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MURDER MYSTERY CLEARED.Point Pleasant Poller* Make Three Arrests for Martin Murder.Point Pleasant police authorities have cleared up the mystery surrounding the murder of Benjamin Martin, 52 years old, whose body, weighted with a railroad jack, was found at the mouth of the Kanawha river at Point Pleasant last Friday. According to information received here from G. C. Hite, head of the police department of the Mason coun-j ty capital, Samuel Smoot, John W. Smoot and Mabel Smoot, the latter the wife of Samuel Smoot, have confessed they murdered Martin on a houseboat on the night of March 31. The three were arraigned in magistrate court in Point Pleasant today.The motive for the murder, according to the story told the chief of police by the Smoots, was that the latter wonted a houseboat owned by Martin, and that they stole to his bed in the dead of night and murdered him with an axe, after he had declined to sell the boat to them. They then placed the body in a skiff, tied the railroad Jack, weighing more than] 60 pounds, to one of the legs, rowed a distance of about 60 feet from the houseboat, and toward midstream, and dropped the body overboard.After the body had been removed from the river nearly a month later a man told the chief of police that he had seen the railroad jack tied to the leg on a houseboat. The arrest of the Smoots on the boat followed.(fi*nV
Newspaper Details
Charleston Mail
Charleston, West Virginia, US
Tue, Apr 29, 1919
Page 12
Full Page
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Anonymous
USA 01 Nov 2018
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