On Christmas Eve, I was listening to an old episode of My Favorite Murder (as you do) in which they were talking about the Ax Murderer of New Orleans, and hosts Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark offhandedly mentioned that there’s a grand unified theory of mysterious ax murders in which everything from the New Orleans ax murders to the Villisca, Iowa, ax murders to the Paradise Ridge, Tenn., ax murders were all committed by the same train-hopping serial killer.
But hold on.
Paradise Ridge, Tenn., ax murders?
Fans of Beaman Park and/or Joelton will recognize the name. Paradise Ridge is right here in Davidson County, the name for the flat high area in the northwest part of the county. Did you know we had an infamous, gruesome unsolved ax murder? Neither did I.
OK, so let’s get situated. It’s 1897 in northwest Davidson County, very near the Cheatham County line. What is currently Clarksville Pike does not exist. Instead, you can get up the ridge from what is now Whites Creek three ways. You can go up Eaton’s Creek Road (still a good way to go); you can take Whites Creek Pike around the hairpin turn known as the Devil’s Elbow (which you still can do); or you can take one of the old roads from Dry Fork up Germantown Hill to Morny.
Some old-timers still call that way up the ridge Germantown Hill, but very few people remember Dry Fork or Morny. Dry Fork was at the bottom of the ridge. If you’re on the current Clarksville Highway and look left just before the hill, you’ll see a little Methodist church and a clump of houses. That’s pretty much what’s left of Dry Fork. Morny is now just considered Joelton, but the area with the Dollar General and the Foodland and the hardware store used to be its own thing, separate from the area with the interstate exit and the Dairy Queen.
Morny was also informally called Germantown, because of the large number of German families who’d settled up there. Our victims, members of the Ade family, were among those German immigrants.
Jacob and Pauline Ade had lived up on Paradise Ridge along the Clarksville road for 20 years. They were well-liked and fairly well-to-do. The Ades had 410 acres of farmland and a five-room house. Jacob was generous and known for lending and giving money to neighbors. They had six children — Emma, Rosa, Anna, Henry, Lizzie and Dora. Emma, Rosa and Anna were grown and had moved out of the house. Dora, who was 10, was living in Nashville with Rosa and her husband. Lizzie was 20, and reports vary on Henry’s age, but he was older than Dora and younger than Lizzie.
Also staying with the Ades was a neighbor girl, Rosa Something. Reports give her last name as Morier, Moirer, Morrier, Morrer, etc. They also report that her father’s name was Henry and he was a “Frenchman.” (It’s not clear if this means he was from France or of French descent. Remember, there were a lot of people of French descent in that area, because it was and is full of Demonbreuns and Durards.) Sadly, the 1890 federal census was destroyed, but I searched through the 1880 and the 1900 censuses in both Davidson County and Cheatham County looking for this Henry, and I had no luck.
I looked through nearby cemeteries just to try to get a feel for what last name might be mistaken for “Morier” when spoken with a deep country accent, and the two most prevalent last names from that area that might be misheard as Morier are Morris and Mayo. There were both a Henry Mayo and a Henry Morris living just over the Cheatham County line from the Ades the right ages in 1900 to have had a daughter in 1897. There was also one family of Mosiers that I found with a son named Henry, but he was too young to have been Rosa’s father. Still, Mosier is closer to Morier than Mayo or Morris, so I’m including it as a possibility. Maybe young Henry had an uncle the census didn’t count.
OK, so we have in the Ade house Jacob, Pauline, Henry, Lizzie and Rosa, who was either 10 or 20, depending on reports. On the night of Tuesday, March 24, 1897 — according to the Nashville American — at about 9:30, Squire Simpson’s mother, a neighbor of the Ades, woke Simpson and told him to go see what was on fire. When Simpson arrived at the farm, he saw the house was burning. Presuming the family was gone, he began to try to save the meat from the smokehouse.
Then a wall of the burning house collapsed and Simpson was able to see in the rooms. He saw two bundles of clothes in the middle of the sitting room. He then secured a potato fork to a long pole and poked at the bundles. It immediately became obvious those bundles were people. Using his fork (you may already know this, but I feel like I should point out that this is a farm tool for digging potatoes, not a specialized piece of tableware), Simpson was able to fish four bodies out of the burning building. He then went to get another neighbor, S.A. Thompson, and they went to tell Henry, Rosa’s father, what had happened.
The three men stayed at the Ade home until the sheriff arrived. Once the sheriff and more neighbors arrived, the fifth body, that of Rosa, was discovered, also in the same room as the other four. Rosa was recognizable because she still had her head. The other bodies did not.
