Dead Women Crossing: The Unsolved Murder of Katie DeWitt James
Oklahoma
On July sixth, nineteen oh five, a twenty-nine-year-old schoolteacher named Katie DeWitt James filed for divorce from her abusive husband in Custer City, Oklahoma Territory. The next day she boarded a train with her fourteen-month-old daughter Lulu, heading to stay with relatives in Ripley.
She never arrived. Weeks passed. Her father hired a detective. On August thirty-first, a man heading out to fish near Deer Creek stumbled on a badly decomposed body hidden in the brush near a wagon crossing. The head had been severed. Her wedding ring identified her as Katie DeWitt James.
A woman she had met on the train, Fannie Norton, was found dead of self-administered poison the same day. The murder was never formally solved.
Locals named the crossing immediately and the name has never left. Dead Women Crossing, Oklahoma has remained on maps for over a century, a small place in Custer County remembered entirely because of one July morning when a woman tried to start over and did not make it.
