MOUNT VERNON — Historical research is never finished. There’s always the chance of additional information popping up from some forgotten file or box of papers somewhere.
For me, that possibility is an addictive tease that keeps me working on some stories for decades.
Last Thursday evening, before talking at the Elixir Presents: Chautauqua Series at the Grand Hotel in Mount Vernon about my book The Ceely Rose Murders at Malabar Farm, I updated the audience on a previous case I had spoken about to the group in 2019, which was a year after I did a series of four columns related directly or tangentially to Mount Vernon’s most infamous unsolved murder case: the assault and murder of Miranda Bricker on the lawn of the Maplehurst Mansion in 1905.
For those who wish to review the case, the four stories can be found here:
1. The Maplehurst Murder, Part I: An open and shut case?
2. The Maplehurst Murder, Part II: The unraveling
3. A medal awaits the Copeland family
4. Follow up: from the Maplehurst Murder to Hollywood
Today we add a fifth column in the series by tentatively naming a person of interest, who may possibly prove a viable suspect. It’s a speculative move, to be sure, naming a criminal suspect over a century after the commission of a crime, when everyone involved in the case and its investigation is long gone.
And it remains nothing more than a possible solution for a case that is so cold as to be essentially unsolvable. But everyone loves trying to solve a mystery, so here we go.
Two things we know about the assailant who raped and strangled Miranda Bricker was that he was a male and that he was Black. Sexual assault with traces of semen were evident on Bricker’s body, and in her ferocious self-defense, she had clawed at her assailant, gathering Black skin pigment under her fingernails.
When Sherriff James Shellenbarger used bloodhounds to track the assailant from the crime scene and ended up at the Copeland household, he jumped to the conclusion that the young Black man George Copeland was therefore the assailant.
The dogs, however, never identified Copeland as the scent they were after, a huge error on the sheriff’s part. A newspaper article reports that Copeland knew what the bloodhounds were being used to track because he had already heard about the Bricker murder the day it happened, “from a friend.” The friend’s name is never given.
Considering that bloodhounds tend to be quite accurate in tracking scents, the possibility which emerges is that the dogs correctly tracked the assailant’s scent to the Copeland house at the corner of Ann and McKenzie Streets. It just wasn’t George Copeland they were tracking. It was the unnamed friend.
With this in mind, I decided to attempt to gather a list of potential people of interest. I went page by page through the entire Mount Vernon census from the nearest pertinent years: 1900 and 1910, and noted the name of every African-American male recorded as living in the town. This is an imperfect search net, as it cannot account for anyone who could have moved into town and back out again in the intervening years. But it is one of the few possible starting points available to an investigator at this late date.
My approach was to list all of these boys and men who potentially matched what little was known about the assailant, and use that as a base list for investigations of the subsequent lives of these men.
That is one tool we have that investigators at the time did not: We have the chance to observe the later lives of these individuals.
As expected, most of them were normal people who led normal lives. There was one individual, however, who really caught my eye. His name was George Newman. He is recorded in the 1900 census, but not in the 1910 census, suggesting he had left Mount Vernon.
Searches under that name — which is very difficult, considering that it is a rather common name — returned a lot of useless static, until I found one very compelling hit: A man named George Newman — who may or may not be the same as the Mount Vernon George Newman — went to prison in Ohio in 1915.
This George Newman is identified in a newspaper article as a Black man, but little more information is forthcoming. He was only in the newspaper because after going to the Ohio Penitentiary (not apparently newsworthy) and walking away from a prison honor farm in London, Ohio, (also not apparently newsworthy), he finally did something unusual. Newman became interesting to the media when he took the rare step of turning himself in to the prison authorities before they caught him.
Apparently, Newman had decided that the risk of staying out of prison was too great, and that he’d be doing himself a favor if he turned himself in. He was subsequently sent to the Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield for the remainder of his sentence.
Why is this person of the same name potentially interesting as a suspect?
Because the crime he was sent to prison for was also sexual: The prison report about Newman’s escape identifies his crime as “incest,” and one of the newspapers specifically states that Newman was in prison for “assaulting his daughter.”
It is not the same crime as the one committed in Mount Vernon, but the nature of the crime is similar enough to suggest a sexual derangement in the perpetrator of both. If the Mount Vernon George Newman was in fact Miranda Bricker’s assailant, it provokes an unpleasant thought: Newman was only 16½ years old at the time of Bricker’s death. If he was still in his mid teens and hadn’t yet fully grown, that might help explain why Bricker was able to drag him for 400 feet as they fought, as opposed to a beefy football player like the full-grown George Copeland.
