S6 Ep13: Wesley Elkins: The 11-Year-Old Killer

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:06]Some crimes are so heartbreaking or shocking that they change laws, change society, or even earn the label crime of the century. But the stories that made headlines in decades past aren't necessarily remembered today. I'm Amber Hunt, a journalist and author. And in each episode of this show, I'll examine a case that's maybe lesser known today, but was huge when it happened.

[00:00:34]This is Crimes of the Centuries.

[00:00:47]There are two versions of Wesley Elen's early childhood.

[00:00:51]And the first he was whisked away from a small Elcar, Iowa farm when his adulterous mother Matilda decided she was leaving Wesley's father even before he was born. Matilda left town with her lover landing about 75 mi away in Waterlue where she gave birth to Wesley either in 1878 or 79 depending on which source you believe. We're going with 78.

[00:01:17]Back in Matilda's old stomping grounds, the Elcater gossip held that she had always been an erratic piece of work, a floozy and a mean one at that. That first version, the one that held the attention of all of Clayton County, also had it that before she had flown the coupe, Matilda had tried to kill her husband, but either failed or decided simply leaving him would suffice. In any event, she divorced him. It was scandalous.

[00:01:47]In this version, Wesley supposedly lived the first six years of his life with his mother and her next husband, William Dowin, but was shipped back to Clayton County after Matilda died in 1884.

[00:02:00]The second version has it that Matilda, supposedly still a mean flooy, left Clayton County after giving birth to Wesley, leaving him in the care of his father, or maybe more likely in the care of his father's older halfsister.

[00:02:15]Matilda had by then taken Dowin as her second husband, who already had two children, a boy older than Wesley and a girl who was about the same age as Wesley. That lasted 3 years until Matilda gave birth to another son and died shortly after. Wesley was 6 years old and apparently booted from his half aunt's home by then. So now he was back in Clayton County in the care of a father who had since taken a much younger bride, Hattie, who was just 16 years old when they married. It seems that John and Hattie, didn't want him in their house, either. Hadtie's parents, the alults, agreed to take him in. That little experiment was short-lived. Soon after, they told their daughter and son-in-law that Wesley was on his way back to them. By now, Wesley was nine, an unwanted child who adults found either troublesome or inconvenient, or both. In any case, he was just a little boy, frail and undersized in a messy world not of his making. And he was already on a path that would in just 2 years shock the country and haunt the American justice system for decades.

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[00:05:11]Almost all of those who knew Wesley outside of his home, teachers, pastors, friends, saw nothing in the child to suggest he might be a bad seed. When asked, they remembered a quiet kid who learned quickly and kept to himself. But those who knew Matilda or knew of Matilda from the talk of their neighbors maintained that Wesley was an ill-conceived, ill-bred, and illtempered little boy. That the reason he moved five times in 9 years is because no one could handle his devilish and destructive nature. I don't know if Matilda deserved the scorn she got both in life and in death. I suspect she got more than she really earned, but there's not much documentation about her life outside of her son, so it's tough to say. The critics certainly had something concrete to point to later when Wesley did what he would eventually do at the age of 11. It was proof, they said, that he was born without a moral compass or conscience. He was an unredeemable soul primed irrevocably to an evil life. And when his time on this earth ended, he was destined to spend his eternal life with Satan, who could deal with him in hell. Let's call this the Clayton County view. The most generous version of that view was that he was the sole inheritor of his parents' disdain for one another, a casualty of a very intimate war.

[00:06:42]But those who interacted with Wesley in the larger world saw a very different child. This Wesley was well behaved, respectful even, and a quick and interested learner. He was a slight child, small for his age, and timid, and showed every sign of parental neglect and abuse. When asked about it by his peers or his teachers, a very young Wesley downplayed the brutality. But plenty of people saw it. Back in those days though, they didn't intervene and Wesley certainly didn't ask for help. It was only in later years that you would tell of being regularly beaten by his father and stepmother for the slightest perceived misstep. Their vitrial had made his life a living hell in which he was always scared and always hurt. Let's call this everybody else's view, a view that would soon cease to make a difference.

[00:07:39]The concern for his welfare more or less ended when his father took him out of school and out of any social oversight.

[00:07:46]He was put to working long hard hours on the farm and in the sawmill his father owned. He was also always at his stepmother's back and call for in-house chores and babysitting. Reminder, he was nine.

[00:08:01]Now, those versions of Wesley would remain at odds, though it hardly mattered. Not many people were paying much attention to the Elkins farm. Not until the early morning hours of an exceedingly hot July 17th, 1889.

