Memories

I need to thank another poster for sharing this photo.

It’s 2015. April, in fact. I am 55 years old.
WAIT.
No, I’m not. I’m 6 years old. In my jammies, riding in the station wagon with my Dad. The very early morning sun is yellow and pale orange. I have my spindly legs tucked under me, wiggling my toes in my fuzzy slippers. Waiting and waiting to make that  left turn onto Seymour Street.
There she is! Her silky scarf tied tightly under chin, her pocketbook hanging from her arm. She stands there waiting for us.
My Nanny. My grandmother. An angel in my life.
Weekdays, my father would leave our home on West Walnut Street in Lancaster, PA very early in the morning and head south. He would pick up my grandmother on the corner of Seymour Street and bring her back to our home, where my mother had her beauty shop. She would care for my brother and me while my mother worked and my father was working in Calendar at Armstrong Cork Co.
Whar a treat it was to be awake and be able to pester him to ride along :)
Seeing this photo online took me back to those golden mornings. Like it was yesterday.
I cannot remember what I ate two days ago but I can see Nanny in her midcalf coat, her pocketbook hung on her wrist, that scarf covering her head. I can smell her Cashmere Bouquet.
I hope and pray she knows that I am reliving those precious moments. I suppose it’s a curse of the human condition that we don’t see just how precious moments are until they are memories.

Researching Croghan....

I had a few minutes today to work on some ongoing research. I am currently looking into the Croghan aspect of the Marian Louise Baker murder, namely some follow up to Edward Lester Gibbs' wife, Helen Woodward.
Helen resumed her maiden name when she left Lancaster and Ed Gibbs. She tried to turn the clock back to when she was Helen Woodward...before the nightmare of her marriage to Ed.
It seems that Helen married into the Croghan family and had one son. After the death of Mr. Croghan, she remarried later into the Wilson family.
I have the utmost respect for Helen Woodward Croghan Wilson and will not even begin to invade her privacy with contact. However, if she or any other family member would wish to speak with me, I would be more than glad to hear them tell me anything that Helen or the family would like me to know.
I also was contacted a while back, allegedly, by the daughter of the last surviving juror in the Ed Gibbs murder trial. Unfortunately she never left me any contact information with which I could contact her, and she has never used my various emails in which to contact me. If she is still interested in contacting me, I would love to hear from her or her mother.

As always, I can be reached here, via comment or at s.weik@mchsi.com or PAGirlAtTheBeach@aol.com   Thanks.

Update From F&M Regarding The Portrait

Hi Ms. Weik,

I have forwarded your inquiry to archives and special collections a couple of weeks ago and am waiting to hear back from them as to whether or not they have any information or the photo.  Traditionally such photos have been kept in archives. Unfortunately, the time period you are talking about predates the existence of this museum and even the period prior to collections committee which predated the museum for several decades.  We have very limited records regarding this time period as objects were generally cared for by the departments that held them.   To date, I have not run into any records related to this portrait and have not seen it in the museum's collection storage areas.  We are in the process of finishing a current inventory and should I find anything that is connected to the photo/portrait, I will  let you.

I'm sorry that I don't have any information at this time.

Sincerely,
Maureen Lane
Collections Manager
The Phillips Museum of Art

An Open Invitation And A Promise

As Marian's Story, and yes, by now it deserves all capital letters for it is truly her story, finds it way across the miles, and the world wide web, I want to extend an open invitation to those who are new to the site to contact me at any time, via the email links on my profile or here, via the comments feature.
I understand that many of you have preferred to remain in the background and as many of you know, from your interaction with me, you have my promise of complete privacy.
Trust is paramount with me.
I've trusted those new friends who I've come to know because of the work that I'm doing in honor of Marian and they've come to trust me at my word.
This is still painful for those who love her and it remains very sensitive given the nature of the crime and the horrific path the murderer chose.

I am quite open to meeting and interacting with anyone who wants to share their memories or thoughts with me about Marian, Ed Gibbs or the crime itself.
There has been a bit of a surge in interest in my work and I wanted to welcome you to the blog and make sure you know that I am accessible and available if you'd like to contact me.
Thank you for taking the time to read the blog. It's an extremely important story to this day.
Perhaps, even more so now.
And please know that every bit of work I do in this research, every effort I expend, is in honor of Marian.

Two Lines Left Their Points of Origin......And Their Intersection Was Deadly

The Franklin and Marshall College Campus served as the point of intersection for the lines that reperesent the lives of Marian Louise Baker and Edward Lester Gibbs.

Had Marion not been employed there, and had J. Lester and Florence Gibbs not demanded that their only child, son Eddie attend college, they never would have encountered each other.

The photos of the F & M campus show it's beauty from the past. It remains a beautiful campus today.

Steeped in authentic history, it's been the locus of learning of those who have gone into the world to create and generate impact and progress.

