On the morning of October 15, 1883, a man walking along a quiet country lane on the outskirts of Lincoln, Illinois, came upon the body of a young woman lying at the side of the road. She had been killed with considerable violence. Her forehead had been crushed by heavy blows, there were bruises on her arms consistent with a struggle, and her throat had been cut from ear to ear. The postmortem examination revealed a second fact that investigators kept from the public as long as they could: she had been four to five months pregnant.
The dead woman was Missouri Burns, known to everyone who loved her as Zora. She was nineteen years old, a domestic servant who had come to Lincoln less than a year earlier to work in the household of Orin A. Carpenter, the wealthiest man in Logan County. He was fifty years old, a grain dealer who owned an elevator on the railroad line, a farm, and parcels of real estate across the county.
He lived in a comfortable house with his wife, his elderly mother, and his two daughters. He had hired Zora in late 1882 at a wage of a dollar and fifty cents a week. Lincoln, Illinois, was then a prosperous railroad town of grain elevators and storefronts, the seat of Logan County, about thirty miles northeast of Springfield. It was also the only town in the United States named for Abraham Lincoln before he became president.
A young Springfield attorney had handled the legal paperwork for the town’s founding in 1853, and the story held that he christened the settlement himself by pouring watermelon juice into the soil at the railroad crossing, saying he had never known anything named Lincoln to amount to much. Zora Burns had been born in Missouri, named for the state of her birth. Her father, a wagon maker named William Burns, moved the family north to central Illinois while she was still an infant, settling in St. Elmo.
Her mother died when Zora was too young to remember her face, and her father remarried. Schooling in rural Illinois was a few months a year in a one-room schoolhouse, but newspapers later described her as having a natural tact and quickness of intellect that gave her presence wherever she went. They also wrote at length about her appearance, in the florid language Victorian reporters reserved for women who had become famous and for women who had become dead. In the late autumn of 1882, Zora packed a small trunk and traveled eighty miles north by train to Lincoln, where she had a domestic position waiting at Carpenter’s house.
She cleaned, cooked, washed linens, and kept quiet in the kitchen, retiring to an attic room at the end of the day. A girl who worked at the house next door would later testify that Zora was well-behaved and well-spoken of. But a dollar fifty a week was very little money even then, and within a few months Zora threatened to leave for better wages. Carpenter persuaded her to stay in two ways.
He bought her a pair of fine shoes, the kind a servant would have looked at in a shop window and walked away from, and he raised her wages by an extra dollar a week. Both came with a single condition: she was not to tell his wife about either of them. By the late summer of 1883, Zora had gone home to her father’s house in St. Elmo.
The reason she gave was that she meant to be married. Weeks earlier she had visited her older sister in the town of Wayne, where her sister’s husband, Bill Dukes, shared his name with his own brother. The unmarried Bill was on the property during the visit, and the courtship was rapid. By the end of the visit they were engaged, with the wedding set for October 30.
What Zora did not tell her father, her sister, or her fiance was that she was four months pregnant. The child was not Bill Dukes. She kept the secret tightly, telling only one person, in confidence, in the parlor of a boarding house on the outskirts of Lincoln. That person would later repeat Zora’s words on a witness stand.
In late September, an unsigned letter arrived at the Burns home. It was short and hurried, almost desperate in its rhythm: Zora, why don’t you come? Come right away. I have written you two letters before and sent you money in both.
Someone must be taking your mail and money as well. Come now. Come immediately. Zora told her father the letter was from Carpenter, that he still owed her twenty dollars in unpaid wages, and that she meant to go to Lincoln and collect it.
She would be back by Saturday, in time for her wedding preparations. On the morning of October 12, 1883, a Friday, she boarded the train for the eighty-mile journey north. She would not come back. She arrived in Lincoln that afternoon.
On Saturday the thirteenth, she was seen at Carpenter’s office. Multiple witnesses placed her there. He was, by all accounts, the last person known to have seen her alive. When her body was found that Monday, the first man the police questioned was Bill Dukes.
He was the fiance, and he stood to gain or lose the most from anything Zora was carrying. Officers noticed two things at once: he had a fresh injury to his right hand that he would not explain, and he was also engaged to a second woman, a young woman named Elizabeth Friel who had no idea her fiance had spent the summer courting another girl. But his alibi held. Multiple witnesses placed him in Wayne the entire weekend Zora died.
He drifted slowly out of the case file. Suspicion turned to Carpenter. His buggy was examined, and dark stains on the seats were determined under a microscope to be blood. The science of the time could not say whose blood, or even with certainty that it was human.
But in the cushion, investigators found hairpins of the same type as those still in Zora’s pocket when her body was discovered. Letters now came forward. William Burns produced letters his daughter had received from Lincoln, some of which he said had contained money. A woman named Rebecca Carpenter, no relation to Orrin, came forward to say she had personally seen letters from him to Zora, and that their language made it plain the two had been intimate.
