On May 20-22, 2013, an international meeting devoted to all aspects of Carboniferous-Permian geology with special emphasis on the Carboniferous-Permian transition was hosted by the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, Albuquerque, New Mexico. At that meeting, I presented a paper entitled “A NEW SPECIES OF GLAPHYROPHLEBIA HANDLIRSCH, 1906 (INSECTA: NEOPTERA: BLATTINOPSIDAE) FROM THE LOWER PERMIAN WELLINGTON FORMATION OF NOBLE COUNTY, OKLAHOMA, USA.” In it, I described a new species of fossil insect which I named Glaphyrophlebia anderhalterorum in honor of my grandmother, Katherine Anderhalter and my uncle, her only son, Prof. Dr. Oliver Anderhalter.
The fossil is a spectacular one, with much of the body as well as the forewings preserved exceptionally well for a Wellington Formation insect. The insect’s wing color pattern is preserved on one half of the fossil, the other half comprising an impression of the wing and body.
The species name “anderhalterorum” is a “patronymic,” that is, it is chosen to honor a person or persons. The suffix “-orum” is used behind the name to indicate that more than one person is honored. Here is the text of the Etymology section of the paper, which gives the origin of the name chosen:
“Etymology: The specific epithet anderhalterorum honors my maternal grandmother, the late Katherine Vollet Anderhalter, and her son, the late Prof. Dr. Oliver Anderhalter. My grandmother encouraged me from my earliest school days to excel academically so that I might follow in my uncle’s footsteps and earn a PhD. Her expectations and his example nurtured in me an early interest in science and learning that has lasted a lifetime.”
Here is a color image of the fossil:
And her is a link to a pdf file of the full paper:
Oh, and the blue sage is in bloom today, Salvia azurea scattered across the prairie Like shards of sky, The petals the color Pachelbel’s Canon would be If you could see music with your eyes.
I noticed that its flowers have the same blue glow That Rublev used for the cloaks Of the three wanderers in his Trinity icon. Remember when we saw it in the Tretyakov Gallery?
He painted it 600 years ago With pigment ground from lapis lazuli From the Kokcha Valley, And you said that he had captured The blue of an Archangel’s eyes in those cloaks.
Can you picture how his icon must have stood out Like a blue beacon against the towering gold and red Iconostasis of the Trinity Monastery?
The blue beacons of sage are angels today, blessing These wide tawny fields of gold-leafed Indian grass With their singularly azure essence of blue.
~Roy Beckemeyer, 2011, revised 2023.
My wife, Pat, and I were fortunate to see this icon on our visit to the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. It had resided there from the 1918-9 restoration, which first revealed something of the artistry of Rublev’s original work, until July 2022, when it was returned to the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius, where it had originally resided. On previous returns of the icon to that monastery, exposure to the uncontrolled humidity and temperature and to the candle smoke and incense had caused the icon to deteriorate. It has apparently been returned to the Tretyakov, but there may have been some deterioration and it may not be available for viewing for some time.
My new book, The Currency of His Light (Turning Plow Press, 2023) takes its title from my poem of the same name, which originally appeared in the online journal, The Ekphrastic Review, on November 23, 2020.
The poem was inspired by impressionist painter Claude Monet’s series of paintings, “The Houses of Parliament,” which were painted between 1900, when Monet was in London, and 1905, when he completed the series in his studio in Giverny, France.
Monet was attempting to capture the fleeting variations of light in the foggy, smoggy atmosphere of turn of the nineteenth Century London. In a letter to his wife dated Sunday 18 March 1900, he wrote:
‘Today was a day of terrible struggle, and it will be the same until I leave. Only I need more canvases: there’s no other way to get anything done, than to have different ones going for all kinds of weather, all kinds of harmonies, that’s the real way to do it and, at the beginning, one always expects to find the same effects again and finish them: that’s what leads to these dreadful transformations that are worse than useless.
‘As you see, it’s not enthusiasm that I lack, for I have something like 65 canvases covered with colour and I still need more, this country is something quite out of the ordinary: so I shall have to order more canvases. What a bill I’m going to have from Lechertier’s!’
During the time I was writing this poem, I also had been reading John Milton’s poem, “On His Blindness,” and was captivated by the line “When I consider how my light is spent…” That line, and Monet’s hours spent trying to capture elusive light on canvas made me think of time as a sort of currency (the only real currency any of us have to spend), and of his producing his paintings as investing in another medium of currency, as if he might be coining his own “currency”; hence the title.
