The Wheelerville Murder

Ernest Hipple

 

Home to some of our most stunning state parks and known for its abundance of wilderness beauty, Sullivan County is the second-least populous county in Pennsylvania. The county seat of Laporte, with its population of just over 300, is among the smallest in the United States, leading some people to joke that Sullivan County doesn't have a county seat-- it has a county footrest.

Not surprisingly, this quiet rural county rarely finds itself embroiled in murder mysteries, at least not since the days when lumber camps dotted the slopes of the Endless Mountains. But in 1938, Sullivan County grabbed the spotlight after the suspicious death of an elderly woman on her farm near Wheelerville. 

On the Monday afternoon of February 7, 1938, after finishing supper with his wife, Jennie, John Porter left his farm to mail a letter at the post office in Wheelerville. Jennie walked with her husband as far as the main highway, where they parted. Up the road, he encountered Ward Norton and a 20-year-old trapper, Ernest Hipple, who walked with John to the crossroads near Schrader Creek. Both men were frequent visitors at the Porter home, and Hipple had often performed odd jobs for the Porters.

When John returned home, about ninety minutes later at five o'clock, he found drops of blood on the kitchen floor. In the bedroom, he found the lifeless body of his 70-year-old wife. John immediately notified the sheriff's office in Laporte. Deputy Sheriff Edward Meehan and Dr. Joseph Dreier, the county coroner, arrived at around 9 o'clock. Meehan made an investigation of the home, but found that nothing in the home was missing. Meanwhile, in the glow of a kerosene lamp, the coroner examined Jennie's body, but found no signs of violence. He concluded that Jennie's death had been caused by cerebral hemorrhage. 

The Undertaker's Discovery

Jennie Porter's body was taken to an undertaker in Troy and prepared for burial. However, as undertaker Rexford Soper was embalming the body, he noticed something peculiar-- a tiny hole in the back of the dead woman's neck. The undertaker brought this to the attention of the State Police while Coroner Dreier ordered an autopsy, which was performed by a local physician, Dr. Charles DeWan. 

The autopsy revealed that the hole had been made by a .22-caliber bullet, but Dr. DeWan was unable to find the bullet. He did notice, however, that there appeared to be small slit next to the bullet hole, and concluded that someone had used a knife to remove the bullet in order to prevent investigators from determining the type of weapon that had been used. 

Corporal Charles Santee of the Towanda state police barracks assumed control of the investigation and, after studyng the crime scene, concluded that Jennie had been at the kitchen table when she was shot from behind. Either she had been able to drag herself back into the bedroom, or the killer had dragged her there. No windows were broken, but one of the kitchen windows had been left open for the 29 pet cats the family owned, leading authorities to wonder if the murderer had fired the shot from outside the house through the open window.

When questioned about his wife's murder, John Porter revealed some interesting information. He stated that Jennie had a custom of hiding large sums of money inside her clothes, sewn into the sleeves of old sweaters. After finding the body, he checked to see if the money was missing, but it was still there.
Another interesting revelation was that the Porter farm was to be sold on Friday at a sheriff's sale.

Several months earlier, John had furnished bond for a defendant in a court case who subsequently skipped town, putting up his property as collateral. Corporal Santee wasn't sure whether or not this had any bearing on the murder investigation, but it was an unusual coincidence. But the part of John Porter's story which police found most interesting was that, when John was walking with Ernest Hipple, the young man from Wheelerville was carrying a .22-caliber rifle.

The Susquehanna & NY railroad station at Wheelerville

Taken into Custody

On February 9, 20-year-old Ernest Hipple was taken into custody and questioned by state police. Unbeknownst to the young trapper, police had retraced Hipple's footprints from the spot where he and John Porter had parted ways, and Hipple's footprints lead right to the Porter farm. But things hit a snag when experts examined a rifle from Hipple's home. Not only hadn't the rifle been fired recently, but it was a .38-caliber rifle. Meanwhile, Dr. Charles DeWan had an x-ray performed on the brain of Jennie Porter and was able to find and retrieve the fatal bullet, which turned out not to be a .22-caliber slug, but .32-caliber. Dr. DeWan turned over this evidence to Corporal Santee.

