This is the second in a two-part series on a 1925 case that drew national attention. Read the first part here.
The public assumed the worst when Earl Woodward and Lucille Chatterton disappeared one evening in April 1925 from the Granville farm where they both lived.
It seemed obvious that the 27-year-old farmhand had kidnapped Lucille, who was only 11. Newspapers speculated that Woodward, who had a criminal record for theft, probably killed Chatterton shortly after she vanished.
People wanted Woodward dead. Vermont Attorney General Frank C. Archibald said he could be shot on sight. Hundreds of armed volunteers, law enforcement officers and Norwich University cadets scoured the woods of central Vermont in what was called the “largest manhunt” in the state’s history.
A week after he disappeared, Woodward was arrested without incident. He was discovered under a mound of hay in a deserted barn in Brookfield. With him was a quite alive Lucille Chatterton. The two were hungry, and their clothes were wet from heavy rain the day before, but otherwise they appeared healthy.
Lucille, however, was visibly upset. She was crying and kept saying, “Don’t take me home, father will kill me.”
The pair were driven to an inn in Randolph, where scores of onlookers — some press reports said there were hundreds — met the automobile. Among the throng was Lucille’s father, Walter Chatterton, who leaned into the car to hug his daughter and mutter a few choice words to Woodward.
Reporters from local and national newspapers started interviewing anyone they could, and law enforcement officials allowed press photographers to pose Lucille for a variety of shots: hugging her father, perching on his knee, kissing him. They also snapped shots of Woodward and the men who had captured him. They even photographed the police dog that had led them to their quarry. The photos appeared in newspapers as far away as Alaska and Hawaii.
Two local doctors “made a complete examination (of Lucille) … and announced that she had not been harmed by Woodward,” according to the Associated Press. At the inn, several women bathed Lucille and gave her new clothes to wear. Then Lucille and Woodward were fed breakfast, separately, and questioned by Attorney General Archibald and Addison County Sheriff George Farr before being driven to Middlebury.
For the next few weeks, Woodward and Lucille would sleep under the same roof — Woodward in a cell at the Addison County jail while awaiting trial, and Lucille in the home of the jailer and his wife, who had agreed to look after the girl until after Woodward’s trial.
Even as Lucille and Woodward were adjusting to their first night in a strange place, press coverage of the case and, as a result, public opinion about it were shifting. Newspapers carried comments by the two that this had been no kidnapping: Lucille had left willingly with Woodward, trying to escape her abusive father, who she said had beaten and threatened to kill her on the day she ran away. Woodward said the man also abused his wife.
The Chattertons also found themselves accused of being unfit parents to their eight children because of their extreme poverty. Newspapers reported pitiable details: The family had only three beds in which to sleep and had gone for two weeks the previous winter with only potatoes and salt to eat
Lucille was behind at school because her parents often kept her home, according to Woodward, who told investigators he had planned to take her to friends in White River Junction or New Hampshire, where she could live and attend school.
Woodward was being transformed from a villain to a hero. A Boston Globe reporter reported overhearing a conversation between Angie Sanford, the jailer’s wife, and Woodward, after his first night behind bars.
“Well, they did not do as well for you as they did for Lucille,” Sanford said. “She is up in Pauline’s bed, my daughter who is away, and she looks like a little fairy.”
To which Woodward replied: “Well, I’m glad she has a good comfortable bed for the first time in her life.”
The Hardwick Gazette editorialized that “the sordid life of the Chattertons is not uncommon,” indeed families living in similar conditions could be found in the backwoods sections of Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire and many other states. “If Earl Woodward has succeeded in saving one child from the living death of stagnation in a hovel in the mountains, his prison term, in case he serves one, will not have been in vain. Simple fellow that he is, his act will stand out as one of the vicarious sacrifices which are the glory of life.”
Countering this narrative of Woodward as savior was an article by the Rutland Herald, which ran under the headline “Sordid Village Tales.” The story claimed that an incriminating letter to Woodward had been found at the Chatterton home, congratulating him for having a “little sweetheart.” The reporter assumed this was a reference to an inappropriate relationship with Lucille. Few people seemed to take the article seriously. No other newspaper followed up on the claim and the state prosecutor never mentioned such a letter in court.
Still, the state of Vermont argued that Woodward deserved serious punishment for his role in Lucille Chatterton’s disappearance, charging him with kidnapping a minor under 16 years of age, a crime punishable with up to 20 years in prison and/or a fine of $10,000. After Woodward pleaded not guilty, Judge Albert W. Dickens set bail at $10,000.
