The midland journal. (Rising Sun, Md.) 1885-1947, 1920-11-26
Boys Weird Crime
StunS Kansas Town

| OLullO 1Adl1OOO IL
Almena, Kas.-Nobody knew what
Karl what Karl Johnson. 17-year-old
farmer boy was thinking about as he
and his brother ranged the country
far and wide night after night. on the
old farm horses that were their near
est available approach to frey bron-
J CHS.
Nobody knew what Elmer Heiser-
man, 16-year-old farm boy was think
ing about as he trudged into the one
picture show in the little country set
Element of Almena when the evening
chores were done
, And now nobody knows, or can
guess by the widest effort OF Mortified
imagination, what Carl and Elmer
were thinking about when, il Carl's
confession to Norton County authori-
ties is true Elmer offered him 5000 to
kill the whole Heiserman family so
Elmer could inherit the property and
Carl undertook the job and fired into
the family group through window as
they sat together after supper, wound
ing the sister and aged grandmother.
Carl will ride at night no more
for while, for he is locked in a little
square box of stone with iron bars at
door and window, in the courthouse
yard at Norton; and Elmer is out on
$1,000 bond, and goes no more to town
unless his father is at his side.
And next February Carl and Elmer
will be tried for murder
1t is a preposterous tragedy, an
incredible actually; melodrama in
the exaggerated terms of boys lurid
fancy, in setting of staid Kansas
| cornfields.
Teh bare facts are these:
On the evening of October 26, as
Jacob Heiserman, well-to-do farmer,
living mile and a half out of Almena,
sat with his wife, her mother, Mrs.
Julia E. Sharp, aged 80, and the daugh-
ter, Faye, 81, in their lamp-lit sitting
room, five shots were fired through
the window from the darkness outside.
Faye was struck twice and the grand
mother once. A deputy sheriff, called
by Heiserman, met Carl coming out
the cornfield. He confessed having
done the shooting, and said Elmer
hired him to do it. He was to have
shot the other boy, Ord, when he came
home that night. Elmer had said he
must have money, and if his family
were all dead he would get the estate.
Carl told me the same story, in the
lookup at Norton, standing first on
one foot and then on the other like
small boy caught in mischief. He
does not look his II years.
Elmer will not talk to anyone about
the matter-not even to his father,
Jacob Heiser1nan told me, his ruddy
face lined with trouble. Friends of
the Heiserman's refused to believe the
boy guilty, in spite of coroborative evil
dence at the hearing.
Some of the circumstances were al.
most comic. The rifle, which Carl
says Elmer furnished him, was "22-
short" little better than a popgun
The wounds it made proved to be
slight punctures.
From the time when Carl claims the
plot wsahadhetc hmrfdw cmfwy mfwy
plot was Matched, in front of the gilt
tering windows of the Royal Cafe" in
Almena-four tables and nasal
phonograph-until he was arrested in
the cornfield, was not more than three
quarters of an hour.
Only three-quarters of an hour! And
now there are iron bars between Carl
and the country roads where he used
to ride the old farm horse at night
And Elmer goes silently about his
chores and never appears in the viii
lage without his father beside him.
And both are still thinking the "long,
long thoughts of youth" But nobody
knows what they are.