The corpses in the trunk at the depot

There was considerable trepidation in the baggage room of Chariton's C.B. & Q. Depot on the  morning of Friday, Feb. 5, 1904, as authorities --- including the mayor armed with a search warrant --- prepared to prise open a large trunk to determine why a foul odor was emanating from it.

The smell had been intensifying since the trunk had arrived in Chariton from Seattle on Wednesday and the time finally had come to discover the horrible truth, or at least to determine if worst fears would be realized.

The outcome merited the following front-page story in The Chariton Herald of Thursday, Feb. 11, under the following headline: "Dead Body Found in Trunk: Chariton Officers Make a Gruesome Find in a Stranger's Trunk in the Baggage Room."

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Chariton had a sensation and a tragedy all in one last Friday morning, in a find that was made in the baggage room of the C.B. & Q. depot of this city. The horrible mystery has not yet been fully explained, but enough of it has leaked out to put it on record as one of the most sensational discoveries that the officers here have ever made.

The climax of the discovery came about ten o'clock on Friday morning, although the officers had had suspicions for a day or two before that. An ordinary trunk had come to the baggage room Wednesday before, from Seattle, and no one had come to claim it. Nothing particular was thought of the matter until the city officers, happening in the baggage room often as they do, noticed a peculiar odor emanating from the trunk.

Each hour, seemingly, the stench became stronger, whereupon the officers spoke to each other of their suspicions, and the fearful fact became fixed in their minds that the trunk contained a dead body, and was perhaps the culmination of some murder mystery. The fact that the trunk had come from Seattle made the theory seem all the more plausible, and after waiting until Friday morning for the trunk to be claimed and taken away, the officers determined to investigate the matter.

Mayor Bowen was sent for at 4 o'clock a.m., and he advised the officers to open and search the trunk. Accordingly, the baggage room was closed and guarded from the inside after all loiterers had been excluded, and a search warrant was produced giving authority for the search.

The lock resisted their efforts for a while, but they finally succeeded in picking it, and turned back the lid. The awful odor then almost overpowered them, and though there was nothing but clothing to be seen on top, they felt absolutely certain that a dead body in a state of advanced decomposition would be the gruesome sight that would meet their gaze when they removed the top layer of clothing.

And sure enough, when the bravest of those present finally mustered up courage enough to lift off a bunch of lingerie and a dress or two, there lay a corpse --- four large, juicy looking lobsters, spoiled beyond all hope of cooking, with their claws pressed out of shape by the clothing in which they had been wrapped, and their bodies reeking with the odor that that attracted the suspicions of the officers and led to the investigation.

It was learned that the trunk belonged to Miss Orpha Fox, who had come from Seattle, Wash., for a visit with her sister, Mrs. Fred Wood. She had put a few fresh lobsters in her trunk but it was so long in transit that the varmints decomposed, with the sensational results above described. The question now is, is the joke on Miss Fox or on the city officials?