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My Road Trip with the Dead, Stop 6: Lt. William Wirt Daugherty

9/9/2020

How much respect does a distinguished Civil War hero deserve after he shoots and kills an innocent man? In cold blood? In a downtown Kokomo hotel bar? On Thanksgiving?

Such was the case of Lt. William Wirt Daugherty, whose story had been more or less lost to time until I dug it up.

Daugherty was a 29-year-old career military man, acclaimed for his Civil War service, when he visited his family in Kokomo for Thanksgiving in 1869. During the family’s turkey dinner, Daugherty’s mother complained that a “common laborer” named Joseph Van Horn had been spreading vicious rumors that had stained her daughter’s respectability.

Daugherty vowed to track down Van Horn and make him retract the “lies” or pay with his life. Within hours, the unarmed Van Horn inadvertently chose option number two, taking a bullet in his chest and another in his back.

Daugherty spent the next year behind bars awaiting trial in Tipton County, where his case had been moved due to the community’s outrage over Van Horn’s cold-blooded murder.

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My Road Trip with the Dead, Stop 5: Belle Shenkenberger

9/7/2020

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Twenty-four-year-old Belle Sheridan Shenkenberger was in excellent health in late July 1898, when she and her 2-year-old son moved into her in-laws’ home in Frankfort, while her husband, Ed, fulfilled his obligation to the U.S. Navy. One month later, Belle was dead of arsenic poisoning, and Ed’s mother, Sarah, was arrested and charged with murder.

Belle was a lovely, highly intelligent young woman, who loved books and learning. She was one of Frankfort’s first librarians and had set up the library’s Dewey Decimal System.

Her health started to deteriorate after she suffered a miscarriage on August 1. It caused her to lose a considerable amount of blood, and a week later, she was burning with fever and was too weak to leave her bed.

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My Road Trip with the Dead, Stop 4: Walker & Enoch McClintock

9/5/2020

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I continued east from Cicero that late December afternoon of 2016 for another five miles to pay my respects to 71-year-old Walker McClintock and his 42-year-old son, Enoch, buried at Carey Cemetery near Strawtown on State Road 37. Both had been victims of an unwelcome caller at their Strawtown farm on October 3, 1907.

Their killer was James W. Hensley, then 30, reportedly a “dancing master, comedian, impersonator and joker,” who had traveled from Indianapolis to call on Walker’s 18-year-old daughter, Mary. Almost a year had passed since the elder McClintock learned that Hensley had a wife and banned him from seeing Mary.

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My Road Trip with the Dead, Stops 2 & 3: Harry & Nellie Hiatt

9/3/2020

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Two days after visiting the grave of convicted killer Jesse Worley Osborn in Greentown in late December 2016, I headed south to Hamilton County, where four of the people featured in my book—three murder victims and one killer—are buried.

My first stop that chilly, sunny day was West Grove Cemetery, located alongside one of the county’s east-west backroads, halfway between State Road 31 and Cicero. West Grove is the final resting place of Harry Hiatt.

When I first learned about Hiatt, I couldn’t muster a speck of sympathy for him. In March of 1911, when he was 27, his wife of four years, Nellie, 21, decided she’d had enough of their stormy relationship. So, she packed her bags and moved from the home they shared in Cicero to her parents’ farm a few miles outside of town, taking her two young boys with her.

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My Road Trip with the Dead, Stop 1: Jesse Worley Osborn

9/1/2020

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The idea of visiting dead people wouldn’t stop gnawing at the back of my mind.

I had been immersed for months in studying several of Indiana’s most shocking and historically sensational crimes, many dating back a hundred years or more. As a consequence, victims of those crimes began to feel like old friends, and their killers like lost souls begging to be understood. Visiting their graves was the closest I could get to them physically. Three days after Christmas 2016, I did something about it. It started with a jaunt from my home in Tipton, north up Indiana State Road 19 toward Greentown’s Greenlawn Cemetery.

