Lorena Tawser's Strange Confession and the Unsolved Mystery of the Keener Farm

Lorena Tawser

In January of 1909 York County was the scene of the sensational murder trial of Elias C. Sayres, a "one-armed negro" (according to papers) who shot and killed a farmer named Lewis Barbour in the village of Delta the previous summer. Like many murder trials of the era, this one was well attended, and the courthouse in the city of York was packed to the rafters. One of the spectators was an eighteen-year-old girl named Lorena Tawser, who had attended the defendant's sentencing with her mother.

It was not unusual for young people to attend criminal trials in those days; many a child and teenager have been dragged to the courthouse by their parents to see justice in action, ostensibly in the hope that the criminal's punishment would leave a lasting impression. And, in the case of Lorena Tawser, it certainly did: The teenager was so affected by the proceedings that she fell deathly ill after the trial. Believing herself to be at death's door, she requested a visit from a close friend, Curtis Smith. When he arrived, Lorena confessed to Curtis that she had once helped a man dispose of the body of an innocent traveler and bury the remains in an orchard.

Harry Keener was twenty-five years old when he used an inheritance from his deceased father to purchase a farm at Seven Valleys, in North Codorus Township, in 1908. Harry, who was unmarried, was in desperate need of domestic help. That summer he placed an advertisement in a York newspaper seeking a housekeeper. Lorena Tawser answered the advertisement and was offered the position. A few days later she moved into Keener's farmhouse.

On the night of July 21, 1908, a severe thunderstorm swept through York County. A bolt of lightning struck the barn of a neighbor, Harris Lentz, causing it to burn to the ground. It was a terrible calamity for Mr. Lentz. The fire, which started around nine o'clock, spread quickly, claiming the lives of four heads of cattle and two hogs, and completely destroying Lentz's yearly crop of wheat and hay. Only his house was spared from the flames.

From the window of her bedroom on the second floor of the farmhouse Lorena watched the blaze in the distance as angry lightning continued to streak across the night sky. She soon grew tired and went to bed, and had nearly fallen asleep when she heard a knocking on Harry Keener's front door.

Harry answered the door. It was a traveler, asking for shelter for the night. Harry admitted the stranger into his home, and Lorena heard the two men talking downstairs for a long time.  Though the conversation was muffled, it seemed to the young woman that the two men had hit it off and were having a pleasant chat. She closed her eyes and attempted to go to sleep, but then she heard two pistol shots and a man's anguished cry.

Lorena crept downstairs and saw a fashionably-dressed man sprawled across the floor in a pool of blood. Harry Keener was standing over him with a revolver in his hand.

"Please, don't kill me!" cried the traveler. "I only wanted shelter from the storm."

But Harry responded to the wounded man's request with three more shots. When Harry was convinced the victim was dead, he knelt beside the body and extracted a large roll of bills from the dead man's vest.

Paralyzed with fear, Lorena crouched behind the furniture while Harry went into the yard and loaded the body onto a wagon. She watched through the window as Harry wheeled the wagon through the gate. During her confession she recalled that she had seen the body roll off the wagon, but Harry threw it back on again and then proceeded to the orchard. Then he came back to the house, and ordered Lorena to help him dispose of the body. It was nearly sunrise before the task was complete.
When they finished burying the body, Harry forced Lorena to take an oath, swearing that she would never reveal what she had seen, under penalty of death.

The following day, Lorena claimed that she helped Harry cover up all evidence of the crime. Harry found the stranger's hat and burned it, while Lorena scrubbed the blood from the floor. Harry even applied a fresh coat of paint to his porch and wagon, and laid down fresh sod atop the ground where the stranger's blood had spilled.

Lorena's parents were mortified by their teenage daughter's confession, but wondered if it might be some sort of delusion or hallucination caused by her illness. Lorena was feverish, and had been seized with convulsions ever since returning from the murder trial on January 8. With each passing day her condition seemed to get worse, and on Sunday, January 10, Mrs. Tawser decided to notify the police.

