Bones in the Box
The 1854 French family murders, the hanging of John Hubbard, and the skeleton Wabash County still cannot name.
- 1The Skeleton in the Basement: Why Wabash County’s Oldest Murder Story Still Isn’t Settled
There is a room in the basement of the Wabash County Historical Museum where human bones are kept in boxes.
- 2The Family Beneath the Floor: The Wabash County Murders of 1854
James Lewis went to the French cabin to buy corn. Aaron French had been ill, and selling his crops would help him take his wife and five children somewhere with a milder climate. Lewis had thought the arrangement over before…
- 3Whose Bones Are in the Box? The Skeleton Wabash Still Can’t Name
In a basement in Wabash, Indiana, human remains sit in cardboard boxes. For generations they were identified with one of the most notorious murder cases in the county’s history. Today, even the institution holding them stops…
- 4The Man Wabash Hanged — and the John Hubbard Who Died 29 Days Later
John Hubbard was hanged in Wabash, Indiana, on December 13, 1855. Twenty-nine days later, a man named John Hubbard—almost exactly the same age—was recorded dead and buried only a few miles away. One man said he was born in…
- 5Prisoner Number One: The Wabash Murder Case Hidden Inside America’s First Women’s Prison
When Indiana opened its pioneering separate state prison for women in Indianapolis in 1873, seventeen prisoners were transferred from the old state prison at Jeffersonville. The first woman through the door was Sallie Hubbard.…
- 6The Body Snatchers of Indiana
In the story Wabash County preserved about John Hubbard’s burial, the doctors arrived in two parties. The local men reached the grave first, opened it, and discovered they had forgotten the tools needed to get into the coffin.…