Stranger Than Fiction

September 2024 

The Tell-Tale Initials: How Famed Kansas Journalist William Allen White Cracked a Murder Case
by Dean Jobb

A group of settlers headed west were camped for the night in a ravine near Chelsea, Kansas when a dog’s howls and frantic digging drew them to a secluded spot near a creek. A bone was sticking from the ground—a human bone, part of a man’s leg.

The settlers took over and quickly exposed a skeleton lying in a shallow grave. A bullet hole in the skull revealed that the man had been shot in the back of the head. His clothing and suspenders were intact and a pouch containing a few dollars was found in the grave, but there were no other clues to his identity. A search of the area turned up more clothing, a frying pan, and the handle and blade of a shovel that had broken in two. Three letters were carved into the wooden handle. The owner’s initials, perhaps.

Word of the discovery soon reached El Dorado, a town northeast of Wichita and about a dozen miles from the scene. A cub reporter named William Allen White, home from college for the summer, gathered the details for his paper, El Dorado’s Daily Republican. White would become one of the most famous journalists of the twentieth century, a Pulitzer Prize winner with a national profile who befriended presidents and wielded the power to influence political decisions. Editorials he wrote for his Kansas newspaper, the Emporia Gazette, made him the unofficial voice of Middle America.

In August of 1885, however, this future giant of journalism was eighteen, earned a modest eight dollars a week, and was, by his own admission “a smart aleck” who relished his power to expose, praise, or mock his subjects in print. The week the body was discovered, he was avoiding the target of one of his unflattering reports, who was threatening to horsewhip him in the street. “Language used recklessly,” White discovered, “was dynamite.”

“My reporting gave me a little local fame,” he recalled decades later in his autobiography. “I had no sense of justice then and had great pride in my power.” He was also learning how to craft stories that would entertain as well as inform. Like Mark Twain, one of his journalistic heroes and another product of the Western frontier, “I tried to make all of my items snappy.”

Newspapers across Kansas and in neighboring states and territories republished his brief, snappy report on the murder of the unknown man. It included a detail that would prove to be crucial to cracking the case. The letters carved into the handle of the broken shovel, White revealed, were O.C.K.

 

In the Dakota Territory, 400 miles to the north, relatives of a missing man read about the discovery and were certain they could clear up the mystery.

Oscar C. Krusen had spent the winter in Osage City, Kansas before heading west, toward El Dorado, in search of farmland to buy. He was carrying a small fortune in cash—at least a thousand dollars—and no one had heard from him since May. Krusen had a habit of marking his tools and other belongings with his initials, O.C.K.

Krusen had been traveling with his wife, Hattie, his four-year-old son from a previous marriage, and a hired hand, Orrin Larriway, his wife’s second cousin. Hattie Krusen had returned to Dakota alone. Eyebrows were raised when Larriway showed up a couple of weeks later, claiming that Krusen and his son were still in Kansas and still hunting for a new homestead. Larriway was flush with cash and there was “an unusual intimacy,” as White later termed it, between the cousins. Larriway and Hattie, who unwisely began describing herself as “the widow of Oscar Krusen,” were soon married.

Krusen’s relatives relayed their suspicions to the authorities in El Dorado, who confirmed that clothing on the body and found nearby matched items Krusen had worn. A search of his last residence in Osage City turned up a sack marked with his initials, O.C.K. There was enough circumstantial evidence to dispatch two deputy sheriffs from El Dorado to arrest the couple, who had settled in Elk Point, in what is now South Dakota. They were taken into custody early on the morning of January 5, 1886. “Caught in Bed,” announced a headline in the Daily Republican.

Larriway was charged with murdering Krusen the previous May. His bride was to be prosecuted as an accessory. White, covering his first murder trial, took stock of the suspects when they appeared in court to answer to the charges.

 

Larriway, in his mid-twenties with black hair and beard and a low forehead, sat through the hearing “in a manner of sleepy indifference.” His coaccused, now known as Hattie Larriway, was “small in stature, plump in form” and roughly the same age. She was “quite pretty,” the cub reporter told his readers, even though she exhibited “evident agitation of mind.”

“To think that any human being could be so hard-hearted as to murder a benefactor,” White wrote, “is almost incredible.” Assuming—as almost everyone seemed to assume—that Larriway was the murderer. He stood trial first, in May 1886, in a courthouse packed with spectators and close enough to railroad tracks that passing trains constantly interrupted the proceedings. Seventy men were questioned about their knowledge of the crime, and asked whether they had an open mind about who had killed Krusen, before a jury was empaneled. White boastfully reported that seven of the twelve chosen had learned what they knew of the case from his articles.

