Cold Case Files: WWI veteran killed and cabin burned in 1921 in crime that remains unsolved over 103 years later
The hills of Newton County had already run red by the middle of July 1921. Four killings that year would send men to prison, yet some deaths simply vanished into the hollows. George Rice’s was one of them.
He arrived as a newcomer the previous October, bought a small tract on the old Turnpike road about two and a half miles into Newton County, the same distance west of Yardelle and near the east end of Sulphur Mountain. He built a log house, made a crop with a horse belonging to John Coley, and lived alone while he waited for his wife.
Neighbors described him as forty-five or fifty, medium height, heavy build, dark complexion, black hair and beard. He received a great deal of mail and sent a large amount. On Saturday evening, July 16, mail carrier Floyd Hockensmith delivered letters and went home. Sunday morning the smoke was thick enough that Hockensmith turned back, then walked on to the place of J. L. Rash, who lived about three-quarters of a mile away.
Together they found the cabin in ashes. A .44 revolver with six empty shells lay near the center of the ruins; the shells had been fired by the hammer, not by heat. A single-barrel shotgun with an empty shell rested in one corner behind the stove. Two watches were recovered, one stopped at 11:35.
The horse stood saddled and bridled in an old field, fence rails down in three or four places and the gate open. Human bones, part of a vertebra and an upper arm bone still carrying a little flesh, were pronounced human by Dr. Gladden. An inquest returned a verdict that someone supposed to be Mr. Rice had come to his death by an unknown hand.
The Harrison Daily Times of July 20 ran the headline “BURNING OF FARM HOUSE SHROUDED WITH MYSTERY” and beneath it the stark line “HUMAN BONES FOUND.” Papers noted a reported life-insurance policy of twenty thousand dollars payable to a wife teaching school in Minnesota, and they mentioned that she was only a month or two from a state pension for twenty years of service.
A week later the Newark Journal called it outright murder and robbery, placing the charred remains fifteen miles from Green Forest and the nearest neighbor several miles off. Details varied between the accounts, but the isolation was plain. Rice lived five miles from a rural route
. His nearest company was the mail and the distant sound of other farms.
Mrs. George Rice arrived in late July from Moorhead, Minnesota, accompanied by her sister, Miss Ada J. Still. Homer Dow of Marble City brought the women in. A. B. Arbaugh of Jasper met them and corrected the insurance story: the large policy was a mistake. Neighbors thought perhaps sixteen hundred dollars had been in the house in some form, but the widow did not know. She and her sister visited the ruins.
Local news columns offered sympathy for a woman who had saved her earnings toward a home that was now gone, and for a crime committed in their country. Authorities said little, yet friends of the dead man believed they had means to trace the person who burned the house and killed its owner.
In September a court investigation convened at Yardelle. Justices of the Peace Jenks, Jones, and Brazel presided, with Deputy Prosecuting Attorney P. T. Harrison of Jasper and Alf Salmon of Western Grove assisting, and Constable William Robinson present. Fifty-seven witnesses testified, ten from Boone County and the rest from Newton.
No arrests followed. Some called it a persecution rather than an investigation. In October the matter returned to court. The defense sought a change of venue. Justice Nichols presided. J. L. Rash was acquitted for lack of evidence; Sylvester Rash and J. A. Renner were dismissed. The names floated and then settled into silence. No one was ever charged. The papers that had printed the sensational headlines moved on.
The man who died that night was George Wallace Rice, born August 17, 1877, in Lebanon, Waupaca County, Wisconsin, to Warren and Clara Shipley Rice. He had already lived one marriage. On September 20, 1894, he wed Martha Jane Mason and they had about six children. By the time of the 1920 census he was listed as single and working as a carpenter; at his enlistment he had named his sister Lilly as next of kin.
On July 15, 1918, he joined the 16th Engineers, a regiment of skilled tradesmen recruited under the National Defense Act for immediate railroad work in France. The unit sailed from New York on August 1, 1917, marched before King George V and Queen Mary in England, and reached France on August 27.
They renovated hospitals, built depots, and laid track. In June 1918 they began the Nevers Cutoff, a double-track line that bypassed the Paris bottleneck and included a two-thousand-foot bridge over the Loire. They repaired railways through the final offensives and, after the Armistice, continued the work, even crewing trains from Verdun to Conflans.
Rice returned, remarried on June 1, 1920, in Clay Cou
nty, Minnesota, to Mary Olive Still, a schoolteacher born about 1881 in North Dakota.
He headed south almost at once to prepare the place she would join when her school closed. She never arrived. By 1930 she was back in Minnesota living with her sister. She remained there until her death at sixty-six or sixty-seven in 1948 and rests in Prairie Home Cemetery in Moorhead.
On the morning of July 5, 2024, a new marker was set in place on the way south into Newton County. The fieldstone remains, faded and scratched, but the newer stone keeps the name readable.
George Wallace Rice had crossed an ocean, helped move an army, and come home only to meet a violent end in a cabin on the Turnpike road.
No one was ever held to answer for it.
