<![CDATA[JANIS THORNTON

<![CDATA[JANIS THORNTON - Blog]]>Sun, 05 Apr 2026 17:21:05 -0400Weebly<![CDATA[Confessions of an “Almost” Christmas Shopping Warrior]]>Thu, 23 Nov 2023 14:48:09 GMThttp://www.janis-thornton.com/blog/confessions-of-an-almost-christmas-shopping-warrior

I really can’t explain why every year on the day after Thanksgiving, otherwise sane people lose their minds. Many, even before dawn, rush out to their favorite big-box store for a chance to claim the bargain of the century — usually some overrated item of inferior quality that they don’t even need.
I’ve always been smug about separating myself from people who fall prey to retailers’ high-pressure marketing blitzes designed to turn nice people into predaceous, shameless Christmas shopping warriors. Stampeding through stores, racing for that one, must-have, highly publicized article — of which there is always a shortage — they trample anything that gets in their way.
I have never engaged in such behavior. But … I must confess there was that one holiday season when I came close.
It haunts me still.

The year was 1998. It was the day before Thanksgiving, and I was sitting at the kitchen table preparing my Christmas shopping list. My then-9-year-old son, Matt, excitedly called me to the living room.
“Mom, look. Here’s that toy I’ve been wanting.”
  Filling the TV screen was Furby, the adorable, interactive, battery-powered “pet” predicted to be that year’s must-have toy. For Furby’s manufacturer, the hype would mean millions of added revenue. For hordes of consumer puppets (i.e., parents), it meant only one thing: The annual Christmas-shopping war was under way.
  I had no intention of doing battle for a toy and told my son he’d have to wait until after Christmas when the Furby furor had finished.
  However, just two days later — i.e., “Black Friday” — while my son and his dad scoured the malls for Furbies, I stayed home phoning stores. Sadly, responses were identical. Everywhere, supplies had been depleted.
  Clearly, we were in the throes of a Furby crisis. I feared even fervent efforts to find a Furby would be futile.
  At our house, the frenzy over Furby would have ended there had it not been for the “secret” shared with my son by a cashier at an Indianapolis toy store. A truckload of Furbies was expected for the store’s six o’clock opening the next morning, she told him.
  “So, can we go, Mom? Huh?” he pleaded. “Pleeeeaaaasse?”
  “No!”
  No way was I going to be separated from my bed three hours before dawn on a Saturday to drive 45 miles to fight a mob of crazed shoppers and shell out hard-earned cash for an overpriced child’s plaything.
  The buzzer on my clock radio jolted me out of a sound sleep at 3:45 the next morning. On school days, repeated vigorous shakes were required to wake my son. But that morning, after one gentle nudge, he was on his feet, raring to go.
  Soon we were in the car, toottling along desolate country roads, enveloped in starlit blackness, headed for the Indianapolis toy store. Matt and I giggled hysterically at one another’s silly jokes and our mocking renditions of the golden oldies blaring from the radio. We marveled at how different our familiar world operated when its inhabits slept. Who would guess that at 4 a.m. all the traffic lights in town became amber flashers — beacons for motorists, like us, on a mission? And what a surprise to discover the belt of Orion, which we had always viewed in the eastern skies, at four a.m. was melting into the western horizon.
  Despite our levity, I wondered how many other kids had been privy to the overzealous cashier’s tip.
  “Don’t be disappointed, honey,” I warned. “If there’s a big crowd, we might not get your Furby.”
  “I know,” he answered, emoting somber wisdom at least a decade beyond his years. “That’s OK. At least we tried.”
  We pulled into the store’s driveway at precisely 5 o’clock. Except for a half-dozen empty cars iced over in frost, the lot was barren. Nevertheless, maintaining optimism, I parked close to the front door to maximize our advantage over the mob soon to arrive.
  Fifteen minutes passed. Thirty minutes passed. Forty-five minutes passed.
  No mob showed up.
  In fact, no one showed up.
  The anticipated 6 a.m. opening was only two minutes away, when the store’s manager peered through the plate glass window at us.
  He shook his head at me. I shrugged.
  I like to think it was a selfless sense of humanity rather than the condescending, pompous arrogance he projected that compelled him to step outside and strut over to our car. Through my half rolled-down window, he reported, “Ma’m, we don’t open for two more hours.”
  I thanked him, although gratitude was blatantly absent from my tone. As he walked away, I called out to him. “And I’ll bet you’re not getting a shipment of Furbies today either.”
  Over his shoulder, he hurled a terse reply.
  “No, and we have no idea when we’ll get more.”
  I wish our little quest had a better ending — the one where valiant efforts reap the desired reward. But that was not the outcome in this case. My son and I returned home entry-handed and slept till noon.
  Through these ensuing years, I have realized that, although I failed to give my son the material gift we set out to claim, he came away with something of far greater value — lessons he can use his whole life.
  For example, rising hours before our bodies wanted us to was an exercise in self-discipline. Our fun and laughter demonstrated that entertainment was possible anywhere, even without toys. Waiting a full hour for the store to open provided a lesson in patience. And finally, pursuing our goal, even against unlikely odds, showed my son that if you do your best, there’s no room for regret.
  So … I’m proud to say, that day my son went Furbyless.
  And thank goodness.
  What he ended up with, I wouldn’t trade.
  Not for a Furby. Not for two Furbies. Not even for a whole truckload.