If Woodward’s prospects were looking bleak, Lucille’s were improving. Lucille started attending fourth grade, where she was older than her classmates because she was behind on her education. Lucille received more new clothes and was given a haircut, her shoulder-length hair trimmed into a short bob. The manager of a local riding school even gave her use of a horse to ride around the village.
She was also photographed with a new doll, her first ever, according to the Burlington Free Press.
“Her daddy was too poor to buy any,” the newspaper wrote, “and the cold, repressed New England temper of him and his wife did not permit them to invent a makeshift on which little Lucille could lavish her affection.”
“Until Earl came, I didn’t know what kindness was,” the Free Press quoted Lucille saying. “He never abused me, either on the farm or while we were together in the hills.”
Meanwhile, Walter Chatterton had an epileptic seizure. He’d had them periodically since childhood, but this was more severe than usual because of the strain he’d been under, according to his doctor.
The Rutland Herald, in an editorial, called for a calm analysis of the facts.
“In the heat of the man hunt for Woodward, there was entirely too much talk of ‘shooting on sight,’” the Herald wrote. The paper noted that Woodward had not harmed Lucille, adding, however, that “it would not be surprising if the court should return Woodward to some kind of permanent restraint” — in other words, return him to prison.
Physical abuse, like that which Woodward accused Walter Chatterton of inflicting on his daughter, was “all too common, not only on back farms, but in better class families,” the paper wrote. But given Woodward’s previous run-ins with the law, it was going to take more than his word to justify “taking the child away from her natural protectors.”
The Associated Press adopted a less supportive tone, reporting that the Chattertons wanted their daughter back “even though they have seven other children to care for with their meager resources.” Newspapers published photographs of Eva Chatterton with five of her younger children — Leonard, Lindy, Louis, Lucy (not to be confused with Lucille) and Loren.
Woodward also faced a challenging childhood. At a young age, he had been put up for adoption and had never known his birth parents. A week after he was arrested, however, Woodward received an unlikely visitor: his mother. Mrs. Jennie Sturtevant of Brockton, Massachusetts, traveled to Middlebury to meet the son she had given up. For two-and-a-half decades, Sturtevant said, she had thought her boy was dead.
Sturtevant, whose family name was Woodward, was only 15 when she gave birth. (The father was apparently a French-Canadian handyman who lived with the family.) She eventually left her child in the care of Elizabeth and Charles McIntyre of Granville, promising to send money regularly for the boy’s care.
When Earl was only three, Sturtevant’s father told her that her son had died. Sturtevant had moved to Massachusetts and married, not telling her husband that she’d had a child as a teenager. Press reports of the search were the first she heard that her son was still alive.
Mother and son talked for four hours. They had lots of catching up to do. Though reporters were not privy to the conversation, newspapers were able to offer biographical sketches of Woodward’s troubled life.
The McIntyres had given the boy “a good home and chance,” according to the Randolph Herald and News, which ran an extensive report. Woodward, the paper wrote, seemed to dwell in a fantasy world in which he played “the role of the dime novel heroes of which he read voraciously.” In reality, the paper stated, Woodward proved to be “untrustworthy, light-fingered.”
Woodward lived in the woods in cabins he built, “using a gun much too freely for the comfort of the family whom he terrorized at times.” During World War I, he enlisted in the Navy, but later deserted and returned to Granville, where he took up residence in his childhood home, which the McIntyres had abandoned when they moved out of town.
One day during the summer of 1917, Woodward fired his rifle toward the village, which was a half mile away.
“(S)everal people walking about the street in Granville heard bullets whistling above their heads,” the Herald and News reported. Woodward was arrested and returned to the Navy, where he was court-martialed and given a five-year sentence.
Instead of prison, the Navy sent Woodward to a hospital in Washington, D.C., for psychological evaluation. He was judged sane and, at war’s end, given a dishonorable discharge.
Back in Granville, Woodward was arrested for breaking into the village store. Officers had no trouble discovering the culprit. Indeed, Woodward could hardly have made it simpler for them — tracks led from the store to the old McIntyre place, where Woodward was found hiding under a bed. Officers pulled him out by his heels.
