Oakland Cemetery Chronicles/Edith Mae Claxton
Edith Mae Claxton (1917–1968)
Early on the morning of October 17, 1939, truck driver Harvey Akers struck a bridge abutment on Route 42 near Ashland, Ohio, causing the truck’s body — loaded with Scotch, rum and medical supplies — to break loose and crush the cab. Thrown 15 feet, Harvey was found lying unconscious in a shallow pond.
It wasn’t a good day to be Harvey Akers. As he fought for his life in an Ashland hospital, his estranged wife, Edith Mae, received word that the divorce she sought had been granted. The couple’s six-year marriage was over, and their two-year-old son, whom Harvey was said to adore, would remain with his mother.
On hearing the news of Harvey’s accident, Edith sped to the hospital 50 miles from Akron. Media accounts the next day made much of the 22-year-old divorcee donating blood to her ex-husband in an effort to save him. And, it was noted, she remained at his bedside through the night.
At 4 a.m., Harvey grasped Edith’s hand and begged her to stay near him always, according to the Akron Beacon Journal. She agreed, promising to set aside the divorce decree. Doctors said they hoped that might give their patient more reason to put up a fight.
Edith’s father joined his daughter at the hospital, telling a reporter he hoped his former son-in-law would live. “I believe it will mean the beginning of an entirely new life for them. They do truly love each other, but they are both so hot-tempered.”
Harvey slipped into a coma that Thursday night and died Saturday, October 20, 1939. He was 26 years old.
Left fatherless — and practically motherless, some said — was little Virgil Akers. Born in 1937 in Akron, he was named for his maternal grandfather, Virgil Ray Willis who, with wife Celia Mae, left South Carolina in 1915 for Ohio, where Virgil found steady work in Akron’s rubber industry. Edith was born there in 1917, the youngest of the Willis’s four children.
On the day in 1939 when Harvey Akers lost control of his truck, Edith and young Virgil were renting an apartment in Akron, in the same building as her parents. In February 1943, Edith and her son were still together, living in Portage Lakes, south of Akron, with her parents. Six-year-old Virgil had received “compensation” for the death of his father, the Beacon Journal reported, and the boy had been allowed to “invest” in his uncle, an Army sergeant fighting in the Pacific. Grandfather Virgil took the boy to a downtown bank, where he purchased $1,000 in war bonds.
That 1943 sighting aside, the whereabouts of Edith are hard to trace during the 1940s. That decade’s census is no help: There’s no head of household of the appropriate age named Edith Mae Akers. Nor is she present in the household of her parents or her siblings. One document, however, suggests she left Ohio for a time: On Halloween 1949, in Madison County, Indiana, an Edith Mae McGinnis (with the correct birth date and parents) divorced a man with that surname.
Whatever Edith Mae was up to in the ’40s — and starting a new life in Indiana seems plausible— she tarnished her reputation as a mother so fully that, over a decade later, an Akron newspaper reporter brought her reputation to light. In an article about a series of “catastrophes” that had befallen the Willis family, the writer credits Grandfather Virgil with raising his namesake, claiming that he was named guardian of the boy on the day his father died.
“The boy never lived with his mother,” the reporter wrote, adding that as a schoolboy, Virgil constantly got into trouble, prompting a psychologist to conclude he was “a boy who desperately needs a mother.” A teacher agreed with that assessment in a comment on Virgil’s report card: “Just another boy who vitally needs a mother.”
Virgil Akers was doubtlessly troubled. And when, at 21, his troubles reached a crescendo, his mother was there for him. By then, it was too late.
In June 1950, Edith married George Lorimer Edwards, a divorced father of two daughters and a World War II veteran 15 years her senior. Like Edith’s father, he worked in Akron’s rubber industry. Edwards quickly discovered what kind of family he had married into.
That September, Elizabeth Neal, the owner of an Akron confectionery where Edith once worked as a clerk, was murdered in her home. The assailant reportedly broke into Mrs. Neal’s house and listened to a ball game on her kitchen radio as he lay in wait for her. When she stepped inside, he hit her with a rolling pin, knocking her to the floor, then stabbed her to death with his hunting knife. He fled with the $150 she had in her purse.
