LAST WEEK: Tensions grew as Knox County officials investigated the death of a fraternity pledge in late October, 1905. Kenyon College freshman Stewart Pierson was killed by a train on the railroad trestle over the Kokosing River near Gambier. County and college authorities butted heads as the investigation ran its course. Part III of this story was published on Oct. 15. Part II of this story was published on Oct. 8, 2022. Part I of this story was published on Oct. 1, 2022.
Public opinion was split in the aftermath of the Knox County coroner W.W. Scarbrough’s ruling that Kenyon College student Stewart Lathrop Pierson died because he was restrained. Placed on a railroad trestle outside Gambier during a fraternity initiation ritual, Pierson was hit and killed by an unscheduled train.
Most locals stood behind their public officials, but tension was high. As members of the Kenyon football team rode through Mount Vernon to board a train that weekend, they reportedly shouted abusive comments along the way.
The 59th annual convention of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity in New York City issued a press statement that week denouncing the Knox County officials’ findings. According to the DKE, the report “is absolutely false and has no basis …. The coroner, a self-important county official, in asserting the prerogatives of his office, has caused the newspapers all over the country to be filled with groundless and sensational reports.”
Kenyon College student J.A. McGavery, who allegedly helped Scarbrough with his inquiries at the college, was targeted for revenge. According to an article that ran in the Washington Post, McGavery was found bound and gagged in his room at Bexley Hall in early November. He had been robbed of his money and ring, and had a note pinned to his clothes: “This will do this time, but if we come again it will be worse.”
One newspaper in Albuquerque, New Mexico, ran a headline asserting that the chloroform in Pierson’s picnic basket had been used to knock him out before he was tied to the tracks, an assertion that Knox County officials may have suspected, but certainly didn’t state in any official capacity.
A number of other national newspapers ran an outright fabrication claiming that Scarbrough had been approached by figures offering to bribe him to deliver one verdict or another at his inquest. Scarbrough promptly issued a statement saying that no such events had occurred.
Things even turned petty and ridiculous at one point.
The coroner also found his horse gone the morning of Nov. 12 when he opened the barn behind his house on East High Street in Mount Vernon. Thinking the horse had been stolen, Scarbrough incorporated help from Knox County Sheriff Clements and Mount Vernon police chief Dermody.
After a neighbor from East High Street approached the searchers and told them he had seen three young men walking a horse down the sidewalk the previous evening, Scarbrough began to suspect it was related to the Pierson case. Sure enough, the horse was finally discovered abandoned in a field near Gambier.
More seriously, Scarbrough also received an anonymous letter signed “11 members Cleveland alumni of Kenyon College.”
The letter accused the coroner of trying to “advertise himself” by attempting to prove something impossible. The letter closed ominously: “We don’t want to make any threats, but we are in a position to make matters unpleasant for someone providing this matter is not stilled at once.”
The most supportive comments for Kenyon and the DKE fraternity came from Stu Pierson’s father, Newbold. In a press statement, he officially exonerated the college and fraternity from any responsibility in his son’s death.
“I do not for a moment blame the college authorities or the fraternity,” Newbold Pierson said, “and I look upon the very, very sad affair as an accident. Aside from the untimely death of my boy and the great grief that it has caused my family, my chief regret is that the horrible stories have gone broadcast over the country and fierce headlines have been made in many of the daily papers, throwing the most unpleasant notoriety upon the officials of Knox county, Kenyon college and those connected.”
Whatever else that may have taken place behind the scenes is unknown. But the Knox County officials were certainly aware that the looming case would offer tremendous challenges. While they were confident in their examination findings, to pursue criminal charges of, at the very least, manslaughter or negligence would require the rural county to go up against an institution and its associated families that were better funded for such a fight.
When the grand jury met in mid-November, Knox County prosecutor Lot Stillwell did not present anything from the Pierson case to the jurors.
And there it might have remained, a stubborn stalemate.
The difference, though, is that Kenyon has grown as an institution over the ensuing century, and the Pierson story has taken on its own life in area folklore, including stories that name Stewart Pierson as one of the legendary haunts of Kenyon College. Numerous reports have crept up over the years of a solitary candle being seen in the west bullseye window of Old Kenyon, Pierson’s room in 1905.
Having continuing interest in the story, Kenyon has controlled the narrative all this time, placing their version of the story in publications and, in recent decades, on their website.
Enter yours truly. I worked for the Mount Vernon News from 2007 to 2010, and began my nosing around in local history that ended up leading to the History Knox column for Knox Pages a decade later.
Having heard of the Pierson case, I decided to look a little more deeply into it, and discovered that the original rulings of county officials were often either ignored or outright falsified in many modern retellings of the case. I found that disturbing and disrespectful to the long-gone officials, and by extension, to the county itself.
I didn’t have to live long in the area before I discovered that there is sometimes tension between the college and the surrounding populace. More than once, I heard Knox Countians refer to the college as “that place on the hill.”
Beyond reporting the original findings, it didn’t seem at first like there was much more I could do. But I’m nothing if not resourceful. I’m a writer who has also been heavily involved in music, theater, and visual arts. So, one way that I tried to get to know Knox County while I worked at the newspaper was to get involved with the Knox County Art League.
Through that organization, I met artist Marilyn Kousoulas, who introduced me to her husband Jim. I had many great conversations with both of them, during which I discovered that Jim, by then retired, had lived a busy life including a two-decade stint in the military, and extensive work performing guardian ad litem service in the court system.
