THE WOMAN IN THE WELL
On the mild June morning that Nancy Orleana Kreager stepped out her front door on North Willow Street for the last time, she was wearing a black dress and white shoes that would raise no eyebrows in town, given that Memorial Day had passed. She was on her way to Grayson County State Bank in Sherman, and according to grandson Karl, she was in a hurry. She was going to buy a house.
She was likely excited; five weeks earlier, her children had given her a rocking chair for Mother’s Day, something new for her new house. It wouldn’t be delivered until after she closed and took possession of the property. Cashing a check at the bank would put her one step closer to that day.
The 80-year-old first stopped at the drugstore; the proprietor later said Mrs. Kreager made a phone call to someone he assumed was her real estate agent. And though he wouldn’t have mentioned it, she probably looked unusually thick around her middle. Under that black dress was a money belt stuffed with bills — $3,000-$4,000 worth. In the next few days, daughter Narcissus would confirm having seen that bulging belt two weeks earlier during a visit with her mother.
Her phone conversation concluded, Mrs. Kreager left the drugstore and proceeded to the bank, where she cashed a check for an additional $8,344. She tucked those bills into her purse and, money belt in place, walked outside with as much as $12,000 hidden on her person.
It was June 17, 1946; it would be 51 days before anyone would know what happened next. The white-haired Mrs. Kreager disappeared some time after leaving the bank that late-spring morning.
Undoubtedly feeling optimistic and purposeful, the frugal church-goer had taken precautions not to flaunt her money, but she likely felt no fear. She had lived in Sherman, Texas — then a town of about 20,000 folks 65 miles north of Dallas — all her adult life.
Nancy Orleana Harrell was born in the summer of 1865 in Howe, Texas, just 10 miles south of Sherman. Her Kentucky-born parents — David Jackson Harrell and Narcissa Ellen Poindexter — started their family in Missouri, from which Nancy’s adventurous father twice launched himself, first to California, then to Texas.
A descendant’s account of his expedition to California reveals an intriguing connection between him and the daughter who would go missing decades later:
…David Jackson Harrell went to California and found all the gold he could bring home and $10,000 in money. He wanted this to give to his grandchildren. He had so much gold that he stuffed it in his shirt pockets and pants as well as in a money belt worn around his waist. He was afraid to travel home to Joplin over land so he came back by way of boat around Cape Horn.
That stake financed the Harrell family’s move to north Texas in the early 1860s. The homesteaders — including wife Narcissa and two children — arrived in a covered wagon. Harrell built a stout log cabin 11 miles southeast of Sherman in White Mound, then a thriving settlement that declined after the railroad bypassed it in the 1880s.
Narcissa Poindexter may have recognized in David Jackson Harrell the same restlessness that characterized her father, Micajah “Cage” Poindexter, a farmer, Confederate soldier and Texas Ranger who married five women and fathered 16 children. Narcissa’s mother, the second of Cage’s wives, died when the girl was 15.
A dozen years later, Narcissa was herself a mother of four. While her husband was away on one of his frequent trips to Missouri, she contracted typhoid fever. Worried that Harrell wouldn’t return home safely, she called her twin brothers, then only 16, to her bedside and asked them to raise her children.
Two weeks after Narcissa’s death at 26, Harrell returned and learned of his loss. He’s said to have walked the floor at night, inconsolable; he never courted nor remarried. Rather than find a stepmother for his young children, he chose to raise them — and his teen-aged brothers-in-law — on his own. The Harrell siblings were young: Mary Jane, 8; David, 6; Nancy Orleana, 3; and Willis, 1.
It may be a measure of their bond that the siblings stayed close to home after their father’s death in 1900. Even David, or “Big Bub” — a successful Panhandle cattleman with 25,600 acres and homes in both Claude and Lark — maintained a Sherman residence until 1930. All had long-lasting marriages and lived to see their 70s and 80s.
Nancy Orleana Harrell was still living with her father when, in 1877, the man who would make her Mrs. Kreager arrived in White Mound. At 20, he had joined a wagon train from Missouri that terminated in Bonham; carrying his German father’s shotgun and a few personal items, he found work 24 miles farther west on David Jackson Harrell’s farm. Nancy Orleana was 16 when she married her father’s 24-year-old hired man.
