True Murder Mysteries of Southwestern Pennsylvania

By A. Parker Burroughs

Historical true crime stories from the southwestern corner of the Keystone State, reaching as far back as 1795.

In the southwest corner of Pennsylvania, beyond the picturesque scenes of the Monongahela River Valley, there are long-forgotten mysteries of scandal and murder. Amid the hardship of life on the frontier of Washington County in 1795, young Isabel Stewart was found dead, and her killer never identified in the oldest unsolved murder in the region. La Mano Nera (the Black Hand) gangs from Calabria, Italy, extorted and slaughtered their way into the 1920s as Sicilian-style vendettas became a common occurrence. The disappearance of local huckster Harry Lane in 1893 caused a flurry of murder conspiracies, yet all that could be found was a bloodied hat; it took another one hundred years before the mystery was solved. Local author Parker Burroughs details gruesome homicides and puzzling whodunits in Pennsylvania coal country.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 5, 2020
• ISBN: 9781439671436

Book preview

1

A SENSE OF EVIL

WASHINGTON COUNTY’S OLDEST UNSOLVED MURDER

March came that year, 1795, as it often does, with a wind whipping up the Ohio River Valley, drying grass and bramble so long covered by snow. It whooshed through stands of pine, lifting dry leaves to swirl in brief little tornadoes and to skitter across a rutted road along which a team of draft horses pulled a heavily loaded wagon.

A man held the reins in his raw and reddened hands, a child and a woman seated next to him on the buckboard bundled in a woolen blanket. Water gushed along Chartiers Creek, its shady bank still covered with snow, and the thawing earth released a subtle scent of promised spring. The road beside the creek led north toward the town called Washington. The little family would pass through there in late morning, turning the team west toward Cross Creek and their new home.

For the woman, Mary, the journey marked yet another fresh start in a life of several new beginnings and much heartbreak and travail. She was born in Ireland in 1756, the second of six daughters. In 1773, when Mary, the daughter, was seventeen years old, the family left Ireland for the colonies and soon began farming in Chester County, Pennsylvania.

Life was hard for the parents, John and Mary Leman, with six daughters and no sons to help with farmwork. Their tract was small and the soil rocky. The Revolution had caused great hardship to fall on the Lemans and their neighbors. They had to share what little they produced with those fighting the British, who had enlisted Indians to attack the settlers.

John Leman heard the siren song of vast lands to the west, nearly free for the taking—lands so fertile that crops barely needed tending. In 1780, he received a Virginia certificate for a 349-acre parcel known as Care a few miles to the southwest of the village of Catfish Camp, which would soon become Washington. By 1783, the family had settled on the tract. In his warrant application, Leman renamed the land Leman Grove. That land is just north of what is now the Washington County Airport.

It is difficult to imagine how the family must have struggled then to clear the land and protect themselves, because they had arrived during the Indian wars that ravaged the frontier. The British rewarded the Delaware and Iroquois for the scalps of settlers, and Pennsylvania’s Supreme Executive Council authorized a bounty for Indian scalps from 1780 until 1783. What resulted were savage attacks and vicious retribution, with whole families killed or abducted and entire Indian villages massacred. Working the fields, and all life outside stockades, was highly dangerous.

Sometime during those early years at Leman Grove, daughter Mary was married to a man named Stewart, a Scotsman and one of many of that name who had come from Northern Ireland to eastern Pennsylvania and then on to the edge of the frontier, lured by the promise of bountiful harvests.

To them was born a girl, Isabella Mary Stewart, named in honor of both Mary’s mother and her youngest sister, who had died at an early age. But little Isabel, as they called her, would not know her father long. After his death, the bond between mother and child tightened, and now, at nine years old, with her mother remarried and another man sharing their house and the seat on the wagon, Isabel could no longer recall Stewart’s face or the sound of his voice.

By afternoon, the wagon bounced and creaked along the Middletown road and soon began to climb the hill toward Buffalo village. From there, the man at the reins, James Ridgeway, would turn the horses to the northwest, toward their new home. Belmont, it was called: 174 acres, much of it cleared, rising up a gentle slope from the north fork of Cross Creek, with a good, sturdy log house and a large barn. Life would be more comfortable there for his wife and her daughter than the small homestead from where they had departed that morning.

As so many of his neighbors had done, Ridgeway came—alone—to Western Pennsylvania (from where, no one now is certain) in search of a more prosperous life, only to be shocked by how harsh and crude life could be beyond civilization, in a lawless land. It was here, though, that solid and enduring friendships were made through mutual need and shared misery.

This 1791 Pennsylvania map shows Washington County in the southwest corner, including all of present-day Greene County and part of Beaver County. Pennsylvania Archives.

Families came to rely heavily on other families for laborious tasks like building cabins and barns, and in other ways, too. The Lemans, with all of their daughters, struck an alliance with their neighbors, the Brownlees, who had nearly as many sons, although one had been lost overboard during their voyage from Scotland. James Brownlee married Jane Leman, and his younger brother William married Jane’s sister Margaret.

