Sign Up For Our Newsletter
Selinsgrove Projects, Inc.
P.O. Box 377 | Selinsgrove, PA 17870
Selinsgrove resident John Conley went to Penn’s Creek on the morning of April 3, 1929 to fish for suckers. He got there about 8:30. The morning was cold and clear. As Conley was working his way along the east creek bank, about a mile south of town, he spotted something large out in the stream, caught on a tree stump. Closer inspection revealed that it was a human body, rather badly decomposed. Conley drove to the Odd Fellows building in town, where the state highway patrol had an office. Within an hour, four troopers and a justice of the peace drove to the spot and towed the waterlogged body to the west bank.
Fairly quickly, they knew that the dead man was Archie Wise. The thirty-five-year-old store clerk had been missing for a month, and his disappearance had baffled his wife, the rest of his family, his friends, and the authorities
This was not the end that any of them had hoped for.
Archie’s body showed signs of being in water for a long time. His left shoulder was crushed. In his pants pocket were a wallet and a sodden wad of cash. No watch, no keys.
Coroner A.J. Herman inspected the body with four other physicians and found that there was no water in Archie’s lungs. His neck was broken. Together, these signs said that he had taken his last breath well before he entered the water. Herman convened a coroner’s jury to hold an inquest and alerted the state police. By the end of the week, the Selinsgrove Times stated it plainly:
Police are searching today for the murderer of Archie Wise.
Three and a half decades had built to this dramatic point. Tracing the story of Archie’s life reveals blue skies threatened by storm clouds, as one man’s pleasant routine was shaken by events beyond his control.
Archie Hubert Wise was born in Verdilla, five miles south of Selinsgrove, in December 1893. His parents, Annie and George, were from Snyder and Perry County farming families. They had married four months before Archie’s birth.
Archie’s draft card from June 1917. The reverse side described him as tall and slender, with no physical infirmities.
Little is known about his childhood. Like many area youth, he started working around 12 or 13. He was a clerk in the general store of L.A. Pepper. In the summer of 1917, he left that position to become an assistant foreman at the Groce Silk Mill. He became an officer in the Odd Fellows and joined the Red Cross.
For men of his age (24), this was a typical first step toward military service. The U.S. had declared war on Germany in April 1917; two months later, Archie was contributing to Red Cross efforts in Snyder County. He was involved in war bond campaigns for the next ten months. The photo of Archie at the top is from this era; it captured Archie in front of a display that showed how much Snyder County residents had donated toward the war. And, in June 1917, he registered for the Army under the Selective Service Act, which affected men aged 21 to 45.
Archie left for Camp Lee, Virginia, in April 1918, as part of a group of seventeen Snyder County men. Just two months later, his regiment, the 313th Field Artillery, shipped out to France. They disembarked near Bordeaux and completed months of artillery training near Redon (in northwestern France). Archie’s unit, Battery F, billeted in the small village of Avessac. Such was the fear of German gas attacks that Archie and his fellow soldiers spent three to four hours a day training in gas masks.
In his last weeks of training, in August, Archie wrote letters to his mother and sister, which were published in the Selinsgrove Times. He described the good food, the camp entertainment, the whereabouts of other Selinsgrove men, and the hot weather. He described the farming area of northwest France as similar to the “place along Shade Mountain.”
Battery F, moving through Vailly on November 6, 1918
His regiment moved to the front, at Verdun, in September 1918. Battery F was positioned just to the west of the town of Chattancourt as the late September offensive began. The following days were dark times for the men of F Battery. Endless noise and smoke, the constant fear of being hit, and nights broken by gas alarms made it impossible to let down one’s guard. Archie’s unit suffered German gas attacks on several occasions. A fellow solider from the 313th later admitted that the men were too nonchalant about the threat that autumn and “frequently found [themselves] with a chest full before we knew it.” Seven members of Archie’s battery died during the war. Besides the physical strain of the gas and the terror of mechanized warfare, Archie seems to have weathered the storm as well as anyone on the front lines.
Archie returned to the U.S. with 15,000 other soldiers on the U.S.S. Zeppelin, a German passenger liner surrendered after the war. He arrived back in Virginia in June 1919 and was working in Tom Spiegelmire’s Department Store by the first week of July. He and his sister Verna were described by the Selinsgrove Times in 1920 as “Union township persons making good in Selinsgrove.”
