Flipping through the stack of documents she held in her lap, Susan found two of the sketches the Gehlts had received from the “Warning Killer”. The first was of a man she recognized as Frank, working in some field, guiding a team of horses that were pulling a plow. She was slightly amazed by the amount of detail the artist put into the sketch. Upon closer inspection, she could see rocks hidden in the tilled earth and muscles bunching in the horses’ flanks. Turning the yellowed paper over, Susan saw the message she was quickly becoming familiar with, scrolled in tight writing across the back: “You will never be unfaithful again.”

Laying that page aside, she examined the other sketch—this one was of a young woman and showed her hanging sheets on a clothes line. Susan could tell it had been windy the day Thelma had unknowingly posed for the drawing because wisps of hair were blowing in front of her lovely face, and the sheets already hung were billowing in the breeze, while the sheet she was hanging was plastered to her legs, outlining their shape perfectly. Flipping the drawing to see the reverse, Susan again found the killer’s usual warning written there.

Susan laid the sketches face down atop the other papers on the sofa cushion and began reading the police report that followed. The report detailed the events of September 9, 1930, and the apparent intentional homicide of Frank Gehlt. She skimmed over the names of the arresting officers, the reporting officer, the persons involved (already knowing who was involved in the report) and went straight to the explanation of the case. According to the only surviving person in the house on the night of the murder, Thelma Gehlt, her husband had been out of town with her father, purchasing parts for their tractor and wasn’t due back until the next morning. Their only child, a girl named Frances, was staying with her maternal grandmother, Jaquline, for the week and so was safely away from the house during the murder.

Shortly after midnight, Thelma was awakened by a loud noise. When she heard the strange sound—which she described during her questioning as something that “went bump in the night”—she grabbed her husband’s shotgun from where it stood in the corner of their bedroom. Thelma said that she followed the sound out to the kitchen where it turned out to be Frank arriving home early. Laughing at the situation, she had started to lay the shotgun on the kitchen table, holding it by barrel, when suddenly it went off, shooting him in the abdomen and causing him to drop to the floor. Frantic because she had shot her husband, she called the police and then rushed to his side. Thelma was found covered in his blood, rocking Frank’s dead body when they arrived. Unable to give a clear statement when originally questioned, she was arrested for the murder of her husband on September 9th, 1930.

Attached to the police report was the coroner’s autopsy report. Reading it over, Susan immediately picked up some discrepancies between the coroner’s findings and the officer’s investigation report. Frank Gehlt’s Cause of Death was listed as exsanguination, due to a gunshot wound to the abdomen which perforated the spleen, but the doctor listed several seemingly unrelated injuries that would have lead to his demise if he hadn’t bled out first. All of Frank’s ribs were broken, appearing to have been caused by a crushing blow. The internal organs of his chest were bruised and slightly compressed, and were thought to be similar to those seen after crushing injuries. The blood vessels in his eyes were all ruptured, as occurs in suffocation and smothering deaths. The coroner attributed these ruptures to the mysterious crushing injury that had caused the other wounds. With only the information contained within the police report, the coroner was unable to determine the cause of said wounds and their effect on the last minutes of Frank Gehlt’s life.