I hope you enjoy this video. Roy Beckemeyer, 03-23-2023:
Roy Beckemeyer reading his poem, “The Currency of His Light” accompanied by background images of paintings from the series “The Houses of Parliament,” (Claude Monet, 1900-1905).
My poem, “Hummingbirds” can be found on p. 8 of my new book, The Currency of His Light (Turning Plow Press, 2023). The poem was inspired by my many years of observation of hummingbirds as an avid bird watcher, and by the last lines of Jane Kenyon’s poem, “Year Day,” which I used as an epigraph: “Here are the gestures / of my hands. Wear them in your hair.” The poem contains allusions to pop-culture stop-motion animation as well as to the classic 1930 Marlene Dietrich movie “The Blue Angel.”
Here is a link to “Hummingbirds,” which first appeared in the online literary journal MacQueen’s Quinterley (Issue 11, January 2022).
And here is a link to Jane Kenyon’s poem, “Year Day.”
My latest poetry book, The Currency of His Light (Turning Plow Press, 2023) contains two short poems inspired by quotes from work by the two-time Texas Poet Laureate, Vassar Miller (1924-1998). I suspect quite a few readers will not be familiar with Miller and her work, so thought that I should elaborate a bit here.
I own two (of her ten) books of poetry, Wage War on Silence (1960) and My Bones Being Wiser (1963), both put out by Wesleyan University Press. Both the epigraphs I used were from Wage War on Silence, which was a Pulitzer Prize nominee in 1961. The University of North Texas Press holds a yearly poetry book contest in Miller’s name. She lived in Houston all her life (she had cerebral palsy which made mobility and speech difficult), and she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Houston. She reviewed books for the Houston Post in the 1950s and 1960s, taught creative writing at the St. John’s School in Houston and was writer-in-residence at the University of St. Thomas. The short biography from which some of this information came may be found on the Texas State Historical Association website. She was inducted into the Texas Women’s Hall of Fame in 1996.
In Miller’s obituary in The New York Times (Nov. 8, 1998), Rick Lyman noted: “Many Texas writers and critics, most notably Larry McMurtry, lamented the lack of attention paid to her work, which had never been considered particularly fashionable until late in her career. ‘That she is to this day little known, read or praised in Texas is the most damning comment possible on our literary culture,’ he wrote in a 1981 essay in The Texas Observer.”
After McMurtry’s essay appeared, Miller was named Texas Poet Laureate in 1982 and again in 1988. Her collected papers, which include her correspondence with such luminaries as McMurtry, Richard Hugo, and James Wright, are in the Archives of the University of Houston.
A lovely memoir about Miller and her personality and work may be found in Jenni Simmons’ Curator Magazine article “She Spoke to Silence.”
Here is one of my two poems inspired by quotes from her work, after which I have added Vassar Miller’s poem, “Tree of Silence.” My epigraph is the first line of that poem.
Discourse
“Along the branches of our silence hang our words.” —Vassar Miller, “The Tree of Silence”
The words form, rounded as apples, as oblong pears suddenly succulent, the fleshy home of pips, of seedling insights, ideas of future generations of thoughts and proposals yet unsaid, but pregnant with years of considered cogitation to come, misunderstandings avoided, loves never lost, brilliant discourses instigated by foliferous buds, by orange leaves of words all strung, curled, intricately scalloped by the clenched teeth, the coiled tongue of silence.
By Roy Beckemeyer, from The Currency of His Light (Turning Plow Press, 2023), p. 102.
_____
“The Tree of Silence
(For Nancy)
Upon the branches of our silence hang our words, Half-ripened fruit. Gone are the months of summer, gone Beyond pursuit. Let us leave, though pinched and wan, The windfalls wither Under the tree whose shade affords No shelter either.
For when was language ever food for human yearning! Sun-gilded rain Mocking the sheen of golden peach, Words only drain Hearts of strength; let mortal speech Make time and way For life, the long and lonely yearning How to pray.”
By Vassar Miller, from Wage War on Silence (Wesleyan University Press, 1960), p. 51.
