By Kristy Matthews
Article 1:
One of the biggest mortal sins in the eyes of the Puritans is adultery, because it threatened the sanctity of marriage and the sacred bond of family. There are many legends among New England folklore that speak of the consequences for committing adultery. One case in particular tells the tale of a wife that was beheaded by her husband for her betrayal, and it is said that she now haunts the land deep in the woods in a white gown covered in blood, minus her head of course. These sightings have been reported by numerous eye witnesses since the beginning of the 1800s. Another incident that took place in Maine concerns a man and a woman who met regularly in a wooded area, both of which were married to other people. They were content keeping their affair running as long as possible, however, one night, just as the couple began to start their physical relations, an odd young man made an appearance a few feet from where they laid in the grass. Just then, the woman began to hear the saddest wailing that had ever touched her eyes, and it forced the two lovers apart. As the lovers separated, the young man stood on the edge of the glen, looking down into the raging waters below. He continued his deeply sorrowful crying, however the woman’s lover heard and saw nothing. He began to question whether or not the woman’s mind was still sane, or if she was beginning to have some kind of mental breakdown. When the woman attempted to put her hand on the stranger’s shoulder, she found her hand passed right through him. As she turned to call the gentleman that had come there with her, she found that he had left her and taken off for home. The woman herself wanted to leave, yet something held her there. Suddenly, the young stranger began projecting images of his story into her mind. She saw a happy family. A wife, two beautiful children, and the young stranger, the husband. However, the happy images soon turned dark, and she felt the pain behind the stranger’s eyes. She began to see new images. These images showed her the young man’s wife in the arms of another. Then, a lone image of the young stranger standing before her, throwing himself off a stone bridge late one February night. He broke straight through the ice below, and sunk down deep into the icy waters. A few minutes later he was gone. He had killed himself by drowning. He now spends eternity roaming the woods where his wife had betrayed him, his spirit endlessly weeping for the life he lost for his wife’s adultery. In knowing there was no way she could possible console his spirit, she ran home to her family and her husband. She was never unfaithful again, because she had seen how destructive the act of committing adultery could be.
The tales you’ve just read are based on legends and folklore. They were necessary in order to set up the next tale you’re going to read. The only difference is, this story is TRUE. This is the true story of a murder with a paranormal origin. This is NOT a ghost story. This is a True Crime story with a significant paranormal influence. Some events regarding this murder are mysterious in origin, and a satisfactory explanation for what happened has never been given.
There are many stories that come from the old Union Cemetery. One in particular is the case of a man who lusted after another man’s wife, which ultimately led to murder. Three lives, including the life of the killer himself, were destroyed because of one selfish man. Several decades ago, one autumn was particularly warm and summerlike. These warm days continued all the way into the middle of November. The woman of the story is Ellen, and she was deemed one of the most attractive women in all of Connecticut, and she was happily married to a man named John Smathers. John was a hard-working man who spent his days slaving away at a nearby plant, and most of his weekends travelling across the countryside, because he loved the outdoors. A man by the name of Richard Jason, also lived in Monroe and he watched Ellen Smathers often. She frequently passed by Union Cemetery as walked about the town, especially on gorgeous sunny days.
Richard Jason was a very mysterious man, and although he’d only been in the area a short time and possessed no type of job producing income, he still managed to live reasonably well. He rented a small apartment in an old boarding house and spent most of his time adapting to his surroundings and mingling with older residents in the area. The story of his life as a carnival worker was never authenticated, however, it’s been said that he had spent most of his younger year working for a mentalist named Swami Lorenz. It is rumored that one day Swami looked into his crystal ball and saw something most disturbing to him. He saw Jason take the trapeze artist, Narda, into a ride called the Tunnel of Love. It was there that he saw Richard try to choke her because he had become aware she had been unfaithful to him, and Lorenz warned Richard Jason not to take her into the Tunnel. However, Richard Jason did not listen and took her there anyway. There in the darkness, a sudden uncontrollable rage came over Jason, and he began accusing Narda of betraying him, and was choking her as Swami managed to catch up to them just in time to save the young woman. Filled with shame, Jason then fled the carnival and never looked back. He spent years floating around the country until he finally found himself in the area of Union Cemetery.
