The Madness of John Terrell With Author Stephen Terrell

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All right.

If you pay attention to the calendars, you know it is time for yet another fabulous author.

I have a good one for you today.

Let me tell you who our guest is.

He is a novelist and retired Indiana attorney with decades of experience in trials and appeals at the state and federal levels.

He has been a frequent speaker at legal conferences and seminars and was selected to the Indiana State Bar Association's General Practice hall of Fame.

He is the author of the Madness of John Terrell, Revenge and Insanity on Trial in the Heartland.

Please welcome author Stephen Terrell.

Hey, Stephen.

Welcome to the show.

Thank you very much.

It's great to be here.

It is my honor and privilege to have you here today.

Let me start by saying happy belated pub day as your book just did release on October 29th of 2024.

How does it feel?

It.

It feels great.

It was a long time coming with this book.

About three and a half, four years in the writing and the research and the editing of it.

But it was a great publication day.

I did the release, the launch party, if you will, at the Wells County Public Library, which is in the county seat of Bluffton, where all of this book took place, or most of it.

And it was fascinating being there.

Had a large crowd, basically standing room only, and sold all the copies of the book I had with me.

So, no, it was a good day.

Well, before we get into this book, which is very fascinating, let me ask you, is there anything else about Steven Terrell that we should know that we.

Don'T Well, I think you generally covered it in your introduction.

I am a retired lawyer, practice for 40 plus years basically centered around litigation and yeah, and then I always wrote on the side.

And when I retired I stumbled onto this story and spent a good part of the last, as I said, last three and a half, four years working on it and writing it, researching it.

So let's jump into that because this is where it becomes very fascinating.

John Terrell is related to you.

This is back believe in the 1800s.

You were bored during the pandemic from what I read and you started digging through your family tree.

Can you tell us a little bit about how you decided to do that and what led to this story?

I've always had an interest in family stories and in fact quite a few of my short stories had their genesis with family stories and I took them and then ran with the stories.

My family was very large and I was at the very young end of it.

You wouldn't guess it by looking at me now, but I had more than 40 aunts and uncles and they passed down lots of stories.

And so I had an interest in family genealogy, had done some work on it before.

But when the pandemic hit and I had a, had just retired, had a lot of time here and decided to do a little more in depth work on my family tree.

And then I stumbled upon my great uncle who I had no knowledge of at all.

John Wesley Terrell.

The first thing I did after I found his death and birth dates was I did a search on Newspapers.com for his death notice.

I had his death notice, his death date in 1916.

And so I searched on papers in the area where I live and where I thought he likely lived or grew up.

And sure enough the first story that popped up referred to the notorious John Terrell and his murder of his son in law which had captivated Indiana back in 1903.

You know, doing these family tree researches.

It happened to me too.

I have like some great uncle that was a part of some big robbery back in the day.

So I went down the rabbit hole too.

I'm like man, is this guy really related to me?

Is this really true?

So sometimes when we do these, you know, these family tree researches, we find things that we never knew.

Sometimes we find things we don't want to know.

Yeah, I, I wrote an article when I found this.

I, I do a column for the American Bar association and I wrote a column for them not long after I found out about this.

It was about finding a murderer in their family tree.

And the gist of it was before, you know, you read advertisements, you see them on television about people finding out they're related to some king or some hero or whoever.

Well, the bad guys have.

Some have relatives, too.

And so before you start, as you said, going down that rabbit hole, you might want to think a bit now.

Before we get into some of the other parts.

One of the other things you did find out about your great uncle is that he was the wealthiest man in Wills county after he discovered oil in his land.

Now, when I'm reading this part, forgive me if you haven't heard this before, but it kind of sounded like the Beverly Hillbillies to me because as you could, going on the same thing, Jack Clampet did you.

They wanted to move to Beverly Hills.

He moved to another town with a bigger house.

How did that part make you feel that he was actually a very wealthy man?

Oh, actually, I didn't have much of a reaction other than surprise.

But I did know a little bit about Indiana history and the gas and oil booms in Indiana in the 1880, late 1880s, up through the early 1900s.

And so it was a little bit of a surprise to see this, but not a shock.

I.

You aren't alone about the Beverly Hills Beverly Hillbillies reference.

I had a little bit of thoughts about that, except the difference here was that John was a very astute businessman, and he already was an astute businessman before he ever struck oil on his property.

By the end of 1896, he had six oil wells producing on his property, and he was buying business property, buying farm property, was talking with some businessmen about forming a bank.

So he was a very shrewd and sharp businessman, unlike the Persona of Jed Clampett.