[00:08:17]That's when Wesley would wake up around 3:00 a.m., take the family rifle, and kill his father while he slept before clubbing his stepmother to death. What exactly precipitated this isn't clear.

[00:08:32]As always with Wesley's case, there would be differing versions of the crime as reported in a few different newspapers and in court. They all tried to get to the bottom of things, but there were a lot of questions to sift through. The first one was obviously, was he the gunman? Yes, as it turned out. Secondly, what was the motive? Uh, hard to say. Desperation, maybe. Did he plan it? Yeah, probably. Did he know what he was doing? Well, sort of. And finally, did he understand the consequences?

[00:09:08]Well, we'll get to that.

[00:09:11]First, let's take a look at kids who killed their parents. There's a fancy name for that. It's parasite. Here's Dr. Joyy's brothers talking to CBS's Palazon when the infamous Menendez brothers were first on trial.

[00:09:25]>> There are three kinds of kids who kill their parents. one kind is severely mentally ill and they hear voices uh and have hallucinations and they tell them to kill.

[00:09:38]>> So that that that's a pretty easy predictor of of someone who might be inclined to this kind of >> mentally ill people are less likely to murder than others, but there are some and it's a rare kind of thing.

[00:09:49]>> What about the other two?

[00:09:50]>> There are others who are so abused that they learn to be helpless. there's a learned helplessness and it reaches a critical mass where they can't take it anymore either because they consider and it's usually the oldest child uh that oldest child considers that he or she must protect the others or protect the other parent uh and they see no other way out and so there's a critical mass and when the killing happens it's when the parent is helpless asleep watching television uh not actually physically abusing the child uh when they get enough courage and often there is a kind of an overkill if if they shoot and it's usually shooting because that is at a distance you don't have the contact uh they overkill shoot many more times than necessary to kill the person out of the fear. There's also a third kind uh and these are the sociopaths who have no feeling of remorse, no feeling of concern for other people, no conscience, no anything. Uh and for them um anything can trigger the situation.

[00:10:55]Wesley Elkins could conceivably have belonged in any of the three categories.

[00:11:01]What we do know about this parasite is that around 3:00 a.m. that Wednesday morning, 11-year-old Wesley took his father's hunting rifle from where it hung on the wall above his dresser in his own tiny bedroom. He then went into his parents' bedroom and standing a few feet away from his father, shot him in the face. The sound awakened his stepmother, so he ran out of the room to fetch a club from the kitchen. When he returned, Hadtie was leaning toward the nightstand, trying to light a lamp to make sense of what had happened. When Wesley hit her in the back of the head with a club when she fell back across the bed and onto her dying husband, Wesley continued to club her until he was sure she was dead. For good measure, he also struck his father a few more times to reassure himself that neither would live to tell what happened. He then put the rifle back where he got it and took the club outside.

[00:12:00]Around daybreak, he wrapped his baby sister up tight, hitched up a horse to a wagon he could handle, and headed out first to take the baby to Hadtie's parents' home, and then he'd go for help. His plan was to find his brother, Mark, who was 10 years older than he was and worked at a nearby farm. That way, the youngster wouldn't be alone when he could inform the police about a terrible thing that had happened at the farm when some stranger came in and killed the adults in the house. On the way to the alults, a neighbor saw the buggy in the early morning light just as it was passing his front gate. He recognized the boy and realizing that this was an unusual occurrence, called out for him to stop for a minute. Wesley did as he was asked. That's when 60-year-old John Porter, who knew the Elkins well as they worked for him as tenant farmers, asked the 11-year-old where he was off to.

[00:12:57]Wesley said he was going to drop the baby off before finding Mark to tell him that he had found their father and stepmother dead in their bed. An intruder, he said. Dumbfounded, Porter told Wesley to leave the baby with him and his wife and to make haste to go get Mark. The older gentleman could see what looked like dried blood spatter on Wesley's face and clothing, but the boy had been inordinately calm and careful with the baby. Funny thing, he wasn't wearing any shoes. Porter awakened his own household and gathered the troops.

[00:13:33]His wife took the baby. George Porter's 24year-old son agreed to go to the Elkins house immediately and see if perhaps this was a mistake or failing that see if he could do anything to help. The Elkins home contained just three rooms, each barely big enough to move in. The back door was unlocked, so the two Porter men cautiously pushed it open. They quickly were met with the horror that Wesley had described.

[00:14:02]23-year-old Haddie lay awkwardly across the bed. Her skull was so badly crushed that her face was almost unrecognizable.

