INTRODUCTION

The seed for this book was planted when I ran across a historic photo of a beautiful young woman wearing an Annie Oakley–style straw hat and a frock coat with a ruffled shirtwaist. I was immediately struck by the intelligence in her eyes, the confidence in her expression and a touch of haughtiness in the tilt of her chin. I had to know who she was.

It took several keystrokes on the computer to learn her name was Maude Collins, and she was the first female sheriff of Ohio. No wonder she looked confident! She led me to Vinton County and out on a single-lane gravel road where a double murder was committed ninety years ago. She solved those murders by reading footprints in the mud. When I read about the crime, I knew I had to write about Maude and how she brought Inez Palmer and Arthur Stout to justice for killing Stout’s father and stepmother.

While Inez may have been wicked, other women in this book—like Maude—were not, and they deserve to have their stories told.

Four madams are included in this book. Without passing judgment, I have tried to present what their lives were like. These women all had something more in common than the sex trade: They were tough as nails and successful businesswomen.

Clara Palmer contended with constant police raids in the 1880s and ’90s. Only her death could shut the doors of her gilt-edged bordello in Cleveland.

You could say that Lizzie Lape had a franchise on bawdy houses in Ohio from the 1870s to 1904, having opened them from Akron to Marion to Lima and beyond. She married a number of husbands along the way, too.

Rosie Pasco and Lillian Ginger Pasco Tailford hailed from Ottawa County. Their houses were legend, as were their soft hearts and philanthropy. Rosie opened her doors in the 1930s. Ginger’s house was closed down by the feds in 1970.

Mildred Gillars is the lone traitor in the book. As a failed actress, she left the United States to find work in Europe before World War II. Because she fell in love with the wrong man, she wound up promoting Nazi propaganda as Axis Sally on the radio.

And then we have the killers.

Hester Foster was already doing time at the Ohio State Penitentiary when she lost her temper with another female inmate and bashed her head in with a shovel. Foster was the first woman in Ohio to be executed. She was hanged in 1844.

Cincinnati’s Big Liz Carter would have met the same end for poisoning her man in 1890 if it had not been for her size. She escaped the noose because of her weight.

Love of a married man drove Jean Maude Lowther to murder in 1930. She hid in the bushes on a rainy night at a lonely spot near Ashtabula and waited for her lover to drive his unsuspecting wife into an ambush.

Dovie Dean was after Hawkins Dean’s 115-acre farm in Clermont County when she married him in 1952. She used arsenic to kill him. During her trial, she became known nationally as the woman who couldn’t cry. She was the second woman to die in Ohio’s electric chair.

After Martha Wise’s abusive husband died, she took up with a new man. But her family disapproved and forced her to end the affair. In 1925, she retaliated by slipping rat poison into the Medina County family’s drinking water. Sixteen family members died.

By far the most evil woman in the book is Anna Marie Hahn. In 1937, she dosed at least five elderly Cincinnati men with arsenic and croton oil then watched them die in agony while she pretended to be caring for them. Her motive was money. A sixth victim lived to testify against her. She was the first woman to die in Ohio’s electric chair.

You might say Maude Collins brought all these women to my attention, and in doing so gave me the opportunity to research their stories and write about them. I hope you enjoy reading about these women and their crimes as much as I enjoyed researching and writing about them.

1

DOUBLE MURDER AT AXTEL RIDGE

Inez Palmer (1926–27)

Inez Palmer and Arthur Stout shocked the small Vinton County community when they murdered Arthur’s stepmother and tried to burn the evidence, then killed his father and stuffed the body down the well. The lovers might have gotten away with it had it not been for Sheriff Maude Collins.

Maude was sworn in as sheriff of Vinton County in October 1925, just two days after her husband, Sheriff Fletcher Collins, was gunned down while serving a warrant during a traffic stop on the Coalton Pike half a mile north of Jackson. Until her husband’s death, the thirty-two-year-old mother of five children, ages three to eleven, had been the jail matron. When the coroner, who lawfully would have succeeded Fletcher Collins, refused the office, the county commissioners appointed Maude as head law enforcement officer. She put on the badge, took up a gun and became the first female sheriff in Ohio history.

Maude’s most shocking case began in the spring of 1926 after Arthur, thirty-three, brought Inez, nineteen, from Moundsville, West Virginia, to Vinton County to live with him and his two boys a few miles outside of Dundas. Newspapers of the time reported her age as twenty-four, but census, prison and orphanage records show that she was born on December 4, 1907. Supposedly, Inez was hired to keep house, since Arthur’s wife, Amelia, died. The two took up residence down a one-lane dusty road in a small cabin on Axtel Ridge on the rolling farmland owned by William Bray Bill Stout, Arthur’s father. Because they lived without benefit of clergy, and maybe because Inez was actually much younger, countryside tongues began to wag.

Bill Stout was a sixty-five-yearold father of three grown sons. He was a respected, well-to-do farmer who had lost his first wife, Almira, sometime after she appeared in the 1900 census and before 1906, when he married Sarah Pearce. Sarah was a God-fearing woman, mindful of the family’s morals and reputation. The illicit love nest a couple miles down the road upset her to no end, and she let her stepson Arthur know it. He paid her no heed, so she went to the justice of the peace and had Arthur arrested in mid-November for living in an illicit relationship. Bill, being less rigid than his wife, hired a lawyer for his son and bailed him out of jail.