Marian Baker loved F & M. She was much more that "just a secretary". Marian was loved and very well thought of. That is precisely why no one even thought of checking the financial records or books when she was reported missing. There was never a question as to her honesty.

Edward Lester Gibbs had been a big fish in a small pond at Pitman High in New Jersey. He had excelled in most sports and was well known and well thought of. His family name was well known and his once uncle had been the Mayor of Pitman. That ended with the 1953 election. I do not for a fact whether his term limits prevented him from running again, whether he ran and lost or given the conviction and execution of his nephew, he decided to avoid the public limelight.

Marian graduated from Penn Manor, having taken the Commercial Course. She was hired shortly after graduation by Hamilton Watch Company, in the cafeteria. By a stroke of good luck, at the time, she was notified of a job opening at Franklin and Marshall College. There was no doubt as to her suitability for any job. She was meticulous, she was a hard worker, a pleasant and respectful and respectable young lady and conscientious beyond measure. She loved her job, she loved the college and she was in the midst of one of the happiest periods in her life. She became engaged at Christmas of 1949 to Edgar Rankin and looked forward to married life.

Marian Baker didn't have a promiscuous day in her life.

She was able to smile and appear to be rather comfortable with others, yet she may have been quite shy on the inside. She smiled easily and was an attractive young woman.

Jealous females who couldn't understand "the draw" of Marian made snide remarks and innuendoes. That practice goes on today, in great numbers and with far more insult included to anyone who the masses don't quite understand.

Marian's easy smile and friendliness, coupled with her lack of promiscuity made her the topic of comments and conversation. In addition to the jealous females, who clearly didn't know Marian at all, the men who got nowhere with Marian added fuel to the fire. The old fashioned, is it really?, practice of claiming to have gotten farther with a female than the facts would support was an insult to Marian.

The salacious claims would have gone down in history unspoken and unknown to all had Marian not been murdered in 1950.

Marian was popular with the college administration and officials. They recognized her loyalty to the school and her class. She was chosen to judge an advertising poster contest of Alpha Delta Sigma on the campus, in early 1949. She joined the ranks of Nancy Stonesifer, the Assistant Professor's wife who also worked with Marian in the Treasurer's Office and Max Hannum, the Assistant to the Dean. Alpha Delta Sigma was the national advertising fraternity. I have been told that Ed Gibbs was a member of Alpha Delta Sigma, being a Business major. Is this where he first met Marian. We know that he knew her from his visits to the Treasurer's Office. But that could have been the setting of Ed's first spying Marian, the beautiful young lady.

Marian participated in the college that she loved so dearly. I have wondered about Marian's later life. Would she have left the college to have children and raise them? Or would she hold the college so dear to her heart and stay on campus and grow and become even more a thread in the fabric of F & M?

The photograph of Marian that hung in the Bursar's Office in East Hall on the campus is of great interest to me and to others very close to Marian. I am in the process of finding out what happened to that photograph.

Did it hang there until the demolition? Was it placed in college storage? I'm anxiously awaiting answers to those questions.

Marian's photograph needs to be rehung. Or a commissioned painting of her needs to replace it.

Her heart belonged to F & M and she would be honored to be remembered there.

What an opposing view of humanity you get when you compare Marian Louise Baker to Edward Lester Gibbs.

There is NO comparison.

Gibbs had his demons. His mother's instability, his father's ineffectual stance.

Overprotected and spoiled, Ed was denied the very tools of development he needed to face life as a functioning adult. But he knew his own shortcomings. He bailed on help at the Guidance Center at F & M.

He needed to stand up to J. Lester and Florence and tell them that as a married adult man he was dropping out of college and getting a job. That was all he needed to do.

His parents needed to allow a separate human being the right to choose how he lived his life.

I hold no pity for Gibbs. I can understand the parts of the horror picture that became his life, but I don't excuse it.

A lack of courage killed Marian Baker.

Gibbs' parents lack of courage in allowing their son to make his own choices and perhaps not live up to the family name.....

Ed's lack of courage in taking a stand and doing what he needed to do. He wasn't going to graduate. He needed to blurt it out, hand his mother a handkerchief and take his lumps.

The Gibbs family in it's entirety is responsible for Marian's murder.

Ed wielded the lug wrench but his parents were sitting on his shoulder.

Societal position and appearance were more important to them than their son's happiness.

I can't imagine the relief Ed would have felt if at Christmas of 1949, when he did indeed tell his mother that there was a chance he'd not graduate, his mother would have shed a few tears and dealt with it.

Instead, her show of histrionics fed Ed's pathological desire to please. So he told her he was just kidding.

Christmas 1949....

Marian is filled with joy and happiness as she becomes engaged to Edgar Rankin.

Ed Gibbs is filled with dark frustration and rage.