The same report which identifies Newman’s crime also says that he was admitted from Clermont County, east of Cincinnati, where the county seat is Batavia. This tells us nothing one way or another, for we have no idea where the Mount Vernon George Newman went when he left town.
The family he came from had certainly traveled before, with his grandfather having been recorded on the Virginia census in 1880 before the family moved to Ohio. The 1900 census shows the grandfather, Jerome Newman, living here with his grandson. This detailed census says that Jerome was born in February 1843 in Virginia, and that George was born there in August 1888, suggesting that the move to Ohio followed that.
In the 1880 census, Jerome was shown married to a woman named Gracie, and they had had two children: Lauretta, aged 12, and Joseph, aged 6, who were both born in North Carolina, showing that the family had moved quite a lot over the years, at least from Virginia (where Jerome was born) to North Carolina (where Gracie and the children were born), then back to Virginia, then finally to Ohio.
Was one of those two children on the 1880 census to become the father of George just eight years later? Or was there another, older child that is as of yet unknown?
Whoever the parent or parents of George were, they left him behind with his grandparents. A Mount Vernon News obituary from June of 1899 reports on the death of Gracie, “a well-known colored lady residing on East Front St.” from cancer, aged 49. Young George is not mentioned, though a “Mrs. Jackson” of Columbus is mentioned as a surviving daughter.
Perhaps that was the married name of Lauretta Newman, though further searches returned no information under that name.
Back to our prisoner. A later newspaper report records a peculiar attempt by inmate George Newman to curry favor: In August of 1916, he hand-made a pink horseshoe by carving it from a clam shell and decorating it with four oyster pearls. He sent it to then-governor of Ohio Frank Willis, wishing him good luck on his upcoming re-election campaign. Of course, he had an ulterior motive, including a note that said, “Trusting to your honor and justice that I may be freed to provide for my family.”
Whether that helped his case or not is not known, but the inmate George Newman was released from the Ohio State Reformatory by mid 1917. A newspaper report from Zanesville in June of 1917 noted that this Newman had been arrested for public drunkenness and for carrying an open knife, both of which were violations of his parole terms.
He was described as being held for return to the Reformatory, though later information is elusive. His later whereabouts are currently unknown.
At this time, I have not yet been able to prove that the Mount Vernon George Newman and the prison George Newman are the same person. It is a common name, and there were several by that name living in the state of Ohio in the early 1900s.
So, why should one put suspicion on this person, with only a name similarity and a later criminal career to suggest troubling behavior?
The answer is simple, but strong: In the 1900 census, the person the young George Newman is living with is his grandfather, Jerome Newman. This is the same Jerome Newman who, just a few years later, is living with the Copeland family, which is the residence to which the bloodhounds tracked the path of the killer.
As George Newman kept in contact with his grandfather, might he have been the unnamed friend who told George Copeland about the murder? Jerome is even quoted in one article as saying that he heard about the murder from his grandson over the telephone on Sunday, the day the murder happened.
This proves that George Newman had knowledge of the murder very early on. Does it prove that he was the perpetrator? Not at all. But it certainly makes him a person of interest.
This knowledge was likely also held by Knox County prosecutor Lot Stillwell, and explains why he made remarks to the press that further inquiries were being made. It may be that Stillwell suspected George Newman for the same reasons I do: 1) Proximity, and 2) Knowledge of the crime before it had circulated widely through the community.
But with the case against Copeland taking a week to unravel, and the use of bloodhounds going awry, it seems Stillwell didn’t dare to try another tracking exercise after a full week of spring weather. Thus, he had nothing else to go on.
At least we today have the subsequent devious history of George Newman, if the prisoner turns out to have been the same man as the boy on the 1900 census. This is something Lot Stillwell could not have foreseen.
It is also evident from the records that George Newman left Mount Vernon before 1910, which would have been a logical enough move for someone who had perpetrated a major crime, though it could also be because his grandfather Jerome moved to the Old Soldiers and Sailors home in Sandusky, where he died in 1911. Or it could have been a reason as simple as work which led George Newman to leave Mount Vernon. We simply don’t know.
At this point, documentation is lacking to further bring Newman into focus. We don’t even have a physical description of him, let alone a photograph. So the case remains very much up in the air.
Only further research will turn up any lingering clues.
