Mysteries of the missing

by Edward H. Smith

James H. Boyle was led into court on the sixth of May, faced with his accusers, and swiftly encircled with the accusing evidence, which was complete and unequivocal. He accepted it without display of emotion and offered no defense. After brief argument the case went to the jury, which reached an affirmative verdict within a few minutes.

Mrs. Boyle was placed on trial immediately afterward and also presented no defense. A verdict was found against her with equal expedition on May 10, and she was remanded for sentence.

On the following day both defendants were called before the court. The judge imposed the life sentence on Boyle and a term of twenty-five years on his wife. A few hours afterward Boyle called the newspaper reporters to his cell in the jail at Mercer and handed them a written statement.

Boyle’s writing went back fourteen years to 1895, when the body of Dan Reeble, Jr., had been found lying on the sidewalk on East Federal Street, Youngstown, Ohio, before the house where Reeble lived. There had been some mysterious circumstances or rumors attached to Reeble’s end.

Boyle did not attempt to explain the death of Reeble, but he said in his statement that he and one Daniel Shay, a Youngstown saloonkeeper, who had died in 1907, had caught Harry Forker, the brother of Mrs. James P. Whitla and uncle of the kidnapped boy, taking a number of letters from the pockets of the dead man, as his body lay on the walk. Boyle recited that not only had he and Shay found Forker in this compromising position, but they had picked up two envelopes overlooked by Forker, in which were found four letters from women, two from a girl in New York State and the other two from a Cleveland woman. The contents were intimate, he said, and they proved beyond peradventure that Forker had been present at Reeble’s death.

Boyle’s statement went on to recite that he had subsequently written Forker, told him about the letters, and suggested that they were for sale. Forker had immediately replied and made various efforts to recover the incriminating missives, but Boyle had held them and continued to extort money from Forker for years, threatening to reveal the letters unless paid.

Finally, in March, 1908, Boyle’s statement went on to recite, a demand for five thousand dollars had been made on Forker, who said he could not raise the money, but would come into an inheritance later and would then pay and recover the dangerous evidence. When Forker failed in this undertaking, fresh threats were made, with the result that Forker suggested the kidnapping of his nephew, the demand for ten thousand dollars’ ransom, and the division of this spoil as a way to get the five thousand dollars Boyle was demanding.

Boyle also recited that Forker had planned the kidnapping and attended to the matter of having the boy taken from the school. He said that some one else had done this work and delivered the child to him, Boyle, in Warren, Ohio, where the exhausted horse was found.

This statement, filling the gap in the motive reasoning as it did, created a turmoil. Forker and Whitla immediately and indignantly denied the accusation and brought to their support a Youngstown police officer, Michael Donnelly, who said he had found the body of Dan Reeble. Donnelly recited that he had been talking to Reeble on the walk before the building in which Reeble resided, early in the morning of June 8, 1895. Reeble had gone upstairs, and Donnelly was walking slowly down the street when he heard a thump and groans behind him. Returning to the spot where he had left Reeble, he found his companion of a few minutes before, dying on the walk.

Donnelly said that Reeble had had the habit of sitting on his window sill, and that the man had apparently fallen out to his death. He swore that neither Forker, Boyle, nor Daniel Shay had been present when Reeble died.