughter. Every day and night, she prayed for the truth. But mostly, she prayed for one specific thing. She wanted her daughter to return, and tell her side of the story. Sure, all of us long for the ones we've lost, we'd love one more cup of coffee with them.

One more hug. One more conversation. I know firsthand just how hard it is to let go. But Mary wanted her daughter to literally come back, and she prayed hard for it every day. And then, it happened. Mary told others that it happened over the course of four nights, each night revealing more truth, becoming more visual and real.

She said that her daughter, who she had always called Zona, came into her room and spoke to her. Just as a ball of light, and later as a fully formed body. According to Mary, this was no dream, it was a vision. Her daughter revealed that Edward had killed her after months of physical abuse. There had been an argument that final day, and Edward had strangled her right there at the foot of the stairs, breaking her neck, high up beneath the skull. Once the story was told, Mary said, her daughter vanished once again.

Whatever suspicion she might have had prior to this vision, Mary Hester quickly became a woman on a mission. She went to the local prosecutor, a man named John Preston, and told him the story. At first, there wasn't much he was able to do. The case was closed, and a ghostly vision was far from being a valid reason to open it back up again. But he wanted to help. Maybe, he told her, if there was something new, some new piece of information that could

help call the official cause of death into question, it might justify digging deeper. Mary agreed, and John Preston got to work. Not being a friend or a relative of Elva's, Preston hadn't attended the funeral. When he started to ask around though, people who had been there started to share interesting observations. Edward's odd behavior around the coffin, the positioning of the clothing around the area of the neck and head, his insistence to never leave her side. All of it smelled a bit odd to him, as an outside observer.

Preston took his suspicions to Dr. Knapp, and asked the man if he had seen any unusual details when he examined Elva's body the afternoon she was discovered. At first, Knapp was defensive, and stood by his work, by his medical opinion. We've all been there before, I think. Those moments when we know we might have made a mistake, but we refuse to admit it, Dr. Knapp tried to make one of those prideful stands. Preston refused to let the matter rest, and eventually the physician caved in and told him the truth.

Yes, he had examined her, but Edward had made a complete examination impossible. He was too protective, too territorial. Knapp admitted that he hadn't been able to fully examine her neck, and that's a mission had haunted him ever since. In the end, that was the key they'd been looking for. Those details were enough to reopen the case, and with it, Elva Zona Hester's grave. Dr. Knapp was assisted by two other physicians who came to town to help with the exhumation, and after the coffin was set up in the local schoolhouse, they opened the lid.

And what they found inside changed everything. Elva's neck was badly bruised. It wasn't an oversight by Dr. Knapp, though. Sometimes bruising happens deep beneath the skin, and it's only after death that the marks rise to the surface. Here they were, and these marks were damning. Clear fingerprint impressions on both sides of the throat. The doctors then conducted an autopsy on Elva's body and discovered what the marks hinted at.

Her windpipe had been crushed, ligaments had been torn, and the vertebrae at the base of her skull had been completely displaced. Elva's death had been no accident. Someone had strangled her, gripping her throat until the physical trauma ended her life. The first thought on everyone's mind was that Edward had killed her, but that was quickly tempered by more sober thoughts. There was no proof tying Edward to the murder of his wife, no evidence that pointed definitively to him.

Yes, there were the finger marks, but those fingers could have belonged to anyone, right? On the other hand, Mary Hester knew all about the cause of death before the exhumation. She claimed that her knowledge came to her through another worldly vision, that her deceased daughter actually stepped through the veil between life and death and revealed the truth to her. But no one really believed that, did they? Mary, it seemed, was more of a suspect than Edward was, and that didn't sit well with John Preston.

He had hoped that her vision would be dismissed for the insanity that it was, that it was just crazy enough to avoid suspicion. To help that along, though, he needed to know more about the other suspect, and so he began to investigate Edward's shoes past. What he found was shocking. Edward's shoe, it turns out, was a new name. His real name was Erasmus Stribling Shoe, though many who knew him prior to his days in West Virginia simply called him Trout, and Trout, it seems, had quite the past.

Most importantly, Elva hadn't been his first wife, or even his second. She had been his third. The first marriage had taken place 12 years prior to the death of Elva, back in 1885, to one Ellie Cutlip. They even had a daughter together, but divorced in 1889 when Edward was sent to prison for stealing a horse. John Preston actually managed to track her down and interview her, and she was quick to tell him about how abusive and violent Edward had been toward her.