I sincerely hope that this piece encourages you to read more of my poetry, and more of Vassar Miller’s work as well. Please link to my author’s page for information on how to acquire a copy of The Currency of His Light (Turning Plow Press, 2023).
Here is another example poem from The Currency of His Light (Turning Plow Press, 2023), which will be available around March 24, 2023. Again, I chose a poem inspired by a quote from another poet’s work. In this case, that of Pat Daneman, Lenexa, Kansas poet whose 2018 book After All (FutureCycle Press) was a runner-up for the 2018 Hefner-Heitz Kansas Book Award and first runner-up for the 2019 Thorpe-Menn award for literary excellence.
There are actually three poems in my book that contain, as epigraphs, quotes from the book After All. The one I chose for today is:
Multicellular
“Your body is a science experiment—all hypotheses, no promises.”—Pat Daneman from “Time Remaining”
You grow from single cell to what you are the day you die in stages poorly understood, cells dividing according to instructions coiled onto strings of proteins mankind struggles still to read, signaled by potions, by stringent codes of here not there by logic devices illogical in execution, by mistake, by precise adjudication, by what you can only see as evil intent or loving beneficence, debilitating symptom or heirloom of succulent grace.
By Roy Beckemeyer, from The Currency of His Light, (Turning Plow Press, 2023, p. 76).
As noted, the epigraph is from Pat Daneman’s poem “Time Remaining,” which appears on p. 54 in After All (FutureCycle Press, 2018).
I hope this poem will inspire someone to pick up a copy of either of these books or at least to look online for more poetry from me or from Pat Daneman, whose writing I find quite inspiring. I expect that you will, as well.
In my latest poetry book, The Currency of His Light (Turning Plow Press, 2023), the theme of the collection as you might suspect, is light and how it expresses itself, by its presence or its absence, in our lyrics and our lives.
In this book, as in my previous four books of poems, there are many poems inspired by quotes, by the words of other poets and authors, which I find just as inspiring as images or as how light shines into one’s soul. With such poems I always present the quote as an epigraph, laying out the source of my inspiration.
Here is my poem, “Bedrock and Deluge,” which explores how in one person both stability and chaos can be present, simmering or boiling over, as circumstances change. It found its inspiration in a phrase from a lovely poem, “How to Swallow a River,” by Ines P. Rivera Prosdocimi, which appeared in the Volume 86, No. 4, Summer 2020 issue of New Letters. Her poem in its entirety can be found at the New Letters site: https://www.newletters.org/two-poems-by-ines-p-rivera-prosdocimi/?fbclid=IwAR1LcSYZ_Az6LgTZQX2Ylfw3DitSxRLAP2a4Y8clsKRayr3-eVvNWkx8qp4. The phrase I used as epigraph appears on the second last line of the first page of the poem.
Bedrock and Deluge
“Pack your throat with the stones a river depends on…” —Ines P. Rivera Prosdocimi, “How to Swallow a River”
You are stone, I believe, inexpressibly alone even though embedded in the gravelly stream bed of your ancestry, continuously withstanding the sinuous deconstruction of history’s meandering ways.
Yet again, you are the evocation of a deluge, water swallowing earth embankments, the chaos of spate and surge dislodging stone and stability simultaneously.
You are the beguiling yin-ness and yang-ness of mythology’s shape changer, shedding the stolid worker’s bedrock steadiness at shift-change to become River, voraciously gnawing at every bound in sight.
This poem by Roy Beckemeyer appears on p. 21 of The Currency of His Light (Turning Plow Press, 2023). Thanks for pausing to read this, and, I hope, to read Prosdocimi’s poem as well.
I hope this sample tickles your fancy for more from The Currency of His Light.
The judicial process seemed to be proceeding rapidly on Fillmore Young’s case. From the Jan. 5, 1956 Southern Illinoisan, p. 2: “A Clinton County coroner’s jury in Carlyle has ruled that Mr. and Mrs. Hrold Smith…were killed by a .22 caliber pistol linked by testimony at the inquest to Fillmore Young, their confessed slayer. The jury deliberated 43 minutes late Wednesday before returning a verdict…Clinton County Sheriff Dan Parker testified that Young…led officers to the ‘exact place’ where the bodies…were found in widely separated wells in Clinton County… Young didn’t testify on advice of his counsel, Public Defender R. C. Brady.”
Was Young’s counsel giving him good advice? Or was he, too just trying to get the case through the system?