Ernest Hipple, whose father died when Ernest was only one year old, had been raised by his mother. He eked out a meager existence as a fur trapper, farmhand and handyman, and he had married 16-year-old Dorothea Kaiser of Loyalsockville in neighboring Lycoming County less than a year earlier. They had an infant child, who lived on the Kaiser farm north of Montoursville. As such, Hipple spent a lot of time in Loyalsockville, and general store proprietor R.B. Tomlinson told authorities that he had purchased a box of .22-caliber cartridges from his store three weeks before the murder of Jennie Porter.

Nevertheless, after several hours of questioning by Corporal Santee and troopers Howard Kisner and George Boyer, Hipple continued to deny having any involvement in the murder of elderly Mrs. Porter. He was returned to the jail in the Laporte courthouse by Sheriff Ralph Olbert and placed into solitary confinement for 48 hours. But Hipple didn't crack under this punishment and refused to confess.

With only flimsy evidence against Hipple, it seemed that his release from custody was imminent, but then it was discovered that a check intended for the Porters had been cashed in a local store in December, not by John or Jennie Porter, but by Ernest Hipple. It was evident that Hipple had stolen the check during a previous visit to their home. He was charged with murder by District Attorney Albert Heess and on February 16 he finally confessed to shooting Jennie Porter with a .22-caliber rifle he had borrowed from a cousin in order to steal the money she was known to carry.

In his confession, which he signed before Corporal Santee, Trooper Boyer and Sheriff Obert, Hipple admitted to dragging the elderly woman by the heels to the bedroom, but he had been scared off before he was able to find the money hidden inside Jennie's sweater sleeve. He exited through a side door and took off running into the woods, eventually leaving the rifle with a friend for safekeeping. He pleaded guilty at his hearing before Justice of the Peace Hubert Shellhimer in Dushore and was held in jail for the Sullivan County grand jury. He was indicted on April 4.

Albert Heess, circa 1919

 
The Trial and Sentencing

Ernest Hipple almost seemed relieved to be in jail. Ever since his confession, it appeared as if an enormous load had been lifted from his back. He spent his time reading detective stories and dime novels, seemingly oblivious to his fate, while District Attorney Heess and Special Prosecutor (and former Bradford County D.A.) W.G. Schrier built their case for trial. Unable to afford legal counsel, the court appointed attorneys Charles Mills and Harold Trembath to represent Hipple. 

During his formal arraignment before President Judge E.B. Farr, Hipple elected to forgo a jury trial, choosing instead to leave his fate in the hands of Judge Farr and Associate Judges Hughes and Bown. It would be up to them to decide by majority vote whether the Commonwealth had been successful in establishing a first-degree case. It would then be up to the judges to agree, by majority vote, whether the defendant's punishment would be life in prison or death by electrocution.

It's unclear whether this risky legal strategy was Hipple's idea, or his attorneys'. Perhaps Hipple felt that, by saving the county the time and expense of a jury trial, the judges would show leniency. Or Perhaps Hipple knew that he had no chance of being acquitted and decided to get things over with as soon as possible. While today, holding a prisoner in solitary confinement for two days in order to extract a confession would be legal grounds for an acquittal, as the confession would've been made under duress, such questionable measures were par for the course in law enforcement investigations of the era.

Immediately after Hipple entered his guilty plea, thirteen residents of Wheelerville and surrounding communities, including thee of the defendant's childhood teachers, offered testimony to the three Sullivan County judges in order for them to fix the degree of guilt. Testimony concluded on April 7 and arguments were deferred until May, to give the defense team ample time to pore over the court stenographer's transcript. On May 15, Judge Farr announced that Hipple would learn his fate on the morning of May 28.

