What really happened to Ellis Parker, the small-town detective with the world-wide reputation? In his forty-four years as Chief of Detectives of Burlington County, New Jersey, Ellis Parker became known as the greatest detective in America.

He investigated 300 crimes, many of them baffling murder mysteries; he solved and won convictions in all but twelve. So thorough was his work that in more than half the cases he investigated he turned over not merely the guilty person but a signed confession as well.

Every police chief in America knew Parker. Many, at one time or another, wrote to him for advice.

This — for nearly half a century — was Ellis Howard Parker, Sr.

Then came the Lindbergh baby kidnaping.

Not a detective in America but would have given his left thumb to get his right into that crime pie. For the man who solved it — fame and fortune.

And so Ellis Parker tried his hand at it and completely wrecked a brilliant career and an unblemished reputation.

More baffling by far than any of the enigmas solved by the canny Parker is the mystery of Parker himself.

Here was a man who had devoted a long and useful life to the uncovering of crime. Yet in the very sunset years of that life he himself took a fling at crime.

Here was a man who had sent more criminals than he could today tell you to the gallows, the electric chair, a prison cell. With incredible suddenness, this relentless foe of crime found himself accused and tried and convicted of a crime.

Here was a man who set out to solve a kidnaping and became himself a kidnaper.

To state senators and to admiring fellow townsfolk he was known affectionately as "Ellis." To the three tools who helped him carry out an illegal plot to kidnap and extort a confession to the Lindbergh kidnaping from Paul Wendel, disbarred lawyer, chemist, and inventor, he — the selfsame man — was known, in underworld jargon, as "the Boss."

It was his proudest boast that never, in forty-four years of running down criminals, had he used an ounce of physical force on any of them.

Yet here he was, charged by the federal prosecutor who convicted him with having given orders that an innocent man in another state be spread-eagled on an improvised torture rack.

Perhaps Ellis Parker was not guilty? Perhaps not, but all the weight of nine weeks of evidence in Federal Court at Newark said that he was. A jury said that he was. And his own lack of any defense except repeated denials said that he was.

Why was he guilty? What, in heaven's name, snapped within the shrewd, orderly mind of this simple and kindly and respected country detective to make him turn — at sixty-five — to the commission of a crime?

Examine his background, and it becomes all the more puzzling. He was born in 1871 to Quaker parents on a farm near Wrightstown, New Jersey. At nine he was a healthy, stocky youngster, working on his parents' farm. A rural school gave him the only education he ever had — or needed.

At nineteen he was something of a local musician. He would object to the fancy term "violinist." He was a fiddler. He fiddled at barn dances.

He was fiddling the night Dexter was stolen — and that incident made a sleuth of him.

Dexter was the family horse. Ellis had driven him to the dance, twelve miles from home. After the dance, Ellis discovered, Dexter and the buggy had vanished.

He worked for days on that, his first case. He tramped all over Burlington County. He reviewed circumstances and decided that the thief must be a farm hand his father had discharged some weeks before.

He finally came across the farm hand, the buggy, and Dexter, thirty miles from the scene of the theft. He dragged the guilty man into court and won a conviction.

He became a member of the Mount Holly Pursuit Association and the Burlington County Pursuing Society and showed such uncanny skill at recovering stolen horses that, in 1892, at twenty-one, he was appointed Chief of Detectives of Burlington County.

Burlington County saw no reason to regret that appointment. Neither did Ellis Parker. In Mount Holly, quiet and neighborly little Quaker town, he installed himself in a second-floor rear office of the yellow-brick county court-house that had been erected in 1796.

The office — which he occupied uninterruptedly for forty-four years — was as quaint and unpretentious as the man himself. A desk littered with correspondence and reports, case histories and miscellaneous papers; a window sill cluttered with telephones; baskets in corners overflowing with a curious miscellany that included books, trial-exhibit photographs, maps, and an occasional bone or two from some victim whose violent death Ellis Parker had solved. Sitting on a chair in one corner, completely attired, even to a hat, was the office mascot — a human skeleton.

From the little town of 7,000 his fame as a solver of mysteries spread until he was the one detective in America whose name was an international byword.

Not for a minute did this inflate him. He might have had dozens of better jobs. He wanted none of them; he liked his work and the homespun people of Burlington County. He married and had many children and swapped quaint and often flashingly humorous anecdotes with his friends, and smoked strong pipes.

He has been called a "psychological" detective. He himself insists: "All I ever use is plain, ordinary horse sense."

He was daring in his deductions. A casual conversation might be all he needed to determine in his own mind who was guilty. A tiny twig lodged between trigger and trigger guard of a shotgun was all he needed in one case to break down a murderer. He had a way with people, knew how to get information from them. He broke a murder once by giving a child a gumdrop.