Detective Charles White and District Attorney Ammond visited the Tawser home in New Salem, about a mile south of the city of York, where Lorena Tawser repeated her confession. Detective White found Harry Keener at his mother's house in Stoverstown and arrested him later that afternoon. Within hours, Lorena-- who had been at death's door, or so she believed-- managed to make a complete recovery.

While Harry was being questioned at police headquarters, Detective White and District Attorney Ammond explored the Keener farm. Lorena, accompanied by her mother and brother, led them to a spot between two trees where the body was allegedly buried. However, after a few minutes of digging, it was evident to the detective that the soil had not previously been disturbed. Either Lorena had been delirious, or they were digging in the wrong spot.

Detective White, convinced that Lorena was telling the truth, immediately secured fifty men to dig up the orchard. The men dug for hours, with nothing to show for it. And then Lorena remarked to the detective that Harry had said something about coming back for the body and burning it.

By this time some of the officers were certain they were on a wild goose chase, but then one of the men found a wagon that fit the description Lorena had given. This was supposedly the wagon Harry Keener had used to transport the corpse. After scraping away some of the paint, the detective found traces of blood. Traces of blood were also found beneath the paint on the front porch, and officers discovered a portion of the lawn that appeared to have been re-sodded. A revolver was also found inside the farmhouse. It now appeared that Lorena Tawser had been telling the truth after all.
But where was the body? And, just as importantly, who was the victim?

According to Lorena, the unfortunate traveler appeared to be a man of about forty, a little on the heavy side, and dressed in expensive clothes. She said that he wore two rings on his fingers, and a pin on his jacket indicated that he was a member of a lodge, club or some fraternal order. The police were stumped, however, as there hadn't been any reports of missing persons fitting this description.

Investigators questioned some of the locals, and the mystery deepened when a rumor began to circulate that Lorena Tawser had been seen in the company of an older man when she lived at the Keener farm. According to rumor, this man was from Lancaster, and it was speculated that he and Miss Trawser were romantically involved. Was it Lorena's secret gentleman caller who had the misfortune of showing up at the Keener house on the evening of July 21, 1908?

If the mystery was to be solved, it would be up to Harry Keener to fill in the blanks.

By week's end, every square inch of the farm had been torn up, but no evidence of human remains were found. At police headquarters, detectives were ready to throw in the towel. Harry Keener had been interrogated relentlessly by the detectives, but he insisted that he was innocent.

But then, on the afternoon of Thursday, January 14, after a gruelling interrogation session, Harry broke down. He confessed to killing the stranger, but he claimed that it was in self-defense.  He also made the shocking claim that Lorena had been the one who cut the body into pieces. According to Harry, Lorena cut off his arms and legs and head, and hacked the torso to pieces. Harry said that the stench of the body had caused him to dig it up a few days later, and he and Lorena burned the body in the smokehouse and the unburned remains were buried in a part of the orchard that he later planted over with corn. Another portion of the body, he said, had been buried in the cellar of the farmhouse, while still another part of the body was disposed of in the woods several miles away.

That would certainly explain why the fifty volunteers hadn't been able to find anything in the orchard. Detective White ordered his men to dig up the cornfield and the farmhouse cellar at once.

Meanwhile, other details of Harry Keener's life began to emerge. Harry had once spent two years in prison for fraud, and after his release took a wife, but they divorced a short time later. After the divorce, Harry purchased the farm in Seven Valleys with money he had inherited from his father. Shortly after the murder, Harry placed a matrimonial ad in the newspaper, and after he re-married he and his new wife abandoned the farm and moved in with Harry's mother in Stoverstown.

On Friday, the day after confessing to the crime, Harry Keener took the authorities to the farm and showed them where he had buried various parts of the body. Sure enough, bone fragments were found, but the coroner couldn't confirm that they were human. Things took a strange turn when Harry showed the police another key piece of evidence inside the house-- a woman's skirt splattered in bloodstains. According to Harry, it was the skirt Lorena had been wearing when she hacked the body to bits with a butcher knife.