[00:14:12]She also had visible bruising on her legs. Her 43-year-old husband had taken a rifle shot to the face, which had taken out his left eye. The men saw bloody footprints that led the way through the rest of the house. Porter sent George off to report the crime to the proper people while he stayed behind with the bodies and tried to make sense of things. This part of Iowa was a wash that July morning in corn, barley, and wheat that looked near ready to harvest.

[00:14:44]The list of things that had to be done on a farm was unrelenting in any season.

[00:14:49]But this was a particularly busy time.

[00:14:53]All of that work stood undone that day in Clayton County because word spread quickly and people had to find out what had happened and was even now still happening at the Elkins farm. Many got to the scene before the authorities.

[00:15:08]By midafternoon, Wesley had found Mark and the two sons of the deceased John Elkins watched Sheriff JJ Khan and Deputy LC Place go through their paces.

[00:15:20]George Fairfield, the publisher of the Alcada Register, the area's weekly newspaper, came with them. No one as yet had questioned Wesley's story. He was just not a likely suspect. And this boy was only 4'7. He weighed around 70 lb.

[00:15:38]Puberty was still a few years away. Most people described him as having a round, still very baby face. There were some signs that maybe it was possible the boy's feet did match up with the bloody footprints in the house, but he simply didn't look capable of these two murders. If anyone had to guess, they'd have said he appeared to be in shock. He hadn't cried in their presence, and he hadn't looked particularly spooked by what he had found. He said he had been sleeping in the barn that night. It was a much bigger and more wide open space than the house was. and so much cooler at night. So that made sense. But hadn't he heard the gunshot? Had he had surely screamed had he heard that? How much had he had actually seen? I mean, the night was dark. Visibility inside the house would be minimal, if any, how did he know they were dead? And where was the dog during all this? Why hadn't it barked at the stranger? Did he have any idea who the stranger was or why anyone would want to kill John and Hattie? The sheriff found cash in the house, a substantial sum that would have been worth at least $2,000 today. So, robbery clearly wasn't the motive. The newspaper editor found the heavy maple club barely hidden outside behind a log. Still visible on it were dried blood and human hair. When JW Kaine, the county coroner, arrived a bit later, he brought two local doctors with him and after a quick review, set up an inquest. We don't do these like we used to in America, but back in the 19th century, an inquest was a holdover from English common law, a formal factf finding proceeding convened by a coroner to determine the cause and circumstances of a suspicious or sudden death. It wasn't a trial. There was no prosecution and no defense. A coroner would impanel a small jury of locals, often just pulled from whoever happened to be nearby, and they would hear testimony, examine evidence, and render a verdict on how the deceased had died.

[00:17:50]That verdict could, and often did name a suspect. It might seem odd that it was held in the Elkins home, but there was a good reason for that. As University of Georgia professor Steven Barry once explained to C-SPAN, >> "So, an inquest has to take place where the body lies. You're not supposed to move it. You're supposed to leave it there."

[00:18:10]>> The inquest was in many ways the first filter in the justice system, a way of deciding whether a crime had occurred and who might be responsible before any arrest was made. In rural areas, especially where lawyers and judges weren't always readily available, it served a practical purpose. Today, inquests still exist in some jurisdictions, but they've largely been replaced by the modern medical examiner system, grand juries, and law enforcement investigations.

[00:18:43]The coroner's jury, citizens rendering a verdict on the dead, is mostly a relic.

[00:18:50]What replaced it is more professional, arguably more accurate, and considerably less dramatic. Anyway, in the Elkins case, the coroner chose three men from the various onlookers who had arrived at the house to sit on the inquest jury. He also told the taglong journalist, Fairfield, who had arrived, to take notes for official purposes. Wesley's already long Wednesday was about to get longer. He told the quickly assembled group that he had heard the gunshot and the scream while in the barn, but was too scared to immediately venture back to the house. When he did, he heard Nelly, the baby, crying. She was in the same bed as her parents and needed fresh clothing. He did not touch the bodies, he said, but knew they were dead. He told the jury that he recognized the gun as his father's, but really didn't remember seeing the club before. He said that his father was a good dad to both the boys and that while his dad and Mark might have quarreled when Mark reached adulthood, they were still on speaking terms. The factf finding continued. Mark agreed that he had no special love for his father. He also had an alibi that stood up later under scrutiny. When asked if Wesley might have done it, Mark said he couldn't imagine that. He had never even seen the boy handle the gun.

[00:20:13]Mark also said he had been told by some neighbors that Wesley was treated very badly at home and his stepmother's strictness and his father's obvious dislike of him had led both of them to physically and verbally abused the boy.

