Tag: csi

Salem County Cold Case

Salem County Cold Case, an 1874 murder
An article about a Salem County Cold Case, a murder in 1874, published in the Salem County Historical Society Newsletter.

While studying the array of officials who made up New Jersey’s 19th-century criminal justice system, I often pore over aging coroner’s reports, trial transcripts, and police blotters. While doing that in South Jersey, I came across an unsettling Salem County Cold Case, the murder of Abigail Dilks in 1874.

From the beginning, the mystifying case stumped 19th-century lawmen and prosecutors. They swept the fields and marsh for evidence and interrogated the “usual types,” but the investigators failed to find a motive. Also, no one provided even the slightest information that might lead to a credible suspect, so the killer escaped.

The questions that stumped law enforcement lingered for decades, but those faded as one generation gave way to another. Still, the coroner’s verdict remains in the aging book of inquests at the Salem County Clerk’s Office. Abigail Dilks died at the hands of an unknown person in a lonely area of Lower Penns Neck near Harrisonville nearly 150 years ago.

Since true crime stories and unsolved mysteries are popular these days, I wrote a piece about this horrendous murder for the summer 2022 edition of the quarterly newsletter of the Salem County Historical Society. The case had mostly been lost in the recorded histories and written records of Salem County.

The arrow on this 1876 map for Lower Penns Neck Township shows the location of the murder. (Source: Atlas of Salem & Gloucester Counties, New Jersey by Everts & Stewart, 1876, from the West Jersey History Project West Jersey History Project –  Maps from the Everts and Stewart Combination Atlas Map of Salem and Gloucester Counties – 1876 )

Researching Cold Cases For a Lecture on the 19th Century Criminal Justice System

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The County Gallows at the Franklin County Historical Society.

I have been traveling throughout the Mid-Atlantic researching the dark underside of history, shocking murders from long ago that once stunned communities and filled newspapers with sensational headlines.  From the mountains of Western Pennsylvania and Maryland to the Atlantic Coast, these terrible crimes, many lingering as unsolved cold cases, provide a stark look at the slowly evolving criminal justice system of the 19th and the early 20th century and the nature of crime in the past.

As one generation gave way to another, memory faded and communities eventually forgot the dreadful events, except in dusty old pages of newspapers or an occasional diary.  But if one deeply searches archives, libraries, courthouses, and historical societies, long unexamined coroner’s inquests, court proceedings –  death warrants, pleas, motions, and trial transcripts – and police blotters fill in the details, allowing for some reasonable reconstruction of the circumstances.

I use these tragic cases to examine the early workings of the criminal justice system and consider what law enforcement did or could have done to solve them and bring about justice.  The period of consideration spans the centuries, from when forensic science was unheard of and witnesses and “smoking guns” were about all the police had to rely on to bring killers to justice until scientific breakthroughs in the first half of the 20th century brought investigations into the modern age, allowing the police to crack once unsolvable crime cases.

This fieldwork is for a series of lectures this autumn in libraries across the state for the One Maryland One Book 2018 theme, justice.  The Maryland Humanities sponsors this annual reading program, and many county library systems are offering this lecture to support this year’s book, “Bloodsworth:  The True Story of the First Death Row Inmate Exonerated by DNA Evidence.

19th century, criminal investigation, csi, criminal justice system
CSI – The Historical Edition, a lecture the examines 19th and early 20th century murders to understand how investigations were conducted before the modern age.

Here’s a link to the program at the Frederick County Library on Sep. 28, 2018

For additional photos related to this fieldwork click this link