The day is Christmas Eve, 1959. The place is Mentor, Ohio, a distant suburb of Cleveland. The time is approximately 6:40 in the evening. Charles Roy Clark is standing in the kitchen wearing his Boy Scouts uniform. Later in the evening, he is planning to meet his troop to go Christmas Caroling.
His wife, Lois, stands on the opposite side of the kitchen, gathering what she needs to bake a pie. Next to him stands his twelve-year-old daughter. In his hands he holds a can of pumpkin pie filling.
Then, in the blink of an eye, several things happen at the exact same time. The window shatters. There is a sudden loud boom. Lois thinks at first that the pumpkin can had exploded, but when she turned around, she saw Charles fall to the floor. And then she sees the blood. Charles has been shot.
Charles Roy Clark died on the way to the hospital.
Who Would Want to Kill Charles Ray Clark?
One of the questions that would confound the authorities would be, “Why?”
Charles didn’t have any known enemies, and most people thought of him as a paragon of the community. Boy Scout Troop 104 out of the Mentor Methodist Church loved him. His friends would comment on how he had a “good perspective on life”. He didn’t wish anybody any ill will and it seemed nobody had a problem with him, either.
Charles and Lois had lived in their community for shortly over two years. Charles was originally from Syracuse, New York, but after the bombing of Pearl Harbor (and just a few short months before he was to graduate high school) he joined The US Navy. He had been stationed in Puerto Rico for four years working with blimps.
It was while he was on leave that he met Lois in Miami and it was love at first sight. After Charles had been discharged from the Navy, he married Lois and the two moved to a nice house in Rochester. Charles began working for a contractor called Reliance, as a liaison between the company and The Navy. After six years, he was transferred to Mentor, Ohio.
Everyone who knew the Clark family believed them to be as close to the perfect family as you can get. Lois taught Sunday School every week and Charles was busy with The Boy Scouts. They lived in a picturesque house with a freshly manicured lawn and even a white picket fence.
They weren’t the sort of family to have enemies. But surely, they must have had one?
Right?
The Case For The Prosecution (Part One)
It wouldn’t be long before Lois confessed that everything in the Clark household might not have been as perfect as it appeared from the outside.
She had been orphaned as a very young girl, she said during a police interview. Because of that, she didn’t have any proper role models for appropriate relationships, be that as a wife or a mother. After she got married and relocated to Ohio, she began having affairs. Seven of them, total. The last one ended a month and a half before her husband was shot.
That man’s name was Floyd Eugene Hargrove. Gene, as he liked to have been called, had previously worked alongside her husband and was well known to the entire family. According to her statement, her husband knew nothing of the affair. That, however, might not have been entirely true. At some point shortly before the affair ended, Charles had come home and found Gene in his living room. Charles asked Gene not to come to the house anymore when he wasn’t there. The neighbors might start to think something inappropriate was going on.
She also said that Gene was a kindhearted fellow who could not harm another human being. She said that she still loved Gene, and she believed that he loved her too, but she couldn’t see him shooting Charles.
She also added another detail. Shortly after she broke it off with Gene, she said she started getting anonymous phone calls. The caller was aware that she and Gene had stopped their affair, and the caller knew that she had been “entertaining” gentlemen in their home while her husband was at work. He threatened to expose her multiple affairs if she did not agree to go out with him, too. Lois stated that she hung up on the caller, and that after a few attempts, he eventually gave up and that was the last she heard from the guy.
For some reason, though, the police became fixated on Gene. During his interview, he admitted to the affair, and being somewhat in love with Lois, but said the affair had ended and he was trying to move on. He also provided a relatively solid alibi for the evening Charles died. He had been to dinner with his boss, John Ozinga, and then left at 6:30. He then drove to a friend’s house, but the friend wasn’t there. He then drove to another friend’s house, who he spent some time there before driving to his ex-wife’s house to give some presents to his children.
The police, however, had another idea. Instead of driving to a friend’s house who wasn’t home, they thought Gene had driven to the Clark residence and shot Charles before driving to that other friend’s house. That little gap in Gene’s alibi was just enough time for him to have possibly committed the murder.
