By: Jane Nice, Paulding County Bicentennial Committee Part 1 of 2
PAULDING –On Sunday morning, November 4, 1894, siblings Wilson “Ashby” Good, age 8, and his sister Elsie, age 5, went outside to play near their house three and one half miles northwest of the village of Paulding.
Their mother, who was homebound with a 17-day-old baby, grew alarmed when the children had not returned by late morning. She sent her 11-year-old daughter Clara out to look for them. Clara came home around noon and reported no sighting of her brother or sister.
Unable to shake the feeling of dread, Mrs. Good asked her husband to look for Ashby and Elsie, but Mr. Good felt less concerned and waited until after lunch to go out with Clara and continue the search. The pair spent the afternoon canvassing the area and asking their neighbors if they had seen the children. None had.
By evening, when he returned to his house and learned that Ashby and Elsie still had not found their way home, Mr. Good shared his wife’s fears. At 8 p.m. he fired the shot to signal to his neighbors to join him for a search of the woods. About 20 men set out on horseback and foot with lanterns, but shortly after midnight, with their lamps out of oil, the effort was suspended until morning.
The Good family endured a long night of worry. What could have happened to the children? Were they lost in the great woods near their home? Had an animal harmed them?
Rain was falling when the search resumed at 9 a.m. on Monday. The men divided themselves up into groups to fan out and scour a 600-acre tract of woods first before heading into a smaller, 160-acre wood near the Good family’s home. If Ashby and Elsie were not found in either of those two places, the search would continue in the nearby 2,000 acres of heavy timber that the locals referred to as the “Northwood.”
Before heading out to look, the men agreed to fire a shot when the children were found. About an hour into the search, a shotgun blast rang out. Charles “Charley” Hart was the signaler.
Hart and two other men, who would later implicate Charley as a suspect in the children’s murders, had seen small footprints in the soft earth leading to a brush pile. Charley stayed back as the two men approached the charred heap. There, they discovered the mutilated and burned bodies of the children, with Ashby piled upon Elsie.
Those two searchers later testified to a grand jury that they had found Charley’s behavior suspicious. They said that Charley made no reply to their exclamations when they located the bodies, nor did he come near enough to see the children. Instead, Charley turned and slowly walked toward his own home, a mere 400 feet from the crime scene. There, he fired his father’s gun to signal to the entire search party that the Good children had been found.
Then Charley mounted a mule, rode over the Cincinnati, Jackson & Mackinaw Railroad track, and spoke to the men searching there. Charley seemed to have knowledge of the state of the children’s remains, which cast a shadow of guilt over him after the first two men claimed that he had not gone near enough to see the bodies. How could he know?
The horrific state of the children’s bodies was reported by The Paulding County Republican later that week: Elsie “was lying face downward upon the ground. Her shoes had been removed, and all save the upper portion of her trunk was nude. The fire had burned her flesh in many places, and her head had been all but severed from her body. On one side of her face was the mark of a bludgeon, the blow from which had probably caused her death. Her feet were tied at the ankles with a piece of tar red twine, such as farmers use in binding corn fodder, and the murderer, who had first satisfied his unholy passions, had completely disembowled (sic) her.
“Lying across the body of little Elsie was the charred corpse of her 9-year-old brother. The boy’s hands were tied behind his back, and his trunk and lower limbs had been literally cooked by the fire ignited to destroy the evidence of the crime, but which had failed to accomplish its purpose because of the rain – Heaven’s tears shed because of the cruel fate of two of its bright gifts to mankind. Little Wilson’s temple bore the mark of the bludgeon, and his throat was cut to the bone. His body bore evidence of the same devilish buchery (sic) as that of his sister, and when found was nude save for a little clothing about his shoulders.”
News of the crime spread quickly. Sheriff Ed Staley and the coroner were called to the scene, and soon around 500 people from Cecil and Paulding gathered. By the time the sheriff arrived, several men had congregated around the home of Charley Hart. Sheriff Staley sized up the vengeful tone of the crowd, and after questioning Charley, promptly arrested him and took him to the Paulding County Jail.
Later that day, Sheriff Staley also arrested Charley’s brother-in-law, Clarence Brindle, and another man, Levi Cain, who was reportedly hanging out with Charley the day before when the children had gone missing.
The children’s bodies were examined by the coroner and taken to Thompson Undertakers where hundreds came to view them. “It was a sight that made strong men grow weak and women to weep,” reported the Paulding Democrat on November 8, 1894, under the headlines, “Child Murder Most Foul,” “At Our Very Doors the Most Appalling Crime in the History of Ohio is Committed,” “’Jack-the-Ripper’ Outdone is Fiendish Deviltry,” and “The Baby Girl was Outraged.”
The Paulding County Republican ran with “Horrible! Paulding County’s Fair Name Disgraced by One of the Foulest Crimes Ever Committed” and “Two Children Literally Butchered by Fiends in Human Form.”
The story made national news, and was followed to its conclusion by reporters from prominent newspapers throughout the state of Ohio.
Next time: Charley Hart’s confessions, trial and execution.
More information on the bicentennial can be found on Facebook at www.facebook.com/PauldingCounty200.
