Akron, Ohio Model T Murder Case 1931

Akron, Ohio Model T Murder Case 1931

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By Mark J. Price, Akron Beacon Journal, 1-11-2021

Photographic evidence couldn’t tell the complete story. Jurors had to see the twisted wreckage and run their fingers across the jagged metal.

Piece by piece, workers reassembled a blood-spattered automobile, labeled it “Exhibit 2” and set it up for display in a Summit County courtroom.

The “Model T murder case” in January 1931 was one of Akron’s most sensational trials during the Great Depression. Defendant Marshall W. Corneil, a paper hanger, was charged with first-degree murder in a mysterious explosion that killed his friend and neighbor Clarence R. Barnes, a traveling salesman for Sears Roebuck.

Corneil, 48, lived in the same duplex as Barnes, 43, his wife, Lulu, 37, and their son, Richard, 8, at 25-27 McNaughton St. off North Arlington Street in Middlebury. The men had been friends for years, but prosecutors alleged there was recent tension.

With his car out of service, Barnes borrowed Corneil’s Ford Model T coupe Sept. 23, 1930, for a business trip to Hartville. Corneil had wrecked his previous car a year earlier, but salvaged the body and added a chassis, engine and other parts from a junkyard.

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As Barnes drove along Mogadore Road about 7 p.m., he switched on the lights at dusk.

“I saw the lights flash on and then, right away, there was a loud blast,” J.L. Greathouse, a Mogadore Road resident, later testified. “The car blew up and I ran to one side of the road.”

Another witness, John Singleton, told authorities: “Pieces of the car were blown 150 feet away.”

The explosion launched Barnes through the roof of the car into a field 40 feet away. The injured man was still conscious and able to tell witnesses his name and address.

“I don’t know how it happened,” Barnes told his wife at Akron City Hospital. He died on the operating table about 9 p.m.

News of the blast sent a chill through Model T owners across the country. Were their vehicles in danger of exploding, too?

Akron Chief Detective Edward J. McDonnell didn’t think so. He suspected a “fiendishly contrived plot.”

Akron Chief Detective Edward J. McDonnell.

He reported finding an extra wire attached to a bolt beneath the gasoline tank in the wreckage. He theorized that two pieces of dynamite had been placed under the tank and wired to the machine’s taillights. When Barnes turned on the lights, the dynamite exploded, the detective said.

McDonnell focused on Corneil, the car’s owner. He suspected that the divorced man and former Chicago lawyer had an “undue interest in Mrs. Barnes.”

Lulu Barnes.

“I didn’t kill Barnes,” Corneil protested. “He was my best friend. And when they said I was unduly friendly with Mrs. Barnes, they’re crazy.”

Lulu Barnes defended her neighbor, saying, “I think Corneil is innocent. He was like a brother to my husband and they were frequently together.”

She insisted that she knew Corneil “only through my husband.”

Police arrested her after the funeral. Officers said she was looking over her husband’s $2,000 life insurance policy when they arrived at her home.

“At no time during the questioning of Mrs. Barnes did she show the least bit of emotion nor the slightest signs of grief,” McDonnell said. “Even when the mutilated condition of her husband’s body was mentioned, she sat dry-eyed and self-possessed.”

At the county jail, Corneil accused police of depriving him of food and sleep while interrogating him for more than 30 hours. “At times during this long session, I would doze off to sleep as the detectives were talking to me,” Corneil later testified. “Then they would shake me and ask me more questions.”

During the grilling, McDonnell said he asked Corneil: “Why did you blow him up? Did you want to kill him or just scare him?”

McDonnell said Corneil replied: “I just wanted to scare him.”

The detective said he asked Corneil why he didn’t tell the truth. He quoted the suspect as saying, “If I did, I would go to the penitentiary for life or get the chair.”

A grand jury indicted Corneil on first-degree murder, but declined to indict Lulu Barnes.

Summit County Assistant Prosecutor George Hargreaves, who led the state’s case against Corneil, wanted a dramatic exhibit when the trial opened Jan. 12. Common Pleas Judge Lionel S. Pardee granted Hargreaves permission to rebuild the shattered Model T and place it within view of the jury box.

Assistant Summit County Prosecutor George Hargreaqves in the early 1930s.

The courtroom was filled to capacity for the trial. Deputies had to push back the crowd to prevent the doors from being smashed.

“We deny that murder has been done here,” defense attorney Donald Gottwald said in opening remarks. “If it develops that there was, then we say most emphatically that Corneil played no part in it.”