The transition back to civilian life must have been jarring, but he had the camaraderie of the Odd Fellows, his fellow Red Cross volunteers, and the newly formed American Legion. He boarded on South Water Street. In 1921 or 1922, he moved to Sunbury to work in a store there. He also lived in Shamokin for a while, again clerking in a store. He returned to Selinsgrove in 1924 to drive a truck for Shemory’s Bakery.
The modest wedding announcement, late 1924
That’s when he reconnected with Iva Ruth Rambo, the daughter of a Verdilla farming family whom he had known growing up. Iva’s first husband had died six years earlier in a railroading accident, just one year into their marriage. She was now 28 and Archie was 31. They married in December 1924. As it was a second marriage for Iva, the couple followed the era’s custom to keep the wedding understated. They moved into a house on the corner of South Water and Walnut. From all indications, they lived a quiet life. Iva had social circles in town and in Union township. The Selinsgrove Times noted her attendance at small gatherings. Archie worked and stayed active with his fraternal organizations.
On Saturday, March 3, 1929, Archie closed the Speigelmire Store and spent a few hours with friends at the Hotel Sterner on Market Street and Reuben “Rube” Shaffer’s barber shop on East Pine Street. The shop served as a gathering spot after hours and was close to the firehall, which was also known for late night socializing. Archie’s friends tried to convince him to go with them to Washington, D.C., on Monday for Herbert Hoover’s inauguration. He declined and left his crew at the barber shop just after midnight. He had his week’s wages in the pocket of his brown suit. His home was a minute away on foot.
He never made it.
Iva woke up the next morning to find that Archie hadn’t returned.
The initial thought in town was that he had run off for some reason, but the theory never made much sense. Newspaper writers kept coming back to the two most commonly known thoughts about Archie: he had built an impeccable reputation in working for Speigelmire for over a decade and he had “everything for which to live.”
News coverage also referred to the lingering effects of the gas attacks from the war. Though they didn’t specify what “physical affliction” the gas had left, some people apparently reasoned that Archie may have been wandering around in a daze that early morning and had met an accident.
Archie’s family and Speigelmire mobilized local police, state police, and several groups of private citizens to look for Archie. State police took advantage of the growing radio network in the region to broadcast news of Archie’s disappearance. The hope was that someone might see him far from Selinsgrove or that someone who had been passing through town had seen something connected to the mystery.
Two weeks after his disappearance, flooding rain swept the Valley. Archie’s father-in-law helped the borough constable string a wire net across the mouth of Penn’s Creek, in an attempt to catch his body if he had drowned and would be carried by the rising water. Speigelmire announced a $50 reward for anyone with information that led to finding Archie.
By the end of March, some in Selinsgrove thought that Archie had gotten into a fight after a little drinking. Prohibition was in effect, so no one was quick to admit anything. But it was known that there had been a widely attended “homebrew” party that night at Arthur Jarrett’s. Three unknown men from Kratzerville were mentioned as being there, but that detail led nowhere. No one went on the record; newspapers referred to “authoritative” sources and left it at that.
Alcohol would have to be involved, friends and relatives reasoned; no one in town was on bad terms with Archie.
Silk mill clerk Bessie Styers said she heard noises from her home on Market Street. It had sounded liked someone desperately yelling “Archie,” followed by moaning. Two men from the town water works said they had noticed blood in the alley between Styers’ and Wise’s houses the next morning, but they thought it was from a butchered chicken. It was all hard to believe. The Times called Archie “a chap so harmless … that no matter how much you contemplate the case you cannot arrive at a good reason why anyone should have wanted him out of the way.”
Constable Francis Gemberling did offer one piece of tantalizing news: he had traced Archie’s whereabouts in the hours after he was last reported to be heading home. After 1:30 AM, the trail ran cold. This suggested that there was more to the story on Archie’s end than the public knew.
And that’s when John Conley found Archie’s body in Penn’s Creek.
Two days after he was found, on Friday, April 5, Archie was laid to rest after a funeral at his home. An American Legion honor guard accompanied the funeral cortege to Reservoir Hill, and Achie was buried in Union Cemetery. Coroner A.J. Herman noted on the death certificate that Archie had “met [a] violent death of unknown nature.” Later, someone noted “probably accd., drowned.”
More theories spread. Some believed that he had been killed in a fight, that his assailant(s) had kept his body in a well until they feared being discovered, and that they had then dumped Archie in the creek. The Shamokin Dispatch printed every rumor that bubbled to the surface. The Selinsgrove Times criticized its Northumberland County rival as trading in “correspondence school stories.”