[00:20:28]The neighbors that Mark was specifically speaking of, Hurim Cooper and his daughter Alice, disputed that they had told Mark of any abuse. It was all so confusing. So, no, the inquest wasn't ready to point any fingers. Both Jon and Hattie were indeed judged to be dead.

[00:20:47]The cause of death was homicide, the perpetrator unknown.

[00:20:52]For now, anyway.

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[00:22:36]It was fortuitous that the double homicide of John and Hattie Elkins had occurred on a Wednesday. The local paper came out on Thursday. George Fairfield of the Elcar Register spared no detail in recounting the horrors he had seen in the Elen's private bedroom. It was a story full of detail with a generous sprinkling of fidly enhanced conjecture.

[00:23:01]Now, this was the type of publication that had ads and an education column on its cover. So, the story ran on page five under the headline, "Horrible murder exclamation point." The run-on subhead, John Elkins and wife of Elk Township killed in their house on Wednesday morning. the most revoling murder in the history of Clayton County.

[00:23:23]No clue as to who is guilty of the crime. The coroner notified and an inquest held at the scene. Here's a sample of Mr. Fairfield's pros. Quote, "Mr. Elkins lay on the front side of the bed with his head to the north and facing the east. He was laying as composed as if sleeping, but the horrible wounds about his head and the great pools of clotted blood told a different story." end quote. Fairfield reported that the sheriff and his deputies were hard at work on the case, but quote, "Thus far have made no headway in the matter, everything seemingly being surrounded with a veil of mystery." Many theories have been advanced and all are being followed up, but nothing has yet developed to warrant any arrests." End quote. This would be the first of many dispatches Fairfield wrote about the case. Now, in the late 19th century, Iowa was not usually the side of rural chaos that strayed outside the lines of rising farm prices. Life there was hard, lived by the pious, who rested on the Sabbath because God told them to. People were self-sufficient.

[00:24:34]Dresses were homemade. Homes lacked indoor plumbing. Winters were long, summers hot, days unrelenting.

[00:24:43]Murders were infrequent. The last one in Clayton County had been over a decade earlier. So, it was not surprising that the Cedar Rapids Gazette in the De Moines Register took note of the Elkins deaths in the little town of Elcedar, a hamlet that even today is home to just 1,200 people. A week into the investigation, a $500 reward was touted should someone provide authorities with information that would lead to the arrest and prosecution of the perpetrator. By then, Wesley had been identified as a suspect, but the region was divided into three camps. One camp held that Wesley could not have done it.

[00:25:26]Look somewhere else. The second had it that Wesley did it, but he had help. The third was the most popular. In it, the boy had been evil from the get-go. His depravity was the inevitable legacy of his wicked mother, Matilda. That last option started off popular and quickly gained ground. Wesley didn't need a motive. He was born depraved.

[00:25:55]Now, it would be another 20 years before the word gene was even coined by Danish botonist Wilhelm Johansson to describe units of heredity. But the vague concept of the acorn not falling far from the tree was alive and well. Now, Wesley stuck to his story. until he didn't see.

[00:26:15]After the murder, Sheriff Khan brought Wesley into his own home, mostly for the boy's protection. The sheriff felt responsible for the orphan, and despite him being considered a suspect in the case, wasn't worried for his own safety.

[00:26:30]A reporter from the Deuke Daily Times extrapolated from this temporary housing arrangement that Wesley had been arrested for the murder. That reporter made it clear which camp he fell into.

[00:26:43]He called Wesley a quote unquote young fiend. Now Wesley hadn't been arrested, but the sheriff figured if Wesley could come to trust him enough to tell him what happened in that three- room house, things could lead to that. James Corlet, a local Elkport lawyer and the clerk of the courts there, had the same idea. He asked the sheriff if he might befriend the boy. Khan had no objection.

[00:27:09]Soon, Corlet began to take Wesley on carriage rides. The better to get acquainted and, you know, chat about, I don't know, current events. It's unclear how it happened exactly, but on Thursday, July 25th, Wesley gave up the pretense of innocence and told Corlet how he had done it. The telling was unemotional. Yes, he said he was sorry he had done it. No, nobody had helped him. Corlet wrote out the confession and made the boy sign it. The wheels of justice began to roll. Corlet filed a formal criminal complaint and Sheriff Khan arrested Wesley and hauled him off to the county jail. Newspapers as far away as New York and Pennsylvania reported on the confession. The Philadelphia Inquirers headline on July 29th, 1889. Wesley Elkins, aged 11, tells calmly how he slew his parents.

