Show notes
A century after 11-year-old Janette Lawrence was brutally murdered walking home from a babysitting job, her ghost is still seen wandering the streets of Madison — seeking justice that never came.
EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/KluxenWoods
FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: I narrate a chapter from the audiobook, “Suffer the Children: American Horrors, Homicides and Hauntings” by Troy Taylor. The chapter is entitled “1921: Murder at Kluxen’s Woods” - a murder that has yet to be officially solved, although many hundreds of people in the area feel they know exactly who got away with murder. A murder that resulted in a haunting!
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*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*
SOURCES and RESOURCES:
“Murder at Kluxen’s Woods” is from the audiobook, “Suffer the Children: American Horrors, Homicides and Hauntings” by Troy Taylor: https://amzn.to/45NQExh
(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)
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Originally aired: June 2021
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This episode of Weird Darkness follows the 1921 murder of an 11-year-old babysitter beside a New Jersey winery, the two suspects tried and acquitted for killing her, and the ghost that motorists still report walking the same street toward a home she never reached.It opens on Fairview Avenue in Madison, New Jersey, on the evening of October 6, 1921, when 11-year-old Janette Lawrence left a babysitting job at the Sandt home and walked past the wooded edge of the Kluxen Winery estate toward her house at 142 Ridgedale Avenue. Two Boy Scouts found her body beside a tree stump in Kluxen's Woods about two hours later, stabbed 23 times, her hands bound behind her with the kind of cord local rose greenhouses used for shipping. The Madison borough council ordered the arrest of 14-year-old Francis Kluxen III, grandson of the winery's founder, the next day, and a judge released him on bail after calling the arrest unjustified. Morris County prosecutor John M. Mills went after a different man, 29-year-old greenhouse worker Frank Jancarek, on the word of Frank McGrory, a fired ex-convict who claimed Jancarek confessed to him the night of the killing. Jancarek's April 1922 trial in Morristown featured a letter opener with blood under its handle, a single hair that "closely resembled" his, a witness who conferred with the sheriff before picking him from a lineup, and a defense that told jurors to disregard the chemist's findings because he was German; the jury acquitted him in under an hour. Attorney General Thomas F. McCran then won an indictment against Kluxen, whose trial that July turned on his Boy Scout knife, his footprints at the stump and a nearby hydrant, trousers his mother soaked in water that night, and two mended handkerchiefs from the crime scene that a sewing teacher matched to five taken from a cabinet outside his bedroom. That jury deliberated three hours before acquitting him as well. Kluxen was later adopted by Monell Sayre, the wealthy founder of the Episcopal Church Pension Fund, joined the Marine Corps, shot a neighbor named Joe Hollman dead in San Diego in 1933, and went to San Quentin for a string of burglaries in 1934. The chapter, drawn from Troy Taylor's audiobook Suffer the Children: American Horrors, Homicides and Hauntings, closes with the houses now standing where the woods were, where a family with no knowledge of the case reported a thin, light-brown-haired girl appearing in a child's bedroom, and where drivers on Ridgedale and Fairview Avenues describe a girl in an old-fashioned coat and beret who vanishes in their headlights.
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