The Secret Life and Brutal Death of Mamie Thurman - F. Keith Davis

Young Garland Davis discovered beautiful Mamie Thurman's dead body while picking blackberries on Trace Mountain on a summer afternoon in 1932. He literally stumbled across the corpse by accident.

News of the gruesome homicide traveled lightning fast once the state police became involved. State troopers, sheriff deputies, and policemen from Logan and Williamson swarmed the mountainside. Officer Smeltzer first identified the corpse as being Mamie Thurman, a well-known socialitte who was last seen in downtown Logan on Tuesday night, maybe ten hours before.

Now her throat was slit-with two gunshots to her skull. Black and yellow eyes. Bruised, battered, and horribly disfigured.

Her long limp body was lugged by deputies to a nearby tree. In haste, she was awkwardly propped up against a sapling-and she was left there, slumped and looking as if she were deep in thought, as officers continued to investigate a wide circumference from the briar patch where she was uncovered. They scanned for clues, and even found a number of puzzling items that would only broaden their probe.

By that evening, Harry Robertson, a local banker and politician- who was also rumored to be having an explicit relationship with Mamie Thurman-was arrested at his home in Logan, along with Clarence Stephenson, his African American handyman and boarder.

In a further police search held at the Robertson house, blood splatters and clots were found inside Harry's black Model A sedan, along with bloody rags and other evidence found in Robertson's basement, which positioned the murder investigation squarely on the back of Harry Robertson, his wife, Louise, and on his two tenants.

By the next morning, Mary Yvonne Scales, an ace reporter for the local newspaper, was assigned to the story. For her first coverage for the newspaper, The Logan Banner, she typed, "A new crime wave in Logan County, threatening to eclipse all others before it, reached a horrible climax. The victim of one of the most brutal slayings in the history of modern crime, the body of Mrs. Thurman was found about fifteen feet from the road at the top of Trace Mountain, about two and a half miles above Holden, where it was thrown after she had been carried from a car."

The murder mystery continues to unfold in a raw and weird fashion-taking on a variety of harsh turns and unexpected twists-while adding as many as fifteen additional suspects to the case, all romantically entangled with Mrs. Thurman. The violent crime scene shocked local citizens, and generated 72-point headlines circulating across the height and breadth of the Mountain State. News accounts even crossed the borders into neighboring states, as well.

So, who killed young and attractive Mamie Thurman? A banker? A handyman? A doctor? A jealous wife? After over 90 years, this volume attempts to bring a sense of closure to a disturbing murder, and its subsequent haunting.

Since the story oddly paralleled another nationally known murder case, the vile murder mystery of Elizabeth Short-which took place years later, on January 15, 1947-the Mamie Thurman story has since been tagged "The Appalachian Black Dahlia," or the "Blackberry Dahlia."