[00:28:07]The paper reprinted part of the confession. Quote, "I placed the muzzle of the rifle near my father's head and sent a bullet through his brain. This frightened my mother and she arose and I, knowing that I was discovered, went into the kitchen, seized a club, went back into the bedroom, and killed my mother." End quote. As with everything in this case, there are a few different versions of this confession, differing only slightly in each retelling. In each one, he called Hadtie his mother. And in each, Wesley did the crime. What differed was why and what the punishment should be. For those in Clayton County, the Matilda factor meant that no excuses or explanations would ever do. He was now and forever a danger to society. He must be put away for life.

[00:29:00]James Corlet led the charge. It was a simple matter. The boy had soaked up all of Matilda's hate. Had he though? Is that even a thing? Well, yeah, it kind of can be according to some people. It's of course way more complicated than I have time to explore, but some psychologists point to what's been dubbed the aggression gene. a variant of something called the MAOA gene, which produces an enzyme that regulates neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine. Too much or too little of either can affect behavior, sometimes dramatically. Now, research tells me that everyone has this gene. It lives on the X chromosome. Men have one of those, women have two. So, shouldn't women have twice as much aggression? Nope. The effect of the variant is apparently more pronounced in males. That's because females usually have the mitigating factor of the nonvariant to smooth things out. I hope that made sense to you. It doesn't fully to me, but there's a great example that helps frame this whole thing. Katherine Page Harden, a behavioral geneticist and professor of psychology at the University of Texas, wrote original sin on the genetics of vice, the problem of blame, and the future of forgiveness. She's speaking here with Andrew Sullivan on the Dishcast. So in my book I talk about this Dutch family where all of the women in the family seem seemed to be functioning totally normally except for the fact that they were having to live with the men in their family and the men in their family were chronically persistently seriously violent. So one raped his sister, one stabbed his boss with a pitchfork. Multiple of these men were in prison for serious crimes. I believe one was in prison for arson. And I'm not sure how this family came to be discovered. Maybe one of the women in the family was just like, you have to figure out what's going on with us here.

[00:31:06]And also this curious pattern in which it's just the men or not all of the men, around half of the men. And so there was a Dutch geneticist who figured out that there was a mutation in this family on one gene on the X chromosome. And the gene affects what's called MAOA, which is an enzyme in your brain that essentially eats neurotransmitters, which are the chemicals that your neurons use to communicate with one another. So in this case there was a single letter change just one DNA letter that changed how this enzyme was made which changed how the neurons communicated to one another which caused very impulsive aggression on the part of these men. Subsequent work essentially modeled this by knocking out the same gene in mice. And you could make the mice also really aggressive. If someone came into their cage and they attempted to mate with unresceptive female mice when they had this ma mutate, you know, deliberately mutated in the lab. The good news said mutation is incredibly rare. If only that were the only thing that made us humans homicidal. We've talked about the old nature versus nurture debate before in other episodes, but never in a case involving a suspect so very young, where it arguably matters the most. Here's Adrien Rain, a professor of criminology, psychiatry, and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. He wrote The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime in 2013.

[00:32:50]He expands the discussion beyond the genetic to talk about how well Matilda or any of Wesley's early caregivers might have contributed to his behavior on that summer morning in 1889.

[00:33:04]Here's Rain talking to a UPEN reporter.

[00:33:06]It's not perfect prediction by any means, but yet we're getting some information, added value over social and behavioral predictors about who's going to become a violent offender. Whether it's poor functioning in the frontal region of the brain or a low resting heart rate or the fact that they had birth complications early in life which damaged the brain or the mother smoke or drank during pregnancy. These are all factors, biological factors that are combining with social factors to give us a better understanding of the causes of crime. And once we can understand the early factors that go to shape violence and crime, we are going to be in a much better position to be able to predict it in the future. And brain imaging research is right now giving us information again over and above the usual predictors of which individuals are going to commit a violent offense in the next 3 to four years.

[00:34:03]>> So maybe the gossipy townies in Clayton County were on to something. Or maybe they had just really hated Matilda.

[00:34:21]In October 1889, a grand jury indicted Wesley Elkins for the first degree murders of his father and stepmother.

[00:34:29]The first degree part was important as it assumed he had criminal intent when the murder occurred. The trial was set for early January 1890.

[00:34:40]Wesley's first appointed lawyer ducked out because the case repulsed him.

