What happened
In the autumn of 1896 Elva Zona Heaster married Edward (Erasmus Stribbling Trout) Shue, a blacksmith new to Greenbrier County. On 23 January 1897 a boy sent to their house on an errand found her dead on the floor. Before the doctor arrived, Shue washed and dressed the body himself in a high-collared dress, and during the examination he stayed by his wife’s head and reacted violently when anyone tried to touch her. The death was put down to natural causes. Zona’s mother, Mary Jane Heaster, never trusted her son-in-law. After the funeral she said her daughter’s ghost came to her on four nights and told her how Edward, in a fit of rage, had broken her neck. Mary persuaded the prosecutor, John Alfred Preston, to reopen the case. An autopsy after the exhumation found a broken neck and a crushed windpipe. In June 1897 Shue went on trial, and the mother testified before the jury – including about her visions. On 8 July he was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Witnesses
Mary Jane Heaster, the victim’s mother, in her testimony at the 1897 trial (the visions are recorded in the trial record); prosecutor John Alfred Preston and the doctors who performed the autopsy after the exhumation.
Explanations and hypotheses
The murder was proved by the medical evidence from the autopsy, not by a ghost’s words – although it was the mother’s story that prompted the exhumation. Researchers of the case note that Mary Heaster may have suspected her son-in-law from the start because of his strange behaviour and bruising, and that a dream or “vision” was a persuasive way to force an investigation in 1897. It was the defence that raised the ghost, hoping to make the witness look foolish, and the tactic backfired. Shue died in the penitentiary at Moundsville in 1900. A state marker on I-64 near Sam Black Church commemorates the “only known case in which testimony from a ghost helped convict a murderer.”
Disputed A likely explanation exists, but some of the facts are still disputed.
Sources
- West Virginia Archives and History – The Greenbrier Ghost
- e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia – Greenbrier Ghost (Dennis J. Deitz)
- Katie Letcher Lyle, The Man Who Wanted Seven Wives (1984)
More: Wikipedia (en)