The sheriff’s theory was that the murderer knocked on the door, and when Jacob opened it, the murderer whacked him with an ax. Pauline moved toward the door either at the same time as Jacob, or soon after to aid her husband, and down she went. Then, when the murderer came into the room to take care of the children, Rosa was able to run behind him and get out of the house. After the Ades were dead and the house covered in coal oil and set aflame, Rosa was recaptured, hacked to death, and then thrown back into the burning house.
Because it appeared that Rosa had made it out of the house, at least briefly, and the Ades heads were missing and never recovered, there’s been some thought that there must have been two murderers — because if there had been only one murderer, who took the time to cut off everyone’s heads before setting the house on fire, it seems like that would have given Rosa enough time to run off toward home.
At first, the sheriff considered the motive to be theft, but a can of money was found in the house. Then the sheriff thought a neighbor named Anderson, who'd previously been arrested for stealing some of the Ade's pigs, might have done it. But why wouldn’t Anderson have just fed the bodies to the pigs, instead of ensuring a quick detection of the crime with a fire?
The only witness to the crime the sheriff had was an old, mostly blind and deaf German shepherd of the Ades who had been outside when the fire started. This dog then became the sheriff’s “secret witness.”
Let that sink in. The sheriff used the dog during the investigation as his “secret witness” who would be able to identify the killers. It’s unclear how the dog was used, but it wasn’t very helpful.
First, some black guys from Ashland City were arrested for the murders but in their “confessions,” they claimed they killed the Ades in order to rob them. And since there was no evidence of robbery, they were eventually let go. Anderson was always considered a good suspect, but I couldn’t find any evidence he was ever tried. For a while, Rosa’s father was the prime suspect — the theory being that he and a partner had come to kill the Ades for unknown reasons and, when his daughter ran out of the house and recognized him, he had to kill her.
This theory was unpopular with neighbors, because Henry was super pissed and distraught about his daughter’s death and running around trying to get murder warrants drawn up on the Anderson dude. He didn’t seem like he was acting.
Next, two “bad men” from Cheatham County were arrested and tried for the murders. The evidence against them, aside from them being known bad men, was that one of them was walking on the road to Clarksville near the house and wouldn’t tell neighbors where he was going before the murder, and also, one of them was a private detective.
I’m going to assume this is one of those cultural things where, if we were 1890s people, we would understand what was so sketchy about being a private detective, but I have to admit, I don’t get why this was a clear indication of his lack of morals. But it was.
They were acquitted.
And that was that. The ax murder/decapitation/arson deaths of five people remain unsolved to this day.
I looked some into the grand unified theory of turn-of-the-century ax murders, and on its surface, because nothing was taken and a family was killed, it does kind of resemble the New Orleans ax murders or the Vallisca ax murders. But the grand unified theory depends on a killer riding the rails, able to hop off, do his killing, and hop back on the train before he was detected. There were no train tracks near the Ade house. Also, none of the other murders were covered up with a fire.
So, if not anyone the dog identified or any of the generically bad men of Cheatham county or a serial killer, who?
There is one tiny newspaper article from the Nashville American that came three years after the murders, after the trials had all ended in acquitals. On Dec. 14, 1900, two of the Ade daughters — Rosa and Anna — brought suit against W.S. Whiteman and his wife. The Whitemans had been neighbors and friends of the Ades for many years. After the murders, the Whitemans had stepped up to help emotionally support the remaining Ade children.
I searched papers for information on Whiteman, and there’s not much. He ran a papermill that eventually failed. He was an outspoken opponent of public high schools, because he thought public high schools used all taxpayer money for educating only the rich, since obviously poor kids would finish schooling at eighth grade and then go to work. And he bought and sold a lot of land.
The four remaining Ade daughters had each inherited an equal share of the 410 acres their father had owned. At the time of the murders, it was estimated this land was worth between $4,000 and $6,000. Mr. Whiteman began to advise Rosa and Anna about what to do with their inheritance. According to their lawsuit, he told them the land wasn’t worth much, but he would take their shares in exchange for $100 and two small lots in West Nashville. He tried to claim the lots were worth $1,000 apiece, but they were actually worthless.
He denied having misled them, but he later paid them an additional $250 a piece. As far as I can tell, he kept the land. Getting 205 acres that should cost you more than $2,000 for $600? It’s a better motive than any of the folks they tried to convict of the crime. But Whiteman was never a suspect.
The old Ade farm is now partially still a farm and partially a lovely subdivision off Old Clarksville Pike helpfully named Jacob’s Valley. It’s a nice drive, if you’re looking for some exploring to do, but there’s nothing left to see, as far as I could tell. Certainly nothing that tells you this was the location of a mysterious and gruesome, albeit now forgotten, tragedy.