El Dorado’s leading criminal lawyer, George Gardner, was retained to help the district attorney build the case against Larriway. “He is rapidly working to the front rank of his profession,” noted White, who was clearly a fan. Gardner, he predicted, would soon be “among the leading attorneys in the state.”

The coroner was called to confirm that the man unearthed from the shallow grave was Krusen. The skeleton was the right size and traces of brown hair and beard, still clinging to the skull, matched Krusen. A grisly scene unfolded when the skull was produced in the courtroom so jurors could be shown where the bullet had entered. The coroner suspected the victim was lying on his side—and possibly asleep—when he was shot.

 

The tell-tale initials on the shovel handle became the main battleground between Gardner and Larriway’s team of court-appointed defense lawyers. A succession of witnesses described Krusen’s obsession with marking his belongings, even the furniture in his home. Larriway’s defenders pushed back; none of them had seen Krusen carve his initials on the shovel handle or could swear the one found at the murder scene was his. Frank Krusen, brought in from Sioux City, Iowa, testified the “K” had been “cut irregularly” and this was the way his late brother had carved the letter.

The most damning evidence, however, unfolded after the jury filed out of the courtroom during a break. Krusen’s son, Johnnie, was on hand for the trial, sometimes perching on the district attorney’s knee as he listened to the testimony. Larriway had dumped him at a rail depot after the murder. “Some naughty man” had killed his father, he had told the boy, instructing him to say his last name was Jones if anyone asked. Johnnie disobeyed, identified himself, and had been taken back to Dakota to live with his Uncle Frank. White watched the child as he wandered over to the exhibit table holding his father’s effects, including the shovel handle. “Why that’s papa’s spade,” he exclaimed.

Letters Larriway had written before the murder sealed his fate. In missives sent to Hattie’s sister, he had described himself as “your future brother-in-law.” Notes sent to his beloved referred to her as his “pet,” his “dearest,” and “my own darling.” Krusen was still alive when he signed one of them with the words, “soon to be your husband, O.E. Larriway.”

White estimated women accounted for two-thirds of the spectators and some were “moved to tears” as the letters were read aloud. He rushed up to Larriway during a break and snagged a brief interview.

 

“You seem to have quite an audience as far as the ladies go.”

A couple of women, Larriway admitted, had been writing to him and had tried to visit him in his jail cell. “I am the center of attraction for once in my life,” he noted. “Although I don’t suppose anyone envies my position.”

After five days of testimony, the jury deliberated for half an hour before finding Larriway guilty of murder in the first degree. He seemed resigned to the verdict, White noted, absorbing the news “without a tremor.”

 

Hattie Larriway’s trial as an accessory to murder, slated to begin the day after the verdict, was put on hold. She was pregnant with her cousin’s child, her lawyer announced, and the ordeal threatened to “materially injure the physical condition of the defendant.” She gave birth to a thirteen-pound girl in July, a few weeks before prosecutors dismissed the charge and set her free. White, channeling Twain, quipped that the baby was “the largest ever born in captivity.”

Larriway, meanwhile, was sentenced to hang and shipped to the state prison in Lansing. Prisoner No. 4004’s sentence was later commuted to life in prison at hard labor and he was sent underground to toil in the prison’s coal mine. His bid for a pardon was rejected in 1896 and there appear to be no surviving records of how long he remained in prison and when and where he died.

White was proud of the role he played in solving the Krusen case. If he had not referred to the initials O.C.K. in his reports on the discovery of the body, Larriway might have gotten away with murder.

“Probably I was mean to him, for in jail he grumbled that I had caused his conviction by printing and coloring the evidence,” White conceded in his autobiography, published two years after his death in 1944. “Larriway’s look of burning hate scorched my self-esteem a little as he left the county jail for a life sentence in the penitentiary.”

Age and experience would tone him down, but the fearless reporting and independent streak he displayed in covering the Krusen murder remained hallmarks of his work for the rest of his life.

“I am blind sometimes to the dangers of indiscretion,” he confessed. “The smart aleck on the El Dorado main street still sometimes leads me into temptation and trouble.”

———

Dean Jobb’s new book A Gentleman and a Thief: The Daring Jewel Heists of a Jazz Age Rogue (Algonquin Books) tells the incredible true story of Arthur Barry, who charmed the elite of 1920s New York while planning some of the most brazen jewel thefts in history. Find him at deanjobb.com

Copyright © 2024 Dean Jobb