Early on the evening of Tuesday, December 6, 1927, a young woman dressed with unusual care, took the car keys from her husband’s pocket, and drove thirty-five miles through the winter darkness from the small village of Perry, Ohio, to Cleveland. There, at a card party, she laughed, danced, and played the piano, singing the popular songs of the day to the delight of the guests. No one at that gathering suspected that, hours earlier, she had bludgeoned her husband to death with a claw hammer, bound his hands and feet with rope, placed a bloodstained pillowcase over his face, covered his body with a blanket, and left him lying on the bedroom floor of their small farmhouse. She was known to her friends as Val.
The newspapers would soon know her as something else entirely. The woman was Velma West, born Velma Van Wart in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1906. From an early age, she understood what it meant to be the center of attention. At three years old, she won a “perfect child” contest at a local theater, a small distinction that seemed to confirm the family’s belief that their daughter was meant for the spotlight.
Her early years were marked by poor health, including diphtheria and chronic ear problems, and she was considered a frail, sickly girl through most of her childhood. By the time she reached nineteen, however, she was fully recovered and entered the working world of a city buzzing with the energy of the 1920s. Cleveland in those years was a very different place from the quiet lakeside village of Perry. The decade had brought exceptional prosperity to the industrial cities of the American Midwest.
By 1925, the United States was producing nearly half of the world’s industrial output, and Cleveland, with its iron foundries, automobile plants, department stores, jazz clubs, and movie theaters, was riding that great commercial wave. Young women worked in offices and shops, smoked in public, frequented dance halls, and listened to jazz pouring from clubs along the main streets. It was an era of remarkable social change, and Velma Van Wart embraced it enthusiastically. She found work as a salesgirl at Rothman Fraternity, a store at the corner of West 65th Street and Detroit Avenue.
She proved to be social and attractive, perhaps too social in the estimation of the store’s owner, Harry Rothman. She was frequently seen talking with young male customers instead of attending to her work. She was let go from the job. By that time, other arrangements were already taking shape.
During her lunch breaks, she had been visiting a nearby restaurant owned by a fifty-six-year-old man named William Chapman, who had proposed marriage. The wedding was planned for the summer of 1926. But she never became Mrs. Chapman.
That spring, at a picnic near Lake Erie, she met a young man named Thomas Edward West. Known to everyone as Eddie, he was born in 1902, four years older than Velma. He was, by all accounts, a tall, dark, impressively built young man, the son of Thomas B. West, a wealthy nurseryman who had emigrated from Peterborough, England, and built a thriving business supplying shrubs and trees to homes and businesses throughout Ohio.
Eddie worked in his father’s nursery, earning one hundred twelve dollars a month, and lived in a small house the family provided in the highly respectable village of Perry. Velma broke off her engagement to William Chapman. On July 4, 1926, she and Eddie eloped, driving first to Ripley, New York, then to Pennsylvania, and from there by train to Chicago. The honeymoon was short.
Their money ran out. Eddie left Velma with acquaintances while he looked for work, returning a week later with enough money to bring them back to Perry. And it was there, in the quiet of Perry, that the trouble began. Eddie West’s life was orderly and rural, bound by society’s expectations and family obligations.
Velma Van Wart’s life had never been that at all. She longed for Cleveland, for the dance halls and jazz clubs, the movement and noise, and the company of friends who understood her. She smoked openly in a village where such behavior was considered improper for a married woman. Eddie’s parents, prominent and conservative, made their disapproval clear.
Arguments between husband and wife became frequent. She wanted to go to Cleveland on weekends. He preferred to stay in Perry. He did not always object to accompanying her, but the distances were long, the evenings out were expensive, and his wages, though adequate, were modest.
He went at first, then less often, and disputes replaced negotiation. In July 1927, a young woman from Cleveland named Mabel Young came to Perry for a holiday with the West family’s neighbors. She and Velma met immediately and became, in the estimation of those who observed them, remarkably close. They went swimming and fishing together almost every day.
By that time, Velma had begun dressing in boyish clothes and had cut her hair short. When Mabel returned to Cleveland, the two women exchanged long letters. Eddie West began intercepting those letters. The troubles that had been building for so long had grown heavier.
The arguments continued. Velma left and returned to her parents’ home. Her parents persuaded her to go back to Perry. She returned.
The arguments continued. Trouble was always present, always waiting. On the morning of Wednesday, December 7, 1927, Thomas Edward West did not report to work at his father’s nursery. His brother James was the first to go to the small house to see if something was wrong.
He found the door unlocked. He went inside and climbed the stairs to the bedroom. The room was in a state of utter disorder. Blood stained the floor, the walls, and the bedding.
