Harry Powers was hanged at the West Virginia Penitentiary in Moundsville on March 18, 1932, for the murder of Dorothy Lemke, a widow from Massachusetts. He was a married grocer in Clarksburg, West Virginia, who wrote love letters to widows under a false name, posing as a prosperous man in search of a wife. In August 1931 the bodies of Dorothy Lemke, of Asta Eicher, a widow from Park Ridge, Illinois, and of Asta Eicher's three children were found at his property at Quiet Dell, near Clarksburg.
He was charged with the killings that August, according to e-WV, the West Virginia Encyclopedia, and the West Virginia and Regional History Center at West Virginia University says he confessed to the deaths of the two women and three children. He was tried only once, for Dorothy Lemke's death. Because the new Harrison County courthouse was still being built, the trial was held in Moore's Opera House in Clarksburg, and a jury found him guilty in December 1931. The deaths of Asta Eicher and her children were never brought to trial. Newspapers named him the "Bluebeard of Quiet Dell," and the case later gave Davis Grubb the starting point for his 1953 novel The Night of the Hunter.
Little about his early life is established. e-WV, in an entry by Christine M. Kreiser, says he went by several names. He was known in Clarksburg as Harry Powers. He had been arrested on lesser charges under the names John Schroeder and Herman Drenth, and the encyclopedia describes Herman Drenth as perhaps his real name. In his letters to women he signed himself Cornelius O. Pierson and claimed to be a civil engineer.
The West Virginia and Regional History Center reproduces a 1920 police photograph of him from the police department in Dayton, Ohio. The center's account does not say why it was taken.
He was a short, heavy man. e-WV gives his height as five feet four inches and his weight as 175 pounds, and says he wore thick glasses. He ran a small grocery in the Broad Oaks section of Clarksburg, and he was married. His wife had met him through a lonely-hearts ad that she herself had placed, according to e-WV. The property at Quiet Dell, near Clarksburg, is where the bodies were later found.
The scheme that brought the case to light was a correspondence courtship. According to e-WV, Powers obtained information about well-off widows from a matchmaking organization in Detroit and wrote to them, promising marriage. The history center at West Virginia University describes the same pattern: he used a matchmaking service to reach wealthy women, took false names, said he was a civil engineer, and sent them love letters. Both women whose bodies were found at Quiet Dell expected to marry him, the center says, and what he wanted from them was their money.
The Danish Times, a Danish newspaper in Chicago, reported in September 1931 that Powers had met Asta Eicher through a matrimonial agency in Detroit, and that their correspondence began in the early summer of that year. He then visited her at her home in Park Ridge, Illinois, and promised to marry her.
Asta Eicher was a widow. The Danish Times, whose report is preserved in English in the Chicago Foreign Language Press Survey at the Newberry Library, said she was born in Copenhagen in 1880. Her late husband had been born in Switzerland and had lived for years in Denmark, where the two married. The family had been in the United States for about 25 years, the paper said, and Asta Eicher had lived in Park Ridge for several years. The paper counted her and her children among the members of the local Danish community, and it said that news of their deaths had shaken Danes everywhere.
She had three children: Greta, who was 14, Harry, who was 12, and Anabel, who was 9, according to the West Virginia and Regional History Center. The Danish Times spelled the elder daughter's name Grete. In the novel she later wrote about the case, Jayne Anne Phillips spelled the youngest girl's name Annabel. In an interview with NPR in 2013, Phillips said she had felt a responsibility to the children and that writing about them made them real and alive to her, and in a sense saved.
According to the Danish Times, Asta Eicher and her children left Park Ridge on June 28, 1931, and nothing more was heard from them until their bodies were found. The history center gives the sequence slightly differently: Asta Eicher went first to West Virginia with Powers, and he later went back to Illinois to bring her children.
The Danish Times gave the fullest account of what happened in Park Ridge in the weeks after the family left. Powers came back to the town alone on August 23, the paper said, and moved the Eicher furniture into the garage. He told neighbors that the children had gone to Europe and that he and Mrs. Eicher were to be married, and he claimed to hold a power of attorney to sell the house and its furniture.