That particular autumn, Richard Jason became obsessed with Ellen Smathers. He began stalking her everywhere she went, and he often found himself trying to convince her to accompany him on different outings. He also began phoning her constantly whenever he knew her husband was away. Witnesses who knew him at this time frequently stated that he was literally insane over her. He began taking pictures of her and reportedly carried them everywhere he went. He would stare at the pictures of her and then set out to find her wherever she was. His landlord informed the police of an incident she witnessed one stormy night shortly after Jason began his lease with her boarding house. She was fixing her tea late one night, when all of a sudden, she heard a ruckus coming from Jason’s apartment. So, she went upstairs to find out what was happening and when he came to the door, she saw that the entire place was turned upside down. Cups, plates, and saucers were all smashed to bits on the floor, however the strangest thing she noticed was that behind him, floating in midair was a plate slowly moving across Jason’s room with nothing and no one holding onto it.
The landlord was an avid reader of Fate magazine, and she knew all about Poltergeist activity. She knew that in general, that kind of activity usually centered around children, however she also knew that in some extreme cases, it could focus around the troubled mind of an adult, an adult which could be termed psychotic. For the next few days, the landlord tried to sneak her way into the apartment to see if Jason possessed any kind of occult paraphernalia, but unfortunately, Jason went against the house rules and padlocked his apartment, and the landlord was too scared to ask him for a key.
Day in and day out Jason stalked Ellen Smathers. He honestly believed that someday she would be his possession in every sense of the word. He believed she would not merely leave her husband willingly, but that she give herself to Jason completely, he would rule her indefinitely, and she would love every minute of it. Eventually, John Smathers caught onto Jason and the stalking of his wife, and a few townspeople even reported John paying Jason a visit on a few different occasions, angrily warning Jason to remove himself from Ellen’s life. Then, Jason’s obsession with Ellen and the fantasy he had of her becoming his, took a deadly turn.
Jason had become convinced that the only way Ellen could ever be his, is if John Smathers were eliminated and Ellen became a widow. Over the course of the next month, Richard Jason designed his plan for committing murder. He would kill John Smathers and bury his body down in a sinkhole near Union Cemetery. He planned on weighing the body down so heavily that it would sink so far down, no one would ever be able to find it again.
For almost a week Ellen had been left home alone, and she assumed that Jason had finally taken a hint and given up on her, so she enjoyed spending a peaceful week in her home. However, things took a turn for the worst. John never made it home from work one night. At first, she wasn’t alarmed because he raked in a lot of overtime hours and she thought he would call her to tell her he was working over and when he would be coming home. Sometime around midnight she began to panic. John was the most reliable person she knew and he’d always call her no matter what. The next morning, Ellen called the police and they began an investigation. They received word that John had left work on time, and was headed straight home, and somewhere along his ride home, he disappeared.
As he would later come to tell the police, Richard Jason was standing at his sink shaving when he suddenly felt the temperature in his bathroom drop ten degrees instantly. His first thought was that maybe a window had suddenly blown open from an outside wind, but he quickly realized the bathroom door was shut and there were no windows in the bathroom. He then he was hit with the foul smell of a terrible stench, a stench in which he compared to a hog being killed on a hot day back in his hometown he grew up in. Then, he realized that someone was standing behind him. He looked away from the mirror in front of him for only a second, but when he gazed back up into it, he saw a dark manlike figure in the glass standing right behind him. At this point, he froze. He wanted to scream, but was completely helpless to do so. The shape began moving across the room and then walked directly into the wall and vanished.
Leaving shaving cream still on his face, Jason went running for his bedroom and sat down on the edge of his bed, uneasy about what he had just witnessed. He then began reliving the events that had taken place the previous night. He remembered following John Smathers to his car, knocking him out, bludgeoning his head with a hammer, and then taking him to the sinkhole, weighing the body down, and then pushing him so far down in the sinkhole his body would never be recovered. ‘Everything is going to be just fine’ Jason reasoned with himself all that night. It was his belief that Ellen would soon come to believe that John had moved on and left her and turn to Jason for comfort, him being the man who had loved her for so long after all.
