Hell’s Wasteland: The Pennsylvania Torso Murders

1. Murders Most Foul

The area around Wampum, Pennsylvania, scene of Emma Jackson’s murder. Map by Luke Moussa. murders most foul - 1 Chapter 1 murders most Foul The morning of Wednesday, March 16, 1921, began like any other day on the Jackson family farm. Everything was utterly normal; all seemed as it should be. Achsa Jackson (whose admittedly odd first name was consistently misprinted by the New Castle press as “Ascha”) had given her seventy-three-year-old mother Emma a parting kiss on the cheek as she left for her job as an instructor in the Ellwood City public schools. Her brother William had already gone to work at the National Tube Company, also in Ellwood City. The Jackson farm stood on Wampum Road, south of New Castle, Pennsylvania. The property had been in the family for thirty years; in fact, the Jacksons were known and respected in the rural area as one its “pioneer” families. On this particular morning , however, Emma Jackson was apprehensive. She told her daughter that earlier, at about 7:30, a short, stocky black man had turned up at the front door asking if some vacant buildings on the Jackson property were for rent. When Emma had informed him that they were not, the stranger had left—but something about him unnerved Emma. “He looked just like a fiend to me,” she insisted to her daughter. At around 9:00 a.m., an identified witness watched curiously as a short, stocky black man left the Jackson property. William Jackson arrived home from work a little before 4:00 p.m. and, after leaving his overcoat and dinner basket on the back porch, proceeded to putter in the yard. He heard someone banging on the front door; and when his mother failed to answer the noisy summons, William walked around to the front of the house where a neighbor boy, apparently on an errand, was still determinedly pounding on the Hell’s Wasteland - 2 door . William opened the unlocked door and peered into the empty house. “Mother! Mother!” he called several times, but no response broke the eerie silence. Could she be asleep? Perhaps she was ill, William wondered apprehensively. Or was she upstairs in her bedroom? As he neared the top of the stairs, he momentarily froze: there on the floor in front of him was a bloodstain. Now truly alarmed, he pushed his way into his mother’s bedroom. In the waning afternoon sunlight, coupled with the flickering glow of a single lamp, he saw Emma Jackson lying across the bed, her head hanging over the edge. Her neck had been slashed—almost to the point of decapitation, according to later reports—and there was blood everywhere: all over the bed, soaked into the bedclothes, on his mother’s face and neck, splattered on the wall, and pooling on the floor from the deep wound in her neck. Soon after William’s gruesome discovery, Charles Morrison, Ellwood City’s acting chief of police, and Alexander Leslie, a former Lawrence County detective, arrived on the scene. They determined that Emma had been initially assaulted in the kitchen and then either chased or carried up the stairs by her assailant to the bedroom where her horrified son had discovered her body. Luridly dubbed by the New Castle Herald as “a fiend incarnate” and a “demon,” the unknown perpetrator had viciously slashed Emma Jackson’s throat from ear to ear, severing the jugular, with either a straight razor or a long-bladed knife. The attack must have occurred literally within minutes of Achsa Jackson’s departure for work. Emma had done a huge load of laundry the day before, and the basket of damp clothes waiting to be ironed was still sitting where she had left it. Although the assailant had taken a small purse containing less than three dollars, robbery had apparently not been the motive; jewelry and other valuables in plain sight had not been touched. In a quaint combination of veiled innuendo and demure language—characteristic of a far more genteel age—the New Castle Herald hinted darkly at what the real motive behind the assault may have been. “The body was thrown across the bed in such a way and the old lady’s clothes were found in such a position, that it is believed an intended criminal assault was planned on the aged woman.” Suspicion immediately fell on Joseph Thomas, a suspect...