Further damning to Gene was his ex-wife, who clearly still harbored resentments against her ex. She did tell the police he had arrived that evening with presents and had spent some time with their kids. But, beyond that, she didn’t have a kind word to say about the guy.
Gene was brought into the station and had agreed to take a polygraph test. But, before that could happen, he was subjected to ten hours of non-stop interrogation. Lack of sleep caused him to be tired, and the lack of food certainly didn’t help either.
To get Gene to confess, detectives told him that if he didn’t, there was going to be a big trial, during which both he and Lois would be subjected to questions about their affair. Being that this was the 1950s, this would have been scandalous in their tight-knit community, let alone the Methodist Church the Clarks had attended. Lois, they claimed, would have their children taken away from her and her life would be destroyed. Gene asked for a break. He needed a cigarette and a moment to think. After being left alone for several minutes, Gene said he was ready to confess.
The Case for The Defense (Part 1)
Hargrove told police in his confession that he had found a .22 caliber rifle in the basement of his apartment building and several days before the murder he had purchased some ammunition for it. He, at this time, was not planning on killing anyone. That wouldn’t happen until the day of the murder.
That day, he left his boss’ house and drove one block away from the Clark residence. Then he made his way through the backyards until he came to the edge of their patio, about forty feet from the house, where he sat and waited for a short time. As soon as Charles appeared alone at the window, he fired the fatal shot. Then, he drove to Lake Erie where he tossed the gun into the water before driving off toward his friend’s house, then his ex-wife’s.
After confessing, Gene was asked to take the polygraph test, but he refused saying that he had already confessed and didn’t see the point
Even to the prosecutors, there were numerous problems with his confession.
For example, for Gene to have pulled this off, the timing would have had to be incredible. His boss confirmed that he had left at 6:30, which gave him ten minutes to drive to the Clarks, then made his way across the backyards, wait for Charles to appear, and then make the shot. It was, theoretically possible, though.
During his confession, Gene told detectives where, exactly, he threw the gun into Lake Erie. Diving teams were dispatched but were unable to locate the weapon. They noted the lake had been calm for days and that they should have found it within an hour if it had been there, but they gave up a long time after that.
Speaking of the gun, Charles had difficulty describing it and had no idea if it was an automatic rifle or pump-action. Clearly, it stands to reason, that if he used the weapon, he should at least have known that.
Also, according to the confession, he placed himself at the edge of the Clark’s patio which he said was about forty feet from the window. However, the patio was only fifteen feet long, which would have made that statement impossible.
After the confession, the police went door to door to see if anyone remembered seeing a car matching Gene’s anywhere in the area that night. Not a single person had reported seeing one like it.
Finally, Gene claimed Charles was alone in the kitchen, however this was not the case. Charles’ daughter was standing directly beside him, and Lois was behind him. There is no way that Gene would not have been able to see either of them. It also brings up the question of why he would fire when the woman he claimed to have loved was standing directly behind his victim – if he had missed, the bullet would have certainly hit her, too. Or the innocent little girl standing next to her father.
A few days later, as the police were still interviewing more of Lois’s ex-lovers, Gene recanted his confession. In a joint interview with the police and the Plain Dealer paper, Gene recanted his confession. He had only confessed because he wanted to spare Lois the humiliation and stress of a trial and that he wanted to protect her from a lot of bad things that might happen should this case go to trial.
He further said that he believed that he would only get about seven years in prison and that when released he and Lois would marry and live together happily ever after.
Gene, finally, agreed to take a polygraph test. This time, he passed and … seems he was no longer an official suspect.
The Case for Lois
Life must have been really rough for Lois.
Obviously, there was the pain and grief over losing her husband and witnessing the violence of his death while also needing to maintain some level of sanity for the sake of their young daughter trying to cope with her father being shot while he stood next to her.
Soon she would feel the weight of the community turning against her as well.
She quickly discovered that she wasn’t being seen as the grieving widow, but as the wicked harlot entertaining men while her husband was away.
