Local history: Did a mortician get away with murder?

Seventy-five years ago, a Barberton woman vanished.

Ercell Elizabeth Russell, 36, described as “petite, red-haired and very pretty,” drove away on a snowy day and never was seen again.

Authorities said Russell was in good spirits when she left her 17th Street Northwest home Dec. 10, 1948. She stopped briefly at her sister Lillian’s home on 19th Street to tell her she was going to visit their parents in Wayne County’s Canaan Township.

Russell never arrived.

Investigators suspected the worst after finding her 1937 green sedan abandoned two days later at a roadside park on Route 21 less than a mile south of Canal Fulton. They discovered her purse in the Tuscarawas River about 200 feet downstream from the vehicle.

The contents appeared to be intact. More than $10 in cash — the equivalent of $126 today — was still inside.

Searchers combed the woods and dragged the river and the Ohio & Erie Canal, but they could not find a body.

Detectives examined Russell’s personal life for clues to her disappearance.

Born in 1912 in Canaan, she was the daughter of Harley and Golda Russell and grew up with three siblings on a farm near Creston. The family belonged to Canaan Methodist Church and participated in Grange activities.

Russell was 19 when she married Joseph Angelo in West Virginia in 1931. They mourned the loss of two babies, born prematurely in 1932 and 1933, and buried them at Canaan Cemetery. After the couple divorced in 1938, Russell reclaimed her maiden name.

Russell worked at Goodyear Aircraft in Akron during World War II and later found a job at a department store in Wooster.

The “pretty divorcee,” as newspaper reporters described her, had a boyfriend with an unusual occupation. She dated a Wayne County mortician for about seven years before they broke up in 1947. In the months before her disappearance, they had attempted to reconcile, but the relationship remained shaky. Officials said Russell had suffered a “partial nervous breakdown.”

However, Russell’s landlady, Iva Dawson, said her boarder had left “gay and happy” on the day that she vanished. She wore a yellowish-brown sweater and blue slacks, and although it was cold, she didn’t put on a coat.

She drove off into oblivion.

Later that day, Russell’s estranged boyfriend, a 45-year-old undertaker, called her sister to ask if Ercell was there. No, Lillian replied, her sister had visited earlier, but she had gone to Canaan. The man asked her to relay the message that he was “going to Michigan” on a short visit.

Authorities later wondered if the call was made to set up an alibi.

After the abandoned car was found, Wayne County Sheriff Glenn Rike told reporters he believed that Russell had “met with violence.”

Investigators contacted the mortician, who suggested that Russell had staged her disappearance “just to worry me” and theorized that she had hitchhiked to Daytona Beach, Florida, where they had once vacationed.

“Why would a girl with her own car want to hitchhike?” Rike wondered.

Wouldn’t Russell have packed a suitcase if she planned a trip? And why did she leave $535 untouched in her Barberton bank account?

Weeks passed. Russell’s family hired Rex Hess, an Akron private detective, to investigate the case, and offered a $100 reward for information about the missing woman’s whereabouts.

Authorities returned to the rest area on Route 21. In a restroom, they found a small bottle that Russell’s landlady later identified as a vial of medicine that she had given to her tenant for her nervous condition.

“This definitely establishes — in my opinion — that Mrs. Russell spent some time at the park, apparently waiting for someone,” Hess announced.

Asked if she believed her boarder had met with foul play, Dawson told a reporter: “You can think, but you can’t say anything.”

Searchers again dragged the river and canal, but found nothing.

Detectives quizzed the mortician some more. He said his car was in the garage when Russell disappeared. Apparently that Michigan trip never happened.

“We have established that a car owned by this man was in a Wooster garage being repaired on Dec. 11, but we have not established that he himself was there,” Sheriff Rike told reporters.

“The car was left in a garage there, all right, but the garageman said the man had not returned at closing time and he left the car outside,” Hess said.

But did that matter? The undertaker had access to another vehicle: a hearse.

Barberton Detective Martin Seryak, later the city’s police chief, began to get an uneasy feeling. If someone wanted to transport a body undetected, a hearse would be ideal for that purpose.

And where would be a perfect location to hide a body, a place that no one would ever check? Oh, no.

Seryak suspected that the mortician had killed his estranged girlfriend and buried her in the grave of a U.S. serviceman. In the late 1940s, the remains of U.S. troops killed in World War II were being exhumed from European cemeteries and reinterred in American hometowns.

The Barberton detective quietly sought an order to dig up recent graves, but the Wayne County coroner firmly rejected the request. Not without evidence — and investigators had none.

Authorities never charged the mortician or publicly identified him.

Summit County Probate Judge Vincent Zurz officially ruled Russell dead in June 1956 per her family’s request.

Retiring as police chief in 1973, Seryak looked back at the 1948 case as one of the most memorable of his career.

“The woman was declared legally dead seven years later, and her body has never been found,” he said. “It’s reasonable to assume that she was murdered and buried somewhere in the vicinity.”

He regretted that he couldn’t solve the mystery.

The name of Ercell E. Russell (1912-1948) is etched on the headstone of her parents, Harley and Golda Russell, in Canaan Cemetery. It’s a cenotaph, a monument to someone buried elsewhere.

Her final resting place remains a secret. A Wayne County undertaker may have taken it to the grave.

Mark J. Price can be reached at mprice@thebeaconjournal.com

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This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Local history: Did a mortician get away with murder?