After serving a short sentence, he was hired as a farmhand in Randolph. He robbed the family’s home his first night there and found himself back in prison. He was paroled after serving part of his sentence and returned to Granville, where he found sporadic work as a laborer and lived in an unused schoolhouse. When he fell ill that autumn, a local family, the Chattertons, took him in. He might have felt at home — the Chattertons lived in the former McIntyre place.
We don’t know if Woodward shared any of these details with his mother. We do know she left saying she would help him find a lawyer and, if acquitted, he could come live with her. Woodward said “when this scrape is over you can bet that it will be the last one for me, for hereafter I shall have someone to look up to.”
The case of State of Vermont vs. Earl Woodward was due to start May 13 in Middlebury.
That day, the Boston Globe reported: “This town is the mecca of hundreds of extremely curious persons from miles around, who … came in farm wagons, motor vehicles and on foot and made the town look as if a county fair or anniversary celebration was on.”
Those who managed to squeeze into the Addison County courthouse witnessed a surprising scene. State’s Attorney Wayne Bosworth said the prosecution wasn’t ready to proceed with the kidnapping case. Instead, the state wanted to try Woodward first for two lesser charges involving the theft of a rifle and horse blanket from the Chatterton home.
Woodward’s attorneys objected, saying they had prepared a defense of the kidnapping charge, and moved that if the state wasn’t ready to proceed, that charge should be dropped. Judge Dickens sided with the state and scheduled a jury trial on the rifle theft charge for the next day. The judge moved the hearing on the kidnapping case to the following week.
During the trial about the rifle, Walter Chatterton admitted that he had let Woodward use the gun whenever he wanted. But he said that on the day Woodward and Lucille disappeared, he had told his farmhand not to use it because Woodward didn’t have a hunting license and never cleaned the rifle after using it.
Chatterton’s daughter was the star witness for the defense.
“Little Lucille came into the courtroom this morning with a hop, skip and a jump,” the Globe reported. “She smiled at the judge and she smiled at the jury. No little actress could have faced an audience more calmly and blithely than she did.”
Lucille told the courtroom that Woodward had taken the rifle for defense against bears and bobcats they might encounter. She said he planned to return it once the two reached White River Junction because they wouldn’t need it anymore.
All the testimony and arguments were completed by midday and the court recessed for lunch. Then jury members began their deliberations. It took them seven minutes to reach a verdict: not guilty.
Woodward still faced the far more serious kidnapping charge.
On May 20, Woodward, witnesses, and attorneys were back in court for a hearing to determine if the case should be presented at a jury trial in June. The daylong inquiry featured Lucille Chatterton and her parents on the witness stand, explaining events surrounding the case. Newspaper accounts suggest that the testimony contained almost nothing that hadn’t already been reported. Everyone stuck to their previous version of the facts.
At the end of the day, Judge Dickens reviewed the testimony for 20 minutes and then told those in the crowded courtroom that to try Woodward for kidnapping, the state needed to show that he had “inveigled” Lucille to run away with him “by deception for an evil purpose.”
“When this case broke upon us, in fact, broke upon the entire United States, the thought was that Woodward’s purpose was an evil one,” Judge Dickens said, “but there it was that the State’s case broke down. His purpose was not evil and his intentions were kindly.”
Dickens ordered Woodward released “for lack of evidence sufficient to warrant holding him for jury trial.”
A Boston Globe reporter described the scene: “The crowd in the courtroom arose as one and a great cheer broke forth, intermingled with handclapping and the baying of a hound, which one interested spectator had on his lap during the afternoon session. At the verdict the dog was forgotten, but his voice was heard. Children ran around the courtroom and infants in the arms of their mothers yelled lustily at the unexpected outburst.”
Earl Woodward, who many people would have been happy to see die just three weeks earlier, left the courthouse an unlikely hero and a free man.
Postscript: That’s where Hollywood would want to end the story. But it’s more complicated than that. Although all the charges against Woodward in the Chatterton case failed to stick and he promised to mend his ways, in the ensuing years he had several more run-ins with the law involving thefts and forgery.
Despite his troubled life, however, his mission to free Lucille Chatterton from her desperately poor childhood and get her an education seems to have worked.
A week after Woodward’s kidnapping charges were dropped, Lucille became a ward of the state and for several years continued to live with Angie Sanford and her husband, Noble, the Addison County jailer. She went on to attend Middlebury High School, where she acted in plays, sang in the glee club and worked for the school newspaper. She graduated in 1933, with honors.