"Can you fix this thing so they won't hang me?" asked Harry back at the police station. District Attorney Ammon said that couldn't make any promises.

Later that day, eighteen-year-old Lorena Tawser was arrested and charged as an accessory to murder.
 


Prohibition Heilman


Around the time Harry Keener was serving his sentence in the state penitentiary for fraud, there was a traveling evangelist from Lancaster known to locals as Prohibition Heilman, because his sermons were exclusively about the evils of alcohol. He was a portly fellow, about forty years of age, but had a fondness for flashy clothes and jewelry. One day, in 1908, Prohibition Heilman seemed to fall off the face of the earth. Many speculated that Heilman's wandering had led him to York County.

Both Harry and Lorena claimed to have no knowledge of the missing evangelist. Authorities hoped that further excavation of the Keener farm might unearth clues about the dead man's identity, but a snow storm put those plans on hold. Meanwhile, as detectives questioned Lorena Tawser, the young woman's story took an even stranger turn.

According to Lorena, while she was suffering from her illness, the apparition of the murder victim appeared to her. She claimed that was how she knew about the man's rings, lodge pin and other minor details that led authorities to believe that she played a bigger role in the crime than she had initially claimed. Her story about the apparition of the dead man was corroborated by her friend, Curtis Smith, who told police that Harry Keener had recently attempted to lure him to Baltimore for the purpose of killing him. Harry admitted to this, though neither party would say why Harry had it out for Curtis Smith.

Quite simply, there was something unusual about Lorena Tawser, or so Detective White thought. Ever since her arrest, Lorena refused to take anything seriously. In jail, she kept herself amused by holding two stray cats by the neck at arm's length, laughing uproariously as the cats snarled at scratched at each other. One of the many rumors circulating around York County was that Lorena was a laudanum addict. Another rumor was that she had induced Harry to commit murder by placing him under hypnosis, while others claimed that no murder had been committed at all-- Lorena and Harry were simply staging a hoax. Lorena refuted these claims, of course, and Harry made no attempt to withdraw his confession.

Nonetheless, Detective White had a gut feeling-- an instinct honed by years of policework-- that there was much more to the story than what Lorena and Harry were letting on. During questioning, Lorena grew angry whenever a bad word was said about Harry Keener. The detective stated that it was his opinion that both of the suspects knew the identity of the man they killed. But until the identity of the victim was ascertained, the detective had nothing to go on but a hunch.

It must have been quite frustrating for the detective to learn that Harry's mother, who had considerable wealth, had retained to services of a prominent attorney to defend her son. The attorney, A.C. Rochow, told authorities that his client would no longer cooperate with the investigation. Harry Keener had the right to remain silent, and his attorney encouraged him not to say another word to the police or to the district attorney. With one suspect refusing to speak and the other suffering from mental delusions and a possible drug addiction, the district attorney had no choice but to release Lorena from custody until further evidence was collected.



Lorena Starts a Fight and Harry Goes Free


As soon as Lorena Tawser was released from jail she found herself in newspaper headlines for another reason. The Saturday after her release, she was out on a date with Paul Hamme when Alfred Jefferson Clayman, a young man who had just divirced his wife, walked up to Lorena and-- for reasons unknown-- slapped her across the face. A fight between the two men ensued. Clayman was arrested and paid a fine of $2.50. Strangely, a few years after the altercation, Clayman was stricken with a mysterious illness that left him bedridden for the rest of his life, the symptoms of which were almost identical to those of Lorena Tawser. He would die in 1917 at the age of twenty-eight.

Meanwhile, Harry Keener sat in his cell on "murderer's row" in York County, awaiting his first major legal hurdle. On March 8, 1908, Harry was brought into court on a writ of habeus corpus. At this hearing, the commonwealth was to present its evidence to two judges, President Judge Bittenger and Associate Judge Wanner, who would then decide if there was enough evidence to formally charge the defendant with murder.

