Post by Catsmate on May 31, 2021 14:44:14 GMT
A little oddity from my collection.
James Harrison and the 110 Days Mystery
Our story starts in 1950s America, on Monday 07OCT1958 in the town of Indian River City in the state of Florida. The protagonist, for lack of a better term, is an almost perfect sample of the period, a solid middle-class citizen named James Eugene Harrison, the owner and chief salesman of a successful window sash manufacturer. He's 32 years old and apparently quite happily married (to Jeanne) with two young children.
And disappears.
His wife grew worried when he failed to return that night and phoned the police. However they were unable to find any trace of the man.
Until a week later when the police in the city of Jacksonville (~250km from Indian River City), found an abandoned station wagon that locals reported had been there several days (in fact it was established that it had been there since Tuesday 08OCT).
The vehicle was unusual (the Edsel was a rare commercial failure for Ford and only eight of that model of station wagon were registered in Florida) and attracted attention. The police examined the vehicle and found that, under a rug, the front seat was saturated with blood. A lot of blood.
Testing (serology was fairly rudimentary in the period) showed it to be O+, the same group as Harrison but there was no further differentiation1.
It was assumed, on medical advice, that the blood loss was not survivable. The police hypothesised that Harrison had picked up a hitch-hiker and been murdered. However no other fingerprints were found in the car.
Jeanne Harrison was distraught and, as a stay-at-home wife, at something of a loss what to do. She liquidated her husband's company and she and their children went to live with her mother-in-law in Miami. There she took a job as a receptionist, as the legal limbo left her unable to claim her husband's life insurance.
On 18JAN1959 a Californian man, Roy Victor Olson confessed to the murder of James Harrison. Olson had been convicted of the murder of a television announcer and actor named Ogden Miles, and confessed to killing Harrison and a Seattle man named John Weiler as well. He claimed that after killing Miles he'd fled to Florida, met a young man from Kentucky named James Leach, and the two hitch-hiked together before being picked up by Harrison.
In his confession Olson stated that on 07OCT he and Leach were walking along Highway 90, between Indian Lake City and Jacksonville, when they were picked up by a man in a station wagon. He appeared to be the sort of person who's have money, so when the driver stopped to stretch his legs, the pair attacked him and stabbed him to death.
Olson claimed that he and Leach dug a grave for Harrison's body in woodland, using a folding shovel found in the car, dumping his non-valuable possessions in with the corpse, and emptying two bags of some material they'd also found in the trunk in as well. Olson though the substance was lime.
Investigation failed to locate the grave, but did find two empty fertiliser bags in the region Olson identified as approximately where they'd buried the corpse. Police established that Harrison habitually carried an Army-style folding shovel in his car and had bought two bags of fertiliser days before his trip.
It looked like an open-and-shut case, though the body was elusive. Police sought James Leach, whom Olson had described as having extensive tattoos3 and quickly found him.
When arrested on 23JAN1959 Knoxville in Tennessee, Leach admitted having spent a few days hitch-hiking with Olson but vehemently denied robbery and murder. The 21-year-old had little criminal history, other than vagrancy, but police were skeptical.
That same day their seemingly iron-clad case fell to pieces.
In the city of Phoenix in Arizona a well-dressed (if in ill-fitting clothes) and clean-shaven man stopped a car backing out of a suburban driveway and asked the couple inside to take him to the police station. The driver was wary and refused,m but offered to call the police and the stranger acquiesced. He waited calmly for their arrival while the householder called the police and asked them to respond to the "robber or a lunatic" in his driveway. All the while the man muttered "How did I get here?".
I'm sure you've guessed who he was.
James Eugene Harrison was alive, if seemingly confused. He didn't know where he was, seemingly very surprised when he found he was in Arizona rather than Florida, thought it was October of 1958 and had no idea how he'd gotten there. He did know his identity, though initially police was skeptical. His identity was however confirmed by his wife and by a surgical scar from a back operation performed in 1957.
According to Harrison he was driving to Cocoa Beach "yesterday, at least I thought it was yesterday". While stopped at a traffic light a man opened the rear door, and threatened him with a pistol, getting into the back seat. This man ordered Harrison to take him to Jacksonville, saying "I want to go to Jacksonville. Take me there and you won’t get hurt."
When they arrived in Jacksonville, the gunman ordered him to pull into a parking lot. After that Harrison had no recollection, saying only that "The lights went out".
He claimed to have recovered only a little while before accosting the couple in their driveway, saying "I woke up just a little while ago...I was lying on a parkway beside a street. My clothes were dirty and this T-shirt wasn’t mine...I never wear them. My $300 was gone. So was my watch and my Masonic ring. I found I was still wearing my wedding ring and I had 67 cents in my pocket. I started walking...I thought I was in Jacksonville…"
Police were, again, skeptical. He seemed to well dressed and groomed to have been lying anywhere for long.