Launched on a case, he suspected every one, then diligently eliminated. He worked hard — often twenty hours a day. People who attempted to fool him soon came to grief. He had an ear that detected at once the false ring of any lie. It was not, according to his own story, until he listened to Paul Wendel that that sharp ear failed him.

He was utterly implacable — a relentless nemesis of the for long. He once chased a criminal — by cable and mail — for fifteen years through five foreign countries. He got the man.

For a brief period during the World War, Ellis Parker was sworn in as an operative of the Department of Justice. Federal agents, unable to locate a mysterious wireless station that, transmitting in code, was interfering with government broadcasts, invited him to help them. It took him a surprisingly short time to find the station and the reason why they had had so much difficulty. The station was in an automobile that kept shifting its position up and down the Jersey coast.

The years passed. Ellis Parker grew bald and paunchy. But in the year that catastrophe overtook him, his jaw was as aggressive as ever, his gray-blue wide-set eyes as shrewd and alert.

He was still — to all Mount Holly — simply Ellis.

And then he was arrested, indicted, convicted in the most surprising backwash of the Lindbergh case.

Eighty-five loyal friends and fellow townsmen flocked to Newark to testify that the kindly old man could not have directed the extortion by torture of Wendel's confession — so soon denounced as false.

Despite that, the evidence against him as to the kidnap conspiracy was so weighty that he was found guilty.

What, then, had happened to him? The indictment handed up against him said he had hoped to write a book about his "solution" of the Lindbergh case, and that this book, circulated throughout the country, would "enhance the reputation of the said Ellis H. Parker as a successful and competent detective and the public would be caused to believe the said Ellis H. Parker ... had truly solved the case ... and that large rewards and sums of money for his services would come into the hands of the said Ellis H. Parker."

Yet Ellis Parker in previous years had given any number of writers access to his files of criminal cases without deriving a cent for himself. He had a record, too, of having turned down numerous cases that would have paid him huge fees. If he was greedy, as the indictment implied, greed had seized upon him suddenly.

United States Attorney John J. Quinn, who prosecuted him, depicted him as an overambitious country detective, an egocentric sleuth who refused to accept the real solution of the Lindbergh crime.

Was this the true explanation?

District Attorney William F. X. Geoghan of King's County, Brooklyn, where Ellis Parker's co-conspirators were tried and found guilty, said that Parker schemed to "solve" the case at Wendel's expense to "save the face of a higher authority."

Governor Harold G. Hoffman of New Jersey, lifelong friend of Ellis Parker, had risked his political career, following Hauptmann's conviction, in an investigation to "learn the truth" of the famous case which, he asserts, was not satisfactorily solved.

Does this explain what happened to Ellis Parker?

Paul Wendel himself asserted that Parker had hoped to become head of either the Department of Justice or the New Jersey State Police, with his friend Hoffman holding the Vice-Presidency of the United States.

Federal Judge William Clark, who listened to the 1,700,000 words of testimony at the trial of Parker and his son and namesake, said, when sentencing him:\

"I have the impression that your life as a law-enforcement officer and the position of power that you have reached in the community has given you the feeling that you are above the law...."

And that, today, is the impression shared most widely. For forty-four years Ellis Parker had been "the law" in Burlington County. And then, perhaps drunk with his.

But whatever explanation you may choose will, when closely examined, show distinct flaws.

What did happen? Something must have!

Paul Wendel testified that, while the Lindbergh case was still unsolved, Parker had employed him to go out and listen to what people were saying and report back to him. From such reports, Wendel testified, Parker had said he might possibly make deductions sufficient to give him a wedge for breaking the case.

The courtroom roared at that. Even Ellis Parker smiled. And yet it was not as ridiculous as it sounded. By listening intently to a conversation during one of his famous murder investigations, he had made a spectacular deduction that had told him exactly where to look for the murderer.

College psychology classes to whom, later, he narrated that case and its conversation failed, almost to a man, to follow his reasoning; were unable to leap, as he had, to the obvious answer.

Suppose we tell the case again. See what you can do with it. Compare your powers of deduction with his. See if you, too, can spot the flaw and pick the murderer.

The case broke, in the dark, hot early-morning hours of August 12, 1922, at Lakehurst, New Jersey. The murder victim was a middle-aged married man named William Giberson. He was the operator of a taxicab company. He was well known and rather popular, a good husband, not mixed up with any other woman. No one could think of a reason why anybody would want to shoot him.

His wife, Mrs. Ivy Giberson, was plain and plump, matronly. She had nice eyes and pretty hair, both dark, but she wore spectacles and her hair was massed on her head in old-fashioned knots.

