Then Again: Vermont girl’s disappearance sparked massive search

Earl Woodward was wanted “dead or alive” for the apparent kidnapping of Lucille Chatterton. Image via Newspapers.com

This is the first in a two-part series on a 1925 episode that drew national attention.

The last time anyone had seen Lucille Chatterton was at 6 o’clock on April 24,1925. That’s when the 11-year-old girl told her father she was going to fetch some water from the spring, which was 50 yards from the family’s home in Granville.

Her father, Walter, wasn’t worried when she didn’t return right away. He later said he assumed Lucille had decided to walk to the village, where her mother was working. It’s also possible he didn’t notice she hadn’t returned. The Chatterton home was a busy place — Walter and his wife, Eva, had eight children. They had even taken in a 27-year-old man to help work the 65-acre farm they rented. 

It wasn’t until Eva returned at about 7 p.m., without having seen Lucille, that the family knew she was missing. They also noticed that someone else was missing from the household — the farmhand, Earl Woodward. 

Walter found two sets of footprints, a man’s and a child’s, leading off into the woods from the vicinity of the spring. He phoned Deputy Sheriff Herman E. Ford to report his daughter had been kidnapped. Thus began what contemporary newspapers called the “largest manhunt” Vermont had ever known.

Walter Chatterton and Deputy Ford began their search immediately, heading in opposite directions to cover more ground. After sunrise the next morning, Ford spotted tracks in the mountains above Granville but soon lost the trail.

Local men and boys, many of them armed, joined the search. Ford and the selectmen of Granville, which is located near the geographical center of Vermont, initially took the lead in organizing the hunt. They would soon be joined by officers from the Addison County Sheriff’s Department. 

News of the reported abduction spread by word of mouth at first. Lucille had disappeared on Friday evening, too late for newspapers to carry reports on Saturday. Vermont papers didn’t publish on Sundays, so the first time that most Vermonters heard about the girl’s disappearance was Monday morning.

“Posse Seeks Little Girl and Man Said to Be Kidnapper: Lucille Chatterton, 11, of Granville Thought to Have Been Lured Into Hills,” read the headline on the Rutland Herald’s front page story. 

In another headline, the newspaper added a distressing detail: “Grim Searchers Have Been on Trail for 48 Hours; Suspect Has Prison Record.” 

Woodward had been on parole from the Vermont State Prison in Windsor the previous fall after serving time for a breaking and entering conviction. 

“(He) is not considered here as a man of much morality,” noted one newspaper. One detail particularly alarmed investigators: a rifle and ammunition were missing from the Chatterton homestead.

“It is generally believed that the child will be found dead,” the Montpelier Argus reported on Monday evening, April 27. Next to its story that day about the search, the St. Albans Messenger ran a national story about a 16-year-old girl in Indiana who had been abducted and then shot to death, her body burned beyond recognition. Journalists seemed to be bracing for the worst. 

The posse steadily grew. The United Press news agency, which along with the Associated Press reported the story to the rest of the nation, estimated that 100 volunteers were searching that weekend.

“Their way lighted by flares and torches, a band of men tonight is probing the gloomy mysteries of the mountain fastnesses surrounding this village,” the Rutland Daily Herald reported from Granville on Monday. 

Gov. Franklin S. Billings offered a $100 reward from the state to whoever located Woodward or Lucille. He soon added another $100 of his own money to the reward. At a time when many trades paid less than $1 an hour and a Ford Model T cost $260, the reward no doubt attracted some of the searchers. State Attorney General Frank C. Archibald, who took over directing the search, ordered Woodward captured “dead or alive.” 

With no statewide police force — the Vermont State Police wouldn’t be founded until 1947 — the professionals on the ground were officers from various county sheriff departments, aided by scores of volunteer “citizen-searchers,” as some newspapers called them.

Newspapers published descriptions of the pair. Lucille was described as being “frail and sickly and small for her age,” with light brown shoulder-length hair and light blue eyes. When last seen, she had been wearing a dress and a blue sweater. Officials expressed concern that she was underdressed to survive long in the woods but noted that the weather had fortunately been temperate. 

Woodward was described as standing 5-foot-10 and weighing 160 pounds with a sallow complexion, dark brown hair and blue eyes. He had tattooed arms from his time in the Navy and stooped when he walked. 

Woodward wasn’t known to be violent. Several years earlier when arrested for theft, he had immediately dropped his gun. That sort of response might save Woodward’s life. According to Attorney General Archibald, whether Woodward was shot on sight would depend on how he reacted to being caught.