Shortly after her husband’s funeral, she was officially interviewed by the police and agreed to take a polygraph test. The word from the detectives was that she passed the test. They felt she knew nothing about the murder and had nothing to do with it herself.
When she and her parents were interviewed by reporters, her father had some scathing words to say about the community. He begged everyone to remember all the good things that Lois had done since moving to Ohio, asking for everyone’s forgiveness over her extramarital affairs. Quoting the bible, he reminded them of the passage about not judging others lest you be judged.
Lois, herself, also made it known what she believed to be the cause of her husband’s death and according to her it wasn’t murder, but an accidental death.
While she never claimed that she knew who the guilty party was – she believed that she knew exactly what had happened. The area behind the Clark’s house was known to be a spot where people would shoot off guns, using it as a sort of target practice area.
According to her, it wasn’t murder at all. It was an accidental death.
Someone may have been firing a gun somewhere behind their house and missed their target. Instead, the bullet went through Clark’s kitchen window where it hit Charles. She doesn’t believe that anybody meant to kill her husband – it was just an accident.
Strangely, though, her theory never caught on. Why should anyone pay attention to the lady who had once been their friend now that everyone knew how much of a harlot she was…
The Case for The Prosecution (Part 2)
In some ways, the police felt like they were back to square one. The big suspect they had (Hargrove) had been mostly cleared by his alibi and when he passed the polygraph test. A few other people had, likewise, briefly been considered suspects, but they also provided alibis and passed the polygraph tests, so they were ultimately ruled out as suspects.
With no other obvious names to add to the list, the police began looking even deeper into Charles’s past. He tended to travel a lot for his job, so maybe he had made an enemy somewhere else? They considered professional rivalry might be a motive, but all these leads went nowhere.
Soon, however, Hargrove’s name would once again pop up and police eyes would once again be focused on him. His boss at Ozinga’s had called the police on New Year’s Day to inform them that Hargrove had confided to him that the day before Christmas Eve, Hargrove had purchased a gun he intended to use to shoot Mr. Clark. Now that their original suspect was back in their crosshairs, this time they were going to make the charges stick.
The police were somehow able to narrow their search down to a single store and visiting that store detectives were quick to learn that a lot of people tended to buy firearms around the holidays. Searching through store records, they were able to find a single record of a .22 caliber rifle being sold that day and the store sold it to some guy named Robert G. MacClaren.
The police then consulted with a handwriting expert who determined that the handwritten signature of MacClaren was identical to notes that Hargrove had written, so they now thought they could prove they had their man.
When they looked into Hargrove’s background a little further, they discovered that when he was in the military, he was noted as an “expert marksman”.
Hargrove was arrested at his mother’s house in Toledo and flown back to Cleveland in police custody. Once again, he was interrogated … and once again, he confessed. And, once again, he was a little confused about some of the details. But this time, the police had another idea: sodium amytal … a substance some people like to call “truth serum”.
It is important to note here that neither polygraph tests nor the results of any kind of “truth serum” are admissible in court – and for good reason. To be blunt, it is just as easy to fool a lie detector test as it is to misinterpret or manipulate things which could bring the results into question. In other words, it’s about as reliable as the lock on Aunt Irma’s liquor cabinet.
The issue with “truth serum” is very similar. In the movies, it’s some sort of magic liquid that somehow forces people to tell the truth – but it’s nothing of the sort. It does have sedative and hypnotic properties, it lowers inhibitions, but it does not compel anyone to only speak truths. As a drug, it kind of reminds me of that time Aunt Irma was coming out of surgery and started talking about how one of her nurses is half human and half cat – and trust me, I wanted to believe her since she is the “weird cat lady” in our town, but no – her nurse was 0% feline.
While he was under the effects of the “truth serum” he told a tale that was quite similar to the one he had told before about killing Charles because he was in love with Lois, he thought he was only going to get a short time in prison after which the two would hopefully get married.
Hargrove then told detectives about a spot he used right before the murder to fire off a few test shots. It was a wood utility pole with some kind of metal target on it. When he showed the detectives where it was at, they spotted a single bullet lodged in the pole behind the makeshift target.
