The Phantom Flapper: She came, she shot, she vanished.
A dark secret leads to murder.
On the evening of Thursday, December 6, 1928, a fashionably dressed young woman wearing a turban hat and a dark blue chinchilla coat rang the bell at the Fearn residence in Waco, Ohio, a few miles outside Canton.
Mary Fearn answered the door, and the girl asked to speak to her husband, Vernard, a prosperous 35-year-old coal dealer. Mary summoned him and went back to preparing their evening meal.
When he stepped out onto the porch, the woman pulled out a .32 caliber handgun and shot him five times, fatally wounding him. She then calmly walked to a nearby filling (gas) station, boarded a bus to Canton, and vanished.
Mary, hearing the shots, ran back outside and found Vernard lying on the porch, bleeding.
“I’ve never seen her before,” Fearn gasped to his wife as he lay dying.
The wire services picked up the story, and it quickly became something of a sensation. Headlines read:
Police Baffled by ‘Flapper Murder’ — Atlantic City Sunday Press
Phantom Flapper is Blamed for Shooting — Tulsa Tribune
Flapper Slayer Sought in Ohio Murder Mystery — Roanoke Times
Coal Dealer Murdered by Mysterious Flapper — Raleigh News and Observer
How do you find a flapper?
Stark County Sheriff Edward Gibson and Prosecutor Henry Harter had a nightmare case on their hands. Other than a dead body, all they had to go on was a vague description of the killer.
Based on statements from the victim’s widow, a bus driver, and a filling station proprietor, the shooter was a 20-something woman who was very pretty, slender, pale, and “of the flapper type.”
I imagine that finding a woman based on that description in Ohio in 1928 would have been like searching for a goth chick in Chapel Hill, NC, in 1985.
The police had no idea of the woman’s identity or her connection to Fearn. They canvassed the neighborhood but turned up no additional information.
As the old saying goes, they had to start somewhere. Gibson and Harter brought in and questioned young women based on their mode of dress and proximity to the victim’s home or business or any other connection they could think of.
They questioned a Canton stenographer, but the filling station owner declared she was not the one.
A deputy sheriff was sent to Fairmont, WV, to question a woman who matched the description and was said to have left Canton in a hurry Thursday night.
A woman who left two suitcases behind in a Canton rooming house was briefly a suspect.
A Cincinnati Post article said the police “were seeking a woman of many aliases, a dance hall frequenter, and possessing a reputation for violence.”
A one-time Canton waitress was tracked down after a three-day search. She readily admitted to shooting a man three times because he offended her but said she did not know Fearn. Witnesses agreed she was not the killer.
Four days after the shooting, Stark County commissioners offered a $1,000 reward for information leading to the shooter’s arrest and conviction.
The police obtained a list of Fearn’s coal customers and began checking on them. They also began talking to people at suburban dance halls.
A story in the December 10 Dayton Herald suggested that Gibson and Harter had developed a new line of inquiry based on the shooter’s unerring aim and deliberate planning. It suggested that she might be from Canton’s “jungle,” which the paper described as a “foreboding stretch of grim buildings and dark alleys,” where firearms were an asset to existence.
From the article:
“It is logical,” Harter said, “that such a woman would come from the jungle. She may be hiding there or may be under cover in a similar section elsewhere.”
The article closed by stating that the police had been unable to discover a motive for the killing, and Harter was convinced that there was a “hidden chapter” in Fearn’s life.
Harter was wrong about the “jungle girl” connection, but he was spot-on in his suspicion regarding Fearn’s activities.
Mystery and Motive Revealed
On the night of Saturday, December 13, exactly a week after the murder, the solution to the case would arrive on Sheriff Gibson’s doorstep in the form of a car containing a troubled man and a dying woman.
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The woman was 21-year-old Margaret Heldman, the Phantom Flapper. The man was her husband, 27-year-old Wilbur Heldman, a furnace salesman. The couple had driven in from Lorain, a suburb of Cleveland. They were formerly from Canton.
Margaret met Vernard Fearn at the Smile Inn dance hall in Canton in the summer of 1927, before the couple married. Some weeks after they met, Fearn offered her a ride home in his truck. Instead he took her to a secluded spot where he raped her.
Even after she married, Fearn continued to pursue her.
After reading newspaper stories about the crime, Wilbur suspected his wife of the shooting. She matched the description and had been visiting her sister in Canton when the murder happened. Then he found a letter she wrote and threw away in which she confessed to the crime. In it, she wrote that Fearn had made her life “a hell on earth.”
Wilbur confronted her and insisted that she turn herself in. He bundled her into their car and started driving to Canton. As they reached the city limits, she asked him what the authorities would do to her. His reply was:
“Well, if you don’t get the electric chair, I’ll miss my guess.”
A moment later, she pulled out the handgun she had used to shoot Fearn, placed it against her chest, and pulled the trigger. Wilbur frantically drove downtown to the jail, where his shouting caught Sheriff Gibson’s attention.
Heldman, with Gibson riding on the running board directing him, rushed Margaret to Mercy Hospital, where she died on the operating table.
Two weeks later, Stark County Coroner T. C. McQuate filed an affidavit charging Wilbur Heldman with “Moral Murder.” McQuate held that Heldman’s “inhuman” treatment of his wife on the night of her death compelled her to turn the gun on herself.
A grand jury refused to indict Heldman.
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Sources
Chillicothe Gazette, OH, Friday, December 7, 1928, Page 1, “Canton has New Mystery” (Associated Press)
Dayton Daily News, OH, Saturday, December 8, 1928, Page 3, “Girl Sought in Slaying of Mine Operator near Canton” (Artist sketch) filling station (Associated Press)
Cincinnati Enquirer, Saturday, December 8, 1928, Page 12, “Ohioan Slain by Young Woman”
Atlanta Journal, Sunday, December 09, 1928, Page 16, “Mystery Woman Slayer is Hunted by Ohio Sheriff” (Associated Press)
Tulsa Tribune, OK, Sunday, December 9, 1928, Page 10-D, “Phantom Flapper is Blamed for Shooting” (United Press)
Pittsburgh Press, PA, Sunday, December 9, 1928, Page 1, “Expect Widow to Help Solve Mate’s Murder” (United Press)
Cincinnati Post, Monday, December 10, 1928, Page 1, “Flapper Victim’s Wife May Furnish Clew” by Robert B. Larkin
Dayton Herald, OH, Monday, December 10, 1928, Page 20, “Jungle Girl is Sought for Canton Death” (United Press)
Cincinnati Enquirer, Tuesday, December 11, 1928, Page 12, “Two leads are to Aid in Solution of Fearn Slaying, Sheriff Believes” (Associated Press)
Cincinnati Post, Wednesday, December 12, 1928, “Page 2, “Woman of Aliases is Fearn Suspect”
Pittsburgh Press, Thursday, December 13, 1928, Page 1, “Will Arrest Fearn Killer, Says Sheriff”
Cincinnati Post, Friday, December 14, 1928, Page 1, “Canton Flapper-Slayer Cheats Law by Suicide” (Post State Wire)
Butte Daily Post, MT, Wednesday, January 23, 1929, Page 6, “Can There Be a ‘Moral’ Killer?” by Mildred Hardenbergh