The investigation stalled completely. By the middle of April, it was rumored that Snyder County officials would offer a reward for information that led to a resolution. The rumors proved true; on April 20 commissioners voted to offer a reward of $800. An unnamed resident, who turned out to be Herb Schaffer, eventually admitted that Archie had been at his place until 2:30 that morning. He had been reluctant to say anything because he had a large quantity of homebrew there—enough to make it seem like he might be in the bootlegging trade.
Once Schaffer and friends had finished the batch in the weeks following Archie’s disappearance, he stepped forward to offer his information about the night of March 3. Schaffer’s house was on the Isle of Que at Bough and Front streets, just far enough to the south to make the Bough Street Bridge the likely path that Archie would have taken to get back home.
The Bough Street Bridge, shown in a 1913 Sanborn Fire Insurance map. The bridge was washed away by floods in 1889, 1902, and for the final time in 1936.
The Bough Street Bridge, destroyed in the 1936 flood and never replaced, had notoriously low guardrails on either side. The Times observed that a pedestrian could easily fall over those railings, especially in the center of the bridge, where they were “knee bumpers.” If he had toppled over the side, Archie would have landed in very cold water that had been running high from recent rain and was studded with chunks of ice.
On May 2, Sheriff Cyril Runkle accompanied two state policemen to Selinsgrove and indicated that a “sensational development” was forthcoming. Nothing came of it. Weeks dragged on with nothing new announced by anyone involved in the investigation. In early July, Arthur Jarrett was arrested by state police and state prohibition officers out of Lewisburg on charges of illegal possession of alcohol. The Dispatch guessed that this was an attempt to sweat Jarrett a little, to see if he might divulge something about the night Archie was last seen alive. Nothing came of it.
Three months after his death, Iva gave birth to a daughter named Lois.
A year after Archie’s body was found, the Shamokin Dispatch ran a story marveling at the fact that authorities were no closer to solving the mystery. In a statement to the Dispatch, Iva said, “It is terrible to have the case hang fire this way.” The reporter asked her what she thought had happened, and Iva still dismissed the accident theory. Although Archie “frequently” drank to the point of intoxication, she said, he was always steady on his feet and able to handle himself. He would not have stumbled over the rails and into the creek.
Francis Gemberling, the former Selinsgrove constable, kept the investigation going informally, convinced that an answer could be found. Gemberling claimed in the summer of 1930 to know who killed Archie; he just needed to find evidence that would help him deliver the case to prosecutors. “I will never let up,” he vowed.
For two and a half years, the case stayed cold. Locals spoke about Archie and the circumstances of his death, offering their explanations of what must have happened. A few people played detective, “quietly conducting investigations,” as the Shamokin Daily News described them. But the police had run into a wall, and they now had to play the waiting game if they were ever going to get over it. The most likely break would come when someone who knew something talked. In February 1933, that seemed to happen.
It was the last months of Prohibition, and there was still enough money in bootleg liquor to make people turn on each other. According to the Times, money and greed started “loose tongues” doing what loose tongues do. According to the Dispatch, “warring bootleg factions” were gearing up for a fight.
However it came about, an informant told police that he had heard someone threatening a man that if didn’t pay him for his whiskey, he’d reveal what he knew about the Wise case.
In the previous May, an equipment shed had burned on the farm of the widow Carrie Aikens, south of town on the Isle of Que. It was never determined what had caused the fire, but police now learned that there might be evidence of a shallow grave where the shed had stood. The story was that someone had hidden Archie’s body there, using a field roller to pack the dirt. But after a few weeks, the unnamed person or persons had thought it better to dump the body in the creek before it was discovered in the shed.
The young D.A.
Two state policemen from Harrisburg questioned town residents anew, especially those who had been at Jarrett’s party four years ago. The leading scenario was still that a fight had occurred at that gathering during a poker game, and that one or more of the attendees knew exactly what had happened to Archie.
District Attorney Henry Sommer, who had won the office just months after the Wise case had begun, disagreed. At this point, the winter of 1933, he believed that Archie had died from natural causes, such as a heart attack that made him stumble and fall over the low bridge railing.
But with the renewed activity in the case after years of nothing, others thought that this was the time to bring it to a resolution. Archie’s American Legion post, one unnamed individual, and the county commissioners pooled money to offer a $1300 reward to anyone who gave information that led to an answer. State police interviewed two dozen people, mostly those associated with the Jarrett poker game and the people who had been at Herb Schaffer’s that morning.