After getting out of prison, Edward married a second time in 1894. Her name was Lucy Tritt, but she died within a year of the wedding. Preston was unable to track down a cause of death, but there were stories. There were always stories, and these stories spoke of how Lucy had been killed by Edward, who vanished from town a short while later. At the time, the rumors had been dismissed. Death, even among the youth, was not uncommon. Tragic, yes, but it happened.

Now though, with a second of three wives in the grave, it raised all sorts of questions. It was enough to arrest Edward. His trial began on June 22 of 1897. Although the prosecution lacked the physical evidence to connect him to the death of Elva, they built their case on his string of marriages, and specifically on the death of Lucy Tritt. There was a pattern, they told the jury, and that pattern should be proof enough. Edward's shoe, they declared, was a cold-blooded killer. And the jury found him guilty, but rather than the death penalty that everyone expected,

Edward was sentenced to life in prison. And as you can imagine, that didn't sit well with some. On July 11, while Shoe was sitting in the county jail waiting to be transported to prison, a mob of nearly 30 angry men gathered outside of town. They were armed with guns and a brand-new rope tied into a noose. But thanks to a tip from a local farmer who saw the men gathering, the sheriff was able to keep Edward safe. He rushed him out of the jail and into a hiding place until the chaos blew over.

And then, as promised, Shoe was delivered to his new home at the West Virginia State Penitentiary. He died there, three years later, when a wave of pneumonia and measles swept through the prison. Mary Hester died 13 years later, at peace with her role in the trial. I doubt we could ever know for sure if Mary Hester's ghostly visitor was really her daughter back from the grave. It might very well have been nothing more than a personification of her suspicion and intuition. Or perhaps it was a projection of her grief and loss and pain. We will never know for sure, but the effect was real enough. When Mary Hester took the stand in court that day in June of 1897,

John Preston was careful to avoid any mention of her vision, partly because he didn't want her to sound like she had prior knowledge of the cause of her daughter's death. But mostly because it made the woman sound crazy. She believed the ghost of her daughter had appeared in her bedroom and told her the truth. That was probably enough to discredit her as a character witness against Edward Shoe, and Preston wanted to avoid that at all costs. The defense attorney noticed the omission, though, and decided to use it against them. While Mary was still on the witness stand, he grilled her about the vision she claimed to have experienced.

I've read the court transcripts. I've read his insistence that it had been nothing more than a dream, that she had been exhausted, obsessed, and overwhelmed with her loss. Thankfully, Mary stuck to her guns. It was a vision, not a dream, she said. She'd been fully awake when it happened, and it had really happened, she said. And the judge allowed the testimony to stand. So when the jury retreated to make their decision,

they did so with a ghost story as a piece of the evidence. It took them less than an hour to reach a verdict. Sometimes folklore creeps into our lives and pushes us in a direction we never thought we'd go. Over the centuries, it's driven people to murder, to steal, to abuse, and to build social rules that oppress certain types of people. Folklore in that way is often an excuse for bad behavior. But folklore is also like a gem. We can hold it up and turn it and watch the light play off of its different facets.

The story of Mary Hester and Edward Shoe reveals the hopeful side of folklore, giving us all a glimpse of the power and sway that it commands. As rare as it was, this was a moment where folklore took the stand in a court of law, where belief had weight and the supernatural world, at least for a few moments, entered the public opinion and actually meant something. Yes, folklore can transform people into monsters. Occasionally, though, it's empowered us to dig deeper and find the truth. Because the grave, it seems, can't always stop justice.

In the world of criminal justice, decisions are supposed to be made on a foundation of truth and proof. And as the tools of science have become more accessible, that foundation has, at least in theory, become easier to build upon. Which is what makes stories like the Murder Trial of Zona Hester that much more amazing. Folklore stepped into the courtroom and contributed to the decision. And it wasn't the last time it would happen. Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear exactly what I mean. The prosecutor handling Elva's case didn't want her mother's vision admitted as evidence for obvious reasons. After all, who would believe that a murder could be solved in a dream?

