The Disappearance of Marjorie West

Marjorie West

 

Of all the missing persons cases in the history of the United States, few have made as indelible a mark as the 1938 disappearance of four-year-old Marjorie West. The mystery surrounding Marjorie's unexplained disappearance from a Mother's Day outing has been the subject of books, television shows and magazine articles. In fact, one British newspaper, The Guardian, has referred to the case one of the "great unsolved mysteries of the missing."

On the Sunday morning of May 8, 1938, oil refinery worker Shirley Mills West was enjoying a drink at the American Legion in Bradford, McKean County, with his best friend, Lloyd Ackerlind. They thought it would be a good day to do a little trout fishing, and they returned home to convince their wives to pack a picnic basket and join them for a Mother's Day outing. At around two o'clock that afternoon, the Ackerlinds drove to the West home on Cornen Street, where they picked up Shirley, Cecelia, and the three West children: eleven-year-old Dorothea, seven-year-old Allan, and four-year-old Marjorie.

After leaving home, they returned to the American Legion to purchase soft drinks for their lunch, then filled up the gas tank at a service station at Custer City. After purchasing a jug of minnows for bait, they proceeded to Marshburg before turning onto the dirt road to Morrison. Here, in the rugged wilderness of the Allegheny National Forest, about 18 miles northwest of Kane, they pulled off the road and parked alongside a mountain stream. Armed with fishing rods, the men scampered eagerly into the brush down toward the creek, blinded by visions of wild trout.

Meanwhile, Dorothea and Marjorie went to pick wildflowers while Cecelia West and Helen Ackerlind remained in the car. There was no reason for Mrs. West to worry; their outdoorsman father had taken the girls into the woods many times, and, besides, they weren't going to stay too far from the automobile-- just up the hillside. Spring had been late in arriving that year; the air still held a wintry chill and the bears and snakes were still in their dens. What could possibly go wrong?

At around three o'clock, Dorothea returned to the car and handed her mother a bouquet of violets before returning to the woods for her blue-eyed, red-haired little sister, who was gathering a bouquet for Mrs. Akerlind-- only to find Marjorie missing from the spot where she had been told to wait. Dorothea ran back to the car with tears streaming down her face. Her mother and Mrs. Akerlind raced to the spot where Marjorie was last seen, calling out her name. 

The cries were heard by the two men and young Allan, who were fishing along the Chappel Fork of Kinzua Creek, less than 200 yards from where they had parked, and they immediately joined in the search. Only thirty minutes had elapsed since they pulled off the road to park; surely the young girl couldn't have gone too far. Deciding that it was best not to panic, they remained for a while at the picnic site, confident that little Marjorie was just playing a game. She would return to the car when she got tired of hiding. But, as the afternoon wore on, they began to grow nervous. The men summoned a few fellow fishermen whom they had seen in the vicinity and they agreed to help look for the lost child, but Marjorie West had seemingly vanished without a trace.

Help Arrives at the Scene

The alarm was spread and news of Marjorie's disappearance spread to nearby communities. As darkness fell upon the forest, an army of oil lease workers from Klondike, wearing miners' headlamps, scoured the vicinity for the missing girl. They were soon joined by two hundred volunteers from the Civilian Conservation Corps camp in Kane and members of the American Legion from Bradford. The men searched until they were exhausted, and the search was resumed at daybreak the following morning. Out of the possibility that the small child might've drowned in the shallow stream known as Chappel Fork, searchers turned over every stone along both banks in the hunt for clues, but Marjorie West had vanished like a ghost.

 

State Police Join Hunt, Mayor Broadcasts Appeal

State Motor Police from the Kane substation joined the search on May 9, along with a company of volunteers from the Bradford National Guard and Allegheny National Forest Supervisor H.L. Borden. Meanwhile, supervisor Clyde C. Potter, directing the CCC crew, stationed his men twenty-five yards apart in a mile-long line. They marched forward through the brush and thicket, slowly and methodically, and managed to comb four square miles before nightfall. The search lead the men to a secluded hunting camp on Big Level Mountain, but the door and windows were nailed shut. CCC officers interviewed the camp's owner, who stated that he had nailed the door and windows shut after discovering that some unknown person had forced open the locked door. It now seemed possible that little Marjorie may have fallen into the hands of a kidnapper.

