In the summer of 1895, the American Midwest withered under a merciless drought. In Fountain County, Indiana, a mile north of a crossroads known as Grange Corner, a small wooden house sheltered a family that had lived there for most of their lives. Here lived Frederick Shanks, a sixty-eight-year-old farmer, with his wife Elizabeth and their six children. The air carried the smell of wilted corn and dust, and the wells had run low.
Across the road ran the line between Fountain and Parke Counties, dividing two properties. On the Parke side lived Daniel Keller, a prosperous young farmer of thirty-four, with his wife Nannie and his sister Margaret, known to everyone as Maggie. The two families had been neighbors for a long time, and no quarrel had ever passed between them. The Shankses’ third daughter was Clara, eighteen years old, a blonde girl described by all who knew her as the star of that farmhouse.
When the drought forced the Shanks family to fetch water from the Kellers’ well, the task often fell to Clara, who crossed the road several times a day with her bucket. It was an ordinary chore repeated through the long dry weeks, and it was this ordinary chore that would end in a mystery no court could ever solve. Clara had lived her entire short life in plain view of the county line. According to those who spoke of her later, she was a girl against whom no accusation had ever been made.
Her reputation in the valley was spotless, and she behaved as a polite and obedient daughter of a farming family. Her days were governed by the rhythm of the farm and the demands of the drought. She washed, mended clothes, and carried water. Every morning of that dry season she walked across the road to the Keller property, filled her buckets, and returned.
Young men were said to notice her wherever she went, for she was considered a very pretty girl. But no record suggests she ever encouraged that attention, and every account of her character mentions only her modesty. By early July, a certain unease crept into the friendly neighborly relations. Nannie Keller, Daniel’s wife, began to watch Clara’s frequent visits with growing suspicion.
She was thirty-one years old, and something about the girl’s daily passage through her yard kindled jealousy in her heart. She came to believe, without any foundation, that a romantic attachment had formed between Clara and her husband, and those doubts did not remain private. Clara’s younger brothers, when they saw Daniel Keller working in his barnyard, would teasingly call to their sister that her sweetheart had passed by. Such boyish teasing, however innocent, only inflamed Mrs.
Keller’s imagination. Her belief grew and hardened until she convinced herself that there was an improper relationship between her husband and the girl next door. She began speaking of it to others, and in a small rural community where every household knew its neighbors’ affairs, such talk could not long remain buried. The seeds of tragedy had been planted.
On the evening of July 5, Daniel Shanks, the eldest son, walked across the road to confront the matter directly. He had heard of Mrs. Keller’s claims and could not reconcile them with the sister he knew. Mrs.
Keller received him and repeated her suspicions. She declared that Clara must no longer come for water. The rest of the family could cross the yard, she said, but Clara should never set foot on their property again. The matter did not end there.
The next morning, around eleven o’clock, Nannie Keller went out to the wooden fence that separated the two homes. With her were her husband Daniel and, according to several accounts, his sister Maggie and a relative named Emma Docks. They called for Clara to come to the door, but her brother would not allow it. Elizabeth Shanks, the mother, went out to answer them instead.
There, in the open yard, the accusation was proclaimed aloud. Mrs. Keller declared that Clara had been intimate with her husband, and Mrs. Shanks answered plainly that she did not believe it.
Then Nannie Keller turned to her husband and practically asked him whether he would allow them to deny what she had said. According to the family, Daniel Keller did not deny it. He would later insist that everything he said that morning was only to keep peace within his own house. The exact words spoken remain disputed to this day.
The Kellers withdrew. At noon the Shanks family gathered for dinner, and there Frederick Shanks first learned of the accusation against his daughter. He asked Clara if it was true. She denied it completely.
Then a deep silence fell over the table. Clara could not eat. Within a few minutes she rose, left the table, and went out of the house. No one thought to follow her.
That was the last time her family saw her alive. By the afternoon, Elizabeth Shanks grew worried and sent the younger children to look for her. As they searched, Daniel Keller called from his farmyard that if they were looking for Clara, he had seen her walking up the lane over an hour before. The family searched the thickets around Wolf Creek all afternoon.
Though the mother later said she had always feared the pool at the falls, they did not search there. At five o’clock, having found no trace of the girl, they stopped and went to bed early. That night Elizabeth Shanks could not rest. She said she dreamed of Clara struggling in the pool at the foot of Wolf Creek Falls.
At five in the morning of the seventh of July, she woke her son Daniel and told him of the dream. He ran half a mile to the pool, stripped off his clothes, and waded in. In five feet of water he found the body of his sister. He did not try to pull her out.
Instead, he dressed and went home and got his gun. He walked straight to the Kellers’ gate and called for Daniel Keller to come out. He shouted that Clara had drowned and Keller was to blame. He raised the gun and fired twice.
His aim, unsteady with rage, was too low, and both shots struck the doorstep. Keller jumped back inside. A neighbor named James Rice appeared, calmed the young man, and took him home. The community woke to the news.
Clara’s body was recovered from the pool and taken to the Shanks home. Coroner Young of Fountain County, with the assistance of Dr. A. L.
Spinning of Wallace, performed a quick examination and returned a verdict of death by drowning, ruled a suicide. That same day, Daniel Keller traveled to Rockville and obtained a warrant for young Daniel Shanks’s arrest on a charge of assault. When Deputy Sheriff McLean arrived to serve it, he found the Shanks house surrounded by a crowd of some three hundred men who warned him that if he arrested Shanks, they would hang Keller. The deputy returned with his warrant unserved.