John Carey Kreager didn’t remain an employee for long. A family historian calls him a shrewd businessman who supplemented his income as a farmer by purchasing land at $1 per acre in Grayson County and selling it for $2 per acre. The 1920 census shows he also served the county as a deputy sheriff. He and Nancy Orleana produced 11 children, nine of whom lived to adulthood.
Kreager was found dead of a heart attack in his car in the spring of 1941; he was 84. His obituary names his children and acknowledges as his survivors a sister, 27 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, but no wife. Census records and his death certificate suggest he and Nancy Orleana, who kept her married name, divorced around 1930.
When Mrs. Kreager left the Grayson County State Bank June 17— the last time she was seen alive — she had out-lived her former husband and three siblings, but she was not without family. Five of her adult children and twice that many grandchildren were living in north Texas. When she didn’t return home as expected, the family alerted police.
Newspapers reported that “the entire town,” including the Boy Scouts, turned out to search for her. Son John C. Kreager Jr., owner of Hatchery Feed and Seed Store in Sherman, told officials he feared she had met with foul play.
Four days after Mrs. Kreager’s disappearance, a fisherman reported witnessing two men on a boat lowering “something with feet” into Lake Texoma, prompting local police and firefighters to drag the lake 24 miles north of Sherman. After determining that whatever went into the water was not Mrs. Kreager, county attorney Olan Van Zandt contacted the Texas Rangers.
The Ranger in charge of the case then recruited two Fort Worth homicide detectives to look for leads; Van Zandt asked the Texas Department of Public Safety in Austin to send a criminologist to collaborate with officers. On July 3, the Grayson County grand jury convened to question 25 persons in connection with the missing woman. And the Kreager family offered a $1,000 reward for information leading to their mother’s whereabouts.
The reward led to the only arrest that summer connected to Mrs. Kreager’s disappearance. In early July, police detained a Denison man for public intoxication; they found a note in his pocket identifying Mrs. Kreager’s location. It read: “Body four miles west, half mile north northwest Sherman.” He said the information came from a fortune teller who had read his cards.
Other such “clues” came in from all over the country as out-of-state newspapers picked up column inches that filled Texas editions from Amarillo to Galveston, Tyler to Odessa. From the day after she disappeared until her whereabouts became known, readers were eager for news about the Texas grandmother who disappeared with a loaded money belt around her waist.
At the end of the year, Texas editors ranked Mrs. Kreager’s story #12 on its list of the Best Stories of 1946.
On Wednesday, August 7, 1946, the heat was climbing toward 105 degrees when farmers Willis Benedict and James Neeley went searching for Neeley’s missing cow on an unoccupied farm near Perrin Field, an airport built during World War II a few miles northwest of Sherman. The men approached an abandoned dry well and looked into its depths.
There lay Mrs. Kreager, in her black dress and white shoes, saturated in lime, the well’s wooden lid partly obscuring her badly decomposed body. She was no longer in possession of her purse nor her money belt. The farmers abandoned their search for Neeley’s cow and called Sheriff G.P. Gafford.
Officials contacted Mrs. Kreager’s sons: John Kreager, Jr., the Sherman merchant whose son, Karl, had spoken to his grandmother the day she disappeared, and Willis Kreager, a Church of Christ minister in nearby Gainesville, identified the remains. Willis said a missing toe on her left foot and some withered fingers on one hand allowed him to recognize his mother.
Having consulted with Sheriff Gafford and four DPS experts, Van Zandt told reporters they believed Mrs. Kreager was killed elsewhere, then thrown into the well. As for suspects, the county attorney announced he was seeking “a white man believed to have information about the person or persons who killed Mrs. Kreager.”
The “white man” turned out to be the Denison drunk whom police had questioned a month earlier. After a three-day search, police found and arrested him and the fortune teller who, they immediately realized, had provided remarkably accurate directions to the missing woman’s body.
The fortune teller explained to police that her customer had begged for Mrs. Kreager’s location, that he was desperate to collect the $1,000 reward money. She said she “gave in,” telling the man that the missing woman was being held in a shack by two men and a woman and that the trio planned to poison their captive and throw her into a well.