A claw hammer lay on the floor near the bed, marked with blood. On the floor lay a body, hands and feet bound with rope. A bloodstained pillowcase had been placed over the head, and a blanket covered the body. It was his brother Eddie.
He was not breathing. James West immediately called the Lake County sheriff. Sheriff Ed Rasmussen, known throughout the county as “Big Ed,” a massive and capable officer with considerable authority, took charge of the case at once. The farmhouse was secured and examined.
The crime scene told part of the story. Nothing of obvious value appeared to have been stolen. There was no evidence of forced entry. The way the body had been arranged, bound and covered, with the pillowcase placed with apparent care, suggested that the killer had remained at the scene for some time after delivering the fatal blows.
The sheriff’s first task was to find Velma West. She was located at her mother’s home in East Cleveland, where she and Catherine Van Wart had returned after a day of Christmas shopping in the city’s stores. The two women were exhausted from their outing and sat down to rest. When the sheriff and his officers arrived and informed Velma of her husband’s murder, she appeared shocked.
She accompanied them without resistance. She was taken to the Lake County jail and questioned. She was calm. She smoked continuously, cigarette after cigarette.
During four hours of interrogation, she gave an account of her movements. She said that she and Eddie had argued, that he chose to stay home while she drove to a bridge party at Mabel Young’s home in Cleveland, and that she had no knowledge of any intruder. She did not confess, not during those first four hours at least. Then County Prosecutor Seth Boland entered the room carrying a newspaper.
The headline read: “Edward West Found Murdered. ” Velma West fainted. When she regained consciousness and Boland briefly left the room, she turned to Sheriff Rasmussen and told him she would tell the truth. She wrote out her confession in her own handwriting.
The medical examination of Thomas Edward West’s body had determined the cause of death with clinical precision. He had received between six and eight blows to the head with a claw hammer. The blood spatter and the pattern of wounds indicated that he had fallen to the floor at the start of the attack and had attempted to rise on four separate occasions, evidence consistent with the account Velma later gave. Each time he tried to get up, the blows continued.
He did not survive the final series of blows. He had not been drunk or asleep when the attack began. He was twenty-five years old, over six feet tall, and in excellent physical condition. Velma West was five feet five inches tall and weighed one hundred seven pounds.
In her confession, Velma described the sequence of events. She and Eddie had argued that evening. She wanted to attend Mabel Young’s bridge party in Cleveland. He refused to accompany her and told her she could not take the car.
He struck her, causing her nose to bleed. She picked up a claw hammer she had used earlier that day to hang curtain rods in the bedroom, and struck her husband with it while he sat on the bed. When he fell and tried to get up, she struck him again and again. She bound his wrists and ankles with rope.
She placed a pillowcase over his head. She covered the body with a blanket. Then she washed, changed her dress, burned the soiled clothing in the stove, retrieved the car keys from her husband’s pocket, and drove herself to Cleveland. The coroner determined that death had occurred in the early evening hours of December 6, consistent with Velma’s account of the timing of the argument.
The evidence found at the scene included the claw hammer, the lengths of binding rope, and the bloodstained bedding. The house showed no signs of forced entry at any point. It was, in every sense of the word, a domestic scene. On December 12, 1927, Velma West was formally charged with first-degree murder.
Indicted by the grand jury in Painesville Municipal Court before Judge Marvin Hilter, she was held without bail. When the charge was read aloud in the crowded courtroom, she collapsed. When she regained consciousness, she wept. Her uncle, speaking to the reporters packed in the corridor outside, said she had misunderstood the judge’s remarks and believed she had received a death sentence.
The specter of the electric chair, which had already claimed the life of the convicted Ruth Snyder at Sing Sing prison in New York, had entered her imagination and would not leave. Velma West’s trial was scheduled to begin on March 5, 1928, in the Lake County Court of Common Pleas in Painesville, before Judge G. D. Barnes.
The case had become the talk of the hour. The press covered it with obvious appetite. The image of a bold, beautiful twenty-one-year-old girl from Cleveland, a dancer, a smoker, a jazz pianist, accused of killing her husband with a hammer, filled newspaper columns for months with speculation and analysis. The famed defense attorney Clarence Darrow, known for taking on impossible cases and for his disregard of conventional morality, offered his assessment to the press without being formally retained.
He stated that the crime was the result of Velma finally breaking under the weight of life in a dull, overly restrained small town. She had grown up in a world of companionship and independence, he said, and when she was forced into a narrow small-town life, her reaction was as inevitable as anyone like her. The courtroom was full an hour before proceedings were scheduled to begin on the morning of the trial. The majority of those present were women.