Jason now sat in his room shivering from the still dropping temperature, and he kept trying to convince himself that what he had just seen in the bathroom was nothing more than a mere illusion, a hallucination of some sort. He blamed his vision on the fact that he was exhausted and incredibly nervous, and therefore his mind was merely playing tricks on him. However, the next thing he knew, the floor boards began creaking beneath his feet and he looked up to see the same dark figure standing next to the dresser in his bedroom, as it re-emerged from the wall again. At this point, Jason ran out of the room, ripped open the front door, and screamed for his landlord to get up there to him as fast as possible. Although he knew how embarrassing this was, he couldn’t deny what he was seeing. He thought maybe a second opinion would ease his troubled mind.
“In my room”, he said when the landlord finally made her way to him. “There’s something in there!” She shot him a strange look, like he was crazy, then simply shook her head and entered the room. This particular landlord had more than her fair share of dealing with people suffering from delirium tremens, and she knew that excessive drinking was a cause of the dream process being inhibited, making a person unable to dream while they’re asleep, and therefore, alcoholics, such as Richard Jason, start dreaming while they’re awake instead. To her, that’s exactly what all this was, a nightmare taking place while he was awake. Still, she searched his bedroom, and bathroom, and to her amazement, she found exactly what she thought she would, absolutely nothing. By this time, most of her other boarders had begun congregating in the hallway to see what was happening. No one in the boarding house was particularly fond of Jason anyway, they neither liked him nor trusted him, so they all just stared knowingly at him, their eyes accusing him of a crime they couldn’t possibly know he committed, yet. No one was really surprised to see Jason was beginning to have some sort of meltdown, considering the kind of lifestyle he chose to live. Finally, the landlord reappeared and claimed everything to be free and clear and safe. She sent a wink and a smirk in the direction of her other boarders while a terrified Richard Jason started inching his way back into his apartment. As soon as his door was shut, everyone watching out in the hallway broke into loud laughter. “Stupid SOB, serves him right for drinking the way he does” he heard one of them say.
That night, Jason slept with nearly every light in the house on. When he finally managed to fall asleep, he began having nightmares about the dark figure he’d seen, chasing him down an endless alley with only the occasional torch for light. The ground beneath him was alive with black snakes, and he feared that if he fell down, they would overtake him and then, he woke up screaming. At first, he couldn’t even remember who he himself was. And then, it hit him. He remembered everything. ‘Smathers. Dead. Sinkhole. Nobody will ever find him. Ever. Not with a sinkhole that deep. Not with the iron cast weights holding him down. No. Nobody will ever find him’ were the thoughts running through his mind.
Over the next several days, numerous search parties consisting of men and search dogs scoured the countryside, but to no avail. They were unsuccessful in locating John Smathers body. However, an interesting fact to note is that, one police officer actually reported having a dream of John Smathers falling down in a vortex of some kind. The dream made no sense to him at the time and he simply disregarded it as a personal interest in the case. Even Ellen Smathers herself didn’t take the dream seriously. All the while, Richard Jason was riding around, watching the search teams day in and day out. He watched the men carefully, and the dogs with even more caution. He still ate well and slept well. He sat in his room at night listening to the traffic buzzing by while he drank bourbon and water and began formulating his plan for when the time came to approach Ellen.
He didn’t quite know when the right time would be, when it would be suitable for him to walk up to Ellen and ask her if he might come inside for a bit, have a chat, and hand her the most beautiful bouquet of fresh cut flowers she would ever see. Months. Months would probably be his safest bet and the proper timing for everything to go according to plan. Otherwise, he knew people would begin talking, people would begin suspecting, and the police might start thinking.
Several more days passed, and Jason saw Ellen out on the street one sunny day, and he was severely shocked at the sight he saw. Her beauty was deteriorating. Her eyes were sunken and dark, and she was no longer the fashionista she once was. She looked frazzled and frumpy. “How could she let herself go like that?” he thought. At that moment, he decided that when he finally made his move to start courting her, he would make it his mission to make her dress well again.