]]><![CDATA[My Road Trip with the Dead, Stop 16: Nora Coleman & Sepharna Gleason]]>Tue, 29 Sep 2020 04:00:00 GMThttp://www.janis-thornton.com/blog/my-road-trip-with-the-dead-stop-16-nora-coleman-sepharna-gleason

Every day of her 29 years, Nora Coleman had dutifully endured her neglectful mother’s verbal and emotional abuse. She might have continued to put up with it if she hadn’t found herself in a “delicate condition.” But her 67-year-old mother, Sepharna Gleason, hated children and frequently threatened that if Nora should ever give birth, Sepharna would “throw the brat into the fire and watch it burn.” Nora would not tolerate such threats against her unborn child.

So, the evening of February 6, 1918, Nora snuck into her in-law’s house and helped herself to a shotgun. From there, she continued on to her mother’s rural Angola farm and hid the gun behind a tree.

Later that night, after Nora helped her mother milk the cows, she covertly retrieved the shotgun. As her mother strolled across the barnyard headed for the house, Nora deliberately lagged behind, steadying her resolve, waiting for the right moment. Finally, when Sepharna stepped onto the back porch and reached for the door, Nora raised the gun and pulled the trigger, blowing off the back of the old woman’s head.

Although the matricide eliminated the threat to her future child, Nora unfortunately miscarried within days of the shooting, perhaps due to the emotional price of facing a first-degree murder charge and its prescribed punishment: life imprisonment or death.

Nora dodged both after a panel of psychiatrists declared her insane, and the judge sent her to the Rest Haven Asylum in Richmond, Indiana, for treatment. When she was released eleven years later, she and her husband divorced, and she returned to the familial home, where she had grown up and grown tired of the incessant, vile abuse by the woman whose life she ended on the back porch of that very house.

I feel sadness for Nora living there all alone, surrounded by the hurtful, haunting memories until she died September 25, 1957. She had no one to turn to for consolation, and that may be why I was unable to find a stone monument for her when I visited Flint Cemetery on August 30, 2020, in rural Steuben County, where she is buried, according to her death certificate. I did, however, find a handsome stone honoring her mother in the same cemetery. Nora had provided the stone, as well as a lovely funeral. Always the good daughter, she wouldn’t have had it any other way.•

Three-year-old Nora “Kittie” Gleason posed with her mother, Sepharna (top), her grandmother (left) and great-grandmother for this family portrait taken in 1890. The joyless scowls on the faces of her sourpuss matriarchal elders are likely indicative of the life little Nora was born into and from which she was determined to escape.

Nora Gleason Coleman is pictured with her husband, Ward, shortly after they were married in January 1917.