You definitely get that because in the part of your book where the guy comes and says, well, here's your answer, because he had been asking how far deeper you got to go to get oil, and the guys was covered in it.

And he says, isn't this losing money?

Yeah.

So you totally get that business end of him.

At the very beginning of your book where you thanked people, you were thinking various family members, and you said, thank you for the stories, even though they hadn't talked to you about this one.

Why do you think they never brought this one up to you?

I don't know.

It's.

I mean, the obvious answer is that people didn't want the black sheep of the family, so to speak, to be known for that story to be passed around about the Terrell family.

And it really does Surprise me.

As far back as that was, I'm surprised that it, the story didn't get passed down at least to some extent.

I have a cousin who also is very knowledgeable about my aunts and uncles who were, you know, by the time I came along, quite older.

And he was very interested in genealogy also.

And he confirmed from his standpoint that he had never heard this story.

Wow.

Well, I do want to tell the audience, even though that you do say we're just going to talk about Melvin here in a second, that he does that he did kill his son in law in the very beginning of the book.

I want people to go buy this because you know, that is not the end of it.

So don't think he gave you the story.

He actually pulls it back and he goes into, in depth into the story of everybody, including John Terrell.

So when it comes to Melvin, what's your thoughts on Melvin?

Well, if I can just pause on and follow up on point you made there a bit that's a point I make in my presentations is that this isn't just a story about a murder.

There are lots of true crime books out there that are, you know, and.

But once you tell the story of the murder, that's just a small part of this because it really is the story of these three people.

And in fact, even more than that, if you count John's wife who we talk about, I talk about books, I'm sure, you know, it's a story about people.

It's a story about a time when a lot of people have misperceptions about what the world was like at, at the turn of the century in rural America.

As for Melbourne, you know, I tagged him as the cat of Wells county and I think that pretty well sums it up.

I mean in 1903, you know, every generation I think thinks it invents sex.

And every generation is wrong because it's been around a long time.

And Melvin, you know, got two girls knocked up by the time he was what, 21 years old.

He first got a young 15 year old girl pregnant and there's fascinating little story about her in the footnotes of the book.

But then he got Lucy pregnant.

John's youngest daughter.

Yeah, he was, he was a young man.

His father was relatively wealthy who was certainly well regarded in community.

He ended up I think trying to take.

And he was according to descriptions and according to the picture we have of him, he's a very good looking young man.

And he didn't apparently hesitate to take advantage of that.

Yeah, he Definitely did seem like, seemed like the playboy from back in that day.

And I agree with you on that because when I read this stuff, you know, I was born in 72 and a lot of people don't talk about, you know, the sexual revolution that happened in 1800, 1900s.

And you're right, everybody thinks it's just something new within our time frame, but it really wasn't.

Everything that we have now was created long before us.

John, though, do we think?

Because I feel like Melvin kind of antagonizes him a little bit.

Is he kind of known around the town as a no nonsense kind of guy?

Does people think John Terrell is a bad man at this point?

Well, there's a difference of opinion about him and you'll see that come out when you read the section about the trial.

There was a lot of evidence that came in about his reputation for his moral standing in the community and also his reputation for, for being violent in the community.

And so it went both ways.

You had at the trial, in rebuttal, at the trial, you had some of the most prominent citizens in all of Wells county, you know, office holders, bank presidents, insurance company presidents, all these people who came in and testified about John's upstanding reputation.

And yet on the other side, you had a lot of people come in and testify about his, his lack of good morals.

And that was primarily based, and this was a 1903 trial that was primarily based on the fact he was an atheist.

And that did not set well and Wells county in 1903.

And to be honest, it wouldn't set well in Wells county today.

And the interesting thing about that with John was the fact that his father, my great grandfather, and his grandfather, my great great grandfather, were both fundamentalist preachers.

And yet John was very much an avowed atheist.

I'm going get into trial in a minute, but I do have the interesting question.

So in the part of the book where Melvin decides that he wants to, in my opinion, antagonize John, he's riding by in his horse and boogie doing things he shouldn't be doing.

Do you think for any instance that he felt like John was dangerous or would shoot him because he keeps saying, well, what is that old man going to do?

Yeah, I, I don't think that that crossed Melvin's mind.

That's a guess on my part.

I don't have any firm evidence one way or another.

But based on his actions, he had been antagonizing not just John, but Lucy.

They were separated is the modern term.

At the Time.

And also antagonizing John's son and antagonizing John's two daughters and their families, doing things like running them off the road with his wagon, flashing his gun in one instance, having his good buddy, who was known as a brute around the community, a thug, had him confront John's son and threatened him, in fact, even slapped on John's son Jacob.