It turns out that while Jim Kousoulas was in the military, he had been involved in the study and implementation of some of this country’s first extensive criminal forensics programs. After leaving the military, he helped Indiana University set up their criminal forensics program, the first such college program in the U.S., and spent several years teaching criminology there.
Turns out, I had a prominent forensics expert on hand, right here in Knox County.
I approached Jim with the idea of having him examine the newspaper reports about Cincinnati police Detective Crim’s examination of Pierson’s body, and Jim said he’d be glad to take a look at the material and see if there were any modern perspectives he could offer. I handed him the newspaper article, printed from microfiche. I thought it might take Jim a while to pore over the information.
To my surprise, he looked up and spoke with certainty.
“That boy was tied,” Kousoulas said.
I was surprised at his conviction and asked him how sure he was.
“There’s no question,” he replied.
The bluish indentations around Pierson’s wrists and ankles had been dismissed by the Kenyon partisans a century ago as damage from the train impact, so I brought that up.
“That’s impossible,” Jim said.
He proceeded to explain how damage from a moving object does quick, severe destruction, while bluish skin is caused by extended pressure on skin.
“How fast was the train moving?” he asked.
I looked up the reported information.
“Upwards of 50 miles an hour,” I said.
“An object moving at that speed does not cause impact damage,” he said. “It pulverizes whatever it hits.”
We looked over the newspaper reports and found that the only actual part of Stu Pierson’s body that was pulverized was his head. This means that his head was the only part of the student’s body that was directly hit by the train.
Furthermore, Kousoulas said the forensics indicate that the boy’s hand dislocation was not caused by the impact of the train. Again, the speed of the train would not have wrenched him apart, it would have disintegrated him.
The lack of further marks on the hand further proved the true horror of that moment: Stewart Pierson’s hand was not wrenched off his arm by the impact of the train. It was wrenched off by the boy himself, desperately trying to escape the oncoming train. The heartbreaking thing is that since only his head was demolished, it means he almost made it.
I took this devastating information, and prepared a talk for the Elixir Chautauqua Series in 2010, where I used Jim’s modern forensics insights to present the truth that Knox County’s officials had it right from the beginning.
Kenyon College writer-in-residence (and my good friend) Fred Kluge was in the audience that night. Kluge ended up telling some others at Kenyon about my research, and to my surprise, I was asked to write an article for the college’s alumni bulletin.
There was a catch, though.
I was asked to write an article “on spec,” meaning that the college would reserve the right to rewrite what I submitted if they saw fit. I asked a writer friend about this and he said, “They’re basically buying your research. If they want to put their own spin on it, they will.”
With that in mind, I decided to be happy about the commission, but not to expect my byline to make it into the magazine.
And it didn’t. Granted, knowing that was likely, I tried an experimental approach to the article, attempting a narrative non-fiction approach which, in retrospect, I must admit wasn’t very effective.
Regardless, the draft was accepted. I received an email with a long paragraph of changes that would be required, including things like softening the description of tension between college and community.
In my opinion, that would be distorting the actual events which had taken place, and which continue to resonate today.
I decided that it would be best at that point to drop out of the project. I took my preliminary pay and left the project. The finished article was smaller, presenting my research quietly, without further commentary. It looked to me like Kenyon had managed the public discourse pretty smoothly once again.
For the record, I bear no grudge against the editor, who was doing the job required of him. We remain on friendly terms today. And I understand that the college feels a need to manage what they might view as potential bad publicity.
But in this forum, today, I’m writing an opinion piece. And my opinion is that it’s well past time for Kenyon to give up damage control and make a gesture of apology toward the county that has housed them for almost two centuries. The simple fact is, the Knox County officials were correct, and they were subsequently very generous to the college and its students by not pursuing the criminal charges that could indeed have been pursued.
The college did what it had to do to survive a ferocious storm of controversy. But that’s not the case now. It would be a healing gesture, all these years later, to acknowledge that some of their defensive efforts went over the top and insulted the small-town officials who were both honest and competent.
Town and gown relationships are always complex. But basic respect will go a long way.
I’ve not been able to find out much information about the subsequent lives of the students involved in the disastrous stunt. It’s unknown at this point if they harbored guilt the rest of their lives, or rejected it as part of their wealthy privilege.
Considering the number of people involved, perhaps different ones had different reactions. I hope it at least made them aware of the consequences of taking uninformed risks.
I’m glad I went ahead with my conversation with Jim Kousoulas, a true gem of a guy. He passed away just a few years later, in 2013. He is greatly missed.
Around that time, I took a research trip to Cincinnati’s Spring Grove Cemetery to visit the Pierson family plot where Stu and his parents are buried. Accompanying me that day was my dear friend Kimberly Orsborn. She had been my co-worker at the News, and was the one who cheered me to forge onward with my writing at a time when I was uncertain if it was worth the effort.
She specifically encouraged me to dig into the Stewart Pierson case. The trip to Cincy was the last chance I had to have her join me on a road trip adventure before she died of cancer.
Relationships are powerful, tangled things. Stu Pierson and his father were too trusting of tradition and good intentions. Some of Pierson’s supposed friends in the fraternity proved reckless, with disastrous consequences.
The professional relationships of officials turned unpleasant in the aftermath of this terrible event, but there’s still a chance to right a historical wrong all these years later.
The dark tragedy of Stewart Pierson still lingers in the deep fall shadows around Gambier. His memory deserves no less than integrity.
