Harvey Willow
Harvey Cleveland Willow farmed on the edge of App’s woods in Monroe Township, just across Penn’s Creek to the north of the borough of Selinsgrove. He had two hired men helping him work the farm, George Wetzel and Ralph Shadel. It was an arrangement that Harvey knew well. He, too, had worked in his youth as a hired farm laborer. He was born on Christmas Day 1884 and raised by Emanuel and Mary (Eby) Willow, who farmed around the Selinsgrove area. When he turned 15, he left the household to work for a fellow Perry County farming family. He married Annie Kratzer in 1907, when he was 22 years old.
He had never been part of the respectable crowd in the area. In 1914, he spent time in prison after killing a man in a New Year’s Eve bar fight in Selinsgrove. The Selinsgrove Times described him as part of a thuggish group of brawlers led by his father-in-law. “Luther Kratzer and his boys stuck their iron knuckles in their pockets New Year’s Day,” the paper declared, “fired themselves for a scrap, and came to Selinsgrove.” When he cold-cocked George Spaid squarely in the jaw at the bar of a local hotel, Spaid fell and smashed his head against the concrete. He was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and spent a year in the county jail. When he was released from jail, he worked the farm of Eva Marburger, the widow of one of Selinsgrove’s wealthiest residents.
Anne “Annie” Willow
Annie S. Kratzer, daughter of Emma Catharine and Martin Luther Kratzer, was born around January 10, 1887 in Middleburg, PA. She left school at the age of 12 and from then on helped her mother keep the family house. Twenty years old when she got married, she was considered a minor and needed parental permission to marry Harvey Willow on July 4, 1907.
She lived in Middleburg before marrying, and then moved with Harvey to various townships within Snyder County. She had two children, in 1914 and 1917. Her first child, named Harvey, died of a bowel infection shortly after birth in 1911. Annie kept the house, raising her kids and performing the dozens of tasks necessary to keep a farming household running in the early twentieth century. It was not an easy life. She had her first child when Harvey was serving his year in county jail. During her trial, she spoke at length about the abuse she suffered at the hands of her husband.
Ralph Shadel
Contemporary reports said that Ralph Shadel, the Willow’s farmhand of nine months, “would be most popular at a country festival.” Newspapers described him as a “giant farm boy” with “hands that looked like he’d been working for 40 years.” But reality was a little less grand. Ralph’s prison intake form said he was 5′ 6″ and 130 pounds in 1924. He had chestnut brown hair, a few scars on his face, and $11.15 in his pocket.
The Selinsgrove Times, always quick to disparage people from other counties, noted that Ralph’s father had been married three times and his mother twice. Reportedly, Ralph had suffered from neglect in his childhood. But that could certainly have been exaggerated after the fact. “Childhood neglect” was everywhere in central Pennsylvania in this era, especially if we judge by present-day standards. Ralph was born in 1906 in Juniata County, one of four children. He was sparsely educated and struggled while he was in school. His father farmed and worked odd jobs around the Richfield/McAlisterville area. He was 16 when he killed Harvey.
Ralph was part of a large cohort of young men in rural areas of the United States who, in the early twentieth century, had few prospects beyond working farming jobs for others. It could be a desperate life, with few clear bright spots on the horizon. As the national press told the story, “He confessed that Mrs. Willow, thirty-eight, mother of two children, taught him love and inspired him to kill.”
The Willow Children
The Willow children, Glenn and Ivy, were caught between the media whirlwind and the love triangle involving their parents and Ralph. They were left with their grandmother when Annie was arrested in August 1924. Three months later, in November 1924, Snyder County justices appointed Selinsgrove banker Roscoe C. North as the children’s guardian.
The press used the children as the perfect props to humanize the story of this murder even further. Here’s how the Selinsgrove Times ended its (almost certainly) fanciful account of Annie’s arrest: “There in the road stood the weeping mother of their prisoner, holding her forlorn grandchildren in fond embrace while the youngsters waved their little hands in farewell. The police swallowed hard to hold back their own tears and drove to the jail in silence.”