Much to District Attorney Ammon's consternation, by the time the trial rolled around, the county medical examiner still hadn't been able to determine if the bone fragments found in Harry's orchard were human in origin, of if the splotches found on the property, as well as on the ruffles of Lorena's skirt, were blood. There was a huge crowd at the courthouse that day, and they were were transformed into an angry mob when Judge Bittenger declared that no testimony would be given that day. Harry was taken back to jail. His fate was now in the hands of a grand jury.

On Thursday, April 22, Lorena Tawser testified before the grand jury. Her testimony tallied with everything she had said in her confession, and she maintained that she played no role whatsoever in mutilating the body of the man Harry Keener had allegedly murdered. Harry never took the witness stand, and appeared completely disinterested in the proceedings. He didn't even crack a smile when the foreman of the jury returned at 3 o'clock and announced that there would be no indictment. Harry was now a free man.

What makes this case truly remarkable is that it is one of the few instances in which a man who confessed to murder was set free, even though a witness testified that she had seen the murder take place. Because of the lack of material evidence, the grand jury had no choice but to exonerate the accused killer. After his release from jail, Harry moved back into his mother's house in Stoverstown. He sold his farm to his neighbor, George Brenneman, for $300.

The day after the case was dropped, Lorena Tawser's mother was arrested on a charge of operating a brothel. When Constable Ginter went to the house to serve the warrant, Mrs. Tawser asked for permission to change her clothes before going to the police station. After several minutes had elasped, Constable Ginter went upstairs to fetch Lorena's mother, only to discover that she had escaped through the window. Shortly after Mrs. Tawser was apprehended, Lorena began making numerous unannounced visits to the Keener house in Stoverstown. Both Harry and his mother refused to see the young woman, and threatened to have her arrested if she continued to stalk them.

As for Harry Keener, he later settled in downtown York, found a job on the railroad, and enjoyed a long, quiet, prosperous and peaceful life. He passed away in 1977 at the age of 96. When Lorena's mother was put in jail after pleading guilty to operating a house of ill repute, the Tawser name was irreparably tarnished, and any credibility Lorena had vanished later that month when she and a garbageman by the name of Huskins were arrested and thrown in jail for a crime so lurid that newspapers refused to state what it was.

A few years after the Keener case, Lorena's father was arrested for robbing a liquor store. Mr. Tawser maintained a regular presence in the police blotter of York city newspapers for years afterwards, usually charged with petty crimes like disorderly conduct and public drunkenness.

In time, very few people held onto the belief that Harry had committed the crime to which he confessed. And until the day of his death, he never admitted why he had confessed to such a serious crime. Perhaps it was possible that Lorena did hold some sort of influence over him, inspiring him to confess to a murder that never took place-- or a murder that has never been solved.

Lorena Tawser eventually faded into obscurity taking her secrets, of which there were undoubtedly many, to her grave.

And, for anyone who's curious, the body of the missing evangelist known as Prohibition Heilman-- the man who disappeared from Lancaster in July of 1908, a man who matched Lorena's description of Harry Keener's victim from toe to tip-- has never been found.









Sources:

York Gazette, July 22, 1908.
York Dispatch, Jan. 12, 1909.
Harrisburg Telegraph, Jan. 12, 1909.
York Daily, Jan. 15, 1909.
Lancaster Examiner, Jan. 16, 1909.
Baltimore Sun, Jan. 17, 1909.
York Daily, Jan. 18, 1909.
York Dispatch, Jan. 19, 1909.
York Daily, March 8, 1909.
York Daily, April 23, 1909.
York Gazette, April 26, 1909.
York Dispatch, April 28, 1909.
York Daily, April 29, 1909.
York Daily, July 29, 1909.
York Dispatch, Dec. 10, 1912.