It was warm to start that week; everyone would later remember how autumn had held on until his body was found. Word around Selinsgrove on the morning of Tuesday, December 11, 1923, was that Harvey Willow had gone out hunting by himself and hadn’t returned. Annie had taken the kids to her parents’ house near Kratzerville the evening before, telling them she was worried about his disappearance. Then they returned to their house on the Marburger farm for a long night of watching the door. Harvey’s dog returned the next morning, but not Harvey. Thomas Gemberling, former county treasurer and a friend of Harvey, gathered a small search party, and after a little tramping around the dry woods to the northwest of the farm, Sheriff Arthur Fox found Harvey’s bloodied corpse.
The framing of the story began immediately. The Selinsgrove Times reported that Willow had tenderly bid his family farewell before leaving the previous afternoon. All of the details that the paper presented, including quotes (to the dog: “Come, Rover, we’ll go and get a rabbit” and to Ivy: “Dad’ll bring a rabbit skin to wrap his baby dumpling in”), were either entirely fabricated by the editor or cooked up by Annie. The Shamokin Dispatch noted that Harvey had been hunting with $115 in his pockets, and that only $15 remained.
The citizens in Snyder County were shocked, but perhaps numb as well. Another farmer, John Sanders, had recently turned up shot dead in Aqueduct Hollow south of town. That sudden death had led to eyebrow-raising revelations: Sanders had been shot while holding up a group of young men returning home from a dance. A sweep of his farm in nearby Aline had turned up stolen road construction equipment, piles of dynamite, and an extensive bootlegging operation. And now, here was Harvey Willow, just as dead and perhaps possessing just as many secrets.
By the next morning, Wednesday, December 12, two state policemen from Pottsville’s “Troop C” were assigned the case. Winter came that night, with temperatures plunging into the twenties and the season’s first snow covering the fields. On Friday morning, 7-year-old Lawrence Renninger found a Winchester 12 gauge shotgun shell just thirteen feet from the spot where Harvey’s body had laid. Somehow, the policemen had missed it. The Shamokin Dispatch reported “countryside gossip” that Willow, like Sanders, had been involved in illicit booze.
A second rumor floated by the Shamokin Dispatch less than a week after Harvey was killed was that he had been part of an “eternal triangle.” The details were hazy, but the paper suggested that there was “a woman in the case.” If, at that point, anyone thought that Annie was the woman and that Ralph was the other man, no word of that angle made it to the press. Annie’s brother, RJ Kratzer, declared that Harvey “bore an excellent reputation as a hard working man and had not an enemy in the world, excepting probably any which might have resulted from the tragic New Year’s Day quarrel in Selinsgrove.” By the second week of the investigation a neighbor, Miles Kline, was given the third degree at the Middleburg courthouse. But he was fully exonerated, and the trail seemed to run cold quickly after that.