At the urging of the mayor of Park Ridge, the paper said, he was taken in by local police, who released him at once. The next day police found that valuables were missing from the house, along with part of the correspondence between him and Mrs. Eicher. By then he had gone. Letters left behind showed that Clarksburg, West Virginia, was to have been the couple's future home, and when the Park Ridge inquiry reached Clarksburg, police there learned that the man had used a false name and that the license plates on his car were stolen. Clarksburg police identified him as Harry Powers.
The Danish Times account was written within days of the arrest.
Little is recorded about Dorothy Lemke. She was a widow from Massachusetts, according to the West Virginia and Regional History Center, and like Asta Eicher she traveled with Powers to north central West Virginia expecting to marry him. Her death was the only one of the five for which Powers was ever tried, and the jury's verdict that he murdered her is the only finding of a court in the case.
Police began to investigate the Eicher family's disappearance. When Powers was arrested in Clarksburg, he was carrying letters to other women, the history center says. Newspapers called him "Pierson," the name he had used with Mrs. Eicher.
e-WV says the bodies of the five victims were found at his home at Quiet Dell, together with their personal belongings, and that he was charged with the killings in August 1931. The history center says that he confessed, less than a month before the events at the county jail on September 19, 1931, and led police to the property, where the bodies of Asta Eicher, her three children and Dorothy Lemke were found.
The case drew national attention. NPR's Lynn Neary, reporting in 2013 on Jayne Anne Phillips's novel, said hundreds of reporters went to Quiet Dell in the weeks after the bodies were found, and NPR described the case as one of the first big sensational crime stories of the Depression. A photograph published with that report shows crowds at the site on August 30, 1931.
Phillips grew up hearing about the case from her mother, who had been a child in 1931. Her mother rarely spoke of it, Phillips told NPR, but when the family drove nearby she would say, "There's the road to Quiet Dell." Phillips said her mother's memories were of a long, dusty road, the August heat, cars lined up as far as she could see, and great crowds, and of the sound of people pulling the garage apart for souvenirs.
Powers was held in the Harrison County jail in Clarksburg. On September 19, 1931, according to the West Virginia and Regional History Center, a crowd gathered at the jail to threaten him. The center says the people in it were frustrated by the slow pace of the courts and wanted swift justice. Police expected violence and moved Powers to the state penitentiary at Moundsville.
The case also reached the radio. According to the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina, two West Virginia song publishers, Leighton D. Davies and A. H. Grow, wrote a ballad called "The Crime at Quiet Dell." They said they meant it to answer the idea that West Virginia was a bad state, not to profit from the killings. The song was published and performed on West Virginia radio before Powers came to trial, which worried his lawyer, the collection says, citing an article by Donald Lee Nelson in the JEMF Quarterly in 1972.
Powers was tried in Clarksburg for the murder of Dorothy Lemke. Clarksburg's new Harrison County courthouse was not finished until 1932, according to e-WV. The West Virginia and Regional History Center says the trial was moved to Moore's Opera House both because of that construction and because of the size of the crowds, and e-WV says the opera house was chosen to hold the crowds of spectators.
The jury found him guilty of Dorothy Lemke's murder, and he was sentenced to death by hanging. The history center gives the date as December 12, 1931. He was never tried for the deaths of Asta Eicher and her children.
Under a West Virginia law signed on February 18, 1899, executions in the state had been moved from the counties to the West Virginia Penitentiary at Moundsville, where they were carried out away from public view, according to e-WV's entry on capital punishment. The state then executed by hanging.
Powers was hanged at the penitentiary on March 18, 1932. The date is given by e-WV, by the West Virginia and Regional History Center and by West Virginia Public Broadcasting.
e-WV counts 94 men put to death by the state between 1899 and 1959. The state replaced the gallows with the electric chair in 1949, and the legislature repealed the death penalty in 1965.