In a short two-inch announcement on the front page of the Belleville News Democrat for January 14th, 1956, we learn that Fillmore Young “waived preliminary hearing before Justice of the Peace…on two murder charges…Young…was bound over to the grand jury which meets January 23.”
Wednesday February 8th, 1956: Young’s trial is placed on the circuit court docket for Monday, March 23. “Young’s trial was among a total of 58 cases announced ready for trial by State’s Attorney Richard T. Carter during a two-weeks criminal session which will open March 5.”
But Chief Deputy Flood was still investigating, still following his strong intuition that there had been an accomplice to the murder. On Tuesday he and Deputy Joseph Koch took into custody a 55 year old Carlyle man “in connection with further investigations of the Young case. The officers said they have information that this man left home and was seen with Young the night of last Nov. 27…He was undergoing a lie detector this afternoon.”
Belleville Daily Advocate, Thursday, March 8, 1956. The circuit court judge and Young’s defense finally slow things down a bit. “Fillmore Young…was arraigned before Judge Quinten Spivey in circuit court for continuance of his trial for the murders of Mr. and Mrs. Harold A. Smith…set for Monday, until after psychiatrists report on his mental responsibility.
Judge Spivey, on application of Public Defender C. Robert Brady and Attorney Eugene H. Widman, court-appointed co-defense counsel, today signed the formal order for the appointment of two psychiatrists, who are to examine Young at county jail next Tuesday and submit their report to the court prior to March 30.”
The Belleville Daily Advocate Wednesday, March 14, 1956: “…psychiatrists—Dr. Francis M. Barnes, Jr., St. Louis, Dr. Groves B. Smith, Godfrey, and Dr. E. R. May, Chester—spent two hours questioning Young. They withheld comment prior to a study of their findings and report to the court…”
On March 19, 1956, the case was back to front page feature story in the Daily Advocate” “Filmore Young, 35, of Carlyle, scheduled to be placed on trial for his life next Monday in Circuit Judge Rolla W. Griffith’s court for the Nov. 27 murders of Mr. and Mrs. Harold A. Smith…in a surprise move today entered a plea of guilty.
Young was brought to court to enter the plea at 10:50 this morning, after which Judge Griffith recessed court until 1:15 this afternoon to hear summations of state and defense evidence to guide him in fixing the penalty. Young pleaded guilty only to the murder of Mr. Smith.
Judge Griffith indicated that he would not pronounce sentence immediately after hearing the facts in the case. But take it under advisement ‘so that the court might give fair and intelligent judgement.’
When [Young’s attorneys] Brady and Widman announced that Young wanted to withdraw his previously not guilty plea and enter a plea of guilty, they informed the court that he had been fully advised of his rights.
Judge Griffith, however, advised him of his rights again and told him that the penalty for murder could either be death by electrocution, imprisonment for life, or any number of years not less than 14 years.
Young said he had a full understanding of the consequences of his plea. He was not asked this morning about his guilt or plea in the case charging him with the murder of Mrs. Smith.”
And with these brief comments about how Fillmore Young was settling into daily life in Menard State Penitentiary, the newspapers lost all interest in him. A search of newspapers.com turned up no further articles about him, and I found no obituary.
The case ends with nearly as much mystery remaining as there was from the beginning. Young’s denial there was an accomplice, then his statement that there was but he couldn’t remember his name. His sudden decision to plead guilty rather than go through the trial. The judge’s decision to dismiss the case against Young for Mrs. Smith’s murder, thus eliminating any chance of Deputy Chief Flood from continuing his investigations into who Young’s accomplice might be.
I believe that Young was at least one of the perpetrators of the murders. But was he the only one? Was justice really served for the Smiths?
This 67-year-old mystery is still shrouded in mist and uncertainty, and will always be.
Photos from the December 9 1955 issue of The Belleville Daily Advocate, p. 6 are AP Wirephotos unless otherwise noted:
The capture of Fillmore Young was headline news across the state.
From the Mt. Vernon (Illinois) Register News, Friday, December 9, 1955: “A husky poultry worker’s confession today of a double slaying solved the mysterious disappearance 13 days ago of a Lebanon, Ill. Couple but the riddle of why they were killed remained unanswered.”
