Browsing serendipity is one of the advantages of the traditional newspaper format. Pick up an old newspaper, or look at its microfilmed or digitized replica, and you'll find things you wouldn't have thought to look for.
Open stacks offer a similar advantage. Mullins Library at the University of Arkansas used to keep all but its rarest and most valuable books out on miles of shelves. A person could wander around and marvel at both the breadth of human inquiry and the specificity of subject matter. Or spend days in one little section, taking book after book off the shelf, looking for a name in each index, sometimes with heart pounding.
Alas, nine out of 10 books that could have been discovered on the shelves at Mullins 10 years ago now reside in an off-site storage facility. Students have to find books of interest in an electronic catalog and fill out a request form. It reminds me of the sexual consent forms proposed by college administrators during the first furor over date rape in the 1990s.
So proceeds the disenchantment of the world.
But serendipity persists. Strange stories will turn up while you are looking for something bland, which is what I was doing when I saw this in the May 3, 1953, Arkansas Gazette:
"Head told officers he gave Wolfe 'a box of groceries and $10 to seal the deal.' The Heads never have explained why they offered to keep the child for Wolfe, a widow."
The child was 5-year-old Mary Wolfe. Her foster parents, James Walter Head and Linda Epperson Head, had been accused of beating her, then placing her comatose body in a rain barrel made from a jet wing fuel tank.
Mrs. Head was about to go on trial for first-degree murder, a death penalty case in a state that had never executed a woman. (That's what the Gazette said; according to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, Lavinia Burnett was hanged, along with her husband and son, in 1845 in Fayetteville for the murder of Jonathan Selby, "a well-to-do bachelor about 40 years of age," near Cane Hill.)
Mr. Head, apprehended in Kansas, was deemed insane and committed to the Arkansas State Hospital.
I've pieced together the story from articles in the Gazette and the Democrat from 1953, 1958, and 1959. Details come from what the accused couple and their neighbors told reporters; please keep that qualification in mind.
Everett Wolfe was a bus driver from Detroit whose wife died of cancer. He gave his daughters, Mary and Joyce, to the Heads at Elyria, Ohio, just west of Cleveland. According to Mrs. Head, the couple left Joyce behind because "some woman" at Lorain, Ohio, said that Wolfe had told her to get the child. (Joyce later turned up, unharmed, awaiting adoption by a couple in Lorain.)
Mr. Head is identified as "an itinerant cotton picker." The first mechanical cotton pickers were just arriving in Arkansas in the early 1950s, and African American farm laborers were leaving the South en masse, so it's conceivable that there would be work available for a white itinerant cotton picker such as Mr. Head.
It's unclear how Mr. and Mrs. Head, their 2-year-old daughter, and Mary Wolfe got to Arkansas. Some accounts have them going to Shreveport, then somewhere near Altheimer, or Humphrey, or Red Hill (10 miles south of Stuttgart), before coming to the little community east of Des Arc described by Joe Wirges in the Gazette as "five miles out on the Cotton Plant Road."
Wirges traveled to the community and found the neighbors furious. On Jan. 2, 1953, he reported that they "recalled that the family had moved here about six weeks ago" without food or money. One neighbor had let them live in his tool shed and helped cover the windows with feed sacks.
The neighbors, says Wirges, noticed Mr. Head kicking Mary around the yard. They "recalled the Heads' harsh treatment of Mary and several said that Mrs. Head, when reproached, merely shrugged her shoulders and said: 'Oh well, she's not ours.'"
After a severe beating on Dec. 23, 1952, according to Mrs. Head, the couple believed Mary had died. When neighbors came to offer to help care for her, the Heads claimed she was sleeping. Then they placed her body in a foot locker. Mr. Head began digging a grave but, fearing that neighbors had seen him, abandoned the plan to bury the child.
The day after Christmas, according to Mrs. Head, Mr. Head moved the child and dropped her from a height of several feet. Then he wrapped her in a bundle and hid her behind a kerosene stove. Then, according to Wirges' story, "they invited in several neighbors, and they all joined in singing and a prayer meeting."
Thereafter, they wrapped the child in a window shade (one of the feed sacks?) held together by baling wire and weighed her down with a sledgehammer and a weight from a cotton scale. According to Mrs. Head, they believed the child to be dead. An autopsy found that she died by drowning.
Mr. Head took off in the car. Mrs. Head was arrested while walking from Cotton Plant toward Brinkley with her 2-year-old daughter.
An all-male jury of farmers convicted Mrs. Head of second-degree murder. On May 8, 1953, as she began serving her 12-year sentence in the women's unit at Cummins Prison Farm, she told the prison superintendent that she would try to be a good prisoner. As she was being fingerprinted, someone remarked, "I think you were pretty lucky."
She replied, "I guess I was lucky."
On Aug. 3, 1958, the Gazette's "Whatever became of ?" column checked on old plans to dam Fourche and Brodie Creeks to build a 700-acre recreational lake. The next item in that column follows up on James W. and Linda E. Head. Mr. Head was still at the State Hospital. (In the event of discharge, he would have been tried for murder.) Mrs. Head was still at Cummins.
"The Heads moved around a lot and nobody got to know much about them," the Gazette's column notes.
On Feb. 5, 1959, the Democrat reported that Mrs. Head had been granted parole and would be released from prison the following Saturday. A follow-up item noted that she had exhibited good behavior and headed up the sewing circle in the women's division at Cummins.