“It was God’s wonderful gift” that she had come so close to the truth, she told police.
Officials checked out the story by having the contents of Mrs. Kreager’s stomach examined by a state toxicologist. The fortune teller and the man whom the press briefly dubbed “the missing link” were released. Within days, the county attorney announced that the card-reading episode had “no relation to the slaying” of Mrs. Kreager.
The toxicologist further found that local officials may have been hasty in telling the public they believed Mrs. Kreager was killed before entering the well. Although he didn’t discount that possibility, he said it was also possible that she was dropped into the well while still alive and died of a fractured neck. He based his findings on having found blood in soil samples taken from the dry well.
The funeral of Nancy Orleana Harrell Kreager took place August 9. She was buried in West Hill Cemetery in Sherman, where her former husband had been buried 5 years earlier and their 7-year-old daughter Alice Viola had lain since 1906.
Ten days later, John Kreager presented a check for $1,000 to Benedict and Neeley, the farmers who had found Mrs. Kreager. Contributing to the reward fund were two of his sisters, Orlena Kreager Hooker and Loma Kreager Millsap. The Texas Ranger who headed the investigation of Mrs. Kreager’s disappearance then announced there was “nothing new” in the case.
The Texas Ranger was wrong. On November 2, 1948 — more than two years after Mrs. Kreager went to her grave — Sheriff Benton Davis arrested Ernest Millsap, 53, and charged him with murder. Millsap was Mrs. Kreager’s son-in-law, the father of two of her grandchildren. And, for the past 26 years, he had been married to Loma, who contributed to the $1,000 reward given to the men who found her mother’s body.
Immediately following the arrest at his Sherman home, Millsap was taken to an undisclosed jail; he made no statement. News accounts say the arrest came after the sheriff had revived an “intensive investigation” two weeks earlier; investigators apparently discovered that, at the time of Mrs. Kreager’s death, Millsap had been living on a tract of land near the well.
A World War I veteran with a 7th-grade education, Millsap appears to have been a hard worker all his life. As a boy in Lorena, Texas, he did farm labor for his father. After his marriage, he found work in the oil fields near Ponca City, Oklahoma; it was likely then that the Millsaps adopted their two Oklahoma-born children. By 1932, the family was back in Texas; for a time, Ernest managed the Grande Lodge Service Station in Dallas. From 1935 until his arrest, he operated a farm near Sherman.
On December 17, 1948, about six weeks after the sheriff accused Millsap of murdering his mother-in-law, a grand jury no-billed the indictment; that is, they determined there was insufficient evidence to warrant criminal prosecution. Millsap returned home to Loma, where they had another 16 years together. She died on Christmas Day 1964 at age 66. Ernest Millsap followed in 1970 at age 75. Like Mrs. Kreager, they are buried in West Hill Cemetery in Sherman.
Mrs. Kreager’s murder remains unsolved. What happened to her immediately after she left her bank on the morning of June 17, 1946 may never be known. Certainly, the way her life ended was something no one foresaw. The house she was planning to buy was never purchased; the rocking chair her children gave her for Mother’s Day was never delivered.
The final word — fittingly ambiguous, written in nearly illegible script — rests with the Grayson County coroner, who signed the death certificate in September 1946. The primary cause of death was deemed “murder at the hand of” — is it person or persons? — unknown to me.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: The account of D.J. Harrell’s finding gold comes from Memories Heaven Tall by Martha Harrell Connor and Carrie Hickox. The stories of Narcissa’s death and John Carey Kreager’s entry into the Harrell family, as well as some photos, are from A Family History, written by Dorothy Louise Knox Brown in 1972. Other photos are from Poindexters in America with related families by Nealon Rhea Agree and Dorothy Louise Knox Brown, 1995. Thank you to all descendants who shared photos and information via ancestry.com.
FURTHER READING: Mrs. Kreager’s niece, Mae Orleana, married Ridley Dean. Click here for their story: Murder in Muskogee.
~THE WOMAN IN THE WELL is the title story in the book, The Woman in the Well and Other Ancestories, a collection of stories that grew out of explorations into family history. Available from Amazon and other online booksellers.
