The Dark and Tragic Case of William and Lydia Boxell (Minnesota, 1897)

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]Welcome back to History Mark. I'm glad you're here. The case for today comes from the small town of Howard Lake in the state of Minnesota in the year 1897.

[00:00:09]The names at the center of it were William Thomas Boxell and Lydia Oliver Boxell. This case comes to the channel by way of a viewer in the comments of an earlier video who pointed me toward the history of a small farming town in central Minnesota and toward a crime that has remained unsolved for over a century. The people of Howard Lake have not forgotten it. The descendants of the family at the center of it, who today number in the dozens, gather still to mark the place where it happened. The local historical society in the county seat keeps the original newspaper articles and the court records in a folder under one name, and that is the name the press of the time gave it, the great Boxell murder mystery.

[00:00:53]On the night of Saturday, the 15th of May, 1897, under a full moon over the rolling farmland west of Minneapolis, an elderly farmer and his teenage bride were brutally assaulted in their sleep with a tool taken from their own yard.

[00:01:07]The killer or killers were never identified, although seven different men would be arrested in connection with the case over the course of the next two years. The seventh and final man arrested was a son of the dead man. He would be tried for the murder of his own father. He would be acquitted, and the people of Howard Lake have argued in private ever since about whether the right man was ever named at all. To begin, you have to know who the dead were. If you're enjoying these forgotten cases, please like the video and subscribe. It really helps this channel grow, and tell me in the comments, where are you listening from, and what's the weather like there right now? William Thomas Boxell, who was known throughout Wright County as W.T., was 62 years old at the time of his death. He had been born in Ohio in the 1830s and had come west to Minnesota in 1865 in the years after the American Civil War.

[00:02:07]He had taken up farmland near the small town of Howard Lake in the rolling country west of the Mississippi River and had built up over the decades a substantial holding and a prosperous farm. He had been married twice. His first wife Rachel, with whom he had spent most of his adult life, had born him 14 children in all, of whom nine had survived to adulthood. Several of those surviving children had grown up, married, and raised families of their own on farms and in towns within easy driving distance of the home place. The Boxells by the year 1897 were one of the larger and better established farming families in the district. Rachel Boxell had died some years before the events of this case. W.T., now a widower in his early 60s, had remarried. His second wife was a local young woman named Lydia Oliver. She was 19 years old at the time of the wedding. The marriage had taken place in February 1897. They had been husband and wife for 3 months and 1 day when the killing happened. It is at this point in the story that you have to understand the choice that W.T. Boxell had made shortly after his second wedding because it would become, in the long argument that followed, the most important piece of information in the entire case. Shortly after his marriage to Lydia, W.T. had quietly altered his will. Under the terms of the new document, a substantial share of the prosperous Boxell farm, the land and the livestock and the buildings, was to pass on his death not to his adult children from his marriage to Rachel, but to his 19-year-old bride. Nine grown sons and daughters, who had spent their lives expecting to inherit some portion of their father's estate, would now be cut back drastically and in some cases entirely in favor of a young woman who had been their stepmother for less than a season. It was not by the standards of the place and the time an unprecedented decision. Older widowers in the rural Midwest often provided for new young wives at the expense of children who were already established in their own lives, but it was not a decision that the older Boxell children, several of them with growing families of their own, were likely to take quietly. The arrangement was, in the language of the period, a private matter inside the family. The arrangement was also, by the moonlit night in May, 3 months and 1 day old. The Boxell farmhouse stood on a tract of land just outside the town of Howard Lake in Wright County. It was a working farm of the kind common in central Minnesota in the 1890s. There was a main house, a barn, several outbuildings, and a small woodpile against the south side of the kitchen.

[00:04:55]The axe used to split the firewood was kept, as was the custom of every farm in that part of the country, leaning against the woodpile at the end of each day's work. The farm also kept, as did almost every farm in the district, a dog. The Boxell dog was a working farm animal accustomed to giving the loud alarm at the approach of any stranger day or night.

[00:05:18]On the evening of Saturday, the 15th of May, 1897, the axe was in its usual place. The night was clear and cool with a full moon riding high above the fields. By every account that was later given to the coroner and the investigators, no one in the household had been expecting any trouble. W. T. and Lydia retired to bed in the main bedroom of the house at their usual hour. Whatever happened next happened in the hours of the deep night when nobody who lived in the house was awake to see it. When the investigators came in the morning, the first detail they noted in their report was that the door to the house had not been forced.

[00:05:58]It had been left unlocked in the way of most farmhouses in that quiet country, and the killer had walked in through it.

[00:06:06]The second detail they noted was that the dog had not barked, not in the hour of the killing, not during the entry, not at any point in the long night.

[00:06:16]Whoever had crossed the yard and walked up to the porch and into the kitchen and through to the bedroom of W.T. and Lydia Boxell was someone the dog had not seen any reason to challenge. The dog had known him. What was found in the bedroom would be described by the Howard Lake Herald in language so plain that it has the weight of testimony as a scene of absolute devastation that the first century of Wright County's existence had never produced. Both W.T. and Lydia Boxell had had their lives taken violently using the farm's own wood splitting axe as they slept beside one another in their bed. They had died by the determination of the coroner who examined them without ever having woken.