As more time passed with no success, the police gave up their search. John Smathers was simply nowhere to be found. Everyone began going back to their normal lives, however everyone still talked about the exact nature of the crime that had taken place over their morning coffee, and children began dreaming of a mythical boogeyman hiding in the depths of their darkest closets. But in the public’s opinion, John Smathers had simply vanished without a trace. At this point, Richard Jason’s favorite pass time was driving by the white church where the sinkhole hid his dark secret, several times a day. For down in the sinkhole was the body of John Smathers, and Richard Jason had no remorse for his crime whatsoever. In fact, he actually had a sense of pride over what he’d accomplished. He used five pound pieces of iron in every pocket to weigh down the body, in his mind, John Smathers was gone for good, and he was sitting comfortably. But all of that was about to change.
Richard Jason had just fallen to sleep when he heard loud shouting coming from down the street. Amidst his panic, he first thought he was simply dreaming. So he got up and went to his window to look out. The midnight street was very dark in the early autumn night, yet a single corner street light showed a group of men piling into the back of a pickup truck, and they were the ones doing the shouting. In that instant, Jason felt a sense of paralyzing fear. Somehow, he knew why they were there and where they were going. He knew the body had been found. What he didn’t know was how that could be possible. This weighed heavily on his mind, and soon the urge to go to the church and see for himself overtook him.
When he arrived at the church, the entire grounds were lit up, and he saw a group of twenty or more men, including police, circled around the sinkhole. He stood back on the road watching, waiting. “He floated right to the top”, a man, who came over to ask Jason for a match to light his cigarette, commented. “Had weights tied to him and everything, but he floated right to the top anyway. Just like he wanted to make sure that we knew he was down there. Ain’t that strange?” he commented once more.
When the medical examiner arrived, he knelt down next to the corpse sprawled out on the lawn of the church. “I’ve never seen anything like this before. It’s like the earth just spit him back out or something. Like somebody wanted us to find him.” He stated as he began his examination. An onlooker also commented, “How could he ever come back to the surface like that with all those weights?” The medical examiner could only shake his head, “It isn’t likely that we’ll ever know the answer to that question. It’s not the sort of thing that anybody can ever find the answer to. It just happened, I guess.”
A few minutes later Jason returned home to his room, but sleep was out of the question. It was time to pack and flee the scene. He had to get as far away from there as possible. He packed his belongings in almost total darkness, with the only source of light being from the lone street lamp on the corner. His body was an icy sweat. He was just about to turn the doorknob when he heard them. Two sets of footsteps coming directly up the stairs to his room. For a split second, he contemplated making his escape out the window, but it was already too late.
“Mr. Jason, this is the Chief of Police. I’d like to talk to you for a minute.” He heard a man’s voice say. Jason dropped his bags and quietly tried to make his escape out the window, but to no avail. The door burst open, and there standing in the doorway, with a large loaded revolver in hand, was the Chief of Police. “I think it’s time I take you down to the station and we have ourselves a little talk Mr. Jason.” Without a doubt, he had been caught, and this time, there was no escape.
By dawn, Richard Dean Jason had given a full confession to the murder of John Smathers. He was arrested and thrown in jail, with his bail being set at an astronomically high price. During his life in prison, he constantly wondered about two things. He wondered why Ellen Smathers never reached out to him by answering any of the letters he sent her religiously, and how a weighted down body could ever possibly float up to the top of a sinkhole. It was almost as if unseen forces had been responsible for the body making its way back up to the surface. Richard Dean Jason spent the rest of his natural born life behind bars. Although Jason’s visit from the dark figure was never officially verified, several prisoners reported Jason confiding it to them over the years of his imprisonment. They reported that he spent his life there still searching for some kind of explanation as to how a heavily weighed down body could rise to the surface of a sinkhole.
Editor's note: this is the first of two “Paranormal Murder” articles by this author, both published here. It is a piece about belief rather than about evidence, and the archive keeps it on that footing: no roster entry exists for any of its central figures, because nothing in it was established by a court.
That is the useful distinction to hold. The cases the archive can carry are the ones with a conviction or a documented investigation behind them. A murder that has acquired a ghost story is still a murder, but the ghost story is not evidence of it, and this piece does not claim otherwise.