Found Murdered at Home
On the night she died at a Dallas motel, Emma Jean Stewart reportedly screamed, “Don’t kill me!” Another witness heard a child cry out, “Leave Mommy alone!” Neither deterred the assailant. On April 23, 1963, police found the nude body of the 31-year-old wife and mother of four lying dead on the floor. Initial reports suggested she had been strangled.
Her children — ages 8, 7, 5 and 2 — were taken from the motel to the city’s juvenile department to await the arrival of their father, who was stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia. An autopsy revealed that Emma died from *acute hemorrhagic pulmonary edema. Pfc. Richard E. Stewart arranged for his wife’s burial April 26 in Dallas’s Oakland Cemetery.
On the interment card filed that day were the words “Found murdered at home.”
That Emma’s interment card characterizes the motel as her home — one news story refers to her “studio apartment” — suggests her living arrangements, while not grand, were less temporary than a motel guest’s, that she chose an affordable option in her husband’s absence. Identified as an “unemployed cafe worker,” Emma may have waited tables in the motel’s Last Round-Up Cafe.
Newspapers statewide published the news of Emma’s death. The words “motel” and “nude” appear in almost all, suggesting a lifestyle far removed from the period’s June Cleaver ideal. The image of her children discovering her lifeless body undoubtedly disturbed readers. What made an already salacious story worse is that homicide detectives told reporters they were searching for “a man believed to have visited the woman during the night.”
Emma Jean Johnson was born October 17, 1931, in Port Townsend, Washington.
Her Georgia-born grandfather, Benjamin Johnson, had moved his large family to a farm in Clay County, Texas, in the early 1900’s, where Emma’s father, John Walker Johnson, stayed on as a farm laborer until at least 1910. That homestead established the Johnson family’s Texas roots.
By 1920, John Walker had moved to the Northwest, where he married his first wife, fathered two children, and found work in the lumber industry. The couple divorced, and in 1929, he married Mabel Polk, an Oregon girl with three years of college on her resume. John Walker’s education ended with 7th grade.
Mabel’s paternal grandparents were German immigrants; her strapping (over 6'3") father, Frederick Polk (the man in the hat below), worked as a policeman and, at age 60, was sheriff of Jefferson County, Washington. Her mother, Ethel Jean Baker (in dark sweater) came from a Wisconsin farm family. The couple married in 1929.
Two years later, Emma Jean was born. Mother Mabel undoubtedly named her doomed daughter after her own grandmother, Emma, adding to it her mother’s middle name, Jean.
The two little girls in the above photo are a blond Emma Jean and her big sister, Ethel. A third sibling, Joan, came along in 1938. The 1940 census shows the Thompson family of five living on a farm in Jefferson County, Washington, with enough means to pay a hired hand. Emma Jean, 8, and Ethel, 10, attended school.
At some point between 1940 and 1947, John Walker took his family back home to Clay County, Texas, probably to tend his widowed father, 89. They settled in Henrietta, where John Walker found work as a night attendant in the state hospital. Mabel put her education to use, working as a librarian.
Emma Jean enrolled at Henrietta High School, where she joined Future Homemakers of America. She is in the second row, fourth from left.
Emma Jean may have aspired to be June Cleaver, but until her Ward came along, she found herself a job. At 18, she worked 35 hours a week waiting tables in a Henrietta cafe.
At 18, her husband-to-be, Richard Eugene Stewart, the blond, blue-eyed son of a coal miner, was working in a Leeds, Alabama gas station when he dutifully registered for the draft. It was December 1946; his obituary reports that he served in the Navy during the war.
It’s unclear how Emma Jean and Richard Eugene’s paths crossed, but on November 15, 1953, the two married in Los Angeles, California. Between 1954 and 1960, Emma Jean gave birth to their four children — John, Richard, Cynthia, and Sidney. The three oldest were born in California; the youngest in Oregon.
And, on the worst night of their young lives, they were living with their mother in an Oak Cliff motel, their father far away in Georgia. Once he retrieved his children and arranged for Emma Jean’s burial, Stewart took his children back to Georgia with him.
About two months later, on June 17, 1963, a Dallas County grand jury indicted Robert James Paschall (alias James Creet) for the murder of Emma Jean. The 25-year-old bearded man worked as a handyman at the Last Frontier Motel. He admitted to police that he had been in Emma Jean’s apartment and had relations with her.
A few weeks later, the Dallas County district attorney’s office recommended that the case against Paschall be dismissed because there was no actual proof of murder. The only sign on Emma Jean’s body which might have indicated violence was a red spot on her throat, police officers reported. And, the children could not testify to any physical act of violence.
Exactly what took place on the night Emma Jean died remains a mystery. We do, however, know what happened to Emma Jean’s children. Big sister Ethel and her husband Edwin Ackerman stepped up and raised their niece and three nephews.
That story is best told in Ethel’s 2006 obituary published in a Marion County, Oregon newspaper:
Emma Jean Johnson Stewart is buried in section 3, tier 1, grave 1 in Oakland Cemetery.
NOTE: According to the Mayo Clinic, hemorrhagic pulmonary edema (fluid collecting in the lungs) is most often caused by heart problems, but also by contact with certain toxins, medications, trauma to the chest wall and traveling to or exercising at high elevations. The acute form of the condition is a medical emergency and can sometimes cause death.
The photos of teen-aged Emma Jean, then a freshman, appeared in The Bearcat, the 1947 yearbook for Henrietta (TX) High School. Family photos from ancestry.com.