[00:07:03]The axe with the marks of what it had been used for plainly upon it had been left behind in the room. The killer had taken nothing. The alarm was raised in the morning. The Wright County Sheriff's Office was summoned. The investigators began their work in the bedroom and then in the yard and then in the small towns of the surrounding district. The case became within the week the largest single news story in central Minnesota.

[00:07:30]Newspapers as far away as Minneapolis and St. Paul carried full accounts of the killing. The Howard Lake Herald and the Wright County Eagle would, over the months that followed, devote column after column to the investigation and to the various theories that came and went.

[00:07:48]The first and most obvious question that the investigators had to answer was the question of motive. The Boxell farmhouse had not been robbed. Nothing of value had been taken from the bedroom or from any other part of the house. The axe was the family's own. The killer had not even brought a weapon with him. This had not been a burglary that had gone wrong.

[00:08:10]And it had not been a passing stranger taking the chance of a remote farmhouse on a moonlit night. The investigators understood from the beginning that whoever had killed the two people in the bed had known the layout of the property well, had known where the axe was kept, had walked through an unlocked door without alarming the dog, and had come specifically for the people in that one room. That meant the killer had almost certainly known the family, and it meant that anyone in the family who stood to gain from the deaths of W. T. and Lydia Boxell was now of immediate interest to the Wright County Sheriff. Over the course of the first year of the investigation, the Sheriff and his deputies arrested at least six different men in connection with the killing. The newspapers of the time recorded the arrests one by one. Each suspect in turn was brought in, questioned at length, held for a period in the Wright County jail, and then released for lack of sufficient evidence to charge him. The investigation seemed at times to be moving in every direction at once with no clear path through any of them. And then, in the spring of 1898, almost a year after the killing, the Sheriff arrested the seventh and final suspect, and this time the man was not released.

[00:09:24]His name was Joe Boxell. He was the son of W. T. Boxell. He was the son of the dead man. The arrest of a son for the murder of his own father was, in the small farming county of Howard Lake, an event that ran beyond the ordinary scale of any earlier scandal. The Boxell family was large, and it was respected, and Joe Boxell was a married man with a wife and two small children. He lived not far from the family farm. He had been one of the first relatives to arrive at the scene on the morning of the discovery, and he was now formally charged with the killing. The evidence that had brought the sheriff to him was by every account of those who would later read the trial transcripts entirely circumstantial.

[00:10:11]There was no witness who claimed to have seen Joe Boxell at the farmhouse on the night of the 15th of May. There was no confession. There was no weapon that could be tied to him beyond the axe that had belonged to the whole family.

[00:10:26]What there was, instead, was a slow and accumulated pattern of small things that the investigators had gathered together over the long year of their work, and that they had begun to believe pointed to one man. And underneath all of those small things was the larger fact that the will had recently been changed, that nine adult children of W. T. Boxell stood to lose a great deal of money by it, and that the dog had not barked.

[00:10:54]Whatever the strength of that evidence, the trial would have to test it. Joe Boxell was held in the Wright County Jail in the town of Buffalo awaiting trial. The trial itself would not begin until the summer of 1899, more than 2 years after the killing. It was in the months before the trial that the case acquired a second layer of intrigue, one that the modern listener has to step back to understand. It involved an institution that was a quiet but enormous presence in the small towns of late 19th century America, and one that played a part in the lives of millions of ordinary men whose names are forgotten today.

[00:11:35]It was the institution known as the Modern Woodmen of America. The Modern Woodmen of America, often abbreviated as the MWA, was a fraternal benefit society. It had been founded in 1883 in the state of Iowa, and by the 1890s it had spread across the American Midwest.

[00:11:55]It was a kind of mutual aid organization run by and for ordinary working men. A member paid a small annual fee. In exchange, if the member died, his widow and children would receive a substantial cash benefit from the order, paid out of the pooled dues of the membership. The Modern Woodmen, like the Masons and the Odd Fellows and the Knights of Pythias, were one of the great fraternal lodges of the period. There was a Modern Woodmen chapter in almost every small town in the Midwest, including Howard Lake.

[00:12:28]Joe Boxell, by the summer of 1898, was a member in good standing of the Howard Lake chapter of the Modern Woodmen of America. The death benefit he had insured himself for in the event of his own death was $1,500.

[00:12:43]In the currency of the time, that was the equivalent of several years of wages for a working man. If Joe Boxell were to die, his wife and his two small children would receive that sum.

[00:12:55]What happened next, in the months between Joe's arrest and his trial, was a small story that explains a great deal about the lives of ordinary American families at the end of the 19th century.

[00:13:08]Joe was in jail. He could not earn. His wife had two small children at home and was now the sole support of her household. The annual MWA dues, although small, were not nothing. And if they went unpaid, Joe would be expelled from the order and the $1,500 benefit would be lost.