[00:34:45]Wesley ended up with James Crosby, a really young, really inexperienced 22-year-old local lawyer who literally had no idea how to defend the child. And as you'll learn later, he might not have wanted to try. Straight away, he told Wesley to plead guilty to the killing of his father. Pleading to his stepmother's killing didn't matter. He figured you can only be hanged once. Crosby seemed to think that Wesley's age was his only hope of mitigating the sentence. Wesley did as he was told. The judge, his hands tied by Iowa law that denied any real judicial discretion here, sentenced the 11-year-old to life at a maximum security adult prison. He was still 6 months shy of turning 12. Wesley was sent to the Animosa State Penitentiary.

[00:35:40]The building, which still stands, looks like a Gothic Revival style castle. It was built from local limestone. It's now on the National Register of Historic Places and still serves as a prison. But when Wesley got there, it was still kind of new. He was given the traditional black and white striped garb which had to be adjusted to fit his 4'7 76-lb frame. The key that locked that last door behind him might as well have been thrown away. Juvenile reformatories existed, of course, but they were for the unruly troublemaker, the shoplifter, the vandal, not for children who murdered their parents.

[00:36:24]The first dedicated juvenile court in the country would be a decade in the offing and not in Iowa. New York had been ahead of its time in 1825 when it created the House of Refuge where it separated juveniles from adults, though the state continued to convict them as adults. The juveniles were transferred to adult facilities when they came of age. Chicago's Cook County took the lead in 1899 when seeking to appreciate the difference in blameworthiness. It created a juvenile court. Vince Sheraldi, a senior research scientist at Columbia University's Justice Lab, explains how that was hardly perfect. He spoke in a now this impact video.

[00:37:08]>> When the youth court was founded in the 1800s and 1900s, we just made it up. It just felt right. 16-year-olds felt like adults in some states. 18-year-olds felt like adults in other states. That's about the time when people were leaving their famil family's homes, when they were getting married, when they were starting jobs on their own. And so we just, you know, we went with the mores of the time.

[00:37:31]>> What nobody really understood was that a child's brain is less developed than an adults and thus less able to process or appreciate certain things. And this is obvious to parents of teenagers, most of whom don't need science to confirm it.

[00:37:47]Sheraldi, a former commissioner of New York City's Department of Corrections.

[00:37:51]Again, >> of course, now we have MRIs. We're able to look at brains and see what changes as people age from adolescence to young adulthood to older adulthood. Kids really are different in important ways that matter from a jurist credential standpoint.

[00:38:07]>> And why is this? Because the preffrontal cortex of the brain, which controls our ability to plan and operate, guided by logical thought, is not fully developed until we're in our mid to late 20s, which maybe explains why I was married and divorced by that age. This means that teenagers are still relying on their emotional amygdala, the neurons that value immediiacy of reward over reason. This means children and teens lack impulse control and engage in more risk-taking behavior without much thought given to consequences.

[00:38:44]A great example of this is Wesley. When asked what he thought would happen after he killed his parents, he had answered simply, "I hadn't thought about that."

[00:38:54]Juvenile justice advocates today are using what neurological studies are out there to frame a picture that is more realistic in terms of rehabilitation of juveniles who have broken the law.

[00:39:06]They're doing this despite an imperfect justice system. The thing is, said Charaldi, >> trying and incarcerating kids with adults just basically doesn't work. When we do it, they come out worse, more likely to get rearrested, and with worse life chances. Young people who are black or Latino get tried more frequently as adults, get convicted, and get incarcerated at much, much higher rates than white kids do, even when those white kids are similarly situated.

[00:39:38]>> But no one gave much thought to Wesley's brain back in 1890.

[00:39:42]There were, of course, many who objected to putting him into an adult prison. One of his most vocal supporters was Carl Snyder, editor of the Council Bluffs paper, The Daily Nonparel. Snider had been pounding out frequent fiery editorials against such incarceration for the boy, just as soon as Wesley's confession hit the newswires. Once he was in prison, Wesley reached out to Snyder and the journalist wrote back, treating the boy with kindness and a deep appreciation for his suffering.

[00:40:14]They corresponded for a few years as Snyder continued to investigate the crime and push for his removal from Animosa. After visiting Clayton County and talking to people there, Snyder said he understood the depth of their animosity toward Wesley. But he also began to hear how many knew that Wesley had been victimized by those whose responsibility it was to love him.

[00:40:38]Snyder was not a man who minced words.

[00:40:41]He called the sentence morally irresponsible, a bungling notion, offensive and disgraceful.

[00:40:49]Snider's railings fell on mostly deaf years.