The State Police, however, weren't convinced that such was the case. A kidnapper's goal is to obtain money through ransom, and who would target the child of a worker from the Kendall Refining Company? The family far from wealthy; aside from their home, Shirley and Cecelia West possessed nothing of value. Dismissing the kidnapping theory as unlikely, authorities believed that the child may have fallen into a crevice or a ravine. Two private airplanes, piloted by Lewis Mallory and Joseph Fields, made several low flights over the forest on Monday afternoon, in the hope they might be able to spot Marjorie from the air.

 

On Tuesday, the mayor of Bradford, Hugh J. Ryan, and Bradford chief of police Edward Edmonds widened the scope of the search, believing the theory that some stranger had abducted the child. While most of the volunteers were adopting search and rescue procedures, Mayor Ryan and Chief Edmonds, and other members of the Bradford community, were also approaching the mystery from a criminal angle. It was reported that a man whose automobile bore Pennsylvania plates had recently shown up in Thomas, West Virginia, with a small female child. Police investigated this lead, but identified both persons. 

Another interesting report came from 48-year-old Floyd Burroughs, one of two men from Kinzua who had seen a gray-colored Plymouth speeding toward their own vehicle as they were driving on the Marshburg-Morrison road on the day of Marjorie's disappearance. The Plymouth's high rate of speed had forced the car of the Kinzua men into a ditch. According to Burroughs, this occurred less than a mile from where the child had vanished, at around the same time. That same day, the Wellsboro deputy sheriff arrived with bloodhounds. The hounds lead the party halfway up a hillside, where they discovered a crumpled bunch of violets and the footprints of a child in the soft ground.

Later that week, Post 108 of the American Legion announced a $200 reward for information leading to the discovery of the missing child "dead or alive." Local newspapers also published a description of the missing girl, described as "33 inches tall, weighing 40 pounds, with reddish hair, blue eyes, and wearing a red hat, pink dress, a blue coat, white stockings and overshoes." Cecelia West, certain that her daughter had been abducted, issued a statement over the radio pleading for the return Marjorie to her family:

"I want notice given that anybody who has her should return her to any American Legion post anywhere, or bring her home. No questions will be asked."

The mayor, however, expressed his doubt that Marjorie was still alive. It's not clear whether he was aware or not at the time, but the little girl with the blue eyes and red hair had recently recovered from a bout of pneumonia. With exposure to the cold, crisp nights (the temperature had dipped below freezing for several consecutive nights), the total darkness of the sparsely-populated forest, and a lack of food and water, finding the child alive would be nothing short of a miracle. Mayor Ryan, like others, still held hope in his heart, but his head was filled with reason.

"I expect the crime angle to develop six to eight months from now if anything has happened to the kid," he told reporters. "If she's still in the woods, she's dead by now."

By week's end, after five days of fruitless searching, many had begun to fear the worst, but not everyone was ready to give up the child for dead. In addition to the West family, Helen Akerlind fervently believed that Marjorie would soon be located, safe and sound. "I feel we may find Marjorie somewhere, and find her alive," she stated. "I think all this searching in the forests up to this time proves she has been able to get somewhere and is being cared for by someone who hasn't been able to get word to police."

Mayor Ryan took to the airwaves to broadcast a call to action, asking for one thousand volunteers to report at the Marshburg-Morrison Road at eight o'clock on Friday morning. "We want men who are physically fit to hike through heavy brush for ten miles," pleaded the mayor. "We want them them to bring their own lunches and to be prepared to follow orders." Together, with the aid of Captain Carl Peterson of National Guard Company K, Peter Hazes of CCC Camp No. 3, Sheriff Merle Dickinson of Smethport and Bradford city engineer John H. Quirt, the mayor carefully laid out plans for a massive search. With a detailed map and his surveying instruments, Quirt divided the search zone into sections, and to each section a group of men with its own leader was assigned.

 

The Great Search

Shortly after daybreak on a frosty Friday morning, a motorcade of cars and trucks departed from Bradford, leaving the oil town virtually deserted. The line of vehicles stretched for miles along the mountain roads, finally stopping about eleven miles from town. From out of the cars and trucks spilled oil refinery workers, woodsmen, shopkeepers, dentists, farmers and doctors. They broke up into platoons of twenty-five men, each platoon assigned to a twenty-five-foot-wide strip of forest until the volunteers were practically standing shoulder to shoulder. Bloodhounds were again on hand, this time courtesy of New York state troopers from Hawthorne. Governor George H. Earle had also sent five hundred Pennsylvania state troopers to an area known as the White Gravel sector, near the spot of the ill-fated family outing.

