Episode 39: Take the Stand

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On June 24th, 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 most certainly jeered at her.

They called her names.

Yes, they were hardened criminals, but they 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.

Equality was a rare thing for her, you see.

On July 17th, 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 the trial of 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.

During 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, but 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 Cruikshanks.

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 was 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 their wedding.

The local physician had been treating her for slight complications with her pregnancy since the first of 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 housekeeper when they needed him.

It was a common thing to see his small shape darting up and down the road, running messages from wife to husband 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 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 his young, immature mind, something seemed wrong.

Rather than moving closer, he backed slowly away and then turned and bolted bolted home.

Once there, he told his mother everything he saw.

Moms always have a way of knowing what to do, it seems.

She quickly headed out the door to call on 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.

Elva was just...

Gone.

It might have been easy to write it 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 the 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 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 enough 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.

house.

While Edward grieved the loss of his young bride, Dr.

Knapp went back to his office and recorded what little information he'd been able to ascertain.

He listed her cause of death as, and, I quote, everlasting feint, 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 how much harder it had been for Elva Shu.

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, pressing them in on either side of her head.

He said it was so she could 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 wept continuously 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 for him.

And everyone seemed to understand that.

Everyone, that is, except Mary Hester, Elva's mother.

Mary didn't 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 with 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 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 that she was grieving the loss of her daughter.

Every day and every night, she prayed for the truth.

But mostly, she prayed for one specific thing.

She wanted her daughter to return and tell her her side of the story.

Sure, all of us long for ones we've lost.

We'd love one more cup of coffee with them, one more hug, 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 single 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 more real.

She said that her daughter, who she had always called Zona, came into her room and spoke to her, first as a ball of light, later as a fully formed body.

According to Mary, this was no dream.

It was a vision.

Her daughter revealed to her 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 suspicions 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 justify digging deeper.

Mary agreed.

Then John Preston got to work.

Not being a friend or relative of Elva's, Preston didn't actually attend her 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 outsider.

Preston took his suspicions to Dr.

Knapp and asked the man if he'd seen any unusual details when he examined Elva's body the afternoon that she was discovered.

At first, Knapp was defensive and stood by his work, by his medical opinion.

We've all been there before, 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 that day.

But 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 omission 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.

What they found inside changed everything.

Elva's neck was badly bruised.

It wasn't an oversight by Dr.

Knapp, though.

Sometimes bruising happens beneath the skin, and it's only after death that the marks rise to the surface.

And here they were, and these marks were damning.

Clear finger 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 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 an otherworldly 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 seems, was more of a suspect than Edward was.

and that didn't sit well with John Preston.

He'd 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 Shu's past.

What he found was shocking.

Edward Shu, it turns out, was a new name.

His real name was Erasmus Stribling Shu.

although many who knew him prior to his days in West Virginia simply called him Trout.

And Trout, it seems, had quite the past.

And most importantly, Elva hadn't been his first wife, or even his second.

She'd been his third.

The first marriage was 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, 1894, but she died within a year of the wedding.

Her name was Lucy Tritt.

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 third wife in the grave, it raised all sorts of questions.

And that was enough to arrest Edward.

His trial began on June 22nd, 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 Shu, they declared, was a cold-blooded killer.

The jury found him guilty, but rather than the death penalty that everyone expected, Edward was sentenced to life in prison.

This didn't sit well with some.

On July 11th, while Shu 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.

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, Shu 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 superstition and intuition.

Or perhaps it was a projection of her grief and loss and pain.

We'll 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 Prester 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 appeared in her bedroom and told her the true story.

That was probably enough to discredit her as a character witness against Edward Hsu, 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'd been exhausted, obsessed, and overwhelmed with her loss.

Thankfully, though, 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.

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.

The grave, it seems, can't always stop justice.

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 to the light.

and turn it and watch the light play off dozens of facets.

The story of Mary Hester and Edward Shu reveals the hopeful side of folklore, giving us all a glimpse of the power and the sway that it still 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, Occasionally, though, it's empowered us to dig deeper and find the truth.

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This episode of Lore was researched, written, and produced by me, Aaron Mankey.

Lore is much more than a podcast.

There's a book series in bookstores around the country and online, and the second season of the Amazon Prime television show was recently released.

Check them both out if you want more lore in your life.

I also make two other podcasts, Aaron Mankey's Cabinet of Curiosities and Unobscured, and I think you'd enjoy both.

Each one explores other areas of our dark history, ranging from bite-sized episodes to season-long dives into a single topic.

You can learn about both of those shows and everything else going on all over in one central place, theworldoflore.com now.

And you can also follow the show on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Just search for lore podcast all one word and then click that follow button.

When you do, say hi.

I like it when people say hi.

And as always, thanks for listening.