“Fillmore Young, 34, an impassive 200-pound Negro of Carlyle, Ill. Led authorities to separate rural wells which yielded the bodies of two victims…Young, found asleep when he was arrested Thursday night at his home in Carlyle, admitted the slayings…[but] insisted he did not know why he killed the couple. He denied that he raped Mrs. Smith and Coroner Kane said the autopsy did not establish whether she had been raped.”
“One riddle still unsolved is where a broken tooth and denture found in the Smith’s home came from. Kane said the autopsy showed they were not from Smith’s mouth or that of his wife. Officers said Young had no such tooth or bridgework missing.”
The capture of Young remained front page news—on Saturday, Dec. 10, 1955, The Belleville News-Democrat reported:
“Fillmore Newton Young, confessed slayer of Mr. and Mrs. Harold A. Smith…refused to take a lie detector test yesterday afternoon at the sheriff’s office..[The] photo shows Young seated with Thomas Howerton, an investigator for the State Bureau of Criminal Identification. Standing is William Abernathy, chief polygraph operator for the State Bureau of Criminal Identification, left, and Sheriff Leonard O. Reinhardt. Young, Carlyle Negro, freely admitted killing Mr. and Mrs. Smith…but refused to take lie detector tests about the double murder as well as the unsolved killing of Edgar Allen Schaefer…in 1954.”
The Belleville Daily Advocate for Sunday, Dec. 12, continued coverage of the case, and of Saturday’s funeral for the Smiths. In the second crime re-enactment since Saturday afternoon, the paper reported, Fillmore Young successfully moved the concrete slab on a Clinton County well in which he disposed of the body of Mrs. Smith and then replaced it without help. “The demonstration…was witnessed by Sheriff Clifford C. Flood, who said he still was not satisfied that Young did not have an accomplice.”
“State’s Attorney Richard T. Carter …said that ‘Young didn’t tell us any more than he had before.’” Two male friends of Young, one from Carlyle, another from East St. Louis, were taken into custody but subsequently released. Authorities were searching for a girl with whom Young said he had been drinking with in East St. Louis Sunday afternoon of the day of the murder.
An 11-year-old boy identified Young Saturday afternoon as “the gun-toting prowler who tried to break into the boy’s home shortly before the time Young apparently invaded the Smith home. The boy said he was alone with a 13-year-old sister when Young peered in a window and tried to shove open a door, Flood reported. He fled when the lock held, the boy said.”
“Mrs. Smith did not die of bullet wounds, an autopsy showed. The autopsy was performed by Omar E. Hagebush, St. Louis county pathologist. Hagebush said Mrs. Smith probably either was choked to death or died of strangulation…[she] was shot once in the shoulder and once just below the nose. A third shot scratched her left cheek. She had bruises on her back, legs, and left cheek.”
“Harold Smith died almost instantly, according to the pathologist. He was shot in the middle of the neck, through the tip of his nose, and in the forehead above the right eye. All of the bullet wounds extended in an upward direction.”
Numerous friends and associates of Young including his father, have attempted to convince him to tell authorities the whole story of the case, but he still refuses.
Saturday’s funeral services for the Smiths were attended by a large crowd. Groups also toured the Smith home that day, a seemingly odd thing to do but perhaps predicting the tendency for crowds to visit murder locations these days to honor the deceased.
Photo by Belleville Daily-Advocate.
Photos immediately above and below appeared in the Belleville News-Democrat.
The Two-Week-Old Case Seems Stalled – The Darkness Before the Storm:
In the Thursday, December 8, 1955 issue of the St. Louis Post Dispatch, a short article on the Smith murder case was almost buried in the middle of page 3A. It’s headline, “Hair Caked With Blood Found In Lebanon Home,” was in the smallest type size, with tight spacing, no italics. It reported “A few strands of hair, found caked in a spot of blood in the home of Mr. and Mrs. Harold Smith near Lebanon, Ill. Was the latest clue today in the search for the missing pair…They have been missing for 11 days.”
Chief of Police Reese G. Dobson of Belleville and another officer had found the hair in a painstaking hands-and-knees inspection of the blood stained walls and floors. “The blood-stained hair, along with strands taken from Mrs. Smith’s hairbrush, were turned over to the Illinois State Police for comparison. The stain, one of many in the bullet-riddled home, was on a wall about eight inches off the floor.”
