Today we continue the tragic and sensational story of the death of Betty E. Crabb (1919-1938) of Delavan, which occurred in the early morning hours of 1 March 1938 at the Crabb mansion in Delavan.
Betty was the only daughter of Louis Glenn and Hazel Ersula (Gerard) Collison of Champaign, Illinois. When a student at Champaign Commercial College, she met James Warren Crabb II, known as “Jimmie,” age 21, who was then a student at the University of Illinois. They were married at her parents’ home 22 Jan. 1938.
Though only 19, this was not first Betty’s trip to the altar. There were two previous marriages, or attempted marriages. The first was on 20 April 1936, when she and William Charles Boudreau of Champaign eloped to get married in Indiana. Betty and William did not obtain parental consent, and both lied about their ages on the marriage license, she claiming to be 19 (she was 17) and he claiming to be 21 (he was 19). When Betty’s parents found out about the marriage, they had it annulled. Her second marriage ended with her divorcing her husband to marry Jimmie.
To this day, mystery still surrounds the circumstances of Betty Crabb’s death, but this we know: she died of a single gunshot at about 3 a.m. on Tuesday, 1 March 1938, and the death weapon was her husband Jimmie Crabb’s Colt .45 pistol.
Was it suicide, intentional homicide, or a tragic accident?
In an attempt to answer that question, Tazewell County Coroner Dr. Nelson Wright II convened a coroner’s inquest on 8 March 1938 at the Houghton funeral parlor in Delavan. The inquest lasted four consecutive days, and from the testimony and evidence presented at the inquest we learn about Betty Crabb’s death in very great detail.
The facts brought to light at the inquest reveal that on the evening of 28 Feb. 1938, Jimmie and Betty attended a party that their friends threw in their honor – and both he and she drank to the point of drunkenness, returning home to the Crabb Mansion in Delavan in the early hours of 1 March 1938.
Their return home awakened Jimmie’s father and stepmother, because both of them were being loud due to their intoxication. It got to the point that Jimmie’s father Willis Crabb even called the police and asked that Joe Cook, one of Delavan’s two officers, come to the Crabb house and talk to Jimmie.
Willis said he wanted an officer to encourage Jimmie and Betty to quiet down and go to sleep. Evidently his son had gotten upset and angry, and he and Betty got into an argument or a fight that was escalating to the point that it required outside intervention.
Since Cook was asleep, Marshal R. J. Burbidge and Officer E. W. Ringo responded to the call. When they arrived outside the Crabb Mansion, Willis leaned out his bedroom window and told Burbidge, “Jimmie’s been on a rampage and him and Betty have been making a lot of noise and I want you to quiet them down.”
Just then came a single gun shot from within the house. Willis told Burbidge he had better come up.
At 3:05 a.m., the officers called from Dr. H. W. Brink to come to the Crabb residence. Dr. Brink arrived about 3:15 a.m., and Officer Ringo went downstairs to let him in. Ringo briefly explained the circumstances, and told him that Betty Crabb had been shot. They then went upstairs, and as they reached the top, they saw Jimmie come out of the bedroom where Betty’s body was, where he had been alone for perhaps 10 minutes after the gun shot.
Dr. Brink examined Betty, who had suffered a single gunshot wound to her right breast and was lying on her back on the bed, and confirmed that she was dead.
Most curiously, the gun that had killed Betty was not found at first. Tazewell County Sheriff Ralph C. Goar (formerly Pekin Police Chief) soon arrived on scene and asked about the gun. Marshall Burbidge told him, “I looked all over for it, sheriff, even took my flashlight, looked under the bed, all over.”
Goar then searched the room, and within a minute groped between the mattress and headboard and found Jimmie’s Colt .45 pistol, the death weapon.
Did it fall back there when Betty used it on herself? Funny thing, though: there were no fingerprints on the gun! Yet Jimmie later testified that he had used his gun the week before. (The Crabbs had all obtained firearms for self-defense – the 1930s was a decade in which kidnapping/ransom plots against prominent families were remarkably frequent, and in fact the 1 March 1938 Pekin Daily Times had an above-the-fold front page story about one of those kidnapping plots.)
Investigation of the death scene showed that the bullet had gone through Betty’s chest, out her back, through part of the mattress and out of the bedroom, lodging in a wall near the steps eight feet from her body.
Did Betty shoot herself, as Jimmie claimed? One thing that may have helped investigators would have been a paraffin test on Betty’s hands, to determine if she was holding the gun when it fired. But unfortunately, her body was embalmed before a paraffin test could be conducted. Powder burns were found at her chest wound, though, indicating that the gun was fired at close range.
When the investigation had gathered enough evidence, as mentioned above, Tazewell County Coroner Dr. Nelson Wright II convened an inquest to determine the cause and manner of Betty death. Next week we’ll tell of that inquest.
