Al is working on a major project. This column first appeared in March of 2012.
Ninety-nine years ago this week, a darling little girl stepped from the sidewalks of New Castle, Indiana into the pages of Indiana history and legend. On March 20, 1913, nine year old Catherine Winters vanished and was never seen or heard from again. Her disappearance kicked off years of frantic searches, accusations and the occasional ghost story that continue to this very day. And of course, it has a local connection.
Catherine was a typical Hoosier girl of her time; innocent, friendly, curious and fun loving. It was an unusually warm and sunny Thursday and Catherine, along with her seven-year-old brother Frankie, were home that weekday due to a measles outbreak at school. Catherine walked out the front door of her home, located at 311 North 16th Street, around 9 a.m. that morning to sell packages of noodles for a charity, earn a few extra pennies for herself and hopefully play with some friends afterwards.
Her stepmother Byrd Winters, told little Catherine to be home for lunch promptly at 11 a.m. Catherine stopped for awhile to play with her friend Helen Stretch and unsurprisingly lost track of time. She was running late when family friend Dan Monroe spoke to her as she hurried along the 1100 block of Broad Street, just a stone’s throw from the town square, towards home. It was 11:45 and Catherine, wearing a black and white checkered gingham dress covered by a “red sweater coat” and topped off by a white straw hat, was heading home. Her brown eyes glistened and her light brown hair bounced in the sun as she skipped along the sidewalk. Mr. Monroe smiled as she passed; he would be the last person to speak to Catherine Winters before she vanished off the face of the earth.
One investigator claimed he spoke to a local boy who said he saw Catherine at 16th and Broad streets, just 3 blocks from her home, around 12:15 p.m. Another witness claimed to have seen the little girl at her home after noon. But these leads were never substantiated. It seemed that Catherine had simply vanished. As one private detective said, “as if the earth had opened and swallowed her up.”
When the child failed to return home that afternoon, Byrd Winters called her husband, prominent New Castle dentist W. A. Winters at his nearby office. Dr. Winters rushed home and immediately began the search for his daughter, never dreaming that search would last the rest of his life. He retraced the little girl’s route, yelling himself hoarse in the process and bruising his knuckles as he pounded on every door he encountered along the way. He could find no trace of the girl. Inexplicably, the family did not contact police until the following day.
Dr. Winters immediately concluded that a roving band of “gypsies,” seen by many of his New Castle neighbors lingering around the city that day, had snatched his little girl. “That night was the first night of the great floods of 1913,” he later wrote. “Our machines (Automobiles) went in headlong pursuit of that band of gypsy wagons. It was after daylight when we suddenly blundered onto their camp. I thought my quest was over but in all the camp never a sign of my little girl did we find.”
Later Dr. Winters learned that one wagon had already left the camp (located between Hagerstown and Economy) escaping his search. That missing wagon forever haunted his nightmares and strengthened his belief that the vagabond gypsy troupe had stolen little Catherine. Private Detective A. G. Lunt, from the W. J. Burns Agency, tracked the band of gypsies all the way to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Unlike her father, he was convinced that gypsies had not kidnapped the girl.
There were absolutely no clues and the New Castle police were dumbfounded. As the local investigation stalled, the Mayor and city council turned to a flamboyant former New York City policeman turned private detective named Robert H. Abel. The media had a field day when he arrived in town wearing a Sherlock Holmes cap, smoking a Meerschaum pipe and holding an oversized magnifying glass to his eye. That’s not all, Abel lugged a dictograph (a New York City machine invented in 1907 consisting of a cumbersome foot long box used to record sounds within fifteen feet away) under his arm that would presumably enable him to listen to conversations of suspects without their knowledge. The mayor offered Abel a $3,000 reward ($69,000 in today’s money) waiting for him if he solved the case.
Abel’s unconventional appearance notwithstanding, the Catherine Winters case was a media sensation from the start. After all, child abductions were unheard of in pre-World War I small-town America. Keep in mind that in 1913, horse and buggies were a more common sight on the streets of Howard County than automobiles. Electricity was scarce in rural areas. Radio had just begun to bring music and news into the cities but newspapers were still the most popular way for people to get the news of the day. The Catherine Winters mystery remained in the headlines for weeks.
Still, the case went nowhere, leads stopped coming in and Dr. Winters’ obsession with the idea of gypsy abduction grew as the police investigation lost momentum. What he didn’t realize was that Detective Abel was now turning his spyglass on the good doctor himself. Abel discovered that Winters’ first wife Etta, who died in a Colorado Springs sanitarium in 1909 when Catherine was 5, had left a $3,000 inheritance (again, $69,000 in today’s money) to Catherine and her brother Frank.
During a search of the Winters’ home, Abel found the only physical evidence ever discovered in the case; a red hair ribbon, a red sweater (with the collar missing and a large burn hole in the back), and a partially-burned man’s undershirt hidden inside a concrete wall block wall in the basement. Dirt and cement had been piled several inches deep on top of the items in an apparent attempt to hide them.
Abel immediately informed the police and media that he had found the smoking gun, and what was worse, the undershirt appeared to have “blood-colored” stains on it.
Next week: Accusations abound, and a famous lawman comes to town.
Al Hunter is the author of the “Haunted Indianapolis” and co-author of the “Haunted Irvington” and “Indiana National Road” book series. His newest books are “Bumps in the Night. Stories from the Weekly View,” “Irvington Haunts. The Tour Guide,” and “The Mystery of the H.H. Holmes Collection.” Contact Al directly at Huntvault@aol.com or become a friend on Facebook.