Post by Joanna on Mar 13, 2015 21:10:37 GMT -5
Murder or Suicide for Spite?
A macabre, decades-old secret hangs over the New England farming town of Newbury, Vermont, on the banks of the Connecticut River. Now, a retired judge claims he has solved the mystery.
Prosperous, but unpopular, dairy farmer Orville Gibson (above) disappeared in the wee hours of New Year’s Eve morning in 1957. Three months later, his body was pulled from the river. The case remains officially unsolved, but for decades, it has been widely accepted that a small mob of drunken townsfolk, incensed by rumors that Gibson had beaten his elderly hired man, kidnaped him, tied him up and threw him into the trunk of a car where he suffocated. When they discovered he was dead, they tossed his body into the river. The crime was deemed a “lynching” by editorial writers throughout the country and the story became so popular it was featured in Life magazine. “You can go anywhere, quite a ways off and if you say you’re from Newbury, they’ll bring it up,” observed Eleanor Placey, 72, who was related to Gibson by marriage.
Two men were tried for the murder, but both were acquitted. So what really happened?
Judge Stephen Martin, a young lawyer just beginning his career in 1960, assisted in the representation of Frank Carpenter, one of the accused men. Now he has published a book in which he argues Orville Gibson committed suicide – with some ingenuity and difficulty – in a largely successful attempt to get revenge on his neighbors by pinning the blame on them. In Orville’s Revenge: The Anatomy of a Suicide, Martin claims Gibson, broken by the criminal charge he was facing in the beating of his hired man and the enmity he had created among his neighbors, staged evidence at his farm, walked across the bridge to New Hampshire, walked out onto a pier, tied himself up and rolled himself into the water. “He was very proud, quick to hold a grudge and his whole life was crashing down upon him,” Martin explained in an interview. He has taken his conclusions to the Vermont attorney general’s office, whose investigators plan to take another look. They could reclassify the case, which would remove it from the list of Vermont’s unsolved homicides.
But not everybody buys Martin’s theory. “I don’t know why a supposedly intelligent man like Judge Martin would say that,” said Doris McClintock, 75, Gibson’s niece, who still believes some of her neighbors know what happened to her uncle. McClintock and the Placey family offer point-by-point rebuttals of why they believe Martin’s book is inaccurate, alleging he gets basic facts wrong, while ignoring others that do not fit his thesis. They speak of threats they believe were intended to keep people quiet, including one in which a note was stuck with a knife to a tree outside the home of a potential witness.
CBS affiliate WCAX reported that Larry Washburn and Bill Graham, both state troopers in 1957, questioned dozens of Newbury residents, but no one admitted knowing anything. “A lot of secrecy. No one was talking,” Washburn related.
Martin’s theory isn’t entirely new, but the book lays it out in detail. The idea that Gibson could have tied himself up was brought up during the second trial, but investigators didn’t accept it. Gibson, who was 47 at the time of his death, came to Newbury with his family as a child. He purchased the farm out of foreclosure several years before his death and over the years, built it up to be one of the richest properties in the fertile land along the river.
But he never fit in. He and his wife weren’t part of the partying crowd. He drew resentment for being the early bird at the courthouse to purchase his property, beating more established townspeople who had wanted it. And then came the last straw – the story about the beating of his hired man. Gibson was charged with a crime, though some argue the man’s injuries were exaggerated by the town’s rumor mill. On the day Gibson disappeared, he had planned to contact a lawyer.
David Placey (Eleanor Placey’s husband), now 71, responded to a call from Gibson’s wife the day of the disappearance. Mrs. Gibson reported her husband hadn’t returned from the morning milking and when Placey investigated, he checked the barn (pictured above as it appears today) and discovered what appeared to depressions in a bag of grain where he believed two men had sat, as well as drag marks and a crushed milking pail. “It was pretty plain that something happened there; there was not a question in your mind,” Placey said recently.
Police dragged the river, but found nothing. Then at the end of March, troopers discovered Gibson’s body approximately miles downstream in Bradford. He was wearing his farm clothes, his ankles were bound and his hands were tied behind his knees. The corpse was in remarkable condition, likely because the cold water had preserved the body. The death certificate lists “suffocation (means unknown)” as the cause of death.
It wasn’t until the fall of 1958 that a physician revealed to investigators that he had driven by Gibson’s barn the morning the farmer disappeared and saw a car and two men that he recognized. The men were Robert “Ozzie” Welch and Frank Carpenter and they were tried separately for Gibson’s murder. Welch was released after the judge deemed the evidence against him insufficient, and a jury found Carpenter not guilty.
Martin, who became a judge in 1970 and retired in 1998, argues investigators never considered any possibilities other than a vigilante killing. He is seeking the support of the Vidocq Society, a private organization of sleuths who specialize in solving old crimes. Society member Peter Stephenson reported he believes Martin’s explanation. If vigilantes had killed Gibson, his body would have been beaten to a pulp. And by killing himself, Gibson was able to take control of a life that was spiraling downward, he said. “If you look at Orville’s behavior pre-crime, you’ll find that a lot of people had tried to take control of his life,” Stephenson insisted.
Unfortunately, most of the original players are now dead. Gibson’s wife died in 1973, Welch died two months after his trial and Carpenter died in 1972.
Despite the ugly memories, Gibson’s niece believes it is good that people are talking about her uncle again. “We would just like to know the answers,” she said. “I don’t think there’s any purpose to trying to arrest anyone. It’s way past time for that.”
Sources: CBS News, March 9, 2015; and Unsolved in Vermont.
