The Cutprice Guignol

When Mary Jane Heaster took the stand to testify against the man she believed to be her daughter’s killer, the testimony she shared was not from any earthly source.

At least, that’s what she claimed. Heaster, in an 1897 murder trial in West Virginia that would soon become a legendary part of the state’s folklore, that her daughter had come to her from beyond the grave to insist that her death had not been a result of the natural causes noted by local doctors, but at the hands of her husband, Edward Stribbling Trout Shue.

Heaster’s daughter, Elva Zona Heaster (who went by her middle name, Zona), had met Edward Shue (sometimes referred to as Erasmus Shue in contemporary reports) the year before, in late 1896. Zona, who was born around 1873, encountered the blacksmith Shue in her home county of Greenbrier, West Virginia, and, within months, the two were married.

Zona, however, was not Shue’s first wife. He’d been married twice before – the first union had ended in divorce, while the second, more concerningly, had been brought to a close by the sudden death of his young wife. Local rumour had it that he’d had something to do with her death, but it did not stop Zona from taking him as a husband before the end of the year in 1896.

But, as with his previous marriages, Zona and Shue’s wedded bliss would not last long. On January 22nd, 1897, Shue would sent a local boy to hunt eggs at their house; there, the young boy discovered Zona, dead, sprawled at the bottom of the staircase. The boy rushed to tell his mother of the news, and then shared it with Shue, who hurried home, apparently inconsolable, after sending for the doctor. By the time the doctor arrived, Zona was wearing a high-necked dress, limiting the doctor’s view of her neck and throat during examination – but Shue, claiming to be overcome with grief, insisted that the inspection of her body be kept short. A coroner’s jury ruled that she had died of heart disease, though a few witnesses at the funeral noticed that her neck seemed particularly loose, drooping from side to side when it was not directly supported, and had been covered with a large veil and bow. Zona was buried days after her demise, and, that, at first, seemed to be the end of that.

Mary Jane Heaster, by all accounts, had never been much of a fan of her son-in-law. His previous marriages, including the death of his last wife, matched with mutterings about a bad temper perhaps gave her good reason to be suspicious. His behaviour in the hours and days after Zona’s death had Heaster convinced that he’d had something to do with her daughter’s death, and, in the weeks that followed Zona’s passing, she prayed day and night for some kind of evidence regarding the truth of her daughter’s demise.

And, eventually, according to Heaster, that prayer was answered. Over the course of four nights following her daughter’s death, Mary Jane Heaster claimed to have been visited by her daughter’s spirit. On the first night, Zona appeared to her mother in the high-necked dress she had been discovered in, made for the door, and then rotated her head all the way around to look at her mother – “like”, Heaster would later describe, “she wanted me to know all about it”. Heaster claimed that she was able to touch her daughter’s ghost, and that she appeared to her much as she did when she had been alive, where they shared conversation about a variety of matters – but one pressing issue stood out above all else. In the following visits, Zona would share with her mother that her husband had killed her by squeezing her neck off at the first joint after he had flown into a rage about a lack of meat served for supper; she directed her mother to a house that Heaster had never been to before, where she indicated that Heaster would find blood connected to her death, which, according to Heaster, she did.

Heaster, in light of these revelations from beyond the grave, was not the only one who had her doubts about Shue’s involvement with Zona’s sudden death. It didn’t take long for locals to notice that Zona’s bereaved husband seemed in markedly good spirits for a man who had lost his wife a mere matter of weeks after marrying her, and this, along with Heaster’s appeal to the county’s prosecuting attorney John Alfred Preston to investigate the matter further, led to Zona’s body being exhumed in Spring 1897. An examination of her body conducted by three local doctors, according to a newspaper report from the Monroe Watchmen, revealed that Zona had suffered ruptures to her ligaments, a crushed windpipe, and, in line with her mother’s claimed visions, that her neck had been dislocated between the first and second cerebral vertebrae, with no other part of her body showing signs of any illness or damage. Shue was arrested pending trial for the alleged murder of his wife, and, soon, the matter of the Greenbrier ghost would become a landmark in American legal history.

