Pennsylvania Oddities

In Manheim Township, just north of the city of Lancaster, there flows a tiny stream which has its source near Roseville. This little brook, an unnamed tributary of Landis Run, is little more than a trickle, and although it flows for a distance of less than two miles from Roseville to Eden, there is a long and astonishing list of curious deaths associated with it-- a list that, to my knowledge, has no parallel in the Keystone State.

On June 15, 1934, the body of a missing four-year-old girl, Leah Minerva Dilley, was found after nearly two weeks of searching, in a spot more than three miles from her home-- under extremely bizarre circumstances.

Leah had died from cyanide poisoning resulting from a careless fumigator, before her body was transported to a field and burned in a bonfire, over which three unsuspecting children toasted marshmallows.

Around five o'clock on Saturday evening, March 7, 1953, a TV repairman was at work in his basement workshop, unaware that he was about to step into a nightmare more terrifying than any late-night horror flick that he or his customers had ever viewed on their television screen.

When Paul Schultz went upstairs in his home in Nazareth, his wife, Claire, asked him to go out and look for their two children, who hadn't been seen since two o'clock. The search for the Schultz children didn't take very long at all; Paul found his children partially submerged in the shallow, ice-crusted stream behind their home.

This month marks the 73rd anniversary of the unsolved murder of Gail and Paul Schultz, Jr., who were slain just two hundred yards away from their home-- in broad daylight on a Saturday afternoon.

Of all the missing persons cases in the history of the United States, few have made as indelible a mark as the 1938 disappearance of four-year-old Marjorie West. The mystery surrounding Marjorie's unexplained disappearance from a Mother's Day outing has been the subject of books, television shows and magazine articles. In fact, one British newspaper, The Guardian, has referred to the case one of the "great unsolved mysteries of the missing."

In 1826, the citizens of Lebanon were horrified to learn that a murder had taken place in their peaceful, idyllic community. In every household throughout the county the crime was discussed, while parents and preachers alike used the murder and the subsequent execution of the killer as a teaching device in order to illustrate the perils of intoxication and the evils of liquor. This is the story of the first execution in the history of Lebanon County.

For most of its history, Mechanics Grove was a quiet, unassuming community amid the rolling farmlands of Lancaster County. But things changed in 1935, when authorities went searching for a missing Maryland woman and uncovered a "hospital of horror" inside a farmhouse owned by a disreputable, drug-addicted physician known as as Doc Zimmerly.

For most of his 63 years on earth, Hugh Smith was a respected resident of Liberty Valley. Hugh owned 380 acres of land in Perry County, and he earned a handsome living renting out his lands to sawmill operators. And for 28 of those years, the respectable Hugh Smith may have carried with him the belief that he had gotten away with the perfect murder-- of a young "half-witted" woman known to locals as Crazy Lindy.

During the Great Depression, there lived in Fayette County a mountain man named Iley Tate who ruled the hill country between Haydentown to the West Virginia line like a feudal lord. Tate, a father of 20, had amassed considerable wealth as a livestock trader, and, because of his influence and steel-cold demeanor, he had a number of local lawmen and politicians in his hip pocket. Like many powerful men in similiar positions, Iley Tate came to think of himself as untouchable; but this was an illusion that came to a shattering end in the fall of 1932.

This is the story of Iley and the Tate family-- a family notorious for feuding, fighting, fornicating... and committing the occasional murder.

On April 7, 1930, two men entered a shallow cave near Shohola to escape a sudden thunderstorm-- and discovered the skeletal remains of a murder victim.

The news of the mystery skeleton caught the attention of a probation officer from New York, who had been told a peculiar story a few years earlier about a mountain man who had lured a stranger to his death near Shohola. Though many pieces of the forgotten story fit together perfectly, authorities were never able to identify the victim, or his killer.

On a February evening in 1944, Dr. Louis Schulman, a prominent 42-year-old physician, was gunned down on the streets of Pittsburgh by a former patient. The killer was Martha Ashear, a Syrian immigrant who claimed that she had taken matters into her own hands after no one believed the shocking accusations she had made against Dr. Schulman.

Was Martha telling the truth? Or did Pittsburgh's medical community attempt to protect the reputation of one of their own by discrediting Dr. Schulman's accuser and having her placed into a mental asylum?