When the Pieces Don’t Fit: The ‘Disappearance' of Marie Lance

What I enjoy most about reading and writing is the discovery; the way a story unfolds compels me more than the raw plot. If a story is a puzzle box, my joy is in seeing how the pieces fit and come apart.

To continue the metaphor, when I find myself struggling to force pieces into one another, that means the story has to be trashed or completely rewritten. There’s a small internal reason the pieces won’t fit and no amount of dickering with the words can repair a faulty structure.

So.

The story that I didn’t write last week and won’t write this week reveals how the name “Kermit,” the real point behind the Teapot Dome scandal, and Woodrow Wilson’s very public demise, reveal a latent hatred for central power built into local news. That is, all “national” stories foment an “us versus them” mentality.

The reason I said I “won’t” instead of I “can’t” do the story is it’s already written. The trouble is, the story is boring and I’m clearly trying too hard to beat a mediocre premise into submission. Sometimes I can just get the idea down and hammer out the rest later, but only if it’s not junk.

There’s no salvaging a bad idea, though that’s never stopped me from trying to clever my way out of it, wasting time and failing miserably.

The reason I wrote (poorly) about Kermit Roosevelt, Teapot Dome, etc., is that I wanted to do a “rabbit-hole” story, taking you along on my research expedition and tying it all together.

Initially, I didn’t view it this way, but I intended to write my research notes and bibliography in narrative form, which ended up being as dull as it sounds. The labyrinthine concept appealed to me because it felt authentic, but the artifice ruined the story.

It was a lot to go through just to set you, the reader, as off balance as I was when I came across the bonkers tale of Marie Lance, a 23-year-old woman who went missing from Asheville, North Carolina, in January 1923.

Murder? In a Small Town

Lance wasn’t reported missing when she left town, after all, 23-year-old women don’t “run away.” Neither the papers nor the authorities made serious inquiries if the family even mentioned the fact that she was gone at all. As far as I can tell, the rumor mill decided “missing” was too strong a word because Asheville was at least two people light the morning of January 10.

In addition to Lance, Clarence Lafferty, a former electrician turned dance hall owner, closed up shop and “disappeared” the very same day. I put disappeared in quotes because that’s how it was described in February 1924, the very first time anyone missed him. Before they found what was believed to be Lance’s corpse, people were content to say Lafferty left town, gossips claimed he left town with Marie Lance in tow.

In February 1924, hunters discovered a woman’s decomposed remains at the foot of Neversink Mountain, near Reading, Pennsylvania. The cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head. The woman was wearing a pair of tan shoes from an Asheville shoe store called Pollocks.

The police hoped the owner could identify the wearer. Mr. Pollock confirmed he sold Marie Lance an identical pair the previous year.

So 13 months after the girl vanished, the newspaper did some digging. They discovered Lance was friendly with Clarence Lafferty, whose disappearance was getting more suspicious by the day. More than that, Lance may not have been on great terms with her family when she left.

Lance lived in Asheville with her sister and brother-in-law. When her father died in 1922, she split time between Asheville and her mother’s house in nearby Arden. Her brother-in-law took over and eventually sold the family business. The papers said there was a spat, but that’s the only evidence there was. The story reads as if the writer doesn’t have the proof to say out loud what everybody knows. It’s odd and not the only example of this kind of reporting.

Mrs. Lance set out to have Marie declared dead, but without a positive ID, the widow couldn’t have the remains or a death certificate.

For the rest of February and throughout the whole of March the only progress on the case was that the Reading police all but eliminated Marie Lance as the person whose body was discovered.

One item suggests that someone found Clarence Lafferty who knew nothing about Marie Lance’s disappearance. This testimony satisfied the papers. No word from the police one way or the other.

Finally, in April, there was a break in the Marie Lance case when her mother, sister, and brother-in-law each received a postcard from Paris, Texas, signed, “M.” All the parties agreed it looked a lot like Marie’s handwriting. If a missing person file was ever opened, it now is closed.

As for the corpse in Reading, they’re still working on it. This website seems to have a better bead on the case.

As a mystery fan, I find this story deeply dissatisfying. I did a lot of digging and can’t find any more information, but I don’t believe for a second that Marie wrote from Paris, Texas, two months after a national search for her ended.

I saw this story in the Salisbury (Maryland) Daily Times archive, so pretty much every paper at the time must have run something. Lafferty and Lance were pictured in several papers, and the nationwide coverage lasted about a week.

Why did Marie wait almost 10 weeks after the story broke to reach out? And why with a nearly anonymous (oblique?) “M” at the bottom of a postcard? If the sentiment was genuine, you’d expect a letter explaining where she’d been for the last 16 months. If it wasn’t genuine, why write at all?

I mean, if Lance was alive and carrying a grudge, why not enjoy the “now they’re sorry” fantasy? Or, more to the point, why relent without forgiveness or explanation?

So, if she’s not in Paris, Texas, where is she?

What if Marie Lance is buried under her brother-in-law’s porch? Suppose he (or, I guess, her sister) knocked her off. If that were the case, it only makes sense that they would go from not missing her to taking the opportunity to seek a death declaration.

Once it was clear that it wasn’t her, the family realized they had to come up with an answer to, “Where did Marie go?”

Hell, let’s say the family was innocent. They went from not missing her, to having to deal with her possible death. Maybe they wanted the questioning to stop; because here’s the larger point: even though no one cared about the runaway girl, that she might be murdered was the first time anyone thought she was a victim rather than a floozie. No matter their initial disinterest, once the question turned from “Where did Marie go?” to “What happened to Marie?” it required an answer. One wonders what would have happened if those postcards hadn’t shown up.

Their arrival annulled Marie’s victimhood, turning her back into a floozie (and a Paris, Texas, floozie at that).

Plus, I want to talk about the local coverage. I mentioned the subtle insinuation the writer knows more than they can prove. There’s skepticism in both the reportage of the estate dispute as well as of the postcards.

There aren’t any more references to Marie Lance, not even an obit. What’s crazy is how much I didn’t care about her before I knew she existed. Just like the readers 100 years ago, I made a judgment call that she was a victim rather than an independent 23-year-old, and now I want her accounted for.

At the bottom of it all, given that there’s no answer, I just want it to be interesting. This, I know, is a horrible thing to say.

So often stories turn out to be predictable and twists contrived, that it’s hard to resist hoping there’s something outrageous underneath, as if a world in which a missing girl isn’t worth accounting for isn’t outrageous enough.

Keep the Faith,

Tony

Postscript

Here are some of the links to some of the stories, don’t blame me if you spend too much time searching only to be foiled by the convoluted nature of multiple conflicting reports:

Body Discovered

Estate “Disagreement”

Photo with Mother

Letter from Texas

In case you missed it in the story, here’s the link to a website about the Reading case.

Notes

I got back out to the junk shops last weekend, I’ll probably write about that next, but I wanted to share this treasure with you (more after the jump)

If you haven’t checked out the “Notes” section of Substack, you might be missing out. I’m trying to post there more often.

I’ve decided to add an audio component to this newsletter (as you may have noticed). In addition to the podcast (which I do sporadically), I’m going to voice these newsletters (but not as a podcast). This was a snap decision, so please excuse the podcast credits if you made it to the end. I figure sometimes it’s just more convenient to listen, plus I might make the recordings into something fun later.

Fun with AI

I do a (mostly weekly) podcast with Todd DeHart. One of the conceits is that we let AI name the episode and then enter the AI-chosen name into an AI image generator. This is what we got:

You can listen here.