The thing is, it wasn't the first time the dead had advocated for themselves after their untimely death. And it wouldn't be the last. In the town of Wadhurst in East Sussex, England, 27-year-old Nicola Fuller and her 45-year-old husband Harry Fuller were settling into their lives as newlyweds. Harry was a car dealer and a good one at that. At least in his own mind, he had a habit of exaggerating his wealth to anyone who would listen. And that habit got him in a bit of trouble with a man named Stephen Young. Young was a 35-year-old insurance consultant and father of two who was up to his eyeballs in debt, something to the tune of 100,000 pounds. And it just so happened that he was also a bit of a

gun enthusiast as well. There was an array of both registered and unregistered weapons in his possession, and he was also the treasurer of a local rifle club. Young had heard the stories of all the cash Fuller kept in his home, so he came up with a plan. He would make an appointment to meet with Fuller at his house and then rob him to pay down the money that he owed. Except things were a little different on February 10th when Stephen Young showed up at Fuller's cottage in Wadhurst. Harry turned his back and Young shot him straight through the heart, killing him instantly. Nicola tried to flee, but she was also fatally shot four times before she had the chance to run. Young tried to make the scene look like a drug deal gone bad. He sprinkled some powdered sugar

on Mr. Fuller's body before grabbing the cash and running away. His ruse didn't work, though. His car had been seen on the premises, and there was evidence of the call that he'd made to Harry the night before. It didn't take long for the authorities to track down the man behind the murders. Stephen Young was swiftly arrested. But what should have been a cut and dried case was surprisingly drawn out. The first jury had to be entirely replaced when one of the jurors asked to be removed due to the disturbing subject matter. A new jury was brought in, and the trial was restarted. It took place over a period of five weeks in Brighton, England. On the final night of the deliberation, the jurors all found themselves sequestered in

Brighton's old ship hotel together. They were addled, having been away from their families and their daily lives, all while listening to the troubling and sordid details of a double homicide. Several of the jurors eventually went to sleep, while a group of four carried on into the night, drinking and talking. It's safe to assume that they discussed the case and the difficulties in ascertaining the truth. So, with a little liquid courage, fueling their decisions, someone got a bright idea to ask one of the victims directly, Harry Fuller. They found a sheet of paper and scrawled the alphabet across one side, along with the words yes and no. Then they turned an empty wine glass upside down over the letters and each

juror placed their hands on top. In other words, they had MacGyvered together a makeshift Ouija board. One juror took it upon himself to address the spirit directly. He asked, Is Harry present? The glass slid across the paper. Yes. Who killed you? The juror asked. The spirit then spelled out Stephen Young Dunnett. How? The juror asked. S H O T replied the ghost. As the jurors discussed the exchange amongst themselves, another reply came through from the beyond. It spelled vote guilty tomorrow. A few of the jurors were crying by the end of the seance, but even those who had held it together were visibly shaken by the experience.

They all agreed not to tell the others about the board, nor what Harry's ghost had told them. The following day, the jury gathered one last time. They deliberated, then submitted their verdict. They had found Stephen Young guilty of murder. He was sentenced to life in prison. Story is one that sounds right at home among other tales of turn of the century spiritualism. A time when folks gathered around a table on a Saturday night and reached out to the dead. But this wasn't the 1800s. It didn't even happen during the 1930s or 40s. Stephen Young's fate was decided by a Ouija board in 1994. The year friends debuted on television. But that wasn't the end for the murderer, nor for the jurors. One month later, the Crown Court

received a three page long handwritten letter. It was a confession detailing everything that had happened the night before the verdict was announced. It had been written by a juror named Adrian, the youngest of the four who had helped conduct the seance that night. He felt guilty ever since it had happened, saying, to me, this was a miscarriage of justice. I thought to myself, this is someone's life we're dealing with. I was astonished that these grown up people had played this child's game. Word quickly spread about the Ouija board jurors in the press and the courts overturned the conviction. A mistrial was declared and now the whole process had to be started over one more time with a brand new jury. When it was finally over, justice won out.

Stephen Young was found guilty once again. And this time, no witnesses had to be summoned from the afterlife. This episode of Lore was researched, written, and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with additional help from Jenna Rose Nethercotts and Harry Marks, and music by Chad Lawson. Lore is much more than just a podcast. There's a book series available in bookstores and online and two seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime Video. Check them both out if you want more Lore in your life. I also make and executive produce a whole bunch of other podcasts, which I think you'd enjoy. My production company, Grim and Mild, specializes in shows that sit

at the intersection of the dark and the historical. You can learn more about all of our shows and everything else going on over in one central place, grimandmild.com. And you can also follow this show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Just search for Lore podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. And when you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening.