Revisiting the Murderer in the Family Tree

Writing has always been part of my life. From the time I was in grade school, I saw myself as a writer. By high school, I envisioned myself as the next Ian Fleming, my favorite writer. The dream waxed and waned throughout my life. For three years after college, I worked in journalism. In law school, I was on the law review board of editors and had my note on prior inconsistent statements published.

But practicing law has a way of stealing away most dreams that have nothing to do with the law or running a law office. At least, that was the way with me. But the dreams of writing were still there, hidden away.

I fed the dream occasionally, writing for legal publications and an occasional op-ed piece for a newspaper.

In the early days of the pandemic, three things changed for me. First, just weeks before the first reported Covid-19 cases, I retired.

Second, with all the extra time on my hands, I renewed my interest in genealogy and began researching my family.

Third, I was approached by the editors of Experience Magazine about writing an article. My writing dreams had taken a backseat to the practice of law and my growing family. But with my children grown and increased available time now that I was retired, I jumped at the opportunity.

My first article was about traveling across the country on my motorcycle. It was followed by two articles about writing in retirement. Then came my fourth article, one which has rippled through my life for nearly four years and bloomed during November 2024.

As I mentioned above, during the early months of the pandemic, I renewed my research into my family history. Computer technology has greatly eased the task since my prior efforts in tracking my family in the early 1990s. Now, there are tools such as ancestry.com, family search, newspapers.com, and more.

I discovered my great-grandfather’s first marriage, of which I was unaware. The marriage lasted only five years before his first wife died. They had two children about whom I previously knew nothing, including my great uncle John Wesley Terrell. All I knew of him were his birth and death dates: 1852 and 1916.

Death notices and obituaries often are great sources of family information, particularly occupations and names of married daughters and grandchildren. So, I typed John’s name and death date into newspapers.com. What I found was staggering.

John’s death made headlines across the state of Indiana. He was, to my shocking surprise, the “notorious John Terrell.” In 1903, John ambushed Melvin Wolfe, his estranged son-in-law, with a shotgun, then chased him to a nearby doctor, where he broke into the operating room, put the shotgun against his son-in-law’s head, and pulled the trigger. The story made headlines in hundreds of newspapers across the country, including on the front page of the New York Times.

My discovery prompted my Experience Magazine article, “A Murderer in the Family Tree.” It quickly became the most commented upon item I’ve written for Experience. But the article was also just the beginning of my journey with Uncle John. Like the boy gleefully jumping around in a room full of horse poop, shouting, “There’s got to be a pony in here somewhere,” I read through hundreds of newspaper articles about the murder and its circumstances. I became convinced that there had to be a book in there someplace.

Over the next three years, I polished up my research skills and dug in. Newspaper research sites led me to hundreds of articles about my great uncle, Wolfe’s murder, the trial, and all that followed. In the Indiana Archives, I found the 2,500-page trial transcript, appellate briefs, executive orders from Indiana Governor Winfield Durbin, and the single page remaining from my great uncle’s stay in the East Haven Asylum for the Insane. I used Ancestry.com to find birth, death, and marriage records, not only those of my family but also those of the judges, lawyers, and other characters involved in the story. I visited the offices of county clerks, recorders, and auditors, finding my way through records that dated back nearly 200 years when the first of my ancestors stepped foot in Indiana. I spent hours in the Wells County (IN) Public Library, ironically located on the former site of the Wells County Jail, where John was twice housed.

However, not all of my research was done in offices filled with yellowing paper. I felt a need to connect with all the people involved in this tragedy. So, I located the farms of both the Terrell and Wolfe families. I walked the roads in an area not much changed from the events of 1903. I found what I thought was John Terrell’s house, still in good condition, and used a local title company to confirm it was the same house where my great uncle and his family lived in 1903.

I stopped my car and walked along the road where, in 1903, John Terrell ambushed his abusive, cheating cad of a son-in-law, Melvin Wolfe. Several times, I visited the once-bustling town of Petroleum and found the place where the doctor’s office once stood where John tracked down Melvin and finished his gruesome task by battering down the door to the operating room and putting his shotgun against Melvin Wolfe’s head and pulling the trigger.

I spent time in the Wells County Circuit Courtroom, where John was tried for murder, and where I found a photo circa 1903 that showed most of the lawyers, the sheriff, judge, and bailiffs involved in John’s trial.

I visited where the story ended—the gravesites of all the principals, located in small, quiet country cemeteries scattered across northeastern Indiana.

I also researched issues raised by the story. My great uncle was an ardent atheist in a community that even now is fervently religious, so I researched the tolerance (or intolerance) of atheism in turn-of-the-century rural America. I also researched the insanity defense, the treatment of mental illness in a pre-Freudian world, and insane asylums in the early 1900s, and I investigated the surprising use of opiates among my grandparents’ generation prior to the Great War.

And I spent countless hours at my computer writing. I found a wonderful publisher in Kent State University Press, which publishes a historical true crime series. After several revisions and adding more than 450 endnotes, the book was ready for publication.

I have written three novels, all of which were independently published on Amazon and well-received by readers. But there is something even more special about this nonfiction true crime story about my own family.

The Madness of John Terrell: Revenge and Insanity on Trial in the Heartland was released on October 29th.