Unsolved Mystery: What Happened to Jefferson Walters?

Jefferson Walters, who murdered Anna Zinn in 1935.

After Jefferson Walters callously murdered 15-year-old Anna Zinn in southern Fayette County in 1935, the killer disappeared into thin air. Nearly eighty-five years have elapsed since the murder, and yet, in spite of a massive search effort in several states, Jefferson Walters has never been found.

On a cold Thursday night in February of 1935, Alfred Thorpe-- a 34-year-old married father of two-- was out on a date with a schoolgirl half his age. Anna Zinn, a pretty blonde from a large family who lived in the rural farming community of Bowood, had a fondness for older men; for months she had been flirting with another married man-- 45-year-old Jefferson Walters, who had been showering the teenager with gifts and attention. But, ultimately, she preferred the company of Thorpe, and on this crisp winter evening she and Alfred had just returned from a dance in New Geneva. They had parked in the woods, about 150 yards from the Zinn farm, to engage in some heavy petting.

Shortly before midnight, the couple's amorous embraces were interrupted by the beam of a flashlight, advancing in the direction of the 1927 Chevrolet coupe. A moment later, a man in blue overalls and a denim coat said, sarcastically, "This is a nice time for you to be out, Anna."

It was Jefferson Walters. Anna told him that it was none of his business. Before anything else could be said, Walters pointed a gun at the teenager and fired point blank into her chest. The bullet, taking an upward course, lodged in her brain. A second shot was fired into her head, directly behind the ear.
"Do you want some of it, too?" said the killer to Thorpe, who jumped from the car and ran down the road. Thorpe didn't stop running until he reached the home of Ralph Dils at Twin Oaks, a half mile away, where he found a telephone and called the police. Thorpe was taken into custody as a material witness by the district attorney, who gave him permission to attend Anna's funeral.

On Sunday, Feb. 10, three days after the murder, Anna was laid to rest at Cedar Grove Cemetery in New Geneva. Her funeral filled Old Frame Presbyterian Church to capacity, while 250 more stood outside in the cold weather. Asa Walters, brother of the killer, attended the service, which was conducted by Rev. Smith. Asa said that he hadn't seen or spoken to his brother since the shooting.

"For a man to do what Jeff did there would have to be something wrong with him," he told reporters after the service. Also among the mourners were twelve pupils from the Sunday School where Anna taught, which was held in the same building where she attended grade school. The young children sobbed pitifully as Rev. Smith opened the casket to reveal her bullet-riddled corpse.

Alfred Thorpe

A Posse is Formed
 

On the day of Anna's funeral, county and state officials organized a posse of more than a hundred men to scour Nicholson Township with a fine-toothed comb in a concerted effort to catch Jefferson Walters, dead or alive. "We want Jeff Walters," said County Detective Jack Hann, responding to the theory that he might have trekked into the wilderness to take his own life. "If he's dead, we want his body."

The manhunt was no easy task; there were numerous abandoned mines in that part of Fayette County, capable of keeping a person alive even during sub-zero temperatures. When mining experts told authorities that, with an adequate supply of food and water, a man could survive for months down in the mines, police promptly stationed guards at the entrances of abandoned local mines as a precaution.

District Attorney Wade K. Newell believed that Walters had planned the murder in advance. It was learned that, four days before the murder, Walters had purchased a side of beef from Nick Honsaker. Police searched Walter's home and failed to find the meat, indicating that he may have been purchasing provisions for a hideout.

"I was always afraid there'd be trouble between that fellow and my girl, and for that reason I watched them pretty close," said Anna's father. "But I guess I didn't watch them close enough. I just didn't realize just how far they had got." With fourteen children to look after, Mr. Zinn and his wife Catherine could be forgiven for this oversight. Thomas Zinn, known to friends simply as 'Birchie', had ten children with his first wife, Mary Frances Campbell. After Mary's death, he wed Catherine Minerd, who bore him four more children.

Shadowy Lives and Blurry Facts


Catherine told police that, on the night of the murder, she had heard two shots coming from the direction of the bridge on the main road west of the Zinn's driveway. While this corroborates Thorpe's story, there were other clues which certainly raised a few questions at the time.

For instance, police found bloodstains up the Zinn's lane for a distance of fifty feet, which they believe had dripped from Thorpe's clothing as he ran. Yet, if Thorpe ran from his car to the Zinn driveway and then on to Twin Oaks, this would have required him to cross paths with the man who was shooting at him. And if Thorpe ran in the direction of the Zinn house, why didn't he seek shelter there? And if he knew Anna was dead, why didn't he inform her family?