William VanBuskirk, elected constable in 1931, recalled that there had been about twenty men in and out of Jarrett’s house that night. VanBuskirk himself was there for nine hours, from 7 PM to 4 AM.
Suddenly, the “Kratzerville angle” reemerged.
VanBuskirk remembered that a group of Kratzerville men had stopped in twice during the early morning hours. All of this had been looked into before, but it couldn’t hurt to make sure. Due diligence took the police out to Kratzerville on March 21, to see if anything could be made of it. This was their last lead to trace before formally closing the book on the case, they told Sommer. The D.A. said their best bet was to go to Foster Kline’s general store, where residents typically sat around a cast iron stove and gossiped. VanBuskirk accompanied the state policemen out to Kratzerville.
They found a few locals in Kline’s store who named young men who were known to drive, drink, and play cards. One was 23-year-old grist mill worker Harry “Spike” Naugle. The men found him nearby and asked a few questions. VanBuskirk would later say that Naugle was “trembling like a leaf.” His answers were just shifty enough to make the police take him in.
They picked up four other men who were known as Naugle’s friends and were also thought to have been at Jarrett’s gathering four years ago. The police took all five to the courthouse in Middleburg, where they were separated and questioned by D.A. Sommer. The process continued the next day, with men spending two nights in solitary confinement in the county jail. The interrogation stretched to fifty-one hours.
On March 22, the five men—Spike Naugle, Roy Hollenbach, John Hollenbach, Harry Knouse, and Dale Kline, all aged 23 to 19 years old—eventually admitted their role in Archie’s death.
Kline, the youngest, broke first. He said that they had been playing poker at Art Jarett’s house on Front Street that night. Wise was not at the party (he was several houses away at Herb Schaffer’s). When the men left, Kline said, Roy Hollenbach drove fast down Bough Street. Knouse was in the front with him, and Kline, Naugle, and John Hollenbach were in the back.
Roy hit the sharp slope up to the Bough Street Bridge fast enough to make the car jump then skid and swerve to the right. As Roy was straightening it out, they felt an impact but saw nothing. That impact was the car hitting Archie, who was on foot and was slammed him into the railing. Kline said that Roy stopped the car on Water Street, five doors down from Archie’s house.
Roy said he thought they had hit someone. The front end of the car looked normal, but Naugle said they should go back to check at the bridge. Roy allegedly said, “To hell with going back, we’ll go home and keep our mouths shut.” That part of the story broke down; Kline eventually admitted that Roy and Knouse walked back to the bridge, found a lifeless Archie Wise there, and dumped his body over the side.
The next day, Kline said they met in Kline’s store and swore to keep the secret. When he could do so without attracting attention, Roy Hollenbach junked his car.
District Attorney Sommer believed this tale, but state law put a two-year limit on charges of involuntary manslaughter. Sommer signaled that he would charge the men with murder. He brought charges by the end of the week: murder, being accessories before and after the fact, conspiracy, conspiracy to obstruct justice, and obstruction of justice.
William Miller, former Snyder County D.A., editorialized that the murder charges were not sustainable in this case—the evidence just wasn’t there. The men’s attorney insisted at their preliminary hearing that “dropping a corpse from a bridge is no crime.” But the prosecutor stressed that Wise very well could have been alive before he went over the side. Sommer dropped the accessories charges altogether and clarified that the murder charges applied only to Roy Hollenbach and Harry Knouse. They were released on a bond of $2,000. The backseat passengers were released on a $200 bond.
The Shamokin Daily News reported that many Selinsgrove residents still believed that there was more to Archie’s death. After four years of speculation, people apparently would not abandon the idea that someone had killed Archie elsewhere and planted him on the bridge.
On June 6, 1933, when the case came before a grand jury in the Snyder County courthouse, Sommers dropped all charges. He simply didn’t have the evidence to support a murder case.
There was no positive way to establish that Archie had been alive at the moment the men threw him into the creek. Sommer released a statement that said he believed that all “fair-minded persons” would agree that the heinous act of dumping the body off the bridge should not go unpunished. But there was nothing that the legal system could do after four years.
Not with a bang, but a whimper. The Dispatch’s headline announcing the end of the legal saga.
And that’s how the story ended. Iva lived until 1986. She worked as a baker and a cook at area restaurants. Daughter Lois graduated from Selinsgrove High in 1947. She was trained as a stenographer. In 1949 she married William Slough, a business owner from Sunbury, and lived most of her life there. Archie and Iva are buried in Union Cemetery.