Maude Collins, Ohio’s first female sheriff. Courtesy of the Vinton County Historical Society & Genealogical Society.

A few days after Arthur got out of jail, Sarah’s badly beaten body was discovered by a neighbor boy. Gertrude Perry sent her fourteen-year-old son, Manville, on an errand to Bill Stout’s house, possibly to borrow sugar. When Sarah did not answer the boy’s knock at the kitchen door, he went to the sitting room door, which stood open a crack. He was confronted by a grisly scene when he peered inside. Sarah Stout was sprawled facedown on the floor in front of the stove, her hair matted in blood, according to the newspapers. A horrible smell of something burning hit him in the face.

Manville ran to find his father, William Perry, and Wesley Christian where they were working at the hillside coal mine. Perry called the sheriff ’s office; Christian went to find Bill Stout.

By the time Sheriff Maude (as folks called her) got the call, it was toward evening. She and her chief deputy, Ray Cox, went out to the Stout farm. It was dark when they arrived, but Maude could see that Sarah had been severely beaten then doused in kerosene and set afire. The flames had burned Sarah’s clothing but had died out either for lack of air or because the flooring was not flammable. It was obvious the fire was meant to destroy the evidence. During an autopsy, coroner Walter Swain found that Sarah had been choked to death.

After her husband’s death, Maude Collins was left with five children to support. Courtesy of the Vinton County Historical Society & Genealogical Society.

East Main Street, McArthur, Ohio. Courtesy of the Vinton County Historical Society & Genealogical Society.

Maude asked the neighbors if they had seen any strangers around the farm. No one had. Deputy Cox walked around the outside of the house looking for anything suspicious. Nothing turned up.

Bill Stout sat on the steps of the house, weeping. He told Maude that Sarah had packed him a lunch early that morning. After that, he left the house to work in the north field, and he had not seen anyone around the house. Arthur later corroborated that alibi. He had seen his father in the field.

Maude tentatively marked Bill off the suspect list, but Arthur rose to the top of her list. There are a couple of different stories as to how Maude investigated the murder and wound up arresting Arthur. One version claims that Sarah told her neighbor Lucy Gibbs that she was frightened that Arthur would kill her because she caused him to be arrested. Gibbs’s name appears on the trial witness list. Perhaps she was going to testify to Sarah’s fear.

Another version was written by an unknown author and reprinted in a July 1992 article, Twin Horror of Axtel Ridge, in True Detective, a magazine published in the UK. It purports to be an interview with Sheriff Maude Collins at the time, in which she tells of calling in tracking dogs from Pomeroy forty miles south along the Ohio River.

Before the dogs got there, Maude asked Arthur for an accounting of his time. He claimed to have chopped wood most of the day. Later in the afternoon, he used his horse to drag a wagon tongue he had borrowed from his father back to the older man’s farm. She asked him if he had gone in the house. You didn’t even drop in to pass the time of day with your stepmother?

Arthur’s answer was awkward. No, we haven’t been on speaking terms for some time. I guess you know why.

After the tracking dogs arrived, the sheriff set them to work. They sniffed the path Arthur took with the horse and wagon tongue from his cabin right up to Bill and Sarah’s kitchen door. Presented with the dogs’ finding, Arthur admitted going to the kitchen door but swore he never entered the house.

Sheriff Maude gave the evidence some thought and decided it all pointed toward Arthur. She and her deputy went to prosecutor John E. Blake and asked him to get a warrant from Justice of the Peace George W. Specht. Within a short period of time, the sheriff and deputy had their warrant and went back out to Axtel Ridge to arrest Arthur for the murder of his stepmother. As they were taking him away, Inez Palmer rushed out the door to give him an ardent kiss on the lips. Apparently, it was the first time Maude ever laid eyes on the pretty, dark-haired housekeeper.

Bill Stout was astounded at his son’s arrest. I can’t believe Arthur did it, but if he did, I want him punished.

A newly minted attorney named William J. Jones took over as prosecutor of the case. After graduating from The Ohio State law school the previous June, he decided to go to McArthur to gain experience. Little did he know that the experience would include a scandalous murder case.

Jones wanted Arthur held until the next session of the grand jury convened in January. Arthur was lodged in the county jail. Jones denied him visitors, perhaps because the jail was in the sheriff ’s home. Inez disregarded the rules and made her way six miles through the cold at least once a week to see her lover. Sheriff Maude caught her talking to him through the window many times and sent her off.

On February 17, 1927, the grand jury indicted Arthur for the first-degree murder of Sarah Pearce Stout.

Sometime during that winter, Bill moved into Arthur’s cabin with Inez and his two grandsons, William H., nine, and Arthur Jr., thirteen.

And then Bill came up missing. On Thursday, March 10, Maude received a phone call from a clerk at the general store in Oreton. Inez Palmer had asked the clerk to make the call. Bill Stout had left the country. He said he was going west and he wasn’t coming back. This was problematic because the elder Stout was supposed to testify in Arthur’s trial.

Axtel Ridge homes of the Stout family. Courtesy of the Vinton County Historical Society & Genealogical Society.

Suspicious, Maude and Deputy Cox went out to the cabin to talk to Inez. The young Palmer woman said she was worried because Bill had left the night before and threatened to never return. She claimed he had been out all day mending fences. Maude must have wondered why he