The run-up to the trial was as dramatic as everything that had come before, with Shue threatening to kill himself in prison as he awaited judgement. But, by the end of June 1897, the case would appear before court, and Mary Jane Heaster took the stand to offer testimony that she claimed had been granted to her by her daughter from beyond the grave.

Heaster was cross-examined on the matter of her apparently-supernatural visions; she testified that she was not a superstitious woman, though she believed in the Christian scriptures and that they were the words of God and his son (“Don’t you believe it?” she asked, apparent incredulous, to her examiner); she repeatedly insisted under questioning that her visions of her daughter were not dreams borne from the stress of her situation, but that Zona had come to her in her waking hours to communicate the circumstances of her death and that her husband had been the one to kill her.

There were no other witnesses to the death of Elva Zona Heaster Shue, leaving only the circumstantial evidence available from the exhumation and Heaster’s own claims of supernatural intervention. Shue himself took the stand in his defence, and, if anything, this seems to have been the deciding factor that turned the jury against him – according to an article in the Greenbrier Independent, Shue “talked at great length; was very minute and particular in describing unimportant incidents; denied pretty much everything said by other witnesses; said the prosecution was all spite work; entered a positive denial of the charge against him; vehemently protested his innocence, calling God to witness…and appealed to the jury to look into his face and then say if he was guilty”.

And decide they did. Shue was found guilty of the murder of his wife, and, after law enforcement intercepted an attempted lynching, he was taken to carry out his sentence at the West Virginia State Penitentiary in the nearby Mounsville, where he died of during an outbreak of an unspecified disease in 1900.

But the case of the Zona’s murder – which would later come to be known by the moniker The Greenbrier Ghost – would long-outlive everyone who had been involved in it. The story would go on to become part of West Virgnian folklore, even commemorated by a sign that was put up in 1991 near Zona’s final resting place that declared it “the only known case in which testimony from [a] ghost helped convict a murderer”. But the truth is that the case of the Greenbrier Ghost is not the only one in which an apparent visit from the spiritual world has helped to solve a case – but what place, if any, does a relationship with the supernatural have with the justice system?

There have been several other notable cases in which a spirit is claimed to have returned from the grave to solve their own murder, perhaps most famously that of the murder of Teresita Basa. Basa, a respiratory therapist in Chicago, was found stabbed to death in her apartment in 1977 when neighbours called the fire department after smelling smoke; initially, the case went nowhere, until a co-worker of Basa’s claimed that his wife had been possessed by Basa’s spirit and pointed the finger at another respiratory therapist who worked alongside her, Allen Showery. Showery initially attempted to get evidence against him thrown out due to the nature of its apparent discovery, but later, after an initial mistrial, pled guilty to the murder and spent fourteen years in prison.

Of course, there’s the matter of psychics to contend with. Psychics have controversially involved themselves in a number of high-profile cases – during the kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart, for example, more than 9,000 tips were delivered to the police that claimed to have been uncovered via psychic visions, though none of them ultimately offered any useful information. A number of psychics have made careers off their involvement in the world of true crime, perhaps the most recognizable case being that of Sylvia Browne. Browne erroneously told the mother of missing girl Amanda Berry in 2004 that her daughter was dead; the girl’s mother, who apparently believed Browne’s conclusion “98%” died the following year, prior to the discovery of her daughter who was still alive.

According to a 1979 study in the Journal of Police Science and Administration, tested psychics, when allowed to handle evidentiary objects, were no better at providing factual information related to the crime than their non-psychic counterparts, and since then, there has been no compelling evidence that psychics are uniquely capable of uncovering information that could not be reasonably guessed at. In a 1992 article in the Skeptical Enquirer, Jane Ayers Sweat and Mark W. Durm noted that, in a survey of law enforcement in the fifty largest US cities, less than a third had entertained the use of psychics during an investigation, with several outrightly hostile to the idea. One respondent to the survey from Austin declared that “I have yet to see any information received from psychics of any value, based on 20 years experience. The information is usually distorted, of no investigative value, and inaccurate. They hamper an investigation and often cause distractions from the main investigation”.