While under the influence of the drug, he took the police to a place on the Chagrin River where he said he could have disposed of the gun. Then, still clearly under the influence, he was brought before a judge where he attempted to plead guilty to murder.
Common sense would dictate that someone under the influence of any drug, let alone one that had been administered by the police, should never be brought before a judge, but that didn’t seem to be the issue here. However, the court refused to enter a guilty verdict on his behalf because of state law requiring written, not verbal declarations of guilt in capital cases.
It is also worth noting that while police were looking into Hargrove (for the second time) they also decided to interview his ex-girlfriend, Beverly, to a greater extent. She, again, told police that they had divorced over his anger issues, saying how he was a street angel and a house devil. She also recalled him experimenting with various religions, such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses and medieval and mystical Rosicrucianism, as well as describing practices that bordered on witchcraft.
The following day, police divers visited the Chagrin River and were able to recover a .22 caliber shotgun. They had a bullet from the gun tested against the bullet recovered from the utility pole and (somehow) determined they were a match.
The case the police were starting to put together was convincing – at least it was the way they presented it.
The Case for The Defense (Part 2)
At the end of his first week in jail, Hargrove hired an attorney, Louis Achilles Turi of Wickliffe, who apparently was very good at his job.
One of his first orders of business was to try and have his plea changed from “innocent” to “innocent or innocent by mental defect”. Perhaps if the courts declared him insane, or otherwise unable to go to trial, it would bring this matter to an end. The statement from his ex-wife about his religious explorations seemed to help, but the courts would soon rule that he was not insane – at least in the legal definition.
If Turi wasn’t able to stop the trial that way, he was going to attack the police case against his client. He believed the police held some sort of grudge or vendetta against the man, charging him in spite of all the exculpatory evidence.
Once the dominoes started to fall, however, it seems that the police case against Hargrove was paper thin.
Several of the statements Hargrove made while under the influence of the “truth serum” were completely thrown out. The police should not have given Hargrove a tour of the city while under the influence, let alone appear in court.
The gun found in the Chagrin River, as well as the bullets that had been fired from it were also called into question. All the police could offer was a visual confirmation between the two bullets, which was flimsy at best. The police had also not properly documented the evidence when it was collected, waiting for some unknown reason for five days to enter it into the log. This created a massive problem with the “chain of evidence” from which they could not recover.
Turi also had the gun and bullets examined by the new Scientific Investigation Center (a CSI like thing but with 1950s technology) and they quickly determined that the two bullets did not match.
When a bullet is fired from a gun, the barrel imprints grooves onto the outside of the casing and no two firearms produce the same marks. The bullet pulled from the victim was in two pieces and only a single groove could be seen, in spite of six being present on the gun found in the river. The bullet pulled from the utility pole had three grooves, none of which aligned with anything.
After a few days of testing, they were able to determine that neither the bullet from the victim, nor the one from the utility pole were a match to the gun found in the river.
When Lois testified about the relationship she had with Hargrove, she had been asked about other lovers. She admitted this time to three others, including a police lieutenant she had been seeing at the time she started seeing Gene. After the policeman discovered she had been dating another man, he called off the relationship with Lois because he refused “to play second fiddle” to another man (even though he supposedly knew Lois was currently married. The policeman, however, claimed that he and Lois had never been intimate – but if they were, could this be at least part of the reason the investigators seemed so inclined that Hargrove be charged no matter the cost?
This officer was suspended without pay after his name was brought up at trial. After a brief investigation, he was let go from the police department.
Another problem with the prosecution’s case came when the man from the store where the police said that Hargrove purchased the gun (using a fake name) was not able to identify Hargrove in the courtroom.
The policeman who had recovered the bullet from the utility pole admitted in court that he had put a nick in the bullet when he dug it out, which was not noted in any of the forensic reports.
The handwriting expert they used to compare the signatures from Hargrove against the ones from the store where the police said the gun had been purchased (who said they were a match) admitted during cross examination that they had forced Hargrove to write the name over and over until he had produced a signature that was close enough to match.
