Appalachian Murder, Mystery And Legend
The Poker Faced Hellion
listen to what these two did back in 1936
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- Broadcast on:
- 22 Sep 2024
- Audio Format:
- other
(gentle music) - Apple Atchia, the word that evokes a whole pass of the reactions. Everything from the beauty of a mountain top to trailer parks, drugs, and about everything in between. The Apple Atchian Mountains are indeed the oldest mountains in the world. They once towered 30,000 feet into the air. They stretch from Eastern Canada through 14 states all the way to Louisiana. The folks who live in these mountains have faced an unending number of tragic and just plain odd hatens that cry out for the telling. Hello, I'm Larry Bentley. I know I was born and raised in these very mountains by a family who themselves were born, raised, and lived for generations in the heart of the Apple Atchian Mountains. Come with me and we'll take a look at some of the unending stories that come from within my beloved mountains. And we'll look through the eyes of an old Apple Atchian at some outside the area as well. Welcome to season four of Apple Atchian Murder, Mystery, and Legend. How do my good friends and hope you're doing well today? Excuse me. Good to see you and thank you so much for stopping by. And if you're listening over on YouTube, don't forget to smash that like button and that lets people know you're there and know we're there too. Folks, we see so many shocking stories in the news today that it leaves us feeling like the end of time must be knocking on the door and old Gabriel's tuning up his trumpet for a big bebop run down to announce the second coming to Jesus any day now. But if we slow down and actually think about it first, Bell, we gotta remember that we now have an uncountable number of cameras to go alongside an uncountable number of folks reporting the news. That means that there's gonna be more news. So then we gotta ask the question that you've heard me mention many times before, which is, is it actually worse today than it used to be? Or is it that the more things that happen now make the news? Every now and again, I find a story that makes me think that it's been that way for, or this way for quite a spell now. Today would be one of them stories. So you've have yourself a sit down there and hold on tight while I tell you how bad it actually was, just a few generations back. Now, the folks looking from the outside in, 17 year old Gladys McKnight, seemed like a pretty normal young girl, and so did a boyfriend, 18 year old Donald Whiteman. But to the folks that knew the two young love birds, what happened in the dog days of August in 1936, wasn't a completely shock, even though the crime itself sure as hell was to any normal human being heard about it. It was indeed August 1936 and Gladys and Donald had just graduated from high school in Bayon, New Jersey. Earlier that year that was, Bayon sits in a peninsula between New York Bay and Upper Bay in New Jersey. Gladys could literally stand out on the front porch and see New York. Now, as you all know, I do refer to that as part of the Appalachian Mountains because if it wasn't our eastern shore would be somewhere about to Mississippi River. Now, yeah, I know I'm stretching things a tiny bit, but I guarantee you not but much. Helen, who was Gladys' mother, very strongly disapproved of the relationship between Gladys and Donnie Boy. But for some reason, let it keep going. Probably, because her bull headed high strong, I know it all at 17 daughter, would have left no peace to be had in entire house and neighborhood even though, you know, if she'd actually tried to end it. Besides, she was close enough to being an adult that if she fought with Gladys over it, then maybe the two ended up married in a year or so. She might never see her daughter again or maybe even see any grandbabies that she might have. Now, Count's very on exactly what led up to the mess it took place. Some sources say Gladys and Donald had been out drinking beer together while others claimed that Donald just showed up to visit. Nobody really knows exactly how that come down. Here it came to be that all three were in the house together. Gladys' father, Edgar, was still at work so that three of them were all alone there. Now, that means that the story told from here on got told by the one or ones that were left standing. Now, there'd been tension between all three of them because Gladys thought that her mother, Helen, was just an old-fashioned coot. According to the young couple, they joked around about removing the old stick in the mud from the lottery of life because she just wasn't with it. I reckon only the with it were supposed to be the ones allowed to carry on with mankind. All the squares needed to go. Now, if you notice one thing in history, folks, notice this. Mankind repeats a cycle that goes something like this. Peace time is usually good. It's a good thing and it's usually been earned or