From Wondery

At 8 a.m. Saturday, February 1st, 1896, John Hewling, a boy who worked as a hand on the farm of John Locke, about a mile south of Fort Thomas, Kentucky,

was cutting across a field on his way to work when he jumped a fence to find a headless body of a woman

lying alongside a hill on the ground.

It was about eight feet from a fence and lying halfway on an abandoned roadway just off the

Alexandria Pike near the Army Post that gave the city of Fort Thomas its name. He ran to get

Locke, the owner of the farm. By the time Campbell County Coroner Tingley got there an hour later, a large crowd had gathered.

The woman's dark blue skirt, soaked with blood, was high up around her neck and shoulders.

Her breasts were exposed.

She wore black woolen stockings and black garters with plated buckles and a single glove on her right hand.

She wore a pair of rubber boots over her cloth-topped shoes made in Greencastle, Indiana.

Except for the shoes, her clothes were not expensive, indicating a woman of a lower class.

She was not wearing a coat, so investigators presumed it had been used to carry away the missing head.

Nearby lay the other brown kid glove, several hair pins and feathers such as might decorate a hat. Also nearby

was the torn sleeve of a man's shirt. There were large clots of blood near the corpse, and blood

smeared on the leaves of the privet hedges about two feet away. The coroner guessed the body had been dead but a few hours, an estimate

supported by the dry conditions of her clothing. That is, she was killed after the rains had stopped

late Friday night around 10 o'clock. The head had been removed neatly, clean cuts except around the spine.

The culprit seemed to have some knowledge of anatomy and surgery.

She also had cuts on the fingers of her left hand, some of them deep and clean, as if she had grabbed a single-edged knife.

Because of the blood clots, the coroner believed that her

heart was still beating when the head was removed. Although her clothing was in great disarray

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