]]><![CDATA[My Road Trip with the Dead, Stop 15: Dee, Homer & Jesse McClure]]>Sun, 27 Sep 2020 04:00:00 GMThttp://www.janis-thornton.com/blog/my-road-trip-with-the-dead-stop-15-dee-homer-mcclure

Jesse McClure laid down his son
And blew his brains out with a gun.
When he saw what he had done
He did it to his other son.
— Hoosier folk song, author unknown

Even Jesse McClure himself couldn’t explain why he’d done it. He knew only that several weeks before, his wife, Sarah, had left him and taken his boys — baby Dee, 2, and big brother Homer, 3. McClure was pissed. The morning of Sunday, October 25, 1903, stewing in a rented room at an Elwood boarding house, McClure downed a few shots of whiskey. It was all he needed to muddy what tiny speck of good sense the good Lord had given him.

At high noon, he climbed into his rented horse-drawn carriage and headed north out of town. A couple hours later, he walked up to the house in West Liberty, where Sarah and the kids were staying with her sister, and banged on the kitchen door.

Above: The despicable Jesse McClure

Left: Sarah & Jesse McClure in “happier” days

Her brother-in-law answered and told McClure, “Sarah don’t want to see you.” McClure’s blood boiled, and he yelled back, “Tell her to send my boys out. I wanna take ’em fer a buggy ride.”

Sarah let the boys go, which she soon regretted, and off they went, rolling down the road. Within the hour, Homer was dead, and Dee was barely clinging to life, both of them shot in the head by their loving daddy.

As for McClure, following a lucid moment during which he imagined a lynch mob with himself on the wrong end of the rope, he hightailed it for the Grant County sheriff’s office in Marion to turn himself in. The next day, he was transferred to the Tipton County jail, and was later tried in Tipton Circuit Court.

When a reporter asked McClure why he’d done it, he couldn’t answer. Instead, he shifted the blame to a higher power. “God told me to do it,” McClure said, “and He will take care of me.”

Although Homer had died instantly at his father’s hand, Dee, lingered in a coma for almost two weeks before he died. The boys were buried in the Knox Chapel Cemetery, located in the southwest corner of rural Grant County, two miles north of the Madison County line. According to newspaper reports, Dee was interred during a driving rainstorm as hundreds of friends and neighbors gathered in an outpouring of love.

Sarah McClure had little money and may have been unable to purchase headstones for her children, as none bearing their names can be found in the old cemetery today. When I visited Knox Chapel in mid-August of 2020, I studied every stone, hoping to find the McClure boys’ markers. Unfortunately, I didn’t. Many were so broken and worn, their engravings were no longer decipherable.

However, as I made my way through the grounds, two small stones, side by side, seemed to call to me. The time-worn names and dates chiseled into them long ago were impossible to read, so I selected them as proxy markers to represent the brief lives of the McClure boys. Who’s to say they aren’t the children’s actual stones anyway?

And what about the burial place of their father?

Ironically, less than four years after McClure — who soon became Indiana State Prison Inmate No. 2718 — had smugly told a reporter that God would take care of him, God followed through. However, it probably wasn’t what McClure had in mind. How could he have known that in those days, the I.U. School of Medicine wasn’t picky and would accept the remains of anyone, even a deplorable monster like him? ... Rest in pieces, Jesse McClure •

From the October 27, 1903 Muncie Morning Star

]]><![CDATA[My Road Trip with the Dead, Stop 14: The Agrues & Dink Carter]]>Fri, 25 Sep 2020 04:00:00 GMThttp://www.janis-thornton.com/blog/my-road-trip-with-the-dead-stop-14-the-agrues-dink-carter

I visited River View Cemetery on a pleasant, sunny afternoon in August 2020. The cemetery is located just south of the southeastern Indiana city of Aurora along the Ohio River in Dearborn County. Established in 1869, River View is a gorgeous cemetery with lots of historic character, occupying 30 acres of heavily wooded, rolling hills a stone’s throw from the river.

I spent my first half-hour there wandering the grounds just past the main entrance in search of five members of the Johnson Agrue family, buried there in 1941. I found them side-by-side near the top of the hill. A casual cemetery visitor might pass by these small markers and never imagine the horrific, senseless death that had befallen each grave’s occupant.

The fact is, the shotgun massacre of Johnson and Nina Agrue, their adult sons Leo and Will, and their 11-year-old granddaughter, Mary Elizabeth Breedon, was one of the bloodiest mass murders in the history of the county.