Dozens of witnesses were called during the 13-day trial. Ford Motor Co. electrical engineer Toelle August and chemist John L. McCloud testified that the company had built 13 million Model T cars, but none had been known to explode.

The death car was torn down and reassembled in the courtroom.

However, Gilbert Tramer, a research engineer from the Case School of Applied Science, called the blast accidental. “I am absolutely convinced that the explosion occurred inside the gasoline tank,” he testified. “Gasoline mixed with the proper portions of air will form vapor which will explode.”

Corneil received up to 10 letters a day in jail, mostly from adoring women.

“Please do not think me a curiosity seeker,” one fan wrote, “but I do so much admire your courage, and believe you are innocent. I wear a blue hat and black coat and sit in the second or third row. I would not be ashamed to give you my name though perhaps it would be better to wait until later.”

The state called three witnesses who claimed Corneil had shopped around for a hit man.

Furnace Street grocer Liborio Percoco, a former bootlegger known as “Whiskey Dick,” testified that Corneil visited his store and offered $200 to have “a husband who gave his wife a lot of beatings put away.”

“I told Corneil that amount would not be coffee money for a New York or Chicago gunman and that such a job would probably cost him $5,000,” Percoco testified.

Edna Warfield said Corneil was hanging paper at her house in May when he mentioned a woman who was having trouble with her husband. “Do you know anybody who would get rid of him?” she quoted him as saying. “It would be worth $100 to you if you do.”

Tallmadge Avenue roadhouse operator James Carter testified that Corneil has visited him in May with a strange request.

“He called me out into the backyard and talked about bumping off a fellow,” Carter testified. “He said, ‘You should know a lot of bootleggers and racketeers and I have got a little job I want done.’

“I asked him what kind of a job and he replied ‘I have got a fellow I want put out of the way.’ It surprised me and I said, ‘Do you mean killed?’ and he replied, ‘Yes.’ ”

The defense decried the witnesses as underworld figures who lacked credibility and lied under oath. One was a bootlegger, one was a liquor violator and the third was married to a man who owned a “house of ill fame,” lawyers said. Defense attorney John Palmer called the state’s case a “deliberately woven falsehood.”

Assistant Prosecutor Hargreaves told jurors that Corneil and Lulu Barnes were to blame, saying: “He wanted her and she wanted him. And they both wanted the blood money that was upon poor Barnes’ head.”

Looking over the Model T, jurors deliberated six hours in the empty courtroom before finding Corneil guilty of murder. They recommended life in prison instead of execution.

“It’s all in the game, no hard feelings,” Hargreaves said, extending his hand to Corneil as he was led to jail.

The defendant didn’t accept it. “You tried to send me to the electric chair,” he said.

Corneil spent three months at the Ohio State Penitentiary before returning to the Summit jail. On May 22, the 9th District Court of Appeals reversed the guilty verdict, saying “it was against the weight of evidence.” The judges questioned the admission of “expert testimony” from unreliable sources and ordered a new trial.

“Inasmuch as no new evidence has been found and as the first trial cost the county $5,000, we can see nothing to be gained by proceeding with a new trial,” Hargreaves said.

Late June 26, Sheriff Alvin Henry woke up Corneil in his cell.

“Get up, Marshall,” Henry said. “You’re going out of here.”

Corneil shook hands with the sheriff and left jail.

Marshall W. Corneil shakes hands with Sheriff Alvin Henry in June 1931 after being released from a cell at the Summit County Jail in Akron.

“That was the most cheerful awakening I ever had,” Corneil later told a reporter. “Imagine going to sleep a life prisoner and waking up a free man.”

He said he would stay in Akron, find a job and put the trial behind him.

“Now I want to forget it and I hope others will do the same,” he said.

Marshall W. Corneil was 73 when neighbors found him dead in his Brown Street home in 1954. Before taking a fatal dose of poison, he had left tags on his furniture with instructions on what to do with it.

Clarence Barnes’ widow, Lulu, received a $1,100 settlement from the life insurance company. She remained in her Middlebury home and remarried. She was 80 when she died in 1974.

The Ford Model T coupe, the prize exhibit in the 1931 murder trial, was dismantled.

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Barnes' death certificate.

Gravestone pictures from Find A Grave.com ~

Gravestone pictures from Find A Grave.com ~

Lulu Barnes remarried after her husband's murder.

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