The article went on to report that Scott Air Force Base had turned down a request from chief deputy sheriff Clifford Flood for the loan of 500 men for a search of the Lebanon area. Brig. General Wentworth Goss, the base commander, announced that he was ready to help in emergencies, but the base “does not wish to become involved in routine active civil law enforcement.” Things were looking grim, as if the urgency, at least the newsworthiness, of the case was waning.
On That Darkest Day in St. Clair County, Lightning Had Struck to the East in Clinton County:
Meanwhile, on Thursday, December 8th, the case was moving swiftly, but this progress was unknown to St. Clair County and State officials. Lightning struck on Friday, December 9th, 1955, 12 days after Harold and Arline Smith had been murdered in their home, when the case was once again a front page, story of the day, Headline News topic:
“Fillmore Young, a Carlyle, Ill., poultry dealer, admitted today that he killed Mr. and Mrs. Harold A. Smith of Lebanon, Ill., early the morning of Nov. 28 and placed their bodies in rural wells about 15 miles apart.” Said the lead story for the St. Louis Post Dispatch. “He led authorities to the wells, one about three miles southeast and the other 13 miles northeast of Carlyle, and the bodies were found as he said he had left them. Both had bullet wounds in the head. The bodies were removed from the wells.”
“Carlyle is 20 miles east of Lebanon. Young, a Negro, maintained under several hours of questioning that he could not explain why he had killed the Smiths.”
Young would continue to maintain his story of not recalling the actual murder of the Smiths, claiming he also had no motive for the killings. He also denied having an accomplice, an idea that had been put forward by investigators.
The Post-Dispatch article also attributed closing the case to Clinton County officers: “Clinton county authorities solved the case with the help of farmers’ volunteered information that Young’s automobile was stuck in a ditch near Carlyle the morning after the Smiths disappeared.” Apparently St. Clair County and State officials were finally brought into the developments once Clinton County police had made the arrest and questioned Young for hours, eliciting his confession.
“Young, 34 years old, was charged with murder in two warrants issued at Belleville today. He signed a statement and authorities continues to question him.”
Young’s account of the killing to authorities and a Post-Dispatch reporter was hazy and omitted many details. He said he could not remember anything about going to the Smith home that night.”
“‘The first thing I remember,’ he told a reporter, ‘was waking up in the Smith house with a gun in my hand and two bodies on the floor. I didn’t know the people, but knew the area there because I had often hunted rabbits there. First I carried the man outside and put him in the trunk of my car. Then I came back in and dragged the woman out and put her in the rear seat.’ ”
“I drove to the old Kollmeyer farm, about three miles southeast of Carlyle—I knew that area too, from hunting rabbits—and went to a well with a concrete slab on it. I moved the slab and put her body down…Then I drove around with the man’s body in the trunk, looking for a place to put it, but got stuck in a ditch. A man named Elmer Higgins came along in an automobile but couldn’t get me out. He went and got a farmer named Emil Brinkmann and they pulled me out. Then I went to another farm, about 13 miles northeast of Carlyle. There I dropped the man’s body in a dry well and put some debris over it.”
When asked how he got into the Smith’s house, he claimed that he couldn’t remember. “I used my father’s gun,” he said, “a .22 caliber target pistol…This all happened early Monday morning (Nov. 28), I had been drinking all day Sunday with a girl in East St. Louis and Carlyle.”
Young was arrested about 8:30 o’clock Thursday night by Clinton County sheriff Dan R. Parker at Young’s home in Carlyle. “The sheriff said he suspected Young when he learned that someone had seen a blue automobile near the Smith home the Sunday before the pair disappeared because he knew the man owned a blue car, an old-model Oldsmobile. Last Sunday [Dec. 4, 1955] Willard Brinkmann, son of Emil, told the sheriff of helping pull Young’s machine out of a ditch near the Brinkmann’s farm home the morning of Nov. 28. Sheriff Parker and his chief deputy, Douglas Keith, went to the scene and found a bloody hand towel. They sent the towel to the St. Louis police crime laboratory, and yesterday a test showed that the blood was of the same type as that which had been found in the Smith home. Then the sheriff decided to arrest Young.”
[So it appeared the case might have been closed almost a week earlier, if the Clinton County officers had made contact with the St. Clair and Illinois State Police investigators in charge of the case when the towel was first found.]