A bugler sounded a blast of his horn, and the immense posse of able-bodied men advanced through the Chappel Fork Valley. To say that Mayor Ryan's call had been answered was an understatement; more than two thousand men had shown up that morning, and by three o'clock, that number had swelled to over three thousand. The list of volunteers included men ranging in age from 18 to 70, hundreds of whom were skilled hunters, trappers and outdoorsmen who knew well the crags, boulders, bear dens, and dark recesses of the Allegheny National Forest. The possibility of the day coming to an end without a solution to the mystery-- happy or tragic-- was impossible to comprehend.

The party appeared to have hit upon an important clue not long into the search, with the finding of a scrap of lace. The piece of fabric was examined by relatives at the camp headquarters, who declared that Marjorie had not worn any lace on the day she vanished. The girl's father, Shirley, a former marine who had fought in the First World War, had not left the woods since Sunday, and he was also at the camp,and appeared on the brink of collapse. As the search dragged on, hampered by icy winds and freezing rain, local businesses and refineries sent trucks to the camp with lunches for the volunteers.

Amazingly, by nightfall, not a single definite clue had been unearthed. There was a moment of alarm when searchers stumbled upon an old mattress cover smeared with a faint red substance, but this turned out to be a cloth someone had used to polish a maroon-colored automobile. With many of the exhausted volunteers drenched by rain and bloodied by thorns and brush, Mayor Ryan reluctantly called off the official search. It was later estimated that the cost of the week-long search, including the cost of food, gasoline, supplies, and other related expenses, had eclipsed $50,000 (more than $1.1 million in today's currency).

While the civilian volunteers had been withdrawn by Mayor Ryan, their places were taken by National Guardsmen. Thirty-six members of Troop L of Punxsutawney, under the command of Captain J.T. Bell, and members of Troop I of Dubois, under the command of Captain Walter McCreight, arrived late Friday night and billeted at CCC Camp No. 3 at Kane. They resumed the search on Saturday, covering 25 square miles, but, once again, found not a sign of the missing child.

They did, however, stumble across a local man who heard that a former forester had made threats against a ranger after being fired from his job, and wondered if this disgruntled employee had something to do with the case. On this theory the man's home was searched, but there didn't appear to be any connection.

Additional Theories

While clues were had to find, there was no shortage of theories about what happened to Marjorie West. Recalling the two men from Bradford who had been forced into a ditch, some believed that this reckless motorist may have struck the child, and, in a panic, disposed of the body in another location. Some even wondered if the girl's abductor, perhaps with blood still on his hands, had been one of the search party members. 

Like firebugs who stand among the crowd watching a structure they had set ablaze burn to the ground, kidnappers and child murderers often participate in the search for their own victim; such was the case of Irwin Lewis, the Chester County farmer who was eventually hanged for the brutal slaying of his stepdaughter, Mary Newlin, in 1907. In that case, it was Lewis himself who had rallied the neighbors to form a search party.

Reports flooded in from neighboring states about possible sightings. From Belleville, Ohio, came a report that a blue-eyed, red-haired child in soiled clothing had run onto the porch of a village resident, claiming that she was looking for her mother. The girl was supposedly living with strangers in an apartment over a hardware store. Ohio state troopers from Mansfield traveled immediately to Belleville, but the girl in question proved not be Marjorie. The following week, three boys exploring the forest about seven miles from the spot of the disappearance stumbled across what appeared to be a newly-excavated grave beneath an enormous tree. The State Motor Police investigated, and found that two men had buried a few barrels of homemade cherry wine to age. Another reported "mystery grave" turned out to be nothing more than a freshly-dug flower bed.

Many have argued, and still argue, that Marjorie suffered the misfortune of falling down an abandoned oil well. Certainly this possibility must've crossed the minds of her father as well as Helen Ackerland, who were both employed by the Kendall Refining Company. Indeed, many members of the search party were oil field workers.

However, there exists the possibility that not every well site was known to the searchers, especially considering the long history of oil exploration in Western Pennsylvania. The Seneca, and other local tribes, knew about the distillation of oil from bituminous rocks as early as the 18th century, inspiring one enterprising Venango County businessman, Nathan Carey, to peddle barrels of "Seneca oil" as early as 1809. In McKean County, commercial oil-drilling operations date back to 1859 (three months after the famous Drake Well was constructed in Titusville) when businessmen from New York and Boston erected a coal oil mill between Marshburg and Kinzua-- the general vicinity where Marjorie disappeared. In 1880, Johnson, Sawyer and Co. drilled an 800-foot-deep test well near the Marshburg-Morrison road, which was abandoned a short time later. Might this long-forgotten test well be Marjorie West's final resting place?

