Fittingly, it was Friday the 13th.
A foul odor reeked from the growing hole they opened. It was slow going. The ground was spiked with pieces of broken concrete from the basement floor that had been dug up before.
Prior tenants of the house at 133 South 14th Street had long noted a smothering stench in the basement, yet never knew its source.
The widening hole was more than two feet deep when one of the worker’s shovels excavated something odd. Not a fragment of cracked concrete or broken sewer pipe.
It looked like … a bone.
It had been charred black, as if burned.
The plumbers kept digging. Soon, more bones were brought up from the earth. Some were red-spotted, and the plumbers’ hands burned at the touch.
These bones had been laced with some sort of caustic agent or acid. Still, they kept digging, setting aside their eerie finds on the basement floor.
Then came a remnant of a shattered skull. There was no doubt. It was human. The biological puzzle being assembled hinted at a frail, fragile form.
This time, the workers ceased their digging and informed their boss. He notified Dauphin County Coroner Jacob Eckinger.
In this photo from the Feb. 16, 1915 edition of the Harrisburg Telegraph, officials wash out clues taken from the cellar of 133 S. 14th St. in Harrisburg. The dirt taken from the cellar was washed out on a screen to try to find any trinkets that may have belonged to the victim. Harrisburg Telegraph 1915
This being 1915, no forensic crime unit came swooping in. The coroner simply instructed Cashman to have his men complete the exhumation.
By the time workers finished that morning, the partial skeleton of what would be determined to be a teen girl had taken shape. Her grave measured about two-feet wide by three-feet deep. Its outline was unmistakable, as the walls surrounding it were packed hard and hadn’t been previously disturbed.
The skeleton’s trunk, legs and arms were intact. But a large section of the skull and part of the lower jaw were missing. Four teeth and a “mass of golden hair” were found near the broken skull.
The workers transported their discoveries to the only place they could think of – the plumbing company office. There, Cashman and his men reassembled the bones on a table.
Coroner Jacob Eckinger arrived with Dr. Roscoe Livingston Perkins, who handled the autopsies and forensic exams
The plumber, the coroner and the physician studied the scatter of bones, all arriving at the same conclusion:
“It looks to me like foul play,” Cashman was quoted as saying.
“There is no doubt in my mind that murder has been done,” Eckinger later opined in newspaper accounts.
Newspapers, the dominant media of the day, scoured the streets for a new angle on the hottest story in town. Most resorted to printing open speculation. All of it centered on the home, built in 1892, upon what had been a farm field. The property was owned by Ms. Minnie M. Burtner and managed and leased out by the W. E. Jones real estate company.
“The names of all the occupants of the house have been brought into the gossip which started simultaneously with the finding of the skeleton,” one newspaper account read.
“Neighbors who resided on that street for years are believed to know a great deal about the case,” the Patriot added.
Early suspicions centered on one nearby woman, a writer for magazines who spent most of her time at home, never mingling much, reports said.
“Many intimations were that she was a (odd) character, and some said she was a little off and several intimated that she was a witch,” one newspaper wrote.
Another article pointed an accusing finger at the “disreputable people” who lived next door. The article speculated that “these people may have done the tunneling” into the basement “to bury the body.”
There was another question at the core of the case, perhaps more fundamental than even the identity of the killer: Who was the girl in the grave?
Reporters and the county investigator soon focused on a dentist who had employed a teenage girl as a live-in nursemaid for his two young children during the time the family dwelled in the house.
Dr. Charles E. Ayres, who lived at the “Mystery Home” between 1901 and 1902 and had since relocated to York, soon had reporters at his door. But the dentist had no good answers for whatever happened to the teen girl he employed some 13 years before.
The sudden silence from dentist Charles E. Ayres made him appear more suspicious. One newspaper observed: “He seemed much worried and refused to say anything whatever about the murder mystery in Harrisburg or his connection with the house.”
In published reports, Ayres initially said he couldn’t recall the name of the girl, who would have been 15 when she worked for his family.
The dentist’s nursemaid came from a “broken home” in Mechanicsburg, he told reporters. But when his wife wanted to hire her again, Ayres said they couldn’t locate her.
He later confirmed her name was Bessie Guyer. But when her current whereabouts could not be determined, Ayres came under even more scrutiny. More @link
'Murder House': 106-year mystery begins with unknown girl buried in Harrisburg basement
*Who is the girl in the grave? Part Two coming…
