Linden, New York, was a tiny village of 300 farmers and apple orchardists ten miles south of Batavia in southernmost Genesee County. It had its own general store, post office, and train station—but don’t look for it on a map today. It was destroyed during the first half of the twentieth century—by a serial killer.
Linden’s downfall began on November 15, 1917, when the body of an unknown woman was discovered in woods outside of town by the farmer who owned the property. The woman’s head was bashed in with a blunt object, probably a large rock. The coroner estimated that she was twenty-five to thirty years old and had been dead for three days. The coroner dubbed her “Ruth,” but she remained forever unidentified. Because she was a stranger, Linden lost interest, and the case was quickly forgotten.
Almost five years later—Tuesday, October 16, 1922—at the junction of the Bethany Center and Linden Roads, about a mile and a half from town, Justice of the Peace Morris Neilan was passing his next-door neighbor’s home when he noticed something odd. Miss Frances Kimball, seventy-two, was nowhere to be seen, and her cow had not been milked.
There was a search for Miss Kimball, a staunch teetotaler known to scold men who reeked of hard cider, and she was found dead in her basement, stuffed under an apple bin, head bashed to a pulp with a big rock, which was found nearby covered with blood and hair.
The killer struck her first with his fist, breaking her jaw, knocking her cold, and sending her false teeth flying. He then walked to the cellar window, reached from the inside and cut the telephone wires, returned to the unconscious woman, picked up a large rock and pounded her skull to fragments. At some point he discharged semen upon her. The killer had little to fear from the woman yet exhibited tremendous anger. Overkill is the modern term.
Despite an unprecedented investigation involving the state and county police, the crime went cold and stayed that way.
The village was quiet September 23, 1923, when someone tried to burn down the house of Morris Neilan, who lived next door to Miss Kimball.
Then, on March 11, 1924, there were three more murders in Linden, done in such a way that comparisons to Miss Kimball’s murder and the arson at Justice Neilan’s house were inevitable. The crime scene was on Dale Road (on a portion now known as Silver Road), about 100 yards from the Linden railroad station. The victims were Thomas and Hattie Whaley, both fifty-five, and Mrs. Mable Morse, fifty, whose husband ran the Linden village store. The Whaleys were shot to death with a .32, and Mrs. Morse was fatally struck over the head repeatedly with a pick handle. The bodies were placed on top of one another and set on fire.
The Whaleys lived alone, about a fiveminute walk from the center of the village. Mr. Whaley worked as a section foreman on the Erie railroad, so his home was conveniently close to the station. Thomas Whaley worked the graveyard shift, normally getting home at six in the morning. As a side income, Whaley kept two cows and sold the milk to the village grocer, George Morse, Mabel’s husband.
On the evening of the murders, shortly after six o’clock, Mrs. Morse took the empty milk pail from the store and started for the Whaley home. Time passed. She didn’t return.
Back at the village store, Myron Smith, the Morses’ employee, was concerned that Mable wasn’t back. She was very punctual, especially after the milk run because she needed to listen to her favorite radio program on WHAM, the most beautiful music originating all the way from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester.
Smith went to the Whaley home to see what was holding up Mrs. Morse, knocked to no avail, and found all doors locked. He raised a kitchen window and was hit by a billow of smoke. He and two passersby broke down the Whaley’s rear door, put out the fire, and found the bodies.
The killer had placed hooked rag rugs over the bodies, poured kerosene on them and set them afire, creating a smoldering, lazy fire. A posse of village men was formed and searched the countryside for the killer while the women and children huddled in the village store.
Mrs. Morse’s son Clyde said that on the evening of March 11, perhaps only minutes after the murders took place, he received a phone call at his home on Elmwood Avenue in Rochester from a man who refused to identify himself.
“You will never see your mother again,” he said, before hanging up.
Clyde told his neighbors about the call, and traveled to Batavia, where he learned that the call had not been a prank and may have been a taunt from the killer.
In those days, people believed if you took a photo of a dead person’s eyeball, you could pick up an image of the last thing they saw in life. If it was a murder victim, such a photo might reveal the killer. Photos were taken in this case, but the results were disappointing.
Everyone in Linden and the surrounding area had a theory as to who the killer was. Linden became a pressure cooker of tension and anxiety. One family moved away. Then another, and another. Until Linden was no more.
Apparently, the killer moved as well. A clue as to where he went came on May 27, 1934, when Benjamin Phillips, seventy-six, a farmer on Buffalo Road in Alexander, also in Genesee County, fought a home-invader before succumbing to a “horrible beating.”
After the murder, Phillips’s body was set on fire in his bed. Death was caused by a badly fractured skull. There were sharp and blunt wounds. The killer used two weapons, one of them probably an ax. The body was still smoldering when discovered. The victim’s kerosene can, usually half full, was found completely empty. The horrible scene was discovered by Mrs. Phillips and her son Joseph, who were surprised to find the house completely dark when they arrived. The fire was contained to the first-floor bedroom where the body lay.
Although none of these murders were solved, a prime suspect emerged, one who unfailingly denied any wrongdoing and routinely accused his accusers of being the killer, determined to authorities off the scent.
His name was Andrew a, and he had a grudge against all the Linden victims. Miss Kimball had once had him arrested for drinking; this was during Prohibition. She even testified against him in court.
Thomas Whaley earned Michel’s ire when he told people that he suspected Michel was the Neilan arsonist, and possibly the Kimball killer as well. He also reportedly refused to lend Michel money.
George Morse, and by implication his wife, got onto Michel’s alleged list by cutting off his credit at the village store. Michel was into the Morses for $160 and was told in writing no more groceries until he paid that down. At one time or another, Michel made threats against all four of them.
Michel came close to being arrested after the triple homicide. He was grilled for hours but was eventually released for a unique reason: Michel had suffered a horrible accident in a sawmill when he was a boy and had sawed off four fingers on his right hand. To pick up the slack, his remaining forefinger grew in girth until it was “twice the size” of a normal finger. That finger, it was argued, was too thick to have pulled the trigger on the .32 revolver used to kill the Whaleys. Couldn’t he shoot with the other hand? Nobody asked, and Michel remained free.
Shortly after the triple homicide, Michel moved to Attica, three miles from the Benjamin Phillips crime scene in Alexander. His beef, if any, with the final victim is unknown.
Ah, but was Michel the type of man who could kill humans by bashing in their heads? Yes, he was—once having been arrested for beating a horse with a two-by-four so severely that the horse lost an eye.
And what of “Ruth,” the Jane Doe victim found in the woods in 1917? She was probably a sex worker from Buffalo or Rochester. Turns out that Michel, at the time, worked clearing wood near that crime scene.
Michel died at the age of seventyseven in the Rochester State Hospital, a mental institution, in 1960. He’d been committed in 1958 as mentally incompetent.
Because of the tremendous population increase since the murders, folks today do live where Linden used to be, but there is no village and their addresses say Bethany.
This article originally appeared in the July/August 2025 issue of (585).
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