There are other dozens of forgotten oil wells that could be candidates; according to an 1880 article in the Kane Weekly Blade, there was J.M Tait's No. 4 well on the Bingham lot, just south of a 2,147-foot-deep test well on the "old Groner lot", where the McCalmont Oil Company had their operations. Another firm, Carter & Hurd, had at least seven wells in the Kinzua region, while the Union Oil Company had drilled over twenty. And this doesn't take into consideration other small-time operators, like Martin Comestock and William Doe, along with the handful of wells drilled by Cornwell, Parker & Co. and Van Scoy & Co.

Evidence Supports Abduction Theory

During the great search, three bloodhounds brought to the Allegheny National Forest by the New York state troopers led their handlers from the picnic area to a spot near the top of the mountain half a mile away, where the scent trail suddenly disappeared. Unless Marjorie West had somehow fallen down an abandoned well that not even hundreds of searchers could find, this could only mean that somebody, or some thing, had carried her away.

In June, Mrs. West received a mysterious phone call. The caller was a man, who said, "If you want your little girl back, look for a pinkish-blue, two-door sedan with the top torn-- and you'd better hurry." Police tapped the family's telephone, but the man never called again. They eventually concluded that the caller had been a prankster.

By mid-June, no new leads in the kidnapping theory had developed. There came no ransom demands; there were no mysterious, forboding letters mailed to the West family. In Harrisburg, Commissioner Percy W. Foote of the State Motor Police announced the formation of a 400-man detective division to guard against kidnappings, selected from the ranks of 1600 motor policemen. "Parents in Pennsylvania have no reason to be uneasy for the safety of their children," stated the commissioner, adding that while no section of the country is immune to such crimes, the new detective division will provide an extra measure of security through a network of criminal investigators in each of the four major troop patrol areas in the state. In addition, two plainclothes officers specially trained in FBI methods and procedures would be assigned to the commanding officer of each troop headquarters.

A Fantastical Invention

Meanwhile, Lieutenant Andrew J. Hudock of the Troop D state motor police headquarters in Butler, who had been directing the investigation into the criminal angle from Bradford, continued to interview persons who might have possessed useful information. He compiled a list of known sex offenders and meticulously researched every potential suspect. Hudock was so determined to find the missing child that he listened to every oddball theory and entertained every absurd proposition that crossed his desk.

According to the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, he even gave an audience to two Bradford "inventors" who claimed to have a machine that could locate the child. In the presence of Lt. Hudock, the inventors placed a photo of Marjorie between two electrified metal plates from which protruded a cluster of wires leading to a compass. The needle seemed to point in a southwest direction. After a series of mathematical "calculations", the two men declared that Marjorie was somewhere in West Virginia. Lieutenant Hudock politely thanked the inventors, but most likely rolled his eyes when they left his office.

The sweep of the Allegheny National Forest also continued. Four state troopers from the Kane substation-- Rudolph Gertzen, Frank Kelly, Gordon Foley and John Rothwell-- were permanently assigned to the Marjorie West case, entering the forest at the White Gravel sector at 8 o'clock each morning and a new section of the woods until 6 p.m., when they would check off an area and plot another hunt for the following day. The troopers tied colored crepe paper to tree trunks and streamed the paper from branches to mark off the sections they had searched, and in this manner they continued for months, covering an average of eight miles per day, often in dense underbrush. These four men would continue their search every day until ordered off the case, or until some new clue in the case developed. Seneca trackers from the Cornplanter Indian Reservation near Warren also participated in the search. They, too, failed to find a trace of Marjorie.

The Search Called Off

The summer gave way to fall, and with the opening of small game hunting season in November, hunters were reminded by the State Motor Police that the case of Marjorie West was still open, and to be on the lookout for clues that might help unravel the mystery. By this time, the reward for information leading to the child's discovery had grown to $2,000 if Marjorie were found alive, and $1,000 if her dead body was recovered. However, neither reward was ever claimed, as the State Motor Police finally called off their 7-month-long search in December. 

As the year drew to a close, three of the most sensational Pennsylvania news stories of 1938 displayed an alarming similarity-- they featured cases of unfortunate girls. In March came the discovery of six-year-old Alice Mary Harris, an "unwanted child" whose family had kept her locked up in the attic of a farmhouse since infancy. The year ended with the discovery of the mutilated body of Margaret Martin, a teenage business school graduate from Kingston, stuffed into a burlap sack and found under a bridge in Wyoming County, while the hunt for Marjorie West occupied headlines in the months between.

