The Connecticut Shoebox Murder Mystery: America's Oldest Cold Case
On the morning of August 8, 1886 local resident Edward Terrill and his dog were on a walk down a dirt logging road through wooded farmland on the outskirts of the town of Wallingford, Connecticut.
Terril noticed a wooden box about thirty inches long and twelve inches wide resting under some bushes on the side of the road. It seemed like the wooden box had fallen off a cart on its way into town.
Black lettering on the outside of the wooden box indicated that it had originally been meant to contain a, “dozen pairs of finely stitched men’s shoes.”
As Terril approached closer to get a better look his dog started whining, howling and frantically sniffing at the air. Terrill walked right up to the box and the frenzied excitement of his dog increased with each step that he took.
When he bent down to examine the box he was taken aback and made to gag by a foul and putrid odor emanating from the crate like none he had ever experienced before.
Terrill quickly turned and ran back to Wallingford where he recruited his brother Joseph and a friend to return to the spot beneath the bushes where he had first discovered the box that morning. The men came armed with crowbars and a cart of their own. This time Terrill was determined to not only pry open the wooden box and discover what was inside, but also to bring its foul smelling contents back into town.
When the three men pried open the box with their crowbars they discovered not shoes, but a headless, limbless male torso, wrapped in tar paper and resting on a pile of straw inside the box.
A medical examiner was able to determine only that the torso belonged to a man aged somewhere between 30 and 40 years old and that he had been dead for five to ten days before being discovered inside the box on the side of the dirt logging road outside Wallingford.
The torso contained no gunshot or stab wounds and the coroner estimated that it belonged to a man who had probably weighed about 175 pounds when he was alive. Inside his stomach the medical examiner found a large and fatal amount of arsenic and determined that the victim had died as a result of poisoning. It was theorized that the body had been dismembered and decapitated after death in an attempt to cover up the victim’s true identity.
Speculation about the victim’s identity ran wild in and around Wallingford and within twenty-four hours the mystery surrounding the “Connecticut Shoebox Murder” was reported on by newspapers across the country.
It was widely believed by authorities, at first, that the torso belonged to a man named Arthur J. Cooley. Only days earlier Union Army Civil War veteran and renowned drunkard Arthur J. Cooley had gone missing after abruptly retiring and collecting a $1500 pension from a local slaughterhouse where he had worked for the last two decades.
Cooley was a resident of nearby Durham, Connecticut. He was a known gambler and a heavy drinker who was said to frequent houses of ill repute. Authorities in Connecticut instantly assumed, once the dismembered body was discovered inside the shoebox, that it might belong to Cooley since his family members had recently reported him missing after he had failed to return home one night from a local tavern.
However, only days after the discovery of the shoebox murder victim, Arthur J. Cooley did, in fact, turn up at home after a week’s long drinking binge, leaving investigators stumped once again as to the true identity of the shoebox murder victim.
Earlier that year, in March of 1886, a prominent young man named Frank H. Morse had been brought to trial in town, after having moved to Rochester, New York three years earlier, and charged with arson for a series of fires that had been set in Wallingford to buildings that his father owned and used as a glass factory.
The New York Times of March 17, 1886 reported that, “one night, nearly three years ago, two buildings used by Frank H. Morse as a glass shop were discovered on fire and burned to the ground. There was no doubt that the fire was of incendiary origin. The night watchman was found drugged near the building. Suspicion pointed to Morse, but he proved that he had been home the whole evening before the fire broke out.”
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| Site of the act of arson in Wallingford in 1886 |
Frank H. Morse Sr. was able to post bond to get his son released from jail within days of his arrest and all charges against Frank Morse Jr. were quickly dropped by authorities for lack of evidence.
Though many townspeople speculated that the fires had been set by the Morse family on purpose to collect on their $1300 insurance policy, there simply was not enough evidence to charge either the senior or junior Morse with arson, and as of August 1886 when the shoebox murder victim was discovered, the case of the Wallingford arsonist still remained open. Many speculated that the two crimes were somehow connected, and that the body discovered inside the wooden shoebox was that of the real arsonist who may have been killed for not doing a good enough job in making the fires appear to be accidental.
Authorities were able, based upon the writing on the box, to trace the shoebox back to a manufacturer located in Fall River, Massachusetts, a distance of about 120 miles from Wallingford. However, when police contacted the manufacturer they claimed that the dozen pairs of shoes had been sent to a retailer based in chicago. When contacted the retailer confirmed that he had sold the contents of the wooden box and then discarded it in the trash behind his store where it remained for about two weeks before he reported that it disappeared. He claimed to have no idea how the box could ever have ended up in far away Wallingford, Connecticut.
On September 26, 1886, over six weeks after the torso was first discovered inside the wooden shoebox on the side of the road, a local farmer found a set of badly decomposed arms and legs, also wrapped in tar paper, hidden in a wooded area near where the shoebox had originally been discovered.
After the discovery of the arms and legs a local woman came forward and reported to authorities that in earlier August of 1886 a bearded man whom she believed to be a hobo, wearing a bloodstained shirt and carrying a pack slung over his shoulder, had knocked on her door and asked for directions to a nearby pond.
She then claimed that hours later she saw this man pass by her home once again, this time wearing a clean shirt, but carrying the same bundle slung over her shoulder.
Police took her story seriously and were convinced that this mysterious bearded stranger with the bloodstained shirt might have had something to do with the shoebox murder. Authorities were even preparing to dredge the pond that the woman had mentioned in her story, but then for reasons unknown, that same woman recanted her entire story only days later without giving any explanation.
Mabel Gage, a local Wallingford prostitute, claimed that she knew the entire story behind the shoebox murder. She was even subpoenaed by the court, but in her sworn affidavit before the court, Mabel Gage claimed that she knew nothing. Two years later Mabel Gage committed suicide.
Even a Wallingford constable claimed that he knew the identity of the killer, and oddly enough this officer of the law said he would never reveal the identity and was never questioned by authorities. He died several years later without ever revealing what he knew in relation to the shoebox murder mystery.
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| Shoebox Road in Wallingford |
To this very day the case of the Connecticut Shoebox Murder remains unsolved. The identity of the victim remains a mystery as does the identity of the murderer or murderers themselves. The authorities in Connecticut still consider it an active case, even though after 135 years the trail has grown very cold, it is still possible that the study of history might reveal new information to help solve the Connecticut Shoebox Murder Mystery one of America’s oldest cold cases.
Today, the old logging road along which the shoebox and its gruesome contents were first discovered back in 1886 has now been officially named Shoebox Road.
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