By the time Ridgeway was forty years old, he was still a bachelor, and although he could offer no other labor than his own, he had become close to the Leman and Brownlee families. In 1788, he was a witness to the will of Archibald Brownlee and was good friends with Archibald’s sons James and William. James and Jane Brownlee had settled along Chartiers Creek in what would some day become North Franklin Township and there operated a mill to grind corn and wheat. Ridgeway had claimed forty acres called Forest, which was nearly surrounded by William and Margaret Brownlee’s three-hundred-acre property farther south along the creek at Sugar Hill, which is now between Lagonda and the Washington County Airport.

When Ridgeway married the widow Mary Leman Stewart, he and the Brownlees became more than friends; they were now family.

James and Mary Ridgeway were hardly young when they married, and it was not likely that they would have children. By that March morning when the three carted their household from Forest to Belmont, Mary was thirty-nine, no longer even middle-aged at a time when life expectancy for American women was thirty-four, mainly because of the high incidence of child mortality. Still, women could expect to live not much beyond their late fifties. James, at forty-five, was approaching old age.

Though their youth was behind them, hard work was not. Ridgeway had paid 218 pounds, 2 shillings and 6 pence for Belmont. The couple would need to sell their land at Sugar Hill and make their new property profitable in order to pay their debts.

Mary had good reason to be optimistic. The trouble with the Indians was mostly over, as was the terrorization of the area by bandits like the Doane gang. The insurrection over the whiskey tax had threatened to plunge the territory into war, but that rebellion had been put down quickly by President Washington. The excise tax was mostly ignored, and the anger that created, particularly among the small farmers like her husband, had not abated. But at least there was peace.

Quality of life had improved so much since those dark days of the early 1780s. People were arriving from the East every day, bringing with them a taste for the finer things they had left behind. In town, magnificent houses, some made of limestone and furnished with the finest things from Europe, were replacing the crude log cabins that squatted beside the muddy streets. The road they were taking, what we now know as Route 844, once just an Indian path, was now the main thoroughfare to the Ohio River, traveled by so many people headed for the promise of better lives in Ohio and Kentucky.

For Mary, the move to her new home must have been bittersweet. Her father had died in the summer of 1794, and the move would put more distance between her and her widowed mother, and it would deprive little Isabel of the company of her cousins. But she would have had every reason to believe in her husband’s ability to create a better life for his new family and to anticipate this new chapter of her life with hope.

The wagon turned from the Middletown road and followed the trail for a few miles beside the north branch of Cross Creek. Eventually, they reached a clearing and could see ahead of them the gently sloping hill that was their new homestead, a log house and a barn silhouetted against the setting sun.

Mary Ridgeway could see that the next few months or even years might be difficult, but she could not have anticipated the horror and tragedy that lay before her.

ISABEL’S WORLD

In the old place they had lived, Isabel Stewart had no shortage of playmates. More than a dozen of her Brownlee cousins were within a few minutes’ sprint across their families’ fields, close to where the Washington County Airport is today. But since they had moved to Cross Creek Township, the closest neighbor was nearly a mile away, and Isabel would have rarely seen other children. Even if she had new friends, they wouldn’t be running to each other’s houses, not with the danger that lurked in the woods. She most likely had been told many times by her mother and stepfather not to stray beyond the barn, unless she was interested in losing her scalp or being kidnapped.

Most of the Indians had been pushed to the other side of the Ohio River and beyond years ago, and the attacks on White settlers now were rare. But they still happened. Wary parents like Mary Ridgeway, when doing chores outside the house, frequently stopped in their labor to stand and listen, as do deer, eyes scanning the fence line and the surrounding woods for any kind of movement. The man Isabel now called father, James Ridgeway, would have never left for work in the fields without a knife and his gun.

Isabel had no time for play, anyway. She was of an age now, almost ten, when she was expected to work nearly as much as any adult member of the family; their survival depended on it. It would have been her duty to feed the cows, horses, chickens and pigs; to help her mother with washing, cleaning and cooking; and to work beside her stepfather and the men he hired, raking and stacking hay and rye, weeding the gardens and bringing in the harvest.

At the center of Isabel’s new world was a two-story log house seated on a sandstone foundation. Beneath the steps to the front door was the entrance to the root cellar with an earthen floor, and attached to the side of the house was a separate building, the kitchen. The log barn also sat on a stone foundation, and situated about the property were a hog pen, a chicken coop, a stable and an outhouse.

Ridgeway had purchased the property, Belmont, from Andrew and Sarah Walker on February 3, 1795. (It was then in Cross Creek Township; in 1805, township boundaries were redrawn, and the land is now in Mount Pleasant Township.) The Walkers had acquired it from John Leiper, a Revolutionary War veteran who had served under General Anthony Wayne and had fought in some of the most noted battles of the war. Leiper had purchased the land from Joseph Wells, one of a family who laid claim to several thousand acres of land in what would become Washington County but was once part of Virginia and once considered to be owned by indigenous Americans.

The view from the house to the south and east could be breathtaking on a clear day: a vista of rolling hills like sea swells stretching to the horizon. And all around, when the wind was still, columns of smoke rose from the