A Saturday morning outing to Hemlock Cliffs, with an unexpected side order of unsolved murder.

On Saturday morning we drove down to the Hemlock Cliffs in Crawford County, a charming sandstone box canyon that's part of the Hoosier National Forest. The photos don't do it justice; it's a hidden jewel, not a big ticket item. Coupled with the drive, I found the experience to be a lesson in regenerated second-growth forest. There'd have been a great deal of pasture land and denuded hillsides even when I was a kid.  

When I posted about it later on Fb, a friend mentioned the saga of William Dessie Messamore.

In the early 1950s, Messamore was questioned about a family who had disappeared from his Crawford County, Indiana, farm without a trace on January 7, 1949. Members of the missing family were Thomas Vandiver, his wife, Beatrice, and her daughter from another marriage, Wanda Johnson. The family had been living with Messamore on his farm in English when they disappeared. The Vandiver investigation led to a confession from Messamore that he had been part of a Kevil, Kentucky, bank robbery. Police worked for years to solve the Vandiver mystery while Messamore served a 28-year prison sentence, including time at Alcatraz, for the bank robbery and a Paducah jail break. He was eventually paroled. No one was ever charged in the Vandiver case, although authorities always suspected the case was murder and thought Messamore was involved.

Supposedly the house where the crime occurred was located a few miles north of our whereabouts Saturday near the hamlet of Mifflin, which no longer exists. It is said the house was up on Saltwell Hill, with an expanse of cliffs in the back yard, so local legend affirms the existence of bones in a sinkhole (or the bottomland over the edge of a cliff like those we walked past). 

It's a helluva story, and based on Messamore's attraction to crime, all too possible. The story is retold here (The Vandiver Mystery) and there (Hughes Interview).