The case produced at least one book while it was still news. The West Virginia and Regional History Center holds a copy of Love Murders of Harry Powers: Beware Such Bluebeards, published in 1931 and credited in the center's bibliography to Evan Bartlett of the Sheffel Press, New York. The center says it was written by Powers's former lawyer and presents itself as factual but is often sensational.
Davis Grubb was born in 1919 and grew up in Moundsville. e-WV's entry on Harrison County says that Grubb, who worked in Clarksburg for several years, based The Night of the Hunter on the Quiet Dell murders, and e-WV's entry on Clarksburg says Powers lived in the city and inspired the novel. The West Virginia and Regional History Center says Grubb knew the story and loosely based characters in the book on it. The center holds his original typescripts of a short story called "Gentleman Friend," which became the novel, and a first draft of the novel with his revisions and handwritten notes.
The Night of the Hunter was Grubb's first novel. Published in 1953, it is set in and near Moundsville and follows a preacher who menaces two young children to learn where their father hid his money, according to e-WV. In the film of 1955, the only one directed by the actor Charles Laughton, Robert Mitchum played the preacher, Shelley Winters played a widow, and Lillian Gish also starred; Laughton wrote the screenplay with James Agee. The history center says the film was poorly received at first but later gained a following and was chosen by the Library of Congress for preservation. A television version followed in 1991.
In 2013 Jayne Anne Phillips, a novelist from Buckhannon, West Virginia, published Quiet Dell, a novel about the case. e-WV describes it as based on the 1931 murders of two women and three children at Quiet Dell. The West Virginia and Regional History Center says the book is partly fictional but relies heavily on the historical record and uses the real names of the victims and of others involved. Its central character, a young Chicago woman who covers the case as a reporter, is invented, NPR reported.
The five deaths: Powers was convicted of one murder, that of Dorothy Lemke. He was charged with the Quiet Dell killings in August 1931, according to e-WV, and the West Virginia and Regional History Center says he confessed to killing the two women and three children. No court ever ruled on the deaths of Asta Eicher and her children. West Virginia Public Broadcasting, in a 2019 item marking the anniversary of his execution, said he was convicted in late 1931 of murdering both women and the three children; the other sources say he was tried and convicted only for Dorothy Lemke's death.
His name: e-WV calls Herman Drenth perhaps his real name. The reports do not give his birth date or birthplace.
Grubb's birthplace: e-WV's entry on Davis Grubb says he was born in Moundsville; the West Virginia and Regional History Center says he was born in Clarksburg and raised in Moundsville.
The verdict date: the history center gives December 12, 1931, as the day he was found guilty and sentenced; e-WV gives no date.
The Eicher family's journey: the Danish Times said the mother and children left Park Ridge together on June 28, 1931; the history center says Powers came back to Illinois for the children after their mother had gone to West Virginia.
1920: Police in Dayton, Ohio, photograph him (West Virginia and Regional History Center).
Early summer 1931: He begins writing to Asta Eicher of Park Ridge, Illinois, through a matrimonial agency in Detroit (Danish Times).
June 28, 1931: Asta Eicher and her children leave Park Ridge, according to the Danish Times.
August 23, 1931: He returns to Park Ridge alone, the Danish Times reported.
August 1931: He is charged with the killings at Quiet Dell (e-WV). Less than a month before September 19, he confesses and leads police to the property, where the five bodies are found (West Virginia and Regional History Center).
August 30, 1931: Crowds gather at the site (NPR photograph caption).
September 4, 1931: The Danish Times in Chicago reports the deaths of the Eicher family.
September 19, 1931: A crowd gathers at the Harrison County jail to threaten him; he is moved to the penitentiary at Moundsville.
December 1931: Tried at Moore's Opera House in Clarksburg; convicted of the murder of Dorothy Lemke and sentenced to hang (dated December 12 by the West Virginia and Regional History Center).
March 18, 1932: Hanged at the West Virginia Penitentiary, Moundsville.
1953: Davis Grubb publishes The Night of the Hunter.
1955: The film of The Night of the Hunter is released.
2013: Jayne Anne Phillips publishes Quiet Dell.