[00:13:29]So, Joe Boxell's father-in-law, who lived in the same district, made a quiet decision. He began, while Joe was in jail awaiting trial for murder, to pay Joe's annual MWA dues for him.

[00:13:43]The reason was a calculation that, to a modern listener, sounds astonishing. If Joe was acquitted of the killing, the dues would simply have been a kindness extended to keep the family in good standing with the order. But, if Joe was convicted and the sentence was carried, then in the event that the ultimate penalty was carried out, his wife would receive the $1,500 from the Woodmen.

[00:14:08]The father-in-law was, in the most literal possible terms, hedging on the outcome of the trial. He was paying premiums on his son-in-law's possible execution.

[00:14:19]This piece of information, when it came out during the trial, would become one of the most talked about details of the entire affair in the Howard Lake newspapers. It said, in a way that nothing else could, that the man closest to the accused was preparing for a guilty verdict.

[00:14:36]The trial of Joe Boxell began in the courthouse of Buffalo, Minnesota, the seat of Wright County, in the spring of 1899.

[00:14:44]It would last until the 18th of July of that year. The case for the prosecution rested on the slow accumulation of small circumstantial details that the sheriff and his deputies had gathered over the preceding 2 years. There was no single piece of evidence that, on its own, would have convicted the accused. There was, instead, a long and complicated pattern that the prosecutor was asking the jury to read as a whole. Behind all of it was the question the jurors could not be made to forget. Who had the most to lose from the new will? Who knew the layout of the farmhouse? Who could walk past the dog without making it bark.

[00:15:24]There was also, the prosecution understood from the beginning, a particular problem with the witnesses. A number of the men who were expected to testify in the case, including some who had been close to Joe Boxall in the months before and after the killing, were themselves members of the Howard Lake chapter of the Modern Woodmen of America.

[00:15:46]The bonds of the fraternal lodges of that period were not casual ones.

[00:15:51]The oaths that members took at their initiation included pledges of loyalty to brother members, and the brotherhood of the order was, for many of the men who joined it, the most important social institution in their lives. More important than the church, more important than party, more important than the law.

[00:16:13]The Howard Lake newspapers, in the days before the trial began, openly speculated that fellow Woodmen who were called to the witness stand might quietly hold back information that could be damaging to one of their own.

[00:16:28]When the testimony came, it was as the papers had predicted. Witness after witness gave careful, narrow answers.

[00:16:35]They confirmed what could not be denied.

[00:16:38]They volunteered nothing more. The prosecutor could feel the case slipping from him with every passing day. He could not prove what he believed to be true. There was no witness who would put the accused at the farmhouse on the night of the killing. There was no confession from the accused himself.

[00:16:55]There was only the pattern of small things, and the pattern by itself was not enough. The case went to the jury in mid-July of 1899. They returned with a verdict of not guilty on the 18th. Joe Boxall walked out of the Buffalo courthouse a free man. He returned to his wife and and two children. His father-in-law's quiet investment in the Modern Woodmen dues did not, in the end, pay out because the man it was meant to insure had been spared. The $1,500 stayed in the pool of the order. And the killing of William Thomas Boxell and his 19-year-old wife, Lydia, on the moonlit night of the 15th of May, 1897, was never solved by any court of the state of Minnesota. In the generations that have followed, the question of who killed the Boxells has remained one of the quiet conversations of central Minnesota. The family itself has argued it. Joe Boxell lived on for many years after the trial. He went on with his life. He never confessed to anything, and he never publicly defended himself, either. The other six men who had been arrested over the course of the investigation, the names that had moved through the Wright County jail without ever sticking, went on with their own lives, too. The seven of them carried between them the suspicion of a small county for the rest of their days. In the modern day, the case has been kept alive by a descendant of the family.

[00:18:22]Christine Marcotte, who is W. T.

[00:18:24]Boxell's third great-granddaughter, has spent more than a decade researching the killing. She has collected hundreds of newspaper articles from the period. She has read the court transcripts of the 1899 trial. She has interviewed dozens of family members. She has presented her research at the Wright County Historical Society, and she has written a historical novel drawn from the material. Her work, more than any other, is the reason the case is remembered at all. The house in which W. T. and Lydia Boxell were killed is still standing in Howard Lake more than a century after the night they died in it. In 2012, the descendants of the family gathered for a reunion at Memorial Park in the town and were allowed by the present owners to tour the rooms where the killing had taken place. They walked through the same hallway. They stood in the same bedroom.

[00:19:17]They had come from across the country to see a place that none of them had ever been to before, but that all of them had heard about from their mothers and their grandmothers for their entire lives.

[00:19:28]Tell me in the comments who you think killed W.T. and Lydia Boxell on that moonlit night in May 1st, 1897. Was it Joe Boxell, the son who walked out of the courthouse two years later a free man? Or was it one of the other six men whose names passed through the Wright County Jail and whose stories were never told? I read every reply.

[00:19:50]Thank you for being here. The channel will see you again in the next one, History Mark.