In the summer of 1931 Asta Eicher, a fifty-year-old widow from Park Ridge, Illinois, left home with a suitor she had met through a lonely-hearts correspondence club, and soon afterward her three children, Greta, fourteen, Harry, twelve, and Annabel, nine, were collected too. Her neighbors and friends began asking questions. Among her last known contacts was a Cornelius O. Pierson of Clarksburg, West Virginia, and when police in Illinois and West Virginia inquired, they found that no Cornelius Pierson lived there. The description matched a local grocer, Harry F. Powers, and the Clarksburg postmaster said the man who collected Pierson's mail was known to him as Powers. He was arrested in August 1931 with letters to other women in his pockets.
He had been born Harm, or Herman, Drenth in the Netherlands and emigrated with his family to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1910, at eighteen; some accounts give his birth year as 1889. He had earlier been arrested on minor charges under the names John Schroeder and Herman Drenth. Short, heavy and thick-spectacled, he ran a small grocery in Clarksburg's Broad Oaks neighborhood and was married to Luella, whom he had met through her own lonely-hearts advertisement. Through matrimonial clubs he wrote to women across the country, presenting himself as a prosperous man looking for a wife.
On Luella's farm at Quiet Dell, south of Clarksburg, he had built a garage with a basement beneath it. Searchers dug beside it and found the bodies of Asta Eicher and her three children in a ditch. They had been bound with rope, their heads crushed, and Asta was blindfolded. A few yards away the diggers turned up the bankbook of Dorothy Pressler Lemke, fifty, a divorced nurse from Northborough, Massachusetts, who had also been corresponding with him, and then her body. Personal belongings of the victims were found on the property. Powers confessed. The scene became a spectacle: thousands of sightseers came to Quiet Dell, and locals sold tickets and souvenirs. On September 20, 1931, a mob of thousands surrounded the Harrison County jail demanding that he be handed over, and the Clarksburg fire department drove them back with tear gas and fire hoses. He was moved to the state penitentiary for safekeeping. Luella Powers denied knowing anything of her husband's crimes and was never charged.
He was indicted for all five murders and tried for Dorothy Lemke's. Because the Harrison County courthouse was being rebuilt, the trial was held in Moore's Opera House in Clarksburg, beginning on December 7, 1931, and hundreds of people were turned away. Witnesses testified to what had been found in his home and that he had been with the victims and collected their luggage. He testified himself, and his defense blamed the killings on two acquaintances of his who were never shown to exist. The jury, sitting in the star's dressing room, deliberated for less than two hours and on December 12 found him guilty of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to hang.
He was hanged at the West Virginia Penitentiary in Moundsville on March 18, 1932, and was pronounced dead eleven minutes after the drop. He complained to the end that he had been tried in an opera house, where people go to be entertained, after being refused a change of venue. A Clarksburg doctor who witnessed the hanging said afterward that Powers had given him a full confession. He is buried in the prison's Whitegate Cemetery. The murder of the Eicher family inspired Davis Grubb's 1953 novel The Night of the Hunter, later filmed, and Jayne Anne Phillips's 2013 novel Quiet Dell.