Ella Barham and Albert Molitor: Arkansas & Michigan

In 1912 in the Arkansas Ozarks, 18-year-old Ella Barham was murdered, and Boone County hanged her neighbor Odus Davidson on circumstantial evidence. In 1875 in Rogers City, Michigan, fifteen men plotted to kill the town's founder, Albert Molitor. The shooting killed him and his clerk, Edward Sullivan, and the town kept the secret for sixteen years.

Ella Barham's errand on a November morning in 1912 was a hat for her sister, and she never came home. Her remains were found that night on a hillside south of Crooked Creek. Odus Davidson was convicted of first-degree murder in January 1913 after his own lawyers had him moved to Berryville while the jury was out, so he never heard the verdict. He was hanged in Harrison on August 11, 1913, still saying he was innocent, and his appeal was studied by the lawyers for Leo Frank in 1915.

Albert Molitor helped found Rogers City in 1868, paid his workers in scrip good only at his own store, and called himself the King of Presque Isle County. On August 23, 1875, buckshot tore through his mill office. His clerk, Edward Sullivan, who was not a target, died on the boat to Alpena, and Molitor, taken to Detroit, died on September 18. In 1891 a farmer named William Repke confessed and named fourteen others. Presque Isle County dismissed 252 prospective jurors, the trial moved to Alpena, five men were sentenced to life at hard labor, and all five were later pardoned. Hermann Hoeft and Andrew Banks, named as the recruiters, were never charged.

Content note: sexual violence, a dismemberment, a hanging, a shooting, a family driven from its home by armed riders, and the mob expulsions of a county's Black residents.

Foul Play, Season 40: America's 250th Anniversary. Fifty states, fifty crimes. This is Episode 16.

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