Quite rightly, as far as I am concerned, the use of the supernatural in matters of law enforcement has been met with consistent skepticism and often open doubt – the law is intended to be neutral and factual in its application as far as possible, and invoking the spirits of the nebulous world beyond hardly fits with that. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t have some kind of place within the legal system – even if it’s not for the reasons we might think. But that doesn’t mean that the supernatural can’t serve as a throughline to more practical results.

Due to the emotional and spiritual nature of such beliefs, psychics are more often than not hired by a family instead of law enforcement, they may have access to personal information that the police are not privy to – as noted by William J. Smithey in his paper on the subject, “psychic’s ability to cultivate a
close relationship with friends and family can produce legitimate investigative leads”. Similarly, the use of psychics can simply be a way to assure bereaved family members that everything is being done to catch the perpetrator of the crime; Smithey also remarks that the desicion by law enforcement to engage with psychics is primarily a political one:

“…the mother of a missing child telling the news media local law enforcement is not doing all it can to find her son or daughter is a nightmare for any agency involved in such an important investigation. Not only does such negative media attention affect the agency, but such negative press can have a detrimental effect on the investigation as well if detectives become sidetracked by a media frenzy. In such an instance, the decision to utilize a psychic detective is simply the lesser of two evils.”

And when it comes to cases such as that of Basa and the Greenbrier Ghost, the supernatural could potentially be a stand-in for other motivations. While the details that Heaster claimed the ghost had shared with her did roughly match up with the findings of the post-mortem examination of her body, these details were not publicly confirmed by Heaster until the trial – which is to say, after her cause of death had been more firmly established. If I were to speculate about the nature of this case, I would guess that Heaster had (quite reasonable, given the circumstances) suspicions about her daughter’s husband being involved in her death, and appealed to superstition and religious beliefs held by the majority of the local community to push for another examination of her daughter’s body. After this, she was able to tweak whatever details of the supernatural visitations she had shared to match with what was now more concretely known about the case, and to provide a more convincing version of it that confirmed Shue as her daughter’s murderer.

In Basa’s case, her co-worker claimed that his wife had been possessed by a spirit sharing details about her killer – while the more likely explanation, at least to me, seems that he had heard something about Showery’s involvement through less-than-legitimate sources and found a different route through which he could “discover” the information. In the above mentioned article from the Skeptical Enquirer, another survey respondent remarked on the matter of psychics that “all information received from any source is investigated for its validity” – perhaps because those claiming psychic visions or prophetic dreams may be a way for witnesses to offer information or evidence they would not otherwise be comfortable coming forward with, whether for fear of implication in another crime or punishment from the people they’re informing on.

Of course, I can’t quantifiably say that the evidence procured by apparently supernatural means was not a legitimate visit from the other side. But, regardless of where you stand on the validity of the paranormal, the world of true crime has a long and storied history with the great beyond – and the Greenbrier Ghost, despite claims that it’s the only case of its kind, is anything but unique in that regard.

I would be fascinated to hear about other cases you’ve come across that were purportedly solved by some involvement from the paranormal – please let me know in the comments, and, if you’d like to check them out, here are a few more of my historical true crime articles:

The Impossible Case of the Pimlico Poisoning

The Myth, the Murders, and the Matter of the Bloody Countess Báthory

The Spectre, the Bricklayer, and the Murder: The Hammersmith Ghost and the Curious Legal Status of Belief

Sources

Contemporary newspaper articles on the Greenbrier Ghost case – 1–2

The Greenbrier Ghost – Skeptoid

Evaluation of the Use of Psychics in the Investigation of Major Crimes – Journal of
Police Science and Administration

The Use of Psychics in Homicide and Missing Persons Investigations by William J. Smithey

An Experimental Test of Psychic Detection – Richard Wisemen

(header image via Appalachian History)