[00:40:57]As his years behind bars began piling up, there were others though who stepped up to speak to and for Wesley. One was warden Marquee Bar, a young family man who vowed to be a new kind of warden, the kind that thought prisons were not meant to be the public's avenger. They were there to improve men and if possible, give them a second chance. Bar began a 2-year long conversation with Wesley. He protected him as well he could by assigning him to work in the deputy warden's office with a prison chaplain and in the prison library.

[00:41:33]Another frequent visitor was the Reverend Silvin S. Hunting, a Unitarian minister turned prisons rights activist.

[00:41:41]Looking to understand the child, hunting got the shy and reluctant Wesley to tell him about the brutality he had suffered at the hands of his father and stepmother and how he had often thought of killing his father. The night of the murders, he told Hunting that he had had a very bad headache. And though he did not say it explicitly, that he had had enough. Bar, Hunting, and Snider all encouraged Wesley to further his education. By placing him in the library for the better part of each day, they made sure he was surrounded by books that might alleviate his loneliness, broaden his horizons, and give him adventures he may never have the opportunity to experience. He read everything Redard Kipling wrote. He read Robert Lewis Stevenson. When he first got there, the library contained 3,000 books, but also magazines and newspapers for the prisoners to check out. He shelved, he cataloged, he worked to expand the offerings in it. 2 years into his sentence, when he was about 14, a fellow inmate told Wesley that he had seen something in the law journals in the library that might impact his case.

[00:42:54]Seems that the Iowa Supreme Court had decided a case in 1878 in which a kid named Silus Fowler put a rock in his slingshot and hit George Ruth, another kid, in the head. Nobody died, but the kid wielding the slingshot was charged with assault. On appeal, the state's highest court agreed that children between 7 and 14 should generally be presumed to be incapable of committing any crime. Again, this case was in 1878, the year Wesley was born. It had been sitting there as possible precedent for about 12 years before Wesley's trial. It seems that Wesley's lawyer, James Crosby, the one who could find no way to defend him, had not tried very hard.

[00:43:42]That lawyer had been stymied by Wesley's confession. But it's important to note that the only confession that included any mention of intent that Wesley had sat up nights planning his father's death was written by James Corlet.

[00:43:57]Corlet later admitted that he had written out the confession in his own words and that he might not have used the words that Wesley had actually said.

[00:44:08]This had been suspected all along as the corlet confession was written in language far exceeding Wesley's ability at the time. Wesley was older now and not an idiot. It was time he got a new lawyer. Wesley asked the new warden, Flander Madden, what he should do. A sympathetic Madden said he would write a letter to the governor and ask how to proceed. Patricia Elbrien and Thomas Wolf, the authors of The Plea: The True Story of Young Wesley Elkins, could find no evidence that the governor responded or that Wesley got new counsel. Wesley had found his defense. He just couldn't find anyone to make it.

[00:45:03]Wesley Elkins embarked on the long, arduous, twisted, and nigh upon ridiculous task of trying to free himself from prison. He had two avenues: commutation or gubernatorial pardon. You should know that every state differs in what they require an appellant to do and how many hoops they have to hurdle over or jump through to achieve either of those two things. Iowa may have constructed one of the most timeconsuming.

[00:45:34]Per the state constitution, if one has been sentenced to life, the first thing to do was apply for a pardon or commutation of that sentence. The governor then could say no and that would be it. or he could send it to the legislature where both houses could discuss and vote on the matter. The governor then could take their advice or not. But that wasn't all. 4 weeks before the legislature would all but retry the case, the governor had to notify a de mo newspaper being in the state capital and all and a newspaper from the town where the crime was committed. Those notices would have to appear for a solid month to allow for public input before the legislature could debate the case. The Iowa General Assembly met once every 2 years, which made timing tricky. Any appellant could only try in evenumbered years. If the appeal failed, they would have to wait another 2 years before trying again. If that weren't all, the aspiring parolei had to show proof that they had somewhere safe to go if released. They also had to have a job skill, have shown educational progress, and have managed to get some influential Ians to write letters and support.

[00:46:52]Wesley was 17 when he first thought he would give it a try. He would do it three more times. And each time he had his ducks in a row and his supporters standing by, all while the Clayton County crowd stood firm that he was a natural-born killer and a danger to them all. Included in the whole making sure the child stayed put business were James Corlet, the guy who had befriended young Wesley and gotten him to confess, and James Crosby, Wesley's one-time defense attorney, who had since become a judge and who remained certain that Wesley was irretrievably malevolent. See, I told you Crosby hadn't tried very hard on behalf of his client. Turns out there was a reason. In some years, Wesley's appeal got further down the hoops to hurdle than others, but it always ended in failure. And every time, he'd have to look on helplessly as adults with similar life sentences for similar crimes would be successful in their efforts to be set free. Yet, Wesley persevered.