A group of officers, including Carlyle Chief of Police Earl Robert, questioned Young for about two hours without him admitting any connection to the case. But then Parker and Keith, who had known Young all his life, took him into a room without anyone else and continued talking with him. “In a friendly, man-to-man fashion, Parker said, the officers told Young they were convinced he had killed the Smiths, and before long he was telling his story.
“Young was cool and showed no emotion as he told his story, which he did with little prompting. Asked if the Smiths fought with him before the shooting, he replied ‘No.’ His father, Newton Young, said the son was a heavy drinker and that sometimes his behavior was odd even when he was sober. For example, he said, he would stare into space for a long time, or look at the father fiercely.”
Officers also took custody of Young’s automobile and found bloodstains in the trunk and rear seat.
In a separate interview with Newton Young, Fillmore Young’s father, he said “I can’t figure it out, I just can’t figure it out. If he had to kill someone I wish he’d have killed me. Fillmore never was a bad boy. He made good grades in school. He left high school after one year to join the army in 1941. He served in World War II and then went back into service, this time in the Air Force, for the Korean war. When he came out of the Air Force the last time, he started drinking. He hasn’t been able to get a job on the outside and I have been paying him a salary to work for me in the poultry and egg business. I told him just awhile back that he’d have to stop drinking or I’d cut off his salary.”
His father pointed out that Fillmore was a powerful man, 5 feet, 11 inches tall, and weighing 205 pounds. “He was still good at fixing things, but I guess his mind wasn’t just right,” he said.
Fillmore Young had married in 1948, but about six months into the marriage his wife drowned while they were on a fishing trip. He had been tried for murder at that time but was acquitted.
The article also reported on the results of the St. Clair County coroner, Dr. C. C. Kane, whose examination “showed that Smith was shot in the forehead, cheek and neck, and Mrs. Smith in the cheek and left shoulder. The coroner said Smith was probably killed instantly, but that his wife might have lived for some time. In his judgement, he added, she was finally smothered or strangled. The shots were fired from a distance.”
A Preliminary hearing was set for Friday December 16th.
The Belleville Daily Advocate’s coverage included news that a “ballistics report received at the sheriff’s office today disclosed that the weapon with which the Smiths were killed was not the same as the gun of the same caliber that [had] killed Edgar Allen Schaefer, 27, of Lebanon, recreation director of Mascoutah schools. Schaefer was killed while he was in a parked car with a girl friend in a picnic area near Lebanon early on the morning of New Year’s Day 1954.” Young denied killing Schaefer, denied having an accomplice, and denied raping Arline Smith.
Young had been brought to the St. Clair county jail at 5:30 Friday morning. He was now being “held for the circuit court grand jury, which State’s Attorney Richard T. Carter said is to hear evidence in the case during a session beginning Jan. 16.”
The Daily Advocate took a generous, diplomatic approach to the news of the solving of the case: “Sharing honors in the actual solution, although many deputy sheriffs and officers aided, were Sheriff Leonard O. Reinhardt, Chief Deputy Flood, Acting Night Chief Deputy James A. Schoonover, State Highway Patrol Lieut. Walter Sauerwein, Highway Patrol Sgt. Emil Toffant, Clinton County Sheriff Parker and Deputy Sheriff Douglas Keith of Clinton County.
The first break in the case came late yesterday when the St. Louis police crime laboratory reported that blood found on the towel and another piece of cloth from a sack was type O-M, the same type as that found in the Smith home…The investigating officers then went to the Smith home…where they met Jacob Dressel, father of Mrs. Smith…Mrs. Dressel and a sister of the dead woman identified the towel and the piece of cloth as of a kind they had seen at the Smith home.”
The story noted that “Volunteer firemen from the area aided the officers in the recovery of the bodies from the wells. In the case of Mr. Smith, dumped into the dry well, his body was covered with debris which Young said he dropped in.”
Young said he had brought Mrs. Smith’s body to a covered well. He used a crowbar to force off a slab of concrete, threw her in head first, then shoved the slab back on top of the well. Her body was recovered clother only in a “checkered house dress” but underclothes and shoes were missing.
A double funeral for Harold Albert Smith and his wife, Mrs. Arline Louise Smith, will be held at 2 p. m. Sunday at the Meyer Funeral Home, Lebanon.”
phanaerozoic 