Virginius “Dink” Carter

Thirty-three-year-old Virginius “Dink” Carter is one of the worst of the deplorable monsters featured in my book. He never could say exactly why he hitchhiked to his in-laws’ farm on Laughery Creek, six miles south of Aurora, on that Friday morning in May of 1941, and then, one by one, killed his wife’s parents, her brothers, and her niece, shooting each of them execution style.

Nor could he explain why he returned to the crime scene the next day and attempted to blend in with the shocked onlookers, who were anxious for answers. His indifference to the catastrophic deaths of his relatives attracted the attention of the local sheriff, who started quietly asking people in the crowd about Carter’s whereabouts the day before.

Three of the Agrues’ neighbors reported seeing Carter near the farm around the time of the shootings, and that was all the sheriff needed to hear. He immediately took Carter to jail, grilled him relentlessly, and broke him 48 hours later. Carter made a full confession and was later tried, convicted, and sentenced to death.

Carter was executed February 9, 1942, in the electric chair at the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City. His body was returned to River View Cemetery, south of Aurora, for burial within eyeshot of the five graves of the innocent victims whose lives he had brutally stolen nine months before.

After I’d paid my respects to the Agrues and little Mary, I strolled down the hill, not at all certain where and how I would find Virginius “Dink” Carter’s grave among the scores of tombstones in all directions. But, oddly enough, after I crossed the main driveway, I walked directly to it. The stone that protruded through the thick, green grass bearing his amusingly misspelled name (Virginous) was, like his nickname, dinky. Even at that, in my opinion, it was too good for him. •

Mary Elizabeth Breeden, Carter’s 11-year-old victim

The Agrue farmhouse

Dink’s wife, Leona, and one of their two daughters, Priscilla

]]><![CDATA[My Road Trip with the Dead, Stop 13: Garnet Ginn]]>Wed, 23 Sep 2020 04:00:00 GMThttp://www.janis-thornton.com/blog/my-road-trip-with-the-dead-stop-13-garnet-ginn

Garnet Ginn, a 33-year-old Portland High School home economics teacher, was loved by students and faculty alike. She was close to completing her master’s degree and had her future looked bright. She had everything to live for.

But on Tuesday, February 28, 1950, Ginn failed to show up for her classes. Phone calls to her were unanswered, prompting the school superintendent to go to Ginn’s house to see what was the matter. Finding no one home, he peeked in her garage and called the police.

Garnet Ginn

Wedged into a 14-inch space next to her car, she was perched on her left knee and suspended upright by a narrow strap—one end tied to the car door’s handle, the other looped around her neck. The coroner declared Ginn’s death a suicide, but her family knew better.

Days after Ginn was buried, her parents had her body exhumed for an autopsy performed by the Indiana State Police. The ISP’s pathologist determined she indeed had been murdered. Unfortunately, police could never name a suspect, leaving the case unsolved.

However, thanks to renewed interest in the case in 2019, the Portland Police finally identified Ginn’s likely killer. But with no evidence to substantiate their suspicions, the case remains open.

On a blistering hot day in July 2020, I visited Garnet Ginn’s grave in the IOOF Cemetery outside of Akron, Indiana. She was joined by her mother, Gail, in 1966, and her father, William, in 1982. Rest in peace, Garnet.•

]]><![CDATA[My Road Trip with the Dead, Stop 12: Richard Gladden]]>Mon, 21 Sep 2020 04:00:00 GMThttp://www.janis-thornton.com/blog/my-road-trip-with-the-dead-stop-12-richard-gladden

Richard Gladden spent 36 years in prison paying for his wife’s carbon monoxide poisoning death, a crime he did not commit. Or so he said.

The night of February 1, 1932, the couple — Gladden, then 21, and Dolores, 20 — had wanted some alone time under the stars. So they went for a drive in their Whippet coupe and parked on the side of a gravel road east of Frankfort. To fend off the winter cold, Gladden kept the motor running and cranked up the heater. But before he knew it, they had both dozed off. When he awoke two hours later, the motor was dead. And so was Dolores. On the thinnest of evidence, the Clinton County sheriff locked up Gladden and charged him with her murder. Within three months, Gladden was tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in the Indiana State Penitentiary.

Gladden maintained his innocence and worked relentlessly to get his sentence commuted. In 1966, Governor Roger Branigin granted Gladden’s parole. Curiously, early in Branigin’s legal career, he had been a colleague of the judge that tried Gladden’s case. Had the governor been influenced by that association? If he had, he never mentioned it.