According to the police report, Anna was shot in the chest as well as behind her right ear, and her body was found with the head under the steering wheel, her bloody right hand clutching the emergency brake. She would've died right on her lover's lap, which suggests the blood on the driveway most certainly came from Thorpe. It is likely that Thorpe realized the Zinns didn't own a telephone, and so he kept on running.

Police were able to determine the slugs had been fired from a German-made Luger automatic pistol, which seemed to make it and open-and-shut case, since Walters was a WW1 veteran and had obtained a similar weapon as a war souvenir. It was suggested that Walters' gun must've jammed, or else he probably would've taken a shot at Thorpe.

As for Anna's two suitors, both men were married but separated from their wives. Walters' wife had left him on their wedding night, while Thorpe had been living alone in the neighborhood for two years with his two children. According to Mr. Zinn, Walter first became interested in Anna when she was 12 years old. "He seemed to be sorry because she'd lost her mother and he would bring her candy and other gifts," he said. Around that time, Walters began taking Anna to town to cash the family's government assistance checks-- a routine that continued up until the month of her death. "They haven't been on speaking terms for the past week because Thorpe started to take her to town for relief checks on account of Walters' machine breaking down," said Mr. Zinn.

While it seems unbelievable that no one, neither Mr. Zinn nor the police, were bothered by the fact that men old enough to be her father had been trying to court Anna since she was 12, it is also strange to see the difference in how newspapers portrayed the slain girl. For instance, the Uniontown newspapers (closest to Bowood), depicted Anna Zinn as an innocent, virtuous Sunday School teacher and Alfred Thorpe as a kindly country squire who had graciously offered to drive Anna and her two friends to a school dance. A few papers outside of Fayette County, on the other hand, were quick to point out that Thorpe and Walters had been romantically involved with Anna for years, and portrayed the girl not as a simple country maiden, but a blonde-haired home-wrecking vixen. While several newspapers declared Anna to be 16 years of age at the time of her death, historical records prove otherwise; she was born on November 13, 1919. This means that she was only three months past her 15th birthday.

Thorpe, whose age is listed as anywhere between 19 and 26 in newspaper articles of the slaying, was also painted in a flattering light that he probably didn't deserve. He often bragged about being descended from William Hewey, a pioneer settler to the region. If historical records are accurate, this means Thorpe was born in Springhill Township in 1901, which would have made him either 33 or 34 at the time he was dating Anna Zinn, who had celebrated her 15th birthday just three months earlier. In the first photo of Thorpe (which ran in most papers), he is depicted as a dapper, young man seemingly not much older than the girl he "escorted" to the school dance. As you can see by the second picture of Thorpe (taken at least a year before his wife divorced him), he was, in actuality, much older than the hometown papers claimed. Apparently this was intentional on the part of Uniontown newspaper editors who, presumably, wanted to protect the Thorpe family reputation. In articles published in hometown papers, Thorpe has been described as one of the area's "most respected citizens" and a "pillar of the community" who went to great lengths to look after the community's poorest families. Jefferson Walters, on the other hand, is invariably described as a "brutish backwoodsman".

Research also indicates that Thorpe and Walters weren't the only older men "dating" Anna. Police reports show that a diamond engagement ring was found on her finger at the crime scene, and authorities found letters showing the ring had been given to her six months earlier by Rudy Haver, a soldier who was stationed in the Philippines at the time of her death. Haver had written a letter to Anna weeks before her death declaring that they would be married the next time he got a furlough.

The Search Drags On


In spite of multiple posses and large cash rewards offered by county commissioners, nobody could find a trace of Jefferson Walters. The district attorney even released Alfred Thorpe from jail to serve as live bait, believing that Thorpe's release would lure Walters out of hiding to seek revenge.
In July, a break in the case came when a berry picker reported seeing a man, armed with a shotgun, entering the vast subterranean labyrinth known as Delaney's Cave (now known as Lauren Caverns). A posse headed by County Detective Hann raced to the spot but found no trace of Walters. Although the cave has been explored since the 18th century, it is said to be so vast that, even today, parts of it have never been fully explored.

As the search dragged on into summer and frustrations mounted, one woman was inspired to take matters into her own hands by running for Fayette County sheriff.

"I know every rock and crevice in the district. Elect me and I'll get the slayer of Anna Zinn, dead or alive!"