My destination was the grave of Jesse Worley Osborn, who shot his estranged, 24-year-old girlfriend, Fairy McClain-Miller, in the face. Point blank. Twice. Drunk, he murdered her the night of April 7, 1908, in Kokomo as she lay in her bed. Osborn had gone to her house to talk, but when she refused to kiss him, he got mad.

Osborn was the product of a well-respected Greentown family. His father, Oliver, was a highly regarded Civil War veteran and former Howard County commissioner. His mother, Sarah, was active in church and her ladies’ club.

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Catching Up with Donna Cronk

3/12/2020

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The day after a long-awaited lunch with my dear friend, Donna Cronk, I received copy of her latest blog post. Donna is the most gifted essayist I know, and the notion that she would devote an entire blog about me is a genuine honor that leaves me rather speechless. Her kind words almost make cry. Thank you, Donna! I love it ... and you. You are a gem!

CATCHING UP WITH JANIS . . . IF I CAN

BY DONNA CRONK
It was only fitting that I met up with my friend and writing colleague Janis Thornton of Tipton yesterday on "Spring Forward Day."
There's no writer I know with more energy, drive and spring in her step than Janis. She is inspirational.
Not only does she have a day job, she is a prolific author on her own time with a love for research. She has written a number of books, including her 2018 “Too Good a Girl: Remembering Olene Emberton and the Mystery of Her Death,” relating to the still-unsolved death of her high school classmate.

Donna, on the left, and lookey! We have the same hairdo!

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MORE FROM ANNIE SINCLAIR . . .

6/24/2019

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The final stop on my whirlwind, “Love, Lies and Azure Eyes” blog tour is A Wytch's Book Review Blog for a Q&A with my book’s protagonist, Annie Sinclair.

Q: WELCOME, ANNIE! WHY DON’T YOU INTRODUCE YOURSELF TO US?
A: Hello! I’m Annaliese Maureen Sinclair, although everyone calls me Annie, except for my bull-headed dad, who insists on calling me Girl.

I’m 43, for heaven’s sake, and it’s embarrassing. He’s called me Girl my entire life. When other dads were giving their

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Do you believe in ghosts?

6/19/2019

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Stop #9 on my “LOVE, LIES AND AZURE EYES” blog tour is this guest post on Brooke Blogs. I thought it might be fun to write my thoughts about ghosts.

Recently, I was fortunate to sit on an author panel moderated by the wonderful, bestselling mystery novelist Nancy Pickard. She asked each panelist about their latest books, and when it was my turn, I explained that “Love, Lies, and Azure Eyes” was inspired by an unsolved murder in my hometown in the mid-1960s and that one of the main storylines involved liberating the earthbound ghost of the boy wrongly accused of the murder.

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How 54-year-old mystery inspired a novel

6/18/2019

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Stop #8 on my “LOVE, LIES AND AZURE EYES” blog tour is this guest post at Books Direct. Here, I tell how a real-life event inspired a novel.

Thank you for inviting me to introduce myself to your audience and to share a bit about myself and my newly released paranormal-romantic-mystery, “Love, Lies, and Azure Eyes.”

I’ve been writing since I was eight years old, back when I was creating little stories for a neighborhood “newspaper” for which I was reporter, editor, and publisher. Of course, “The Kentucky Avenue Chronicle” — circulation seven — quickly evolved into obscurity, but it was a start. <wink> I was 40 before I was brave enough to try my hand at fiction and enroll in a short-story-writing class at a nearby college. I was terrible at it, but I was bitten. And I evolved.

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Everyone Has a Skeleton in the Closet

6/17/2019

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Stop #7 on my “LOVE, LIES AND AZURE EYES” blog tour is an author Q&A by A Place in the Spotlight.

Q. I found the premise of “Love, Lies, and Azure Eyes” intriguing. I love paranormal angles and cold cases revived. Did you ever lose someone whose demise remained a mystery? Did that inspire the premise?
A. Yes, and yes. “Love, Lies, and Azure Eyes” was inspired by the tragic, mysterious, and still unsolved death in 1965 of a 17-year-old girl I went to school with. In addition to losing her, my high school class also lost a boy just six months

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