Gladden lived a long time after he reclaimed his freedom. He died in 2007 at age 96 and is interred in Rest Haven Memorial Park in Lafayette. I visited him there on July 3, 2017. •

Pictured are Richard Gladden, his wife Dolores, and his mother-in-law Dorothy Titsworth, who showed up unexpectedly during Gladden’s trial to testify that her dead daughter came to her during a dream to tell her mother that her husband had murdered her. It's unknown how much influence Titsworth's testimony had on the jury, but it found Gladden guilty of murder in the first degree, sentencing him to life in prison. It was his worst nightmare.

Clinton County Prosecutor Millard Morrison, who successfully convinced the jury that Gladden was guilty of murder.

Judge Brenton Devol, who served as judge during Gladden’s trial.

Frank S. Pryor, who headed Gladden’s defense, but was not successful in proving his client’s innocence

]]><![CDATA[My Road Trip with the Dead, Stop 11: A.J. Baker]]>Sat, 19 Sep 2020 04:00:00 GMThttp://www.janis-thornton.com/blog/my-road-trip-with-the-dead-stop-11-aj-baker

Thanks to several shots of whiskey, Fred Kaiser finally mustered the courage to confront Andrew J. Baker, the man he believed was sleeping with Mrs. Kaiser.

So, at six o’clock Friday evening, September 3, 1903, at downtown Elwood’s busiest intersection in front of a dozen witnesses, Kaiser stepped up to Baker and threw back his hand.

Without hesitation, Baker drew his gun and shot Kaiser point blank in the chest. Baker claimed self-defense, but the grand jury thought otherwise and charged him with murder.

Baker, a well-to-do butcher who operated a meat market a few doors south of the shooting, was jailed without bail for four months awaiting his day in court and 11 more waiting for a re-trial.

By the time the second jury entered its not-guilty verdict, Baker was broke. He soon left Elwood to start over in Indianapolis. As a parting gift, he stiffed all of his creditors, as well as the attorneys who had won him his freedom.

Baker died in 1929 and was buried in Beech Grove Cemetery in Muncie, his wife’s home town. I made a trip there on June 5, 2017, to look for his grave, only to discover he has no stone marker. He does, however, lie in the shade of a spectacular white oak tree. Some might call it a shady grave for a shady character, and I couldn’t disagree. •

* * * *

This picture of Elwood’s main intersection — Anderson and Main Streets, circa 1900 — shows the location of the altercation outside Sayler’s Drug Store (second door from left) between Andrew J. Baker and Frederick Kaiser at 6:00 p.m., September 3, 1903. Kaiser started it, but Baker finished it, permanently with a bullet shot into Kaiser's chest.

]]><![CDATA[My Road Trip with the Dead, Stop 10: Dan Snider]]>Thu, 17 Sep 2020 04:00:00 GMThttp://www.janis-thornton.com/blog/my-road-trip-with-the-dead-stop-10-dan-snider

After 8-year-old Mollie King and her mother, Hannah King Snider, suffered identical mysterious, excruciating illnesses resulting in their deaths in the late summer of 1876, the Tipton County coroner had their stomachs sent to the Indiana Medical College for analysis. The results showed that both mother and daughter had died of strychnine poisoning, and the obvious suspect was Hannah’s opportunistic young husband, Dan.

The next day, a Tipton County judge issued an arrest warrant, and Snider was taken to jail, tried, convicted of first-degree murder, and sentenced to life in prison. But in 1893, after he’d served 17 years, his supporters presented Indiana Governor Claude Matthews a petition, demanding that he pardon Snider. Surprisingly, the governor obliged, but warned Snider he'd best “keep his nose clean.”

Two years later, Snider blew it and was arrested in Grant County for stealing a horse and buggy. He walked out of the state prison for the second and final time in March of 1897, settled down in Tipton, took a new bride, and established himself as an upholsterer and carpenter.

This drawing of Daniel Snider appeared in the June 21, 1895 edition of the Tipton Advocate.