This guy slapped Jacob's girlfriend, later his wife.

Wow.

So kind of, in a way, I mean, I don't condone violence of any kind, but I do feel like that sometimes people pushes us to that limit.

Do you, even if you didn't like the guy, do you think without all of the antagonizing that Melvin did, that this would have ever happened?

Oh, no, no, I don't think it would.

I think it was caused by his antagonist, antagonist antagonizing of John and John's family.

His abuse of.

Of Lucy, which was severe.

His abuse of the other members of the Tero family.

And I think it just.

That one day it just snapped and he was going to put an end to it.

Now back to the trial.

There is a lot that goes to the trial.

You guys need to read that.

But the most captivating part, and I think you kind of hit a little bit on it, is, is that he was done with.

In 15 minutes they came back with the verdict.

Do you think that that was fair?

You touched on him being atheist, you know, Bible belt back in that day.

Do you think that was fair or they did use that against him?

Oh, I think it's hard to.

To say what goes on in a jury's mind.

They certainly made up their mind long.

The trial went on.

The transcript, which I found was 2500 pages long.

The trial lasted three weeks and that included numerous night sessions.

I'm sure that jury made up its mind despite instructions for them not to make up their mind before they are given the case.

I'm sure they discussed it and they knew what they were going to do.

The vote was 12 to 0 on the first vote to convict.

The only multiple ballots they had, they had three ballots on what his sentence should be.

None of the jurors voted for the death penalty, which was on the table.

And 11 to 1 they voted in favor of life in prison.

And it did not take.

There was one vote, one person to wanted to give a lighter sentence, but it only took him two votes and he folded.

And they came back with the jury verdict in about 15 minutes from the time they started considering it.

That, by the way, just point out there are several other jury things in this matter.

There was a subsequent jury trial about John sanity.

There was a jury trial about a guardianship and John sanity.

There was a trial between Melvin and Lucy on fraudulent marriage.

In all three of those instances, the jury was only out five, ten minutes.

Oh, wow.

Now, I won't give it away, but I will tell the audience after he shoots Melvin, that's not the end.

Got to read this for yourself.

But do you think that the mind was already made up because of the brutality of how everything unfolded?

Well, first of all, you have to keep in mind I always found this fascinating.

The number one reason why jurors were kept off the jury panel was their opposition to the death penalty.

And one could argue that, you know, the jurors that were opposed to a death penalty might have been more receptive to listening to a defense.

The second aspect of it was, and the state made a really good case of this.

The initial case the state put on only took about a day and a half.

And the emphasis of the lawyers was a team of lawyers on both sides.

And the emphasis of the lawyers for the prosecution was put on that no man should be allowed to take the law into his own hands.

No matter what Melvin did.

It wasn't John Terrell's place to take the law into his own hands.

And it did seem that that message got across very clearly to the jurors.

So after knowing this story, reading about it, writing the book, how do you overall feel about John Terrell?

Mixed feelings.

I mean, obviously this was so long ago.

I did not know him.

I do know that my dad had one occasion to run into him, and I know that only through his sister.

My dad never talked about it.

I never heard about that until I had written this.

And my sister mentioned, just in passing, basically that my dad, when he had been young, had met John Terrell, had visited him once with.

With my grandfather.

I have mixed views about him as somebody who practiced law, who believes in.

In the rule of law.

And I can't condone somebody just taking the law into their own hands the way John did.

Yet, on the other hand, he.

His family was so abused that I do understand his finally snapping and taking matters into his own hand as to what followed.

And again, you know, the.

The trial isn't even the end of this.

It goes on.

And as to John's ultimate question of his sanity, I can tend to lean with what I see.

That nobody could have faked insanity for as long as John did from the end of the trial until he's death some 13 years later.

Yeah, I, I think that.

And whether he was faking it or not, if he was faking it, he created his own prison.

I, I kind of feel that because I'm going through a situation right now where there's people that's trying to push me into that.

And I think that sometimes people go that on because they want to see what the worst thing you will do and it can end deadly.

I don't condone violence like you don't either, but sometimes it's just like beating a dog with the stick.

One day you're going to hit him the wrong way and that's going to be it and things are going to happen.

Some, sometimes, some extreme circumstances, you just go, the guy deserved it.

So now, after finding this out by doing a deep dive into your family tree, has this deterred you from moving on with that project or has it encouraged you to keep going?

Oh, no, no.

I, I found it fascinating and I found some other fascinating stories in my family tree.

On my other side of the family, there's my first cousin who actually may have gotten away with murder.

Oh, wow.