won by bloody war that nobody wants any part of doing again. But within a generation or two or maybe three, there are born young folks who think history started the day they were born. They don't know the pains of war and become more self-absorbed. This continues on becoming more and more about what they won't become what they deserve. That goes on until they wake up. They get a wake-up call. They let them know that the fund's all over with and there's another war to get through. It just happens that during this time period, the country was about 20 years past World War I, which was the worst thing that anybody could ever imagine happening at the time. So everybody was assuming that there can never be anything like that take place again. Boy, they had some news coming, didn't they? Mankind was supposed to be just too smart to let that happen again. Most folks thought very little about a man named Hitler winning the election in Germany just a few years earlier. But in the way I say that to say all of this, in 1936 we were nearing the end of a stretch of peace time in this country, which led to the young generation doing what they always do that would be to become more disrespectful and selfish. It's just a cycle that's repeated itself over and over throughout history. That at least me explains a whole lot here. Anyway, it's a good thing these two geniuses weren't in charge of anything or held any power of any kind over anybody, or we'd probably be talking about a whole lot more than we already got to talk about. Now the joke between the two lovebirds finally went just too far on a nice warm August evening. I reckon sugar turned plum to shit across the board and got more serious in the heart attack when Gladys and her mother started arguing over something that didn't amount to a pot of beans. Now, maybe in my humble opinion, it could have actually been a pot of beans that got everybody all worked up after all. Gladys wanted to go play tennis with her boyfriend before it got dark and wanted to eat dinner before she left. Her mother told her, "Well, no problem, go ahead and eat, but you're just going to have to make your own supper if you wanted to eat right then." Now, I can still hear my mother telling me the same thing to this day. Of course, nothing about that made me want to take her out. In fact, back in that day, my mother standing about five foot four and weighing a total of about 100 pounds if she's soaking wet would have took me out if I wanted to start something. Most of the time, being a young feller, I'd just go for the peanut butter and Ritz crackers. After all, Andy Griffith said that it was a good cracker, so that was good enough for me. But that wasn't the way Gladys saw it at all. Matter of fact, Andy Griffith is only about 10 years old and didn't even know what a Ritz cracker was back in. And I guess that didn't leave Gladys a whole lot of options. She screamed, "Oh, the nerve right in your mother's face." I reckon that was the way with it crowd back then told somebody that it was a fixin' to kill 'em because next out came the hatchet and before it was all over with down went Helen. Edgar, who was, like we said earlier, Gladys's father finished up at the officer wherever he'd come home from, his hard day work from. I never could find out exactly what the poor man did for a living, but he was expecting to get a little supper and rest up by the radio. That's what they had back in folks. The radio set a living room like TV sets in one day. Everybody set their list into their favorite programs. My grandfather and great-grandfather, well, favorite programs are the Lone Ranger and Gun Smoke. Anyway, when poor Edgar got home from his job and that evening he found Helen stretched out on the kitchen floor dead on the door nail. Stick around folks, this ain't over yet. Sit tight, I'll be right back. You're listening to Appalachian murder mystery and legend with Larry Bentley. Folks at the police of course were called, run down, flagged down or however they did it back then and had a pretty good idea of who they were looking for because after hearing Helen's terrified screams, a neighbor had come over to the house to see just what the blue blazes were going on and had been told nothing and to get stepping by two, obviously with it teenagers who answered the door. The same neighbor decided that whatever happened wasn't good but wasn't about to have it happen to them so they went back home and watched through the blinds to see what happened next. Why they didn't call the police, you might ask. Well, remember it's 1936 and not a whole lot of folks had phones and a person needed to be pretty sure something serious was actually going down before they went running around looking for a phone or a cop, you know, whichever come first. That's when they saw the two geniuses peeling out in a car and of course the police did catch up right to them in fairly short order thereafter. They were immediately pounced on arrested and dragged downtown