The police were baffled. A simple, if possibly sordid, murder had turned into a full blown mystery.
So what did happen?
Game use.
It's an odd little story that really cries out for a solution. Was Harrison car-jacked by a desperate time traveller or alien for some reason? Presumably they needed transport in a hurry.
Or was he carjacked as he said, and the car-jacker later murdered by Olson? This has some plausibility as, in 1960, the skeleton of a man was found near the Jacksonville Expressway, in the general area where Olson claimed to have buried his victim. He was never identified.
So what happened to Olson? He he recover consciousness but lose his memory for three months? What did he do? Despite extensive newspaper coverage with photographs no-one has ever claimed to have met him in the period, except for one person. On 04FEB1959 a woman in Phoenix claimed that he had been her seat-mate on a bus trip from Los Angeles to Phoenix and had chatted with him, describing him as perfectly rational with no sign of distress or confusion. According to her the man had no luggage with him and left the bus in Phoenix just a few hours before Harrison went to the police. Harrison politely denied her account.
In the face of his lack of cooperation the police were forced to drop the matter.
Or did someone save Harrison and take him for on a "Quick spin around the universe. Have you home before you left. Well maybe not, that always causes trouble."
Comments? Suggestions? Ideas?
1. Beyond the basic ABO and Rhesus factors there are a lot of typable elements in human blood, though such testing is rare today having been supplanted by genetic analysis.
2. This was the era of the 'gay panic defense'.
3. Very uncommon in the period.
James Harrison and the 110 Days Mystery
Our story starts in 1950s America, on Monday 07OCT1958 in the town of Indian River City in the state of Florida. The protagonist, for lack of a better term, is an almost perfect sample of the period, a solid middle-class citizen named James Eugene Harrison, the owner and chief salesman of a successful window sash manufacturer. He's 32 years old and apparently quite happily married (to Jeanne) with two young children.
- At the risk of straying a little from the story I should point out that Indian River City was, despite the grandiose name, a fairly small railway town. It no longer exists having been absorbed by the town of Titusville in the 1970s. There are some pictures here showing the ghost town that remains. This is probably not significant.
And disappears.
His wife grew worried when he failed to return that night and phoned the police. However they were unable to find any trace of the man.
Until a week later when the police in the city of Jacksonville (~250km from Indian River City), found an abandoned station wagon that locals reported had been there several days (in fact it was established that it had been there since Tuesday 08OCT).
The vehicle was unusual (the Edsel was a rare commercial failure for Ford and only eight of that model of station wagon were registered in Florida) and attracted attention. The police examined the vehicle and found that, under a rug, the front seat was saturated with blood. A lot of blood.
Testing (serology was fairly rudimentary in the period) showed it to be O+, the same group as Harrison but there was no further differentiation1.
It was assumed, on medical advice, that the blood loss was not survivable. The police hypothesised that Harrison had picked up a hitch-hiker and been murdered. However no other fingerprints were found in the car.
Jeanne Harrison was distraught and, as a stay-at-home wife, at something of a loss what to do. She liquidated her husband's company and she and their children went to live with her mother-in-law in Miami. There she took a job as a receptionist, as the legal limbo left her unable to claim her husband's life insurance.
On 18JAN1959 a Californian man, Roy Victor Olson confessed to the murder of James Harrison. Olson had been convicted of the murder of a television announcer and actor named Ogden Miles, and confessed to killing Harrison and a Seattle man named John Weiler as well. He claimed that after killing Miles he'd fled to Florida, met a young man from Kentucky named James Leach, and the two hitch-hiked together before being picked up by Harrison.
- Olson was an unemployed cook (and something of a poet) with an extensive criminal record, mainly for armed robbery and car theft. He was suspected of Olson's murder after a blood-stained butcher's knife and chef’s clothing were found in a field..
- While period sources do not do more that allude to it, there was a sexual element to the killing of Miles. he was (at least) bisexual and had a sexual encounter in his car before being robbed and murdered by Olson. Likewise what the media described as "perverted sex acts" were part of the Weiler murder also2.
- After the police in Sacramento put out an alert for Olson, it was found that fingerprints (presumed to be his) matched those found at the scene of the murder of a 32 year old restaurant worker, John Weiler, in Seattle. Some of Weiller's possessions were found in Olson's home.
In his confession Olson stated that on 07OCT he and Leach were walking along Highway 90, between Indian Lake City and Jacksonville, when they were picked up by a man in a station wagon. He appeared to be the sort of person who's have money, so when the driver stopped to stretch his legs, the pair attacked him and stabbed him to death.
- There is something odd here. Harrison shouldn't have been on H-90, given he was supposedly heading from Indian River City to Cocoa Beach and the highway was several hundred kilometres north.