  
A Strange Coincidence

In 1951, thirteen years after the child's disappearance, a strange occurrence took place 190 miles to the east in Montour County which rekindled memories of the great search of the Chappel Fork Valley of 1938. Late on the night of July 16, 250 residents of Danville and surrounding areas heeded the call to enter the snake-infested woods of Montour Ridge to search for a young woman who had gotten lost while picking berries that morning. She was eventually found, none the worse for wear, but it was her name that evoked distant memories-- her name was also Marjorie West. Oddly, the last name of the man she was engaged to at the time (whom she later married) was Chappell.

The West family home in Bradford, as it appears today.

 

Aftermath and Legacy

The mental and emotional strain of losing a child to death is unfathomable, known only to those who have experienced such a tragedy personally. But death, at least, brings closure. How anguishing must it be, then, to have your child disappear without a trace, not knowing if your child is dead or alive? What toll must it take on a parent, scanning every face in a crowd, every face in the window of a passing car or bus, every newspaper photograph, desperately seeking a fleeting glimpse of the flesh and blood you brought into this world-- day after day, month after month, year after year? And what the about the guilt? How do you live with the knowledge that, while you had your back turned for only a moment, the most important thing in the world had been snatched away from you?

An undated photo of Shirley Mills West, from Findagrave.com (photo by Cathy Click)

 

The West family was thrust into this very situation, thanks to a Mother's Day picnic gone horribly wrong, and, not surprisingly, the strain took its toll on their marriage. Shirley and Cecelia West never left Bradford, but they separated in 1953. Shirley Mills West died in 1965 at the age of 65 following an extended illness, while his estranged wife passed away in Pittsburgh in 1978 at the age of 78. Allan West found work in a steel mill in Buffalo and died in Bradford in 1993, while Dorothea married and started a family. She later moved to Illinois, where she passed away in 2007 at the age of 80. While her obituary listed living and deceased family members, there was no mention of Marjorie. Lloyd and Helen Ackerlind, who never had children of their own, also divorced, with Lloyd eventually moving to Oregon.

To residents of McKean County who were alive at the time, the mysterious disappearance of Marjorie West was the defining event of their generation, and the great search of 1938 became permanently etched in their memories. Ten days after Marjorie's disappearance, there appeared in the Bradford newspaper a poem written by a little girl named Antonette Pingie, who was a student at the Lewis Run schoolhouse. Antonette's poem, with its simple rhymes, still serves as an excellent summary of the events which took place on that fateful day 87 years ago:

Where is my daughter who has wandered away,
As a gift to me on Mother's Day?
This tragic day I will never forget,
They've searched day and night but haven't found her yet.
Courageous men and troopers, too,
Have combed that forest through and through.
No clues have been found,
By no man nor a hound.
Last seen by the rock,
May 8th at 3 o'clock.
Gayly laughing and walking,
Picking flowers and talking,
And a bouquet in her hand,
By this rock she did stand.
Her brother and sister and they stood nearby,
Have heard not a sound, not even a cry.
Her parents have called her name in vain,
They feared for their daughter as it started to rain.
A fear of kidnapping, people have guessed,
Of the strange disappearance of little Marjorie West.


 

Sources:

Harrisburg Patriot-News, Aug. 6, 1880.
Kane Weekly Blade, Sept. 9, 1880.
New Castle News, May 9, 1938.
Franklin News-Herald, May 9, 1938.
Pittsburgh Press, May 10, 1938.
Harrisburg Evening News, May 10, 1938.
Franklin News-Herald, May 11, 1938.
Philadelphia Inquirer, May 12, 1938.
Kane Republican, May 12, 1938.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, May 13, 1938.
Bradford Evening Star, May 13, 1938.
Punxsutawney Spirit, May 13, 1938.
Bradford Evening Star, May 14, 1938.
Franklin News-Herald, May 14, 1938.
Punxsutawney Spirit, May 16, 1938.
Bradford Evening Star, May 17, 1938.
Bradford Evening Star, May 18, 1938.
Scranton Tribune, May 17, 1938.
Bradford Evening Star, May 18, 1938.
Hazleton Standard-Speaker, June 11, 1938.
Franklin News-Herald, August 9, 1938.
Warren Times Mirror, September 10, 1938.
Latrobe Bulletin, November 1, 1938.
Danville News, July 16, 1951.
Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, June 21, 1955.