to answer a few questions who actually took out the hatchet and why, along with who actually did turn the poor woman's head into a canoe became one of the biggest questions about the whole mess. Gladys and Don both did what the with the crowd would do in a case like that. They both went into CYA mode and blamed each other. Gladys said Fossey set their chain smoking or filter tip picky wounds with an absolute blank poker face look on her face. Said that Donald had jumped to her defense and whacked a life clean out of her mother because her mother pulled a knife on her and was fixing to take her out with it. Don said that Gladys jumped up from arguing with her mother, ran, grabbed a hatchet and came back and leaped on her mother swinging. It didn't matter who said what or who did what at that point they were both charged with murder and held for trial. Gladys took the stand in with that cold look still on her face and told a whole different version of events because she was with it which meant that nobody is gonna go back and check to see if it matches the first story, right? This time she claimed that her and Donald had been stealing a kiss in the kitchen when her mother flew into a rage and jumped at her with a knife and they fought the old cood off and self-defense and Donald had been the one to grab the hatchet and deliver the fatal blows. Of course, that testimony did contradict what she'd told police earlier in. It was pointed out by somebody that did go back and check what she said to start with and that would be the prosecutor. Gladys did what all good whack-a-doodles do in a case like that. They claimed that everything that she'd said before had been manufactured by the cops. She didn't actually say it. Newspapers of the day took particular interest in Gladys' unsettling demeanor as they put it. One said this, "As the state neared the end of its case, Gladys retained all the icy composure she's displayed since the trial started. Her mask like face with a feline cast showed no evidence of emotion. They went on to call her a poker face school girl. Now, police said that she was the coldest thing they ever saw. All the time she talked, she said there was one leg thrown over the arm of a chair. She spoke one cigarette right after another and she weighed every word she said before she replied to any question. Though the prosecutor vowed to seek the death penalty, there just wasn't enough evidence to pursue first degree murder charges, especially taken into account all of the wildly inconsistent finger-pointing and blame gaming that took place from the time of their arrest all the way through the trials. But Helen McKnight was most certainly dead and these two were to blame for it. They'd both admitted their participation, even if they couldn't decide who actually did what. At the end of the trial, there'd be no electric chair. Gladys and Donald were convicted of second degree murder and sentenced to the maximum allowed at the time, which was 30 years of hard labor. Poker face that, you little hell you. But Gladys was paroled in 1955, years before father died. She went on to show remorse for what she did. Of course, she still couldn't show her poker face around her own hometown and moved to California before she lived out her days until she died in 2001 at the age of 81. Now, I couldn't find anywhere that she had ever married. I couldn't find anything on when Donald was released, but he was, but I'm pretty sure that the two of them never met again. That may have had something to do with him jumping up and yelling at the top of his lungs. You've made a murder out of me at Gladys when their guilty verdicts came back. Now, whenever he was finally released, he moved back to North Carolina and lived out his days peacefully with his wife, Mary, who may or may not have had any idea what happened back in 1936. Now, he died in 1991 at the age of 72. While neither of them ever had another run in with the law that I could find, it remains a fact that Helen McKnight was still dead, which causes folks to argue whether or not justice was truly served. Some are of the eye for an eye opinion, while others say that they were too young to fully understand what the heck they were doing or the full implications of it. They argue that the two serve time and rehabilitated their selves and turned into fine citizens, which should be the goal of punishment to begin with. Me, well, that question's above my pay grade, but my gut sure tells me that they got off just a bit easy. Folks, I hope you got something out of our story today. If you did, please rate and review the podcast and give us a thumbs up over on YouTube. Don't forget to subscribe or follow, depending on where you're listening. Come on over to Facebook group, Appalachian Murder Mystery and Legend podcast, where we talk Appalachian or about anything else you wanna bring up. Now, I'll be back real soon with another Appalachian Murder Mystery or Legend and I will see you then. [BLANK_AUDIO]