On May 28, 1938, Ernest Hipple was found guilty of murder in the first degree by the panel of judges and was sentenced to death in the electric chair. "It was a cold-blooded premeditated murder with no mitigating circumstances," announced President Judge Farr, when Hipple's attorneys pleaded for leniency. Hipple made no comment after the verdict was rendered, though his mother broke down and wept in the courtroom.

Lt. Governor Samuel Lewis

 

The Undercover Lieutenant Governor

Hipple's attorneys appealed the verdict to the State Supreme Court, describing Ernest as a "typical hillbilly" who was mentally incompetent. In their petition, the attorneys claimed that the convicted killer was uneducated, and that he had been an epileptic ever since he was hit over the head with a board as a small child. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld the death sentence on January 9, 1939, and the date of execution was fixed for March 27 by Governor James. The governor later postponed the execution until April 4.

In a last-ditch effort to spare Hipple from the electric chair, his attorneys petitioned the Board of Pardons for a commutation of his sentence, insisting that the now 21-year-old killer was insane. In a bizarre twist, Lieutenant Governor Samuel S. Lewis, who was the chairman of the Board of Pardons, checked into the Sullivan County jail and posed as an inmate to observe Hipple.

"I decided to check on him personally," stated the lieutenant governor. "I visited the place, walked with the other prisoners and casually engaged him in conversation. He was clean shaven and his hair was neat and smooth. He could talk as intelligently as any of the others. If Hipple is feeble-minded, then so am I."

"I guess I talked too much," Hipple would later remark, after he was informed that the prisoner he had spoken to was the lieutenant governor. "It looks as though I have talked myself right into the electric chair."

Defense attorney Charles Mills could do nothing more. "I had hoped for new facts which have a bearing on this case. I was disappointed, however, and have very little to add to my former argument that three physicians say this man is a moron, and if he is he shouldn't be executed."

Execution at Rockview

On April 22, Ernest Hipple was transferred from Sullivan County to the Rockview Penitentiary. The following day he was visited by his mother, brother and sister. His wife and their two-year-old child declined to make the trip. Shortly after midnight, on the morning of April 24, Hipple walked unassisted into the death chamber and calmly sat down in the electric chair. As he was being strapped in, he repeated the prayer for the dying after the prison chaplain, Father McCreech. Immediately after he recited, "into Thy hands I commend my spirit," the current was applied for forty seconds and Ernest Hipple, the "typical hillbilly", was pronounced dead.

After the execution, Hipple's body was shipped to Williamsport, where it was prepared for burial by undertaker Thomas Redmond. Throngs of the morbidly curious gathered around the funeral home, desperate to catch a glimpse of the executed murderer, but were denied entry. His body was laid to rest at West Hill Cemetery in Shunk; coincidentally, his grave is located only a few paces from that of his victim, Jennie Porter.




Sources:
 
Sayre Evening Times, Feb. 8, 1938.
Scranton Times-Tribune, Feb. 9, 1938.
Somerset Daily American, Feb. 10, 1938.
Bloomsburg Morning Press, Feb. 10, 1938.
Williamsport Gazette and Bulletin, Feb. 11, 1938.
Williamsport Gazette and Bulletin, Feb. 12, 1938.
Sayre Evening Times, Feb. 14, 1938.
Wilkes-Barre Times Leader, Feb. 17, 1938.
Sayre Evening Times, April 4, 1938.
Pottstown Mercury, April 6, 1938.
Pottstown Mercury, April 8, 1938.
Wilkes-Barre Times Leader, May 28, 1938.
Philadelphia Inquirer, Nov. 30, 1938.
Danville News, April 21, 1939.
Bloomsburg Morning Press, April 24, 1939.
Harrisburg Telegraph, April 25, 1939.
Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, Oct. 29, 1939.