And on January 10, 1950 Marian Baker paid the price for the sins of the Gibbs family.

Sad and horrible in its own right.

Now add to that a sloppily written book, by a largely absent author, tossing innuendo and scandal onto the memory of Marian Baker, where it surely didn't belong.

Gehman victimized Marian all over again.

And to this day, those that knew her and love her still just can't cotton to that.

It's never set well. It doesn't today.

Back At The Keyboard!

Hi all! It's been a great week and I've finally got enough done around here to feel as if I can take some time to come back to the blogs!
I made a list tonight of all the daytrips or longer roadtrips I want to make related to the Marian Baker murder.
My son asked me a few days ago why I feel the need to go to the areas or sites related to the case and I had to be honest with him.
I think first of all I truly believe I will come away from it all with a sense of what happened. I have no idea if what I'll come away with will be in keeping with the accepted facts and story, or if I will come away with an even greater sense of covert reasons behind the attack and murder south of Lancaster in 1950.
I hope to create a real timeline, as complete as I can make it for Marian Baker and Ed Gibbs both.
It would be even better to be able to document it all photographically. That may be quite difficult with the chance that previous homes no longer exist, new homes being built on the murder site itself, etc.
Another reason that I feel compelled to do this is to simply make sure that as time goes on, there are some folks who remember Marian Baker. And to some extent, Ed Gibbs too.
They were two young people whose paths crossed and ended up in tragedy for both of them.
Two lives unlived.
When the jury returned with the verdict and sentence of death, even the Judge was stunned.
He did his best to hide it, but he was caught off guard.
When he discharged the jury, he never even thanked them for their service. I think that was in part to his being stunned but also to his shock that the death penalty was handed down.
He presided over the trial in its entirety. He didn't see the death penalty coming.
The horrific tragedy was compounded by the death sentence. The sadness was permeating even further and was so much more widespread.
There is and was some compassion for Ed Gibbs and that has to be acknowledged and accepted as well. Normal people don't bludgeon young girls to death.
And Ed wasn't a monster. He was a tormented and overstressed young man. There were many, many blocks in the road that led him to the wooded area south of Lancaster that cold January day.
And that's IF he did it.
I'm not totally convinced just yet.
I sincerely hope to come away from my own form of revisiting it all with a sense of his guilt or his innocence. That may be too much to hope for.
So, I'm making my plans and trying to do it in a cohesive manner. And once I make the trips, one at a time, I'll document it all here and post all the pics I take.
I just wish I would have been pushier about it all when most of the people "in the know" were still alive. This is going to be extremely hard with them gone. But I love a challenge.

I guess my fascination with what really happened to Marian Baker is very similar to my and others questions as to what really happened in the Roseboro back yard in July of 2008.
We know what happened to Jan. But we don't know how it happened or truly why.
Did Mike snap? Or did he really plan it? Where did the blood go? What caused the puncture wound to Jan's head?
Unless Mike confesses or someone steps forward, we may never know.
Or fifty or sixty years from now, someone may be sitting at a computer, blogging about how the case grabbed a hold of them and how they need to make a road trip to get a sense of what really happened that warm, rainy July night in 2008.....

Why?

On Tuesday, January 1oth of 1950, Marian Louise Baker returned to the Cashier's Office from her lunch break in the college cafeteria. She never removed her coat as she sat down at her desk, complaining that she was now so backed up with work that she wished she didn't have to go to the bank. Making college deposits at the bank was a daily part of Marian's job duties. She grabbed her things, a letter to be mailed from Mrs. Stonesifer and her purse and headed to the corner of James and College Avenues to catch the CTC bus to Penn Square. She had returned to the office, from lunch at 1:30 pm.
She was worried that she would be late for or miss her appointment for a permanent wave scheduled for 5:00 or 5:30 that afternoon.
She also needed to pick up her engagment ring from Kay Jewelers, off of Penn Square.
Marian arrived at Penn Square. She picked up her ring, made the bank deposit and then went to the post office.
She hadn't wanted to make this run downtown because she was so backed up with work....
And yet, we are to believe that as she ran her errands, she ran into Ed Gibbs, whose incessant chatter about himself made her sick, and accepted a ride with him supposedly heading back to the college. That part I even have trouble with. He made her sick. That's a pretty strong statement. I can't imagine she wanted to listen to him chatter on the whole way back to campus.
But this is the bigger question for me....
As busy and backed up as she was at 1:30 pm, already worried about not making her hair appointment, when Ed Gibbs pulled up to the light at Prince Street, and he asked Marian if she was in a hurry to get back to the college campus, she said "No." She said NO?????
Ed made a left and they travelled down South Prince Street, clearly away from the direction of the college. It was a cold, gray January day. Not exactly the day for sightseeing. Or nature watching.
Why would Marian have gotten in the car with Ed in the first place if he made her sick?
And if she did get in the car, why was there no fuss about him taking her south of the city when she clearly was flustered about being so busy already in the afternoon?
When that car left the highway and started back the lane to where the cottage was located, why was there no problem, no fight?
He was married, she was engaged. It was the middle of the afternoon of a work day in 1950.
Something is very wrong here.
And why THAT lane? Why THAT property?
How did Ed Gibbs know of that area? Had he been there before?
Did Marian really get a ride from Gibbs?
What happened to her being so busy?
What was being said in the car as he shoved it into "park"?
He said he reached over and choked her with no provocation. He did it on impulse.
She screamed and got out of the car, trying to get away.
He grabbed the lug wrench and went after her.
If he snapped, why wasn't she obliterated?
If he simply wanted her dead, why the wounds on the frontal AND posterior surfaces of her skull? How did the attack happen? Either blow would have rendered her completely unconscious as bone was driven into the brain.
And then we are to believe that Gibbs came back later to try to bury her?
I have alot of work to do.
I need to check records and get myself up to the Historical Society.
I need to read the entire court transcript and see any surviving files from the investigation.
Was the inside of the cottage checked? What about Gibb's car? Was it examined inside?
Somethings aren't making any sense at all....

