Historic Columbus Crimes by David Meyers

Author:David Meyers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Detective Chief William G. Shellenbarger is the large man standing one step below and to the right of President Theodore Roosevelt. (CML)

Mrs. Sheatsley was five feet tall and weighed 108 pounds. She apparently entered the furnace feet first, passing through the opening of the double doors, which was just over forty-four inches square. In order to close the doors behind her, she would have had to jerk the lining of one door into the lining of the other. The firebox in which Clarence Jr. had seen his mother standing measured twenty-six inches across.

Much of Addie Sheatsley’s body below the diaphragm had been partially cremated. Sifting through the ashes, the detectives found portions of the hip and thighbones, a skull, arms, heart, lungs, liver and kidneys. A dentist was able to positively identify her false teeth, and a daughter confirmed that the jewelry was her mother’s.

The detectives also checked for fingerprints, closely scrutinizing three on one hot-air duct and one on another. The latter seemed to be from blood. However, all the prints proved to be those of family members. A bottle of carbolic acid was also reported missing from the medicine cabinet; the family insisted it had been there on Sunday.

Although Reverend Sheatsley initially denied that his wife could have killed herself, a day later he announced he had changed his mind. He had been swayed by the assertion of some furnace men that it was physically possible for a woman of her size to crawl into the furnace. He also suggested that a woman of his wife’s age (which was also his age) “might” become violently insane without warning,

And, finally, he said he had personal knowledge acquired during eight months in India (he had authored the 1921 book Our Mission Field in India) that people could become insensitive to pain through extreme fanaticism, particularly religious fanaticism. So was he suggesting that his wife was a religious fanatic? He didn’t say.

Chief Shellenbarger arranged for a woman of Addie’s size and weight to crawl into the furnace of his own home, which was identical to the one in the parsonage. He also poured a bottle of carbolic acid into the actual furnace, but it did not produce any detectable odor either inside or outside the house. (Strangely, the missing bottle of carbolic acid reappeared in the medicine cabinet a week after Mrs. Sheatsley’s death.)

Mrs. Gladys Redelfs, wife of Reverend Lambert Redelfs, a Lutheran pastor in Lithopolis, seventeen miles south of town, showed up at police headquarters and claimed that she had visited Addie on the day of her death, a fact that had gone unmentioned by Reverend Sheatsley and his children. According to Mrs. Redelfs, she arrived about 12:30 p.m. to deliver some Christmas cards Addie had purchased from her and was admitted by Alice. Mrs. Sheatsley invited her to stay for lunch, but she declined. She said she saw Clarence and his father in the sitting room poring over some mail. In her opinion, her friend seemed quite normal.

A chemist and a pathologist examined the charred lungs of Mrs.

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