He was, he shot a guy who was going to run off with his wife and police arrested him, charged him with first degree murder, but when the case went to the grand jury, they refused to indict him.

Oh, wow.

The interesting story about that and I was really touched by your beginning.

About 988.

For a lot of reasons, I've lost friends to suicide.

I have worked with a group called the Indiana Judges and Lawyers Assistance Program for a long time, which deals with judges and lawyers, people in the legal community who have issues with mental health and trying to deal with that.

And in the story I just told you about my cousin, he ended up spending a good part of his life after that shooting, ended up going into a mental state mental hospital and spending a good part of his life in that.

In part, I think it was due to the impact of having shot and killed someone even though he was never tried for.

Yeah, that kind of weighs on you.

That's why I said to the people that's trying to get after me, I'm like, it's something I would never do because I have a conscience.

And I know I wake up every morning realizing that I took somebody away because they made me mad by something that they said.

So it's always best to just remove yourself from those current situations.

What has your family felt about the writing of this book?

Oh, they've been excited about it.

They've Been found it fascinating.

It might have been a different case if I wrote about somebody who everybody knew in the family.

But this happened so long ago that even John's children had passed away by the time I was, I think Lucy died when I was 7 years old.

This is from research, this isn't from knowing her.

But.

So nobody in the family really knew these people.

So I just think they found it rather fascinating.

Well, I do.

I, I thank you for writing this book because I've been written before to saying that a lot of crime from back in those times, 1800, 1900s, never gets covered.

Some people think that maybe crime was hush hush.

So when this book came across, you know, when I got email from you and I got this book, I'm like, oh, this is fascinating.

And I, I read it to my wife.

The, the excerpt from it, I'm like, this is about a guy who is related to this guy and this happened in the 1800s.

He's like, we never hear these things.

We see the westerns.

But I, I thank you for bringing this out.

I think it's something that we can all learn from that.

Even in those times we had the exact same problems.

Bullying was going on.

It maybe just not as widely talked about then as it is now.

But I do think that it's good to see that some of these same issues was happening back long before us.

Yeah.

And I think if that struck me about this in the writing process as much as anything because.

And if you've gone through the book, you've probably seen some of these.

We've gotten an issue of incest.

When Lucy finds Melvin in bed with his stepsister.

There's an issue with regard to abortion.

There is the issue with regard to opiates because at the time when Lucy, Lucy attempts, she saw abuse, she attempts suicide with laudanum, which is a tincture of alcohol and opioids.

And so those problems weren't.

And you mentioned bullying.

Those problems aren't new to us people in 1890, 1900, 1903, when this took place, we're much closer to us and the same problems and the same issues we deal with.

Teenage pregnancy, another one.

All of those things that we deal with now and we think are new and they're awful for society and it's terrible.

We've never been like this before.

In fact, we seem to have always been like this, certainly over the last 140 years.

So why should people go out and buy a copy of the Madness of John Terrell?

Revenge and Insanity on Trial in the.

Heartland because it's a hell of a story.

That's about the best thing I can say it is.

You know, whether I tell it the best, whether somebody could have told it better, I don't know.

I think it's pretty good myself.

But it's just a hell of a story about a man who is driven to the brink and takes action and what happens to him after that and what happens to his entire family if I can't.

The the opening of the book, the first paragraph is attributed to Lucy the daughter and says Melvin Wolf was a mean, lying, cheating son of a bitch and the handsomest man I ever saw.

Right to the day my PA put a shotgun against his head and blew his brains all over Doc Saunders office.

Blew him straight to hell.

Blew the rest of our lives to hell too.

In closing, is there anything you would like to say to your fans or readers that may be listening to this today?

Hope you've enjoyed the broadcast.

I hope you enjoyed the book and if anyone out there has wants to discuss this with me, anybody in their at their book club has a need for a speaker, please feel free to contact me.

It's a stephen with a ph@terrellrites.com well.

Stephen, I thank you for joining me today.

I'm about to finish this book.

I will be finishing it today.

It is an interesting read.

It is a page turner and I know in some degree it could, even though you didn't really know him, it could be hard to write these things about a family member and put it out there.

So I do appreciate you.

Anytime you want to come back on the show, you know how to get a hold of me.

Feel free to reach out.

Okay, great.

I have enjoyed it.

Thank you sir.

All right guys, that was the great Stephen Terl.

You can get your copy of the Madness of John Terrell, Revenge and Insanity on Trial in the Heartland at Amazon and any other places that books are sold.

Once again, I want to thank you guys for joining us today.

I know you have many Torture Voices in True Crime interview podcast and I am grateful that I am one of the ones that you continue to choose.

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