On Wednesday, the Rutland Herald reported the scene around Granville: “All day every road within miles of this village was patrolled by heavily armed parties of men eager to capture or kill Woodward and return to her grieving parents frail little Lucille Chatterton, and all day other men penetrated more deeply into the dense woods in search of the missing pair.”

The search area expanded as the days passed, mostly to areas just north and south of Granville, which is hemmed in by mountains to the west and east. Some law enforcement officers theorized that Woodward might be headed north to Warren, where his adopted mother lived.

A sheriff swears in volunteers to join the posse searching for Lucille Chatterton, who was shown in an inset in this photograph that appeared in newspapers across the country. Photo via Newspapers.com

The heavy newspaper coverage and reward money generated a flurry of possible leads: Lantern light was seen one night near a barn on Braintree Mountain; a deputy said he believed he had tracked Woodward and Chatterton to Studson Hollow in Warren; at the same time another report suggested they had crossed to the west side of the mountains, heading toward the Rutland train line. 

A series of reports started arriving that clustered around the town of Brookfield. Early on Tuesday morning, a Brookfield area farmer had the strange experience of discovering that one of his cows had already been milked. And that night, a West Brookfield store owner, who had somehow missed all the news reports about the search, sold food, including crackers and oatmeal, and a lantern wick to a young man who fit Woodward’s general description.

Then at 2 a.m. Thursday, a husband and wife whose farm was located between Brookfield and North Randolph were awakened by their dogs’ barking. The couple couldn’t see what had set the dogs off, but later that morning they discovered that a can of cream they had left to cool in a watering trough was missing. Nearby, they saw a man’s footprints.

Simultaneously there seemed to be a break in the case from a different part of the state. In Rockingham, deputies detained a couple spotted picnicking near the road. Noting that the man’s arms were tattooed and that he carried a pair of galoshes like those Lucille had been wearing, the deputies summoned Attorney General Archibald to Springfield, where the picnickers were being held. Fortunately for the sake of their careers, the deputies had time to cancel the request to Archibald when they determined the woman was actually a 23-year-old farmwife and mother of four from South Londonderry who was apparently running away with a farmhand.  

A posse, including 125 armed Norwich University cadets, hunted for Lucille Chatterton and her suspected kidnapper, Earl Woodward. Image via Newspapers.com

By this point, the army of searchers had expanded considerably. Joining the sheriff department officers and citizen volunteers on Thursday were 125 cadets from Norwich University in Northfield. Led by Norwich’s cadet corps commandant and three regular Army officers who taught at the school, the young men formed a skirmish line, with 10 yards separating each. Armed with Springfield rifles, the cadets composed a line three-quarters of a mile wide that marched through the woods of West Brookfield.

A possible sighting occurred midday on Thursday. George Jerd of Randolph spotted two people in the woods in Brookfield who seemed to resemble Woodward and Lucille. They were “running like deer,” he said. Jerd fired twice with his revolver at the man, but he was too far away. Jerd did find a possible clue, however: two blankets abandoned by the fleeing pair. 

At first light on Friday, May 1, one week after Lucille and Woodward disappeared, a large Doberman pinscher police dog named Deeka joined the search. Deeka’s handler, Winfield Dubois, hoped the dog, which had tracked down a number of fugitives in Germany and more recently in the United States, would succeed where hundreds of men had failed. 

Jerd and his friend Ray Chase took Dubois and Deeka to the area where the missing pair had been sighted. Deeka sniffed the blankets and set off. Within about half an hour, the dog had led the men to a derelict farm, where Deeka went to the hay mow. Though the place appeared deserted, the dog kept barking, so the men kept looking. They walked over the strewn hay several times before discovering that Woodward and Lucille were hidden within the pile. 

An International News Reel photo shows Eva Chatterton outside her family’s home with five of her eight children —Leonard, Lindy, Louis, Lucy (not to be confused with Lucille), and Loren. Image via Newspapers.com

Though he was armed, “Woodward was arrested without resistance,” the Rutland Herald reported. The person who did resist was Lucille, who “clung to his (Woodward’s) hand and shrank in fright from her captors.” 

Then, she burst into tears and said she didn’t want to return home.

The Herald and News of Randolph noted that the search “had absorbed the energies of thousands and enlisted the interest of millions of people, all over the nation.” As if the story was over.

The public was left to puzzle over Woodward and Lucille’s unexpected reactions to being discovered — he appeared almost relieved, and she was clearly distraught. 

The disappearance and reappearance of Lucille Chatterton would be reanalyzed in court and in newspapers during the coming weeks. Soon much of what the public thought it knew about the case was deemed to be false, and a new picture of events began to emerge.

Coming soon: Part 2: The State of Vermont vs. Earl Woodward

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