[00:48:01]At one point during his continuing correspondence with the journalist Carl Snyder, who had already left Iowa for bigger jobs, then 18-year-old Wesley wrote that he had grown self-reliant out of necessity. He wrote that he had tried to dodge thoughts about his fate and had worked hard to prepare for a life beyond the prison walls. He wrote that when he looked back on the crime, he felt like he might have gone insane that day. He wanted to prove he was more than the worst day of his life. That letter was with his permission published and its sentiment and its aerudition changed a lot of minds. Snider of course was not his only pen pal. He exchanged letters with his brother Mark, his older halfsister Kora Basset, a little boy from Cedar Falls, and with Cornell College vice President James Harland, who had read what Wesley had written to Snider. The highly respected academic took up Wesley's cause and recruited others to it. Momentum for his release was finally building.

[00:49:07]The 20th century dawned. Iowa tried to keep up. There was a burgeoning movement to better understand child offenders.

[00:49:16]That meant questioning if they should be treated as adults. It also meant that some began to more forcefully put forward the idea that biology was destiny. So sorry for your luck. It was two steps forward, two steps back.

[00:49:31]Wesley couldn't win.

[00:49:34]But in 1902, the stars aligned. He would try to head off the Clayton County contingent by writing a lengthy letter to the newspaper there. He asked them to quote thoroughly investigate my conduct, record, my present mental and moral condition before taking any action adverse to my release end quote. Ka said he could live with her and her family.

[00:50:00]Haron said he was welcome at his and his wife's home as well. The Iowa House turned down his request for a pardon, though the margin was one vote. In the Iowa Senate, the chairman of the Committee on Pardons offered a compromise of sorts. What if we let him out, but require Wesley to only associate with the law-abiding, and we ban any use of alcohol and monitor him for the next 10 years? What if he agreed to write to the governor once a month?

[00:50:30]What if he agreed not to leave the state? What if we made it look like we were watching him all the time? More hoops, but manageable ones. Then and only then would he be given a full and unconditional pardon. Until that time, he would be on a conditional parole, if you will. That bit of politicking got the okay, but the whole thing had to go back to the house, and it failed again by one vote. But wait, an impromptu on the floor tet between two legislators soon had one alerting the assembly that he had changed his mind. He was now on team Wesley and the recommendation to parole young Wes was sent to the governor. The governor gave his ascent.

[00:51:17]Clayton County administrators rattled their sabers, saying that they would now charge the adult Wesley with the killing of his stepmother. They could do that.

[00:51:26]After all, he hadn't been convicted of that crime, so double jeopardy wasn't in play. Ultimately, nothing came of it. On Saturday, April 19th, 1902, Haron picked up the 23-year-old, still slightly built, relatively short young man who had been given $5 as a parting gift from the state of Iowa. The warden at the time told Harland that Wesley was too good a boy to be mistreated, so please do your best.

[00:51:56]Wesley got his full pardon in 1912.

[00:51:59]Despite his age, he went back to high school and joined a literary society. He got permission to move to Minnesota. He saved his money. He bought a house. He worked for the railroad as an accountant. He moved to Hawaii because he had a few lung rellated health problems. He married Meline Lazarus in the spring of 1922. He was 43, she was 28, and a stenographer.

[00:52:24]In 1928, they moved to Fontana in Southern California. He started raising chickens. He kept in touch with family as best he could. He even made it a point to get in touch with Matilda's second husband, William Dowin, and their children. Wesley died in 1961. He was 81 years old. His obituary appeared in the San Bernardino Sun. It simply said that he had been a poultry farmer. No more, no less, no mark on his name, not a monster, not a pariah, just a guy who tended chickens.

[00:53:09]To research this case, journalist Amy Wilson read The Plea: The True Story of Young Wesley Elkins and his struggle for redemption by Patricia Elbrien and Thomas Wolf. She read the available stories about the case in newspaper archives. She also spent some time all over the internet trying to understand the forensic implications of the genetic and neurological arguments that were badly posed in 1889 and how they compare to what we know to be true today.

[00:53:46]Crimes of the Centuries is available early and adree through Grabback Collab.

[00:53:51]Head to www.grabbackclab.com for exclusive content related to this show and access to other series on our profit sharing network. Unless noted in the citations, this case was researched and written by me, Amber Hunt, and produced by Henry Lavoy. Original music is by Bruce Hunt, Andrew Higgley, and sometimes my child, Hunt Van Ben Scott.

[00:54:12]Other music comes from Epidemic Sound.

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