The killer was Edith’s 19-year-old nephew, Robert “Bobby” Major, who had earlier accompanied his grandfather and his new uncle George to Mrs. Neal’s to collect furniture; while there, the men commented on the widow’s lonely place so far out of town. After the murder, Virgil Willis went to authorities with information about his grandson, who then confessed to his crime. The local newspaper subsequently published an editorial in praise of Willis’s integrity, characterizing him as a religious man.
Major was the child of Edith’s sister, Faith, who testified at the murder trial that she didn’t think her son had the mental capacity to know right from wrong, citing a serious head injury, black-outs, suicide attempts and the year he spent in a Michigan school for “subnormal children.” Also introduced in court was the fact that the boy’s father, who stood trial for manslaughter in 1937, had been declared legally insane.
On December 15, 1950, the jury found Bobby Major — unkindly described as “runty” or “sawed-off” in the news — guilty of first degree murder and sentenced him to life, with a recommendation of mercy. He spent 16 years behind bars. In March 1967, he was paroled and assigned to work as a messenger in the governor’s office. Ten months later, at age 36, he died of a heart attack and brain hemorrhage. The governor called him a hard worker, “honest and conscientious.”
In the spring of 1953, Edith and husband George again found themselves in the middle of a family drama involving a nephew. They were on the scene when 16-year-old Richard Willis, the son of Edith’s brother, Arthur, barricaded himself in his bedroom with a gun and threatened to commit suicide. The boy’s parents weren’t present: His mother was in a sanatorium; his father was recuperating from a heart attack in his parents’ home.
The boy reportedly was despondent about the damage done to his vocal cords after 10 throat surgeries in two years following a bicycle accident. The Akron Beacon Journal reported that he had been under a psychiatrist’s care.
Edith and George tried to talk him into leaving the bedroom, but when George’s entreaties became too emphatic, the boy fired a warning shot. “The bullet missed my husband by half an inch,” Edith told reporters. With 10 policemen, a clergyman, and family members gathered outside his room, Richard shot himself to death.
Three years later, in 1956, Edith lost both the sister who testified in her son’s murder trial and the brother whose son committed suicide. Her brother Arthur died at 43; Faith, at 40. Their obituaries name as a survivor “Mrs. Edith Edwards.” There is no mention of husband George.
Virgil Akers was 19 in 1956, and like his cousins, it looked as though he would not survive his teen years. That September, he stole a car for a joy ride on the Ohio Turnpike. Stopped by police near Toledo, he bolted into nearby woods and led a 16-man posse on a seven-hour chase. Virgil had reason to run: He was on parole, having recently been released from the Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield. He had been confined there since 1952, for burglary, purse snatching, and a series of assaults on women.
Grandfather Virgil lamented in the press that he had never known what to do with his grandson, especially when it came to money. “If I didn’t give it to him, I knew he’d steal it, so I usually gave it to him,” adding that, because the boy loved baseball, he had bought him an $18 bat and a $20 baseball glove. “He was always asking for expensive things.”
At Mansfield, Virgil studied to be a barber, and his grandparents were hopeful when, upon his release, he looked for a job and returned to church. But, they weren’t surprised when his efforts failed. They agreed with daughter Edith that Virgil might have a “mental twist.” She had requested a psychiatric evaluation of her son, she said, and one conducted during a hospital stay concluded that Virgil’s future would be characterized by “violent behavior.”
In December 1957, Virgil was charged with attempting to strangle Marilyn Alexander, a former girlfriend whose family he had known since childhood. The charge set into motion a series of evasive maneuvers that earned Virgil a reputation as “escape-happy.”
When his parole officer came looking for him, Virgil led him on a chase, unwisely leaping from his moving car, fracturing his skull. Confined to a hospital bed, Virgil managed to saw through a leg iron and escape to Detroit. Within days, Virgil and three cohorts robbed a nightclub there, holding a gun on the club’s owner and his wife in their home, demanding a key to the club and the combination to its safe. The men netted $3400.
