Hays - Oafy - Montgomery InGenWeb Project

A Card from Mr. Pickett in Which He Exonerates the Unfortunate Girl and Acquits Himself of all Blame

To the Editor of Crawfordsville Journal:

In your account of Monday’s paper regarding the death of Oafy Hays, there appeared several statements wholly at variance with the facts in the case—statements which had origin only in the idle talk of Waynetown gossipers. Equity and justice never injures any one living or dead and I ask permission to make a few statements in defense of myself and the girl whose body lies moldering in the grave. Her name was not Rariden. She is not the daughter of Frank Rariden. The girl was not giddy, as stated. There was not a steadier, or a more level headed girl anywhere. You say she was not intellectual. The whole community will bear witness that her intelligence would compare favorably with the average mind. You say she became worried and distressed on learning of me going with another girl to the Shades. The inmates of the hotel will bear witness that she knew I was going, put my tie on for me and parted with me in good spirits. Not on account of us making love. I board at the hotel and we frequently had favorable opportunities of conversing with each other but I never coerced her and she never regarded me as a lover. And to say that she suicided on my account is false beyond measure, and now gossipers have taken the subject up and intimate that there was guilt of criminal intimacy thereby not only defaming me but smirching the character of a dead girl. This is something that heathens would not tolerate, much less the people of a civilized community. The coroner’s inquest, with the testimony of the expert physician, Dr. Culver, with the post mortem held by Doctors Hurt, Hamilton, and Claypool, will show that there was nothing found about her person that would justify the reports of scandalmongers and idle gossipers, that there was anything criminally wrong with the girl. I write this in justice to the dead girl, whose name was unsullied in the community, as well as in defense of myself. I simply had occasion to talk to her occasionally as any other boarder, nothing more, nothing less, and I trust in justice to myself, the girl and this entire community you will publish the above and command the reputation your paper has always merited.