Other witnesses placed Carpenter and Zora at a hotel in Peoria earlier that summer, where he had reportedly registered her as his daughter in adjoining rooms. Carpenter was arrested on suspicion of murder. The coroner’s inquest began October 28, held behind closed doors, which one Cincinnati reporter called the awful secrecy of a star chamber. Carpenter refused to answer questions on advice of counsel.
But a woman named Mrs. Dengler, at whose boarding house Zora had stayed after leaving the Carpenter household, testified plainly what Zora had told her in the parlor: that she was pregnant, that Orin Carpenter was the father, that he had given her money and presents, and that he had told her he loved her more than his wife. Six men were locked in a room to determine the cause of death. They sat for four hours.
Four concluded the evidence pointed to Carpenter, but the other two would not move from a verdict of person or persons unknown, and four were not enough to outvote two. The verdict came down: Zora Burns had died from a wound to the throat by some sharp instrument in the hands of some person or persons unknown. Carpenter was released on ten thousand dollars bail. The people of Lincoln were not happy.
It was widely known that several men on the coroner’s jury were his business associates and fellow lodge members, and it was widely believed he had hired private detectives to manufacture evidence in his favor. Within a week, the threat of lynching had grown so loud that the state militia was put on alert. No violence came, but there were quiet promises in quiet rooms, and Carpenter knew about every one of them. Two stories now intruded on the case from outside Illinois.
A jeweler in Cambridge City, Indiana, reported that two young men had sold him a small set of rings, one of which had the name Zora Burns engraved inside the band. By the time police heard about it, the men were gone. And in Hampton, Iowa, a man held on an unrelated charge confessed in the hearing of his cellmates that he had been hired to kill the young woman whose name was in every newspaper in the country. He named a price and a place, but could not name anyone who had hired him.
Nothing came of either lead. But both stories took the spotlight off Carpenter long enough to matter. On January 25, 1884, a grand jury indicted Orrin A. Carpenter for the murder of Zora Burns.
Bail was refused, and he was taken into custody. His attorneys filed for a change of venue, arguing that newspaper coverage had prejudiced the local jury pool. The motion was granted, and the case was transferred to Petersburg in neighboring Menard County. The trial began March 10.
The defense team was made up of some of the most influential men in Petersburg, and reporters noted that local officials’ sympathies leaned heavily in their direction. One paper wrote that the prisoner was being treated more like a victim than a man on trial for one of the foulest, cruelest, and most cold-blooded murders ever tried in the region. It was reported in passing that Carpenter had dined privately with the sheriff while in custody. One of Carpenter’s daughters was called to the stand.
She wore bright clothing into the courtroom, spoke freely with companions in the gallery, and answered the prosecution’s questions with clear indifference. When pressed on whether she or her sister could have been the young woman in the adjoining hotel room in Peoria, she admitted that she and her sister had been in Missouri at the time. The Peoria story now belonged only to Carpenter. Carpenter did not testify in his own defense.
His attorneys closed by arguing the case was built on speculation rather than proof: the alleged letters had not been produced in court, and no blood-stained clothing belonging to the accused had ever been recovered. The jury retired. On the morning of March 21, 1884, they returned a verdict of not guilty. He had been acquitted in law, but not in Logan County.
Within days, a printed circular appeared on the streets of Lincoln, signed by many citizens, inviting all lovers of law and order to a mass meeting at the courthouse. Four thousand people attended, an extraordinary figure for a county whose total population numbered only a few times that. They voted that Carpenter should no longer be permitted to live in Logan County. A committee of seventy-five men was appointed to deliver the notice in person.
He refused, standing in his own front room and telling them that he was an innocent man, that no court had said otherwise, and that he did not acknowledge their authority to order him out of his own house. Then William Burns came looking for him. The first time, in the late autumn, Burns walked through the center of Lincoln in broad daylight with a shotgun in the crook of his arm, telling whoever met him that he was waiting for Mr. Carpenter and would shoot him when he came along.
Friends talked him down and put him on the train home. The second time, on December 2, 1884, he came back with a revolver. He found Carpenter on the street, raised the revolver, and fired. The shot missed.
By then, Carpenter had already understood. He had put the grain elevator up for sale, along with the farm and the real estate. The defense had cost him more than the case file ever showed. When he packed his wife, his elderly mother, his two daughters, and what remained of his fortune onto a westbound train, his once ample holdings had been reduced to a single quarter section of farming land, 160 acres, in the open country of the Dakota Territory.
He took it. He started over. No one was ever tried again for the murder of Zora Burns. The case is, to this day, officially unsolved.
Six weeks before Zora died on a country road outside Lincoln, a young woman named Rose Ambler had died on a country road outside Stratford, Connecticut. Same age, same beauty, same throat cut, same respected suitor never made to answer. The newspapers of that autumn printed the two names in the same paragraph, as though everyone reading already understood that something was wrong with the way the country was protecting its rich men from its dead girls. Nothing was ever done about it.
A father walked back to St. Elmo with an unfired revolver in his coat. And in a town named for the most famous lawyer in American history, a domestic servant lay in a country graveyard, the name on her stone reading not the name her father had given her, but the name everyone who had loved her had used.
Zora.