Revisting "A Murder In Paradise"

I started to read "A Murder In Paradise" by Richard Gehman again last night. This has to be the hundredth time, if not more.
For a few months the book has been sitting on an end table in my living room. At no time in my life has it ever been too far away from me. I have no idea why I always keep it so handy and close.
When we moved here, it was packed in a box in the one spare bedroom for several months. When the very familiar pangs started up again, making me need to read it one more time, I remember frantically running up the stairs and heading for the packing boxes, stacked high to the ceiling, in many rows.
I knew instinctively what other items I had packed in the same box with the book, so when I popped the top on the fourth or fifth box and saw my grandmother's linen calendar folded and laying on top of the items, I knew I had the right one!
I also remember my husband telling me to do a search on the internet to see if anyone had an additional copy for sale. My copy is very worn by now. I did find two for sale. The prices were astronomical, at least for my bank account!
Inside the front cover of my copy, I had written my mother's name and address in ink. I clearly was attempting to copy her beautiful, flowing cursive, but failed lol
She had kept the book in a chest of drawers in her room that was reserved for some of her favorite and most cherished jewelry. My Mom was a glamour doll and her jewelry was her signature. That and her beauty mark :) (When she had almost a day's worth of surgery for head/neck cancer she awoke and was angrier at the surgeon removing her beauty mark without permission than she was worried about the surgery; that was my Mom!)
The book was kept in an elevated place in her mind and heart, and the fact that she kept it in the jewelry chest of drawers and not on the bookshelves with her hundreds of other books was quite telling. It has always been revered in our family.
My Mom never spoke much about the murder. She spoke only briefly in my presence of Marian.
But I overheard her a few times over the years speaking of Ed Gibbs. Her tone was strong and it was seething. "He said 'She was hard to kill. She didn't want to die.' " The words slid out of her mouth almost with a slight hiss. Over the years I would come to learn how much my Mom truly did harbor hate for Ed Gibbs. It seemed that if she spoke more of him she'd somehow make him more important in the universe than she wanted him to be.
Marian Louise Baker's photo was in an album at my Grandmother's house for as long as I could remember. I can still see her smile and her side pose in a white outfit. She had dark hair, dark eyes and an easy smile.
I clearly didn't recognize her as a member of our family, at least one that I had ever met, so I asked about the picture. "That's Marian Louise Baker, a friend of Aunt Weenie's." That's all that was said for quite a long time. But for some reason, even as a small girl, I always returned to that picture when looking through the photo albums. To this day I don't know why. It would be years before I knew what had happened to Marian.

The Marian Baker Murder

My research into Pitman, New Jersey, the hometown of killer Edward Lester Gibbs, led me to these photos and postcards. I posted them randomly.
I have been to Pitman once and plan to return. I want to get current photos of these locations and take some shots of the home where he grew up, the cemetery where he is buried.
In the meantime, this is what I have of the life history in visual form, of Edward Lester Gibbs.

This is where Ed graduated from high school prior to entering the service and then attending college at F&M in Lancaster, PA.

This is not the church where Edward Lester Gibbs married his bride, Helen. That poor woman had no idea what she had signed on for. Ed also reportedly worked for a while at the Esso Station that appears on the card.

The wedding reception the new Mr. and Mrs. Edward Lester Gibbs was held here at the Hotel Pitman. Nothing but the best for their son, some residents of the town felt that perhaps the Country Club would have been more fitting.

Another view of the Hotel Pitman.

I'll update with more photos as I get them, and also clearly lay out the timeline of Ed Gibbs life as it led him to the cold January afternoon where he beat the life out of Marian Louise Baker.