Perhaps among the most damaging to the police case was the (so-called) confession. Turi had tried his hardest to keep all confessions from the trial as they were made under duress and used trickery. Even though the courts initially agreed with Turi, during trial the tide changed and the tapes of the confession were admitted into evidence.
This may have had the opposite effect. Hargrove, on the tape, sounded tired and confused, slurring his words, and not sounding as if he was always aware of what he was saying. The tapes also caught interrogators threatening to expose Lois as an immoral adulteress, and even threatened to have the doctor who Lois saw when she suffered a miscarriage arrested and his name dragged through the mud. During cross, the policeman also admitted to telling Hargrove that he would keep Lois’s name out of the papers if he would confess.
The final witness was Gene Hargrove who presented himself as professionally as he could. He presented himself as a common man who had allowed himself to fall in love with a married woman, which he regrets but cannot change. He explained how the police had interviewed him from 10:00 PM on Christmas Eve until the morning of December 26th without a break, or food, or sleep.
He was able to provide a logical explanation for everything he had told police that was used agaisnt him. For example – the telephone poll the bullet had been pulled out of . He had seen teenagers using that pole for target practice several times when he had driven past it. Or, how the first thing he thought of as a place to get rid of a gun was Lake Erie, and how after no gun was found there, the second most logical place (to him) was the Chagrin River. He had an explanation for everything.
During closing arguments, the prosecution tried to paint Gene as a violent, heartless man, a sexual deviant, a criminal and murderer.
The defense tried to paint a different picture. Take away the sex and what do you have? Tubi asked the Jury. He even used that opportunity to remind the jury that there was no evidence that a murder had actually been committed.
After a lengthy and well publicized trial, the jury was sent to deliberate. In less than five hours, they returned with a verdict.
The Verdict
For three weeks, Floyd “Gene” Hargrove’s trial was spotlighted daily in the press. In some papers, Charles was depicted as a hard-working All-American man, boy scout leader and Sunday School teacher while Gene was said to be a heartless and cruel sexual deviant who beat his ex-wife, who knowingly had an affair with a married woman, and who liked to read “girlie magazines” (the type where there was no actual “reading” required).
By the end of the trial, however, newspaper reports seemed more clinical. Gene was hardly a saint, but once all the facts were out in the open, it seems that neither Lois nor Charles were, either. By the end, it started to look like most newspapers had changed their minds over Gene’s guilt.
On June 8, 1960, after less than five hours of deliberation, the jury announced that they had reached a verdict. In a few moments, the courtroom would be packed with spectators, journalists, and at least a few interested parties. Others, like Lois, preferred to stay at home and watch the press coverage on the television.
In a quiet courtroom, the jury announced their verdict. Floyd Eugene Hargrove, they decided, was not guilty of murder in the death of Charles Roy Clark.
The courtroom erupted in cheers and applause.
After the trial, Gene had told some reporters that he hoped that he and Lois could continue their relationship but the lack of communication from her squashed that idea completely. Instead, a few months later, Lois would pack up everything they owned as she and her children would permanently relocate to California. There, he would marry again.
Gene, too, found love later as well. After getting married, he and his wife relocated to Cincinnati where he worked as a salesman before ultimately retiring.
Unanswered Questions
When asked by the papers after the trial, a couple members of the jury stated that they came to their “Not Guilty” verdict because the state had not proven their case. Several members believed that it was possible that Gene had killed Charles so that he could woo Lois, but the jury was unanimous in thinking the prosecutors had not even come close to proving it “beyond a reasonable doubt”.
When questioned after the trial, the chief of police doubled down on Gene’s guilt saying that as far as they were concerned, they had found the guilty party, even if he had been acquitted by the jury.
As for the prosecutor, he commented that after the trial, he supported Gene’s innocence, but saying the case was officially closed, but marked “unsolved.”
Today – the question of who killed Charles Roy Clark remains a mystery. Was it Gene? Or, if not, who could have done it? Did they mean to do it, or was it (as Lois suggested) merely an accident?
Perhaps some day we might discover some answers, but until then it’ll remain a somewhat unsolved mystery.