This was the promise of Winifred R. Harshman, a 40-year-old housewife who was so enraged by the brutal crime that she campaigned to become the first female sheriff in county history. Harshman didn't know Anna or her suitors, but when she read about the murder she believed that she had to do her part. She even admitted that she didn't think she could win the election, but she reasoned that if she threw her hat in the ring it might light a fire under the incumbent sheriff's behind. And Winifred R. Harshman was a woman not to be trifled with; in 1933, while she and her husband were driving to Uniontown, an assailant attacked her husband. Winifred whipped a revolver from out of her waistband and dropped the attacker with a single shot. Out of the 13 Democrat candidates looking to unseat the Republican sheriff, Harshman finished next-to-last in the 1935 primary election with just 295 votes.




False Hope or Lost Hope?


Sightings of Jefferson Walters were reported all over the country, but all of them turned out to be cases of mistaken identity. However, there were a few incidences which may or may not have cleared up the mystery once and for all. In July of 1936 a body was found floating in Lake Lynn, just across the Pennsylvania-West Virginia border. Although West Virginia State Police identified the body as that of a missing WPA worker named Roman Secura, one Pennsylvania state trooper insisted that it was the body of Anna Zinn's killer. Trooper Ray Walsh said that Van Lowe and Orris Wilson, both of whom lived in Fayette County, had viewed the body in the lake and said that it was Walters.

Unfortunately, before Walsh could arrive at the scene, the body was buried in an unmarked pauper's grave at the county poorhouse near Morgantown.

In February of 1938, almost three years to the day of the murder, a trapper named Lloyd Watson found a skeleton on the banks of the Youghiogheny River near Ohiopyle, not far from the home of Ed Thorpe, father of Anna Zinn's lover. The skeleton was clad in blue overalls and a denim shirt-- the same outfit Walters had worn the night he killed the teenage girl. Wlliam Holt, an Ohiopyle storekeeper, stated, "Alfred was up here just a few days after the killing and it looks as if Jeff came up here to finish the job. Thorpe was only man could've convicted Walters of the murder."

There was just one thing wrong with Holt's claim-- Thorpe couldn't have gone to Ohiopyle a few days after the murder because he wasn't released from jail until March. But Holt, at least, was convinced it was Walters.

"Maybe Walters slipped and fell in the river on his way up," Holt theorized. Considering that Walters was a skilled backwoodsman and army veteran, it seems unlikely that he would've suffered such a mishap. "Or maybe someone saw him first," added Holt, suggesting that Thorpe may have killed Jefferson Walters. The bones, which were discovered where Sugar Run empties into the river, were gathered up and taken to Burhans funeral home in Dunbar. Fayette County Coroner S.A. Baltz and Detective John Wall went to Dunbar to see if they could make a positive identification, but determined the bones were not those of Jefferson Walters.



Time Erases All Traces of Jefferson Walters


Although Anna's killer was never brought to justice, interest in the case continued for decades in Fayette County. As recently as 1960 law enforcement continued to pursue leads. Every time a decomposed body or rotting skeleton was uncovered in the wilderness of western Pennsylvania by a hunter or woodsman, residents of Nichols Township waited with bated breath to see if the remains matched Walters' description. They never did.

Perhaps the bones of Jefferson Walters are still waiting to be found in an abandoned mineshaft or in a hidden passageway of Laurel Caverns, our state's longest cave. Or maybe they are buried in West Virginia, where the body found in Lake Lynn was hastily buried in a pauper's grave in 1936. Or maybe, just maybe, there's a possibility that Alfred Thorpe-- the only one who knew for certain what happened that fateful night-- killed Jefferson before Jefferson got around to killing him.




Sources:

Lancaster New Era, Feb. 8, 1935.
Uniontown Morning Herald, Feb. 8, 1935.
Uniontown Evening Standard, Feb. 8, 1935.
Connellsville Daily Courier, Feb. 8, 1935.
Connellsville Daily Courier, Feb. 9, 1935.
Uniontown Morning Herald, Feb. 9, 1935.
Uniontown Morning Herald, Feb. 11, 1935.
Harrisburg Evening News, July 19, 1935.
Uniontown Evening Standard, Oct. 1, 1935.
Philadelphia Inquirer, Oct. 13, 1935.
Connellsville Daily Courier, July 30, 1936.
Uniontown Evening Standard, Feb. 21, 1938.
Connellsville Daily Courier, Feb. 22, 1938.
uniontown Evening Standard, Aug. 5, 1960.