She was as respectable as her husband was popular, a militant prohibitionist, a church worker.

The Gibersons lived in the second-floor apartment of a two-story brick building, over a chain grocery store. To enter their apartment, you went around to the back of the building and up a wooden outside staircase to a rear second-floor porch. A door on the porch opened into the kitchen. From the porch you could look out across a rear yard toward the railroad tracks.

That morning railroad employees were walking homeward along those tracks. In the darkness before dawn they heard a woman scream. When she screamed again they started for the house. They piled up the outside staircase, found the door, and heard the woman still screaming inside.

The door was open. They went in and struck matches, then switched on the lights. They were in a kitchen. On the kitchen floor, just to one side of the door by which they had entered, lay a woman in a nightgown. Her hands and feet were tied with heavy grocer's twine. A gag dangling around her neck had, obviously, been stuffed in her mouth until she had managed to work it out.

They began untying her. She was whimpering, moaning:

"Oh, my God! Will! My husband!"

Her eyes were fixed on a door at the other end of the room, in the side wall against which she lay. That door was ajar, but from where she lay it was impossible to see into the other room. They got her untied and found she was unhurt, except where the twine had been drawn tight.

One of the men went into the other room and found the switch and turned on lights. The minute she was on her feet, she followed him, and when she reached the doorway she began screaming again.

In that room, against the back wall of the house, was a bed. On the bed lay William Giberson. There was some blood on his face, near his left eye, where the bullet had gone in, and more on the bed where it had come out.

They made Mrs. Giberson go back into the kitchen, where she couldn't see the bed — or the dead man on it.

There wasn't any gun, so he hadn't shot himself. And the bedroom had been given a hasty ransacking. Drawers had been pulled out of a dresser, their contents dumped on the floor. Giberson's clothes were strewn all over the room, with his pants pockets turned inside out.

Mrs. Giberson was too distraught to tell the men much, except that she had been awakened by a noise, had got out of bed, had been seized by two strange men who had clapped a hand over her mouth and tied and gagged her. One of them had disappeared into the bedroom and shot her husband. Then both had hurriedly ransacked the place and vanished out the back door. It had taken her perhaps ten minutes to work the gag out of her mouth.

The railroad workers notified the local police, and the next morning they telephoned Ellis Parker. When he got to Lakehurst, local detectives, told him the respectable background of the Gibersons and gave him a synopsis of what had happened.

"She was pretty hysterical right after it, but we got a good statement from her a couple of hours ago."

Ellis Parker smoked his pipe and read the statement.

"What do you think of it?" he asked.

The Ocean County detective scratched his head. "Well," he said, "it sounds pretty right, to me. What she says sounds straightforward. Take the kitchen door — the point of entry. Wasn't forced. They used a key. She says she locked it herself, before she went to bed."

Ellis Parker nodded. "Meaning," he said, "that if Mrs. Giberson knew something about her husband's death, or was trying to cover some one, she'd say the door might have been accidentally left unlocked.

"Exactly. For the past month we've been trying to lay our hands on a pair of burglars that-have been working this county. Usually they go in through a window, but a couple of times they've used a door key. And once they were surprised by a servant girl. They tied her up and gagged her, just like Mrs. Giberson."

"Never took a shot at any one, did they?"

The detective shook his head.

"Well, there always has to be a first time," admitted Parker.

"But that's one of the things that makes Mrs. Giberson's story look good to me. These burglars are both tall. She insists that the pair that came to her home was the Mutt-and-Jeff type: one tall, the other short."

"The Gibersons didn't have a lot of money, did they?"

"No. But you saw what she said in the statement. Giberson drew nearly eight hundred dollars out of the bank yesterday afternoon. He was gonna buy another taxi. He had the money in his wallet. The wallet's gone."

Parker worried his close-cropped mustache for a minute. "Check with the bank on that?"

"Sure. He drew the money out all right. Maybe he flashed that roll some place in public yesterday and these fellow saw it and trailed him. We're trying now to find out all the places he visited after leaving the bank."

Parker nodded approvingly. "I guess we ought to go over to the Giberson place," he said. "I ought to look it over. She's there now, is she? Maybe she'll remember something else about these fellows."

Mrs. Giberson's eyes were red from weeping, but she greeted them quietly enough in the front living room. Parker told her he hated to bother her again, but he'd like to look over the apartment.

"Of course," she said.

The living room was clean and orderly. Mrs. Giberson was a good housekeeper. Parker glanced into the bathroom, then followed a passageway into the kitchen, and went through the connecting door to the bedroom.

He noted with satisfaction that, except for the removal of the body, it appeared untouched. He stared down somberly at the empty bed. There were two depressions, where Giberson had lain and where Mrs. Giberson had lain beside him.

