At the same time Harry Mutchler received his sentence in Union County, in December 1923, an even larger legal spectacle was gripping Snyder County. Just weeks before, school children at recess had found a dead man near the Susquehanna Trail, south of Selinsgrove. He’d been shot through the heart. The killing led to a revelation that shocked residents and revealed just how pervasive the illicit alcohol economy really was after a few years of Prohibition.
The dead man was John K. Sanders, a 40-year-old farmer who lived in Aline, fifteen miles southwest of Selinsgrove. Aline was like many villages in the Central Susquehanna Valley in the 1920s: insulated, church-oriented, and connected to larger towns via employment, shopping, and the post office. Sanders’ farm, along the Meiserville Road, was just minutes from the newly paved Susquehanna Trail, one of the most impressive long-distance highways in the state. Aline would not have raised many eyebrows, though. News from that area in the previous year had been typical rural fare: church picnics, family members visiting, marriages, and icy roads in the winter. So it must have come as a shock when one of Aline’s own, John Sanders, was shot to death in the middle of the night that November 25.
Eighteen-year-old Francis Campbell of Verdilla came forward to tell the District Attorney that he had shot over the head of a man who tried to hold up him and his friends in a car. The four young men were driving home from a dance in Port Trevorton around 2:30 AM. Driving up the steep hollow, they found their way partially blocked by a truck loaded with furniture. Two men were a little further up the road, removing tires from a car that had been wrecked earlier in the day. Campbell and his friends had seen the wrecked car on their way out that night, and knew the owner. One of the men removing the tires ran off into the woods, while the other one stood his ground, shined an electric light, and drew a gun. Campbell fired a gun at the man, and the car kept climbing out of the hollow. Campbell’s statement to the district attorney explained that if he had killed Sanders, it was for fear of his own safety and the safety of his fellow passengers.
If Campbell’s shot did hit Sanders, it was not clear how the body got inside the culvert. Doctors who examined the body said that Sanders would have dropped in his tracks, but his body was found thirty feet below the road and twenty feet from the base of the ravine. A dirt-clogged revolver was found in Sanders’ hip pocket. A friend of Sanders, John Fulkrod, was held in jail on suspicion of having robbed a hunting lodge in the vicinity of the alleged hold-up. Newspaper writers assumed that Fulkrod explained a path cut through the brush of the ravine as the path he had taken to fetch water in a bucket for his car’s leaking radiator. The Evening News of Harrisburg took a more generous view of the “wealthy farmer of Snyder County,” suggesting that Sanders might have been killed when he attempted to stop the robbery. That was apparently the first theory of local authorities, before they learned more from Campbell about what happened on the narrow road.
More revelations were to follow. When the Selinsgrove constable searched Sanders’ farm, he found rye and corn whisky mash, fifty-seven cases of dynamite, $1000 worth of rope, hoses, and road-building tools, and hundreds of empty bottles that smelled of whiskey. John’s wife, Carrie, reportedly told the police, “Take whatever is yours. The children and I want nothing that does not belong to us.” The road-building materials had been stolen from the Piel Construction company, which had built part of the Susquehanna Trail south of town. (See the photo below, which shows the Trail under construction just north of Aqueduct Hollow.) “SLAIN FARMER LEAD DUAL LIFE,” screamed the Shamokin Dispatch. Though no still was found, the District Attorney noted that Sanders was likely part of a whisky ring. The dynamite was apparently stored in a moonshining shed and was wired to explode upon an intruder’s entry.
The uncovering of bootleggers like Sanders became a phenomenon in the 1920s, usually occurring when local authorities or Prohibition agents out of Philadelphia or Harrisburg suddenly arrested someone. Whereas organized crime managed the production and distribution of illegal alcohol to the east, in the coal region, it seems like Snyder County rum-running came through independent operators like Sanders.
These findings led local police to suspect that Sanders might have been shot by someone else in the illicit alcohol economy. A rumor of other gunshots echoing through Aqueduct Hollow even later that night took the scrutiny off of Campbell. A Snyder County grand jury decided not to indict him. They had other matters on their mind—like the recent murder of another farmer just north of Selinsgrove. (But that’s another story.)
Fulkrod eventually admitted that he and Sanders were trying to rob the hunting lodge, driving a truck to the hollow to haul out furniture. Although there would be persistent rumors in the months to come that there was much more to the case than that, Fulkrod’s admission marked the end of the investigation and the end of the press interest in John Sanders. Carrie Sanders, the daughter of a well-respected Richfield farmer, could plausibly deny any knowledge of the whole mess. She stayed on the farm until her son, Samuel, was old enough to take over. By that point, Prohibition was over.