Velma entered wearing a gray fur coat over a black silk dress that fell to the knee. She appeared calm and composed. The trial did not take place. As jury selection was underway, a development changed the calculations of both the prosecution and the defense.
Mabel Young had sent an eight-page letter to Sheriff Rasmussen. Its contents were not fully disclosed, but its existence and the nature of what it revealed about the relationship between the two women made a public trial extremely sensitive for all parties. It was also revealed that Velma had returned to the house on the morning after the crime to retrieve the keys from her dead husband’s pocket, a detail that complicated any claim of self-defense in ways neither her lawyers nor the prosecution wished to explore before a jury. The chief defense attorney, Francis Paulson, stood and addressed the court.
He stated that the defendant offered to plead guilty to second-degree murder. In turn, Prosecutor Seth Boland stood and recommended acceptance of the plea. Judge Barnes addressed Velma directly. She answered each question in a whisper, her hands alternately twisting and releasing before her.
The sentence was imprisonment in the Women’s Reformatory at Marysville for the rest of her natural life. The courtroom received the sentence in silence. In his public statement after the proceedings, Prosecutor Boland explained the decision to accept the plea in precise and measured terms. The plea of guilty to second-degree murder had been accepted, he said, to spare the victim’s parents and the witnesses who would have been called to testify any further suffering.
Eddie’s parents, Thomas B. West and his wife, prominent financially and politically in Lake County, had hoped to avoid a full public trial. Velma West arrived at the Women’s Reformatory in Marysville, Union County, Ohio, in March 1928. She was twenty-one years old.
She never walked out as a free woman. While in prison, she learned that Mabel Young had died in the catastrophic fire at the Cleveland Clinic on May 15, 1929, a fire in which nitrocellulose X-ray films stored in the basement released toxic gas throughout the building. One hundred twenty-three lives were lost that day, including that of the woman to whom Velma had written her long letters from Perry. Velma’s years at Marysville, according to those who observed her, were not without their quiet distinction.
She was regarded as a model prisoner. She studied shorthand. She played the piano and sang for her fellow inmates, the same musical talents that had charmed the guests at the bridge party on the last night of her husband’s life. She enjoyed the trust of the prison superintendent, wore what were known as honor dresses instead of the standard uniform, and was permitted to accompany visitors on tours of the institution.
In November 1938, the parole board refused to consider her case and imposed the maximum sentence without review. Velma West, now thirty-one years old, understood what this meant. Between 9:30 and 10:00 on the evening of June 18, 1939, Velma West, with three fellow inmates named Virginia Brodie, Mary Ellen Richards, and Florence Schell, passed through the corridor door, descended to the basement, left the building, and walked away from the Marysville Reformatory. The escape was carried out with the help of another inmate who had obtained a key.
Velma wore blue coveralls and an orange jacket and carried a pink dress over her arm. The women traveled to Texas by hitchhiking. For thirty-six days, the escapees remained at large. Newspapers across the country published their photographs.
There were many reported sightings. Velma was eventually found in Dallas, where she was working as a waitress under an assumed name. She was returned to Marysville. In the years that followed, she continued as she always had, playing the piano, studying, and speaking to the young people who visited the institution about the consequences of the choices she had made.
In 1959, when she became eligible again for consideration by the parole board, she told the board she preferred to stay. Her father had died in 1944. Her mother and brother were alive, but she did not want to be a burden to them. Records also indicate that her heart condition had deteriorated considerably by that time, and she spent most of her days in the prison hospital.
On October 24, 1959, Velma West died at Marysville. She was fifty-three years old. She was buried in Our Lady of Loudres Catholic Cemetery in Marysville, Ohio. The farmhouse in Perry, where Thomas Edward West spent the last hours of his life, was photographed by Cleveland newspapers in the weeks after the crime.
It was an ordinary house, painted white, modest, sitting among the West family’s commercial nurseries. No memorial or marker points to it today. The nurseries Thomas B. West built, the trees and shrubs that spread across Ohio carrying the fruit of his family’s labor, have long since faded and been swallowed by other things.
What remains is the record preserved in the archives of Cleveland State University, documented in the court records of Lake County, and held in the crumbling newspaper pages that carried the story with such eagerness before moving on to the next sensation. A photograph of Velma remained on her desk at Marysville, quiet and still, her face holding something the camera cannot quite explain. Whether it was surrender, regret, or simply the particular patience of someone who had accepted her place and what she had done, the photograph does not say. She left no explanation that satisfied the question everyone kept asking.
She played the piano that night. She laughed and danced and sang. Then she drove back home through the winter darkness alone, to a village that was never hers.