Olson claimed that he and Leach dug a grave for Harrison's body in woodland, using a folding shovel found in the car, dumping his non-valuable possessions in with the corpse, and emptying two bags of some material they'd also found in the trunk in as well. Olson though the substance was lime.
Investigation failed to locate the grave, but did find two empty fertiliser bags in the region Olson identified as approximately where they'd buried the corpse. Police established that Harrison habitually carried an Army-style folding shovel in his car and had bought two bags of fertiliser days before his trip.
It looked like an open-and-shut case, though the body was elusive. Police sought James Leach, whom Olson had described as having extensive tattoos3 and quickly found him.
When arrested on 23JAN1959 Knoxville in Tennessee, Leach admitted having spent a few days hitch-hiking with Olson but vehemently denied robbery and murder. The 21-year-old had little criminal history, other than vagrancy, but police were skeptical.
That same day their seemingly iron-clad case fell to pieces.
In the city of Phoenix in Arizona a well-dressed (if in ill-fitting clothes) and clean-shaven man stopped a car backing out of a suburban driveway and asked the couple inside to take him to the police station. The driver was wary and refused,m but offered to call the police and the stranger acquiesced. He waited calmly for their arrival while the householder called the police and asked them to respond to the "robber or a lunatic" in his driveway. All the while the man muttered "How did I get here?".
I'm sure you've guessed who he was.
James Eugene Harrison was alive, if seemingly confused. He didn't know where he was, seemingly very surprised when he found he was in Arizona rather than Florida, thought it was October of 1958 and had no idea how he'd gotten there. He did know his identity, though initially police was skeptical. His identity was however confirmed by his wife and by a surgical scar from a back operation performed in 1957.
According to Harrison he was driving to Cocoa Beach "yesterday, at least I thought it was yesterday". While stopped at a traffic light a man opened the rear door, and threatened him with a pistol, getting into the back seat. This man ordered Harrison to take him to Jacksonville, saying "I want to go to Jacksonville. Take me there and you won’t get hurt."
When they arrived in Jacksonville, the gunman ordered him to pull into a parking lot. After that Harrison had no recollection, saying only that "The lights went out".
He claimed to have recovered only a little while before accosting the couple in their driveway, saying "I woke up just a little while ago...I was lying on a parkway beside a street. My clothes were dirty and this T-shirt wasn’t mine...I never wear them. My $300 was gone. So was my watch and my Masonic ring. I found I was still wearing my wedding ring and I had 67 cents in my pocket. I started walking...I thought I was in Jacksonville…"
Police were, again, skeptical. He seemed to well dressed and groomed to have been lying anywhere for long.
The police were baffled. A simple, if possibly sordid, murder had turned into a full blown mystery.
- Was the man really Harrison? Almost certainly, his wife and others confirmed his identity.
- Where did the blood in his car come from? Not Harrison it must he assumed. Around 40% of the US population had that type.
- What happened in the car? Presumably someone died.
- Is Harrison telling the truth? Police were dubious about his story but had no grounds.
- Why did Olson confess? He repudiated his confession but never alleged any police misconduct.
- Did something happen to Harrison? He bore no signs of any injuries.
So what did happen?
No one knows. The mystery has never been solved. Sorry...
Game use.
It's an odd little story that really cries out for a solution. Was Harrison car-jacked by a desperate time traveller or alien for some reason? Presumably they needed transport in a hurry.
- This would probably be a good time to mention probably the best known location in Brevard County, Cape Canaveral, which was preparing in late 1958 for the Mercury programme.
Or was he carjacked as he said, and the car-jacker later murdered by Olson? This has some plausibility as, in 1960, the skeleton of a man was found near the Jacksonville Expressway, in the general area where Olson claimed to have buried his victim. He was never identified.
So what happened to Olson? He he recover consciousness but lose his memory for three months? What did he do? Despite extensive newspaper coverage with photographs no-one has ever claimed to have met him in the period, except for one person. On 04FEB1959 a woman in Phoenix claimed that he had been her seat-mate on a bus trip from Los Angeles to Phoenix and had chatted with him, describing him as perfectly rational with no sign of distress or confusion. According to her the man had no luggage with him and left the bus in Phoenix just a few hours before Harrison went to the police. Harrison politely denied her account.
In the face of his lack of cooperation the police were forced to drop the matter.
Or did someone save Harrison and take him for on a "Quick spin around the universe. Have you home before you left. Well maybe not, that always causes trouble."
Comments? Suggestions? Ideas?
1. Beyond the basic ABO and Rhesus factors there are a lot of typable elements in human blood, though such testing is rare today having been supplanted by genetic analysis.
2. This was the era of the 'gay panic defense'.
3. Very uncommon in the period.