Johnson county, Kansas Newspaper Articles

ARREST OF AN ALLEGED KANSAS MURDERER IN PORTLAND, OREGON

Arrest of an alleged Kansas Murder in Portland, Oregon - A dispatch from Portland says: A young man named Henry W. Grayson was arrested on Tuesday, by detective William K. Cherry on a requisition from Governor Anthony of Kansas. Grayson is charge with the murder of Allen G. Potille, in Johnson County, Kansas on the 1st of November, 1867. Although the murder was committed ten years ago, Grayson has managed to escape arrest until now. Detective Cherry has been on the track of the alleged murderer for some time. Grayson is 29 years of age, of pre-posacasing appearance, and very reputably connected. He asserts his innocence. The officer and the prisoner will leave on the steamer Idaho. (San Francisco Bulletin, January 10, 1878, Page 3)

SKULL FOUND IN A CAVE

OLATHE, Kan.,, March 3.—A cave, apparently of vast proportions, was accientally discovered on a farm three miles west of here to-day ard thirty feet below its' surface has been found a human skuIl. On the wall close to where the skull was found in illegibly written what is supposed to be a story of the fate of the person who died there. Nothing but the figures 1873 can be read. At the landing, about thirty feet below the surface, seams extend in several directions and at one place there
is an opening several feet In diameter, which is apparently a bottomless pit. (The Indiana Journal, March 11, 1896, Submitted by Barbara Ziegenmeyer)

TRUE CONFESSIONS

In his class on confessional literature, Thomas J. O'Donnell gives his students an optional assignment: Write a letter discussing what they see as their sins.

The students who choose to do that, after reading the confessional letters and texts of T.E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, Jean Jacques Rousseau and St. Augustine, come up with some strange, frequently anguished tales of abuse. O'Donnell acts as their confessor.

Beginning about 12 years ago, O'Donnell ventured out from his classroom and into the courtroom to investigate a sensational murder trial in Johnson County. Instead of 20-year-old Kansas University students telling him what they did wrong, a broken family began to tell him their secrets how stepbrother had slain stepbrother, and how a mother possibly conspired to kill her stepson.

The results of 12 years of research and taped confessions can be found in "Crazymaker," O'Donnell's first true-crime narrative that was published July 1 by Harper Collins.

"I think the hard part for me was to get up the guts to go talk to people," said O'Donnell, an associate professor of English at KU. "I think they wanted somebody to talk to, and I was the only one they talked to. For some reason they chose me."

O'Donnell's book describes in detail the death of Chris Hobson, a learning-challenged youth in the Shawnee Mission School District. His mother had died of cancer, and his father, Ed Hobson, met and married Sueanne Crumm, a divorced mother of two. The family then moved in together.

On the evening of April 17, 1980, Chris' stepbrother, Jimmy Crumm, and Paul Sorrentino drove Chris out to a dead end in extreme northern Miami County. There they told Chris to start digging a ditch. When he was several feet deep, the two teen-agers shot Chris to death and then buried him.

The body was discovered, and the two youths were arrested. Then the other shoe dropped: Sueanne Hobson, Jimmy's mother, was arrested for conspiracy to commit murder. Jimmy told the court how is mother, unable to control what she perceived as Chris' threatening behavior, convinced Jimmy and her daughter, Suzanne, that Chris needed to die. Sueanne was convicted, and she, Jimmy and Paul are still in prison.

At about the same time as the killing, O'Donnell had it a tough spot in his life. He failed in a bid to become a full professor, and the roadblock made him start to think of traveling down a different path.

"I got frustrated," O'Donnell said in a Tuesday interview. "I decided that year to try for a promotion, and I didn't get promoted, so I decided to do what I wanted to do. What I did was I read a newspaper and I saw a woman's face in a photograph, and I thought she was beautiful. She's one of those people who are more beautiful in photographs than in other things. Then I saw that within a day or two she was charged with murder."

The facts of the case began playing on O'Donnell's mind. He followed news accounts and collected facts. He sat in with reporters at Sueanne's trial in 1982, and he became convinced he would pursue the story wherever it went. Individuals connected with the murder, including the suspects, the detectives, the district attorney and assorted relatives and friends, began to talk to him. Finally, he waded through thousands of feet of tape and stacks of notes to pull his chronological narrative together.

The resulting book, written from a highly objective viewpoint, weaves first-person accounts of events together into a compelling narrative. O'Donnell said he set out to write more of a work of art than a work of journalism, where he captures the spirits behind the key individuals.

"The detectives were very vivid," he said. "They have a very special way of speaking. Sueanne is very verbal, Jimmy is very eloquent, as is Ed. They just really have their own way of speaking. I wanted their voices to come through. They were all very wired, by which I mean intense."

Throughout the book, witnesses and family members contradict each other. Sueanne still denies her guilt, and Ed, after divorcing her, came to believe her. Paul's and Jimmy's accounts of the slaying don't match. O'Donnell said he wanted to keep the contradictions in the book to make readers realize just how much material lies in the gray area between truth and invention.

"The only thing that's certain is that there was a dead body out there in the ground," he said.

Now that the book is published, O'Donnell reluctantly faces a series of telephone interviews and television appearances, including as-yet-tentative dates on "Sonya Live" on CNN and on Sally Jessy Raphael's talk show.

O'Donnell grew up in central Illinois and earned his doctorate from the University of Illinois. He has been teaching at KU for 20 years, and his previous book was on "The Confessions of T.E. Lawrence."

He is a parent himself and he felt tremendous emotional attachment for Chris, the victim. He talks about a photograph of the body he describes as beautiful that didn't end up in the paperback, and he said he cried when he got to the chapter where Jimmy describes the killing.

Now, however, like a priest who is fond of the sinners who enter the confessional, O'Donnell says he thinks Jimmy should be set free when he's eligible for parole. The purpose of his book was not to punish these people any further than the law has already done. He just wants to present the evidence.

"I never judged them," he said. "I don't judge them. The one thing I didn't want to do in this book is judge. I think (Jimmy) is a hell of a guy, and I don't feel like judging him."
(Lawrence Journal-World ~ July 12, 1992)