Mamie Thurman's body was left beside 22 Mine Road in Logan County, West Virginia, in June 1932, and nobody credible was ever convicted of killing her. Drivers report a woman in outdated clothes walking the mountain in the dark.
Coal truck drivers on 22 Mine Road, the mountain road on the Logan-Mingo county line in West Virginia, told of stopping for a woman in outdated clothes standing on the dark shoulder. She would climb into the cab, and a few moments later the seat beside them was empty. Others report her at the top of the mountain, or walking the roadway in a polka dot dress near the spot where the body was found.
Logan County calls her Mamie.
On June 22, 1932, a boy picking blackberries found Mamie Thurman lying about fifteen feet off what was then called Trace Mountain, near Holden. She was 31, married to a Logan city patrolman named Jack Thurman, and she had last been seen the night before, around 9 o'clock, walking alone near a theatre in town. The Pomeroy Foundation's marker record says she wore a blue polka dot dress. Investigators believed she had been killed somewhere else and driven up the mountain afterward.
The Thurmans rented an apartment from Harry Robertson, a Logan banker and city councilman. Robertson admitted to police a roughly two-year affair with Mamie, arranged with the help of his handyman, Clarence Stephenson, who kept a room in Robertson's attic. Blood turned up in the house and in the car, and both men were arrested. Robertson also told investigators that Mamie had given him a list of about sixteen Logan-area men she'd had affairs with. "One of them is dead," he said of the names, "all except three live in the city of Logan, and all are married but one." The list was never made public. The grand jury declined to indict him.
Stephenson went to trial alone, held in the Mingo County jail because of racial tensions in Logan. The special prosecutor told the courtroom that Stephenson "shot her brains out, cut her throat and broke her neck." The all-white jury came back in roughly 55 minutes with first-degree murder and a recommendation of mercy, which meant life. "I am not guilty," Stephenson said. "I have no knowledge of the crime." He died of stomach cancer at a prison farm in 1942 and was buried on the property. Logan's local histories record that every courtroom transcript, and seventeen copies of the depositions, later vanished from the county courthouse.
A Logan County man named Norman Sloan, who did time in the same jail, said Stephenson told him something else. "He told me he was hired to take the body to 22 Mountain, but he didn't do anything to Mamie Thurman. He never did say who killed her, but he did say he didn't do it."
Drivers park at the bottom of the hill near where she was found, put the car in neutral, and take a foot off the brake. It rolls uphill. Her hands, the story goes, pushing. In 2021 the state put up an official roadside marker for her, and the text ends: "still seeking justice."