The coroner’s verdict of suicide did not satisfy the people of the valley. Clara Shanks was buried the next day in the old Zachmire Cemetery near Wallace. But suspicion against the Keller family grew until there was a real danger of open violence, so the family withdrew to live with George, Daniel’s brother, on the other side of the valley. A citizens’ meeting was held at a schoolhouse near Grange Corner, presided over according to one account by Dr.
R. H. Mackey. It was decided that a second examination must be made.
Ten days after the burial, Clara’s body was exhumed. Seven physicians, chosen from Fountain and Parke Counties, performed an autopsy. The body had begun to decompose, making their task difficult, yet their findings were unanimous and grave. They discovered severe bruises to the head, congestion of the brain, and complete dislocation of the head at the base of the skull.
Simply put, the neck was broken, and the back of the skull was smashed inward. Most importantly, the larynx and lungs were free of water. A person who drowns inhales water into the lungs during the final struggle. That had not happened with Clara.
The possibility of death by drowning was therefore ruled out, and with it the theory of suicide. The examination also revealed that the girl, in the language of the time, had no reason for secret shame. She had never been intimate with anyone at all. The foundations upon which Mrs.
Keller’s accusations and all the suicide theories rested collapsed. The seven physicians recorded their verdict in a single solemn line: Clara Shanks had died by violence at the hands of persons unknown. The coroner himself later amended his finding to state that she had died at the hands of a person or persons unknown to him. Detectives Harry Webster and L.
B. Burns of Indianapolis were hired by public subscription. On August 9, warrants were issued for Daniel Keller, his wife Nannie, and his sister Maggie, charging them with murder. John, Daniel’s brother, was charged with aiding in the crime.
At the preliminary hearing in Indianapolis, John Keller produced an alibi and was released. The other three were held pending their presentation to the grand jury. Even then, angry crowds gathered and nearly seized the prisoners before being stopped at the last moment. The trial began on January 27, 1896.
Because of the intense feeling in Fountain and Parke Counties, the trial was moved to Terre Haute in Vigo County, where Judge Taylor presided. The defendants were indicted in nine separate counts, each specifying a different means by which Clara may have been killed, to ensure no method escaped the law. The prosecution was led by State’s Attorney Maxwell and a team of lawyers from Covington and Rockville. The defense was led by Charles McCabe with the assistance of the veteran attorney Lamb.
The prosecution’s theory was that Clara had gone to the Keller house that Saturday to demand that the slander against her be withdrawn, that she was killed there, and that her body was hidden through the day and carried by night half a mile to Wolf Creek Falls to appear to be a suicide. Most of the evidence was circumstantial. The state presented blood-like spots on Daniel Keller’s trousers, similar spots on the floor of the house, remnants of burned clothing in the stove, and a pair of Mrs. Keller’s everyday shoes still wet and covered with mud, though no rain had fallen until the storm on the night of Clara’s disappearance.
Witnesses spoke of a dark man’s shirt recovered from the pool with the body, which then mysteriously disappeared. A woman who had been jailed with the Keller family testified that she had heard talk of a burned dress and of hiding and moving the body. The defense, in turn, tried to cast blame on the Shanks family, pointing to the ease with which the body had been found and describing the mother’s dream as too vivid to be a dream. When their turn came, the defense introduced no evidence at all and simply submitted the case to the jury.
The courtroom was crowded to capacity through two weeks of testimony from nearly two hundred witnesses. On February 13, the case went to the jury. They deliberated for twenty-two hours. The first vote stood six to six.
Then the votes began to turn, one by one. On the morning of the fourteenth, they returned with their verdict. It was acquittal. When the verdict was read, the packed courtroom erupted in cheers.
The Keller family collapsed entirely, exhausted by the long confinement. The husband, wife, and sister clasped hands, weeping. It was said that no eye in the courtroom remained dry; even Judge Taylor could not hold back his tears, and the eyes of attorney Lamb were wet as he thanked the jury on their behalf. Daniel Keller’s elderly mother threw her arms around her son’s neck.
Spectators rushed to shake his hand, and the women of the audience embraced Nannie and Maggie. The freed prisoners moved to the jury box and shook hands with each juror. That evening they passed through Rockville by train on their way home, laughing and chatting. Maggie, it was said, was the happiest of the three.
Several hundred people had gathered at the station to see them. But the joy had its shadow. They were advised not to return home for several days, as mob threats still echoed in Sugar Creek Township, and the people of the valley remained convinced of a guilt that no jury had affirmed. In the years that followed, the Kellers never felt at ease among their neighbors.
Maggie, who later married and became known as Mrs. La Hue, filed a lawsuit for fifty thousand dollars against ten prominent men of the region, accusing them of conspiring to fabricate the charge against her. In the spring of 1898, that case went to trial in Covington, bringing the old tragedy into the light once more. Clara herself was not forgotten.
A funeral service was held for her at the Friends Union Church near Grange Corner, and she was buried in Zachmire Cemetery, where her gravestone can still be found. For years, hundreds traveled to Wolf Creek Falls to gaze at the pool where she was discovered, a place old accounts described as strange and full of Indian legends, with slopes lined with relics and a cliff top crowned by an ancient grave. In the spring of 1905, the roof of the house where Daniel Keller had lived was removed and burned completely. Many in the neighborhood believed that within those walls Clara had met her death.
No one was ever punished for it. The seven physicians had written their verdict clearly: death by violence at the hands of persons unknown. And so it remained.
The pool kept its secret long ago, and the manner of Clara Shanks’s death on that dry July afternoon remains unanswered forever at the foot of Wolf Creek Falls.