Virgil’s escape not only resulted in his arrest, but also in his mother’s. “Mrs. Edith Akers” was arrested January 11 on suspicion of helping her son escape from the hospital. Bond was set at $2500. The sheriff said he had reason to suspect Mrs. Akers was guilty of the charge, and a municipal judge assessed costs at her hearing two weeks later. Despite that, the sheriff and the county prosecutor’s office recommended Edith be let off, with costs suspended.
Did these law officers extend lenience because they heard a mother’s impassioned plea? Did she tell authorities that her son’s desperate attempts to escape — running through the woods, hurling himself from a car, sawing through a leg iron — presaged a bad end?
Had Virgil told her, as he had a friend, that he feared a return to the county jail, that “this time I’m afraid the cops will have to shoot me to get me?”
That’s exactly what happened. On the morning of April 16, 1958, five men in Akron’s county jail — notoriously an insecure facility — succeeded in breaking out “in John Dillinger fashion,” as the Beacon Journal reported, by fashioning keys to unlock their cells, overpowering deputies, arming themselves and escaping in two county cars parked outside.
The driver of one car was Virgil Akers. His destination was the home of Marilyn Alexander, the girl who accused him months earlier of trying to strangle her with a rope. Virgil forced himself inside by holding a gun on Mr. Alexander, but Mrs. Alexander, who had spotted Virgil from a window, already had phoned police. Daughter Marilyn was not present, having married and moved to Florida, waiting to return home until her case against Virgil came to trial.
The Alexanders told authorities that Virgil never told them why he came to their home that April morning, nor did he say what he wanted from them. When police arrived, Virgil did what Virgil always did: He made a run for it, barrelling out the back door, stolen gun in hand. Twice told to drop the weapon, Virgil never slowed. The police sergeant fired one fatal shot. Virgil was 21 years old.
Edith Mae Willis Akers McGinnis Edwards, age 41, was working as a waitress in Akron when her only child was shot dead. Within the next year, she had moved to Los Angeles, California, where she married for the final time.
His name was Therman Garfield Claxton, an Arkansas-born man two years older than Edith. At 20, he was living on his father’s farm with one marriage and divorce already behind him. Like Virgil Akers, he failed to find a smooth path to adulthood. At age 24, Therman was inmate #3656 at Missouri State Intermediate Reformatory for Young Men.
What likely saved him from a career in crime was World War II. Therman left Arkansas for California and, from 1943–1946, he served on one ship after another in the U.S. Navy. In 1957, he gave marriage another shot: He wed Jamie Lee Roberts in Los Angeles. And, on May 1, 1959, he married “Edith M. Akers.” Records show he didn’t get around to divorcing Jamie Lee until 1971.
At some point, the couple left the West Coast and arrived in Texas. The Dallas city directories for 1967 and 1968 show them living in an apartment on Gaston Avenue. Edith worked as a waitress. Unlike the life Edith left behind in Akron, the one she briefly shared with Therman in Dallas did not draw the attention of law enforcement nor the media.
On Sunday, September 1, 1968, Edith Mae Claxton was transported to Parkland Hospital, where she was pronounced dead on arrival of a “probable coronary occlusion.” She was 51 years old.
Completing Edith’s death certificate was not a straightforward effort. Edith’s mother, by then a widow living in North Carolina, was the official informant, her contribution likely made over the telephone. That could explain why North Carolina rather than Ohio appears as Edith’s place of birth. And, Mrs. Willis’s signature seemingly was provided by proxy.
More telling are changes related to the disposal of Edith’s remains. The word “burial” is boldly typed over the original “cremated.” And, in the blank for the name of the cemetery or crematory, “Oakland Cemetery” obscures a ghostly “Parkland Hospital medical school.”
Edith was buried on Saturday, September 7. A tiny newspaper notice of the graveside service makes no mention of a husband. The much-married deceased — ironically identified as “Miss Edith Mae Claxton” — remains in Oakland Cemetery’s section 8, grave #18. There is no marker.