His second wife, Emma Jane, lost her life in a gruesome, highly suspicious, kitchen fire in 1920, but Snider sloughed off speculation that he’d set it and moved to Russiaville. That is where, in the spring of 1929, he shuffled across the railroad track on his way to the fishing hole and was flattened by a train.

Snider is buried in the sprawling Russiaville Cemetery. I stopped there on May 30, 2017. It took me a while to find his marker. When I finally did, I couldn’t muster much sympathy for the loneliness I sensed from it. The grave sends a fitting message about its occupant—unimpressive and easily overlooked.

Mollie and Hannah occupy unmarked graves in Tipton’s Fairview Cemetery. Sadly, unless someone finds the records revealing the location of their graves, they will remain unknown. Mollie and Hannah’s stories, however, will not. •

]]><![CDATA[My Road Trip with the Dead, Stop 9: Grover & Louisa Blake]]>Tue, 15 Sep 2020 04:00:00 GMThttp://www.janis-thornton.com/blog/my-road-trip-with-the-dead-stop-9-grover-louisa-blake

Twenty-two-year-old Grover Blake could never recall exactly why he had taken the claw hammer from the kitchen closet that March morning of 1908 and bashed in his mother’s brains. He had only wanted some of her secret stash for a friendly game of cards. Considering how much Louisa Blake, 46, adored her only son, she probably would have given him what he wanted had he merely thought to ask.

Blake had been out drinking all night before he stumbled home that morning, murdered his mom, freshened up, and dashed out to meet a buddy at an uptown Anderson bar before heading out of town. Traveling north, he made it to Fort Wayne before he was caught by the Madison County sheriff and his deputies.

During Blake’s murder trial, there hadn’t been a dry eye in the courtroom when his half-sister took the stand. “No mother could ask for a more devoted son,” she said, struggling to maintain her composure. “Every night, on his way to bed, he would kiss her forehead and tell her, ‘Sweet dreams, Mother.’”

Her testimony, coupled with Blake’s previously clean record, influenced the judge, who spared Blake from the gallows, sentencing him instead to life in prison. The next year, Blake’s father, William, asked the Indiana Parole Board to pardon his son. The elder Blake futilely asked again in 1913, 1914, and 1918. In early February 1920, Grover Blake died of the Spanish Flu, thus, in a sense, granting his pardon. Blake was laid to rest a few days later in Anderson’s West Maplewood Cemetery next to his mother. His father joined him 18 years later.

I visited the Blakes on May 29, 2017. Had I not done my research, I never would have suspected their terrible story. ... Sweet dreams. •

* * * *

]]><![CDATA[My Road Trip with the Dead, Stop 8: Fairy McClain-Miller]]>Sun, 13 Sep 2020 04:00:00 GMThttp://www.janis-thornton.com/blog/my-road-trip-with-the-dead-stop-8-fairy-mcclain-miller

Beautiful, 24-year-old Fairy McClain-Miller of Kokomo was a confident, headstrong woman, who loved life. She had recently ended a volatile on-again-off-again relationship with boyfriend Jesse Worley Osborn, and she relished her fresh start.

When she retired to her bed the night of April 7, 1908, she had no reason to fear she would die before dawn.

Even when Osborn, who was drunk out of his mind, barged uninvited into her bedroom and awakened her, she wasn’t afraid. She was angry. The more he pestered her, the angrier she became.

Nevertheless ... he leaned in and demanded a kiss. With that, she pushed him away and told him to leave or she would report his disgusting buffoonery to the one person Osborn cared about—his father.

Unfortunately, Fairy’s ultimatum was the grease that loosened Osborn’s slippery grip on his self-control. No sooner had her threat blown past her lips than he drew his revolver and fired it twice into her startled face.

Fairy was buried three days later in Kokomo’s Crown Point Cemetery. I visited her there on a sunny May day in 2017. The engraving on her unadorned marker reads simply, “Fairy.” As I stood there, I reflected on her strong character and the tragic, irreversible consequence she ultimately suffered for it.

We should not overlook, however, that what Fairy experienced was not unique to her or her time. She, like countless numbers of her self-assured, outspoken sisters—who lived before her and after—was punished by a spineless bully because he felt threatened by her audacious grit.

Nevertheless ... she persisted, if only in the hearts and minds of those who know her story and admire her audacity. •

Fairy McClain-Miller

]]>