He stooped down and examined the pillow. It bore a little red stain and some gunpowder burns.

"This fellow must have stuck the gun in his face," he said.

"Yeah," the Lakehurst detective said. "He never had a chance. He started to wake up and this guy pushed the gun at him and shot him."

"How was he found?"

"On his back. His face was to that wall."

"How about the bullet?"

"We dug it out of the mattress. A thirty-eight."

"Hmm. Pretty hefty caliber," said Ellis Parker.

Back in the kitchen Mrs. Giberson smiled at them wanly. "Do you think you can find the men who killed my husband, Mr. Parker?"

"I'm going to try," he promised. "It might help me if you'd go over everything that happened once more."

She nodded. "We went to bed rather early. I woke up some time in the morning — between two and three. I thought I heard a noise out here in the kitchen. My husband's a heavy sleeper. I didn't disturb him.

"I got out of bed and came out here." They grabbed me. The tall man put a hand over my mouth. They stuffed the gag in and began tying my wrists and ankles."

"Just where, in the kitchen, did this happen?"

She walked to a spot toward the outside entrance to the kitchen, near the wall that separated kitchen and bedroom. Ellis Parker walked over to the spot.

"The man who was tying my legs finished first and went toward the bedroom. He was carrying a flashlight. He disappeared into the bedroom and shot my husband."

Parker nodded. "I want you to try to recall anything that was said. Did your husband speak?"

"Not a word."

"Any noise of a scuffle before the shot?"

"None whatever. This man walked in there, and then there was a shot. His partner was still bending over me, fastening my hands, and he shouted out, 'Why did you have to shoot him?'

"The other man shouted back, 'He was waking up!'

"The man finished tying my hands and went into the bedroom too, and I heard them pulling drawers out."

Ellis Parker nodded slowly. Standing exactly where Mrs. Giberson had been bound, he looked toward the open bedroom door. He couldn't see into the bedroom.

"Will you try," he asked, "to give me the best description of those two men that you are able?"

She did pretty well. She recalled that one man had a scar on his cheek and that one wore a cap, and she gave estimates of the height and weight of each man.

Parker thanked her and went outside with the Lakehurst detective. He knew now how Giberson had been murdered and who had murdered him.

(Do you know, now? If you have caught the very obvious clue in this account, you do!)

They were half a block away from the house when Parker said, "What we have to do now is find the murder gun. She hasn't been away from there, except this morning when she went to the police station so she must have hidden it pretty close to the scene."

The Lakehurst man gasped. "You think she killed him?"

"Sure," said Ellis Parker. "She's the one that did it, all right. The reason I know she's lying is this:

"She said these two men were tying her up. One left and disappeared into the bedroom. Disappeared is her word — and it's the right word. From where she was being tied up by the other fellow, neither she nor the man tying her up could see into the bedroom.

"What happens? No struggle. No words spoken. A shot. Then the fellow that's tying her up just yells out over his shoulder to ask his partner why he killed Giberson.

"Now, that's not natural. How did he know that when his partner walked into that room, Giberson didn't pull a gun and shoot?

"He didn't know. Couldn't possibly know. There are only two natural things he could have done when that shot was fired: Either duck out the kitchen door and get away, or run into the bedroom to see if his partner was in trouble. Instead, he goes on tying up Mrs. Giberson and yells to his pal, 'Why did you have to shoot him?"'

The next day they coaxed Mrs. Giberson away from the house by a ruse. From then on it was simple. Stuffed deep into the eaves of a spare closet, they found the murder gun — William Giberson's .38.

They likewise found a packet of, ardent love letters from some man with whom Mrs. Giberson was infatuated. And they found a nice new black dress — widow's weeds — that she had purchased before the murder.

They put the things back where they had found them, and she wore the black dress to her husband's funeral the next day, and when she came home they arrested her.

She was quite cool and indignantly denied everything, and Ellis Parker decided that if he wanted an admission from this woman, he would have to use a trick.

So he showed her the murder gun and said, "I don't think you told us the truth. Now, wasn't this what happened? You heard these burglars and you grabbed the gun from under your husband's pillow and it accidentally went off and shot him in the head?"

"That's it!" she cried eagerly. "That's it!"

And that was the finish. By her own spoken admission, she had shot her husband. Who was going to believe the "accidental" part of it? Where were you going to find a jury that gullible?

Just to make sure of his case, Ellis Parker went over the Giberson house again from stem to stern, and this time came out with the missing wallet and its $800.

The jury that, tried plump Ivy Giberson wasn't gullible. But perhaps it was a bit chivalrous. She got life imprisonment instead of the chair.

Publication Date: May 7, 1938