1963: Mystery at College Siding -- Elaborate suicide or an unsolved murder?

Richmonders have been found floating in the Kanawha Canal for many years, probably beginning soon after it was completed in the 1850s. Black or White, drunk or sober, the still water that ran beside the roaring James River concealed them all until fate decided when to reveal the bodies of accidental drownings, suicides, or murder victims. As recently as May 2023, a body was found in Tuckahoe Creek, which is a part of Richmond’s canal system and water supply.

That location is not far from College Siding, a term that has fallen into disuse since the University of Richmond ceased heating its buildings with coal in 2012. A branch line ran from the main Chesapeake and Ohio railroad, crossed the canal on a gracefully curving bridge and entered the campus at the intersection of Huguenot Road and River Road. Automobile traffic would come to a halt as coal cars crossed the intersection where the River Road Shopping Center now stands and continued to the UR steam plant on a right of way reimagined in 2020 as the UR “Eco-Corridor.” Despite the only occasional use, the trestle that carried those coal cars across the canal still had to be inspected as debris would float down the canal and accumulate against the bridge’s pilings.

 

C&O Railroad workers James Bendall and C.E. Kennedy were making a routine inspection of the bridge on the morning of April 24, 1963, as they walked the College Siding tracks and peered over the edge. It was cool and dry that Wednesday morning so a quick look at the bridge was a pleasant break in their daily routine. The two men made their way across, leaning over the edge on the upstream side to see what had collected on the pilings below when their attention was drawn to an extraordinary sight. Bendall and Kennedy were astonished to see a pair of shoes sticking straight up out of the water near the bridge. “We thought it may be the feet of a dummy at first,” recalled Bendall. “After we were pretty sure it was a body, we called the police.”

 

 

The former railroad trestle at College Siding as it appears today, sixty years after Earl Lester’s body was found here.

 

The upside-down body was that of Earl Lester, a 49-year-old former coal miner from West Virginia who lived at 2313 West Grace Street. Staff from the Tuckahoe Volunteer Rescue Squad were frustrated in their attempt to recover his corpse until they discovered what kept the floating body in its inverted position: tightly bolted around the neck was a length of chain with a hundred-pound block of concrete on the other end. Adding to the mystery, there was a bullet hole in the center of Lester’s forehead. Dr. Pedro Lardizabal, the Richmond Medical Examiner, said the body had been in the water for about a week, which didn’t make it any easier on Lester’s son, Raymond, who had the grim task of identifying his father’s body at the morgue from a tattoo on his arm. As to what happened to Earl Lester, “We’re considering 50-50 between murder and suicide,” said Dr. Lardizabal.

 

Railroad personnel found Earl Lester’s feet protruding from the surface of the canal on the right side of the College Siding bridge. There was no guardrail in place here in 1963.

 

Lester was a retired coal miner who had to give up work in the mines due to an arthritic condition of his spine, a condition so debilitating he was often forced to wear a brace. He and his family lived in Richmond for four years, but Gladys Lester said that her husband was in the habit of disappearing and going off on “trips” without telling anyone where he went, sometimes for more than a month. He left the house on April 15, leaving a note for Gladys that said simply, “I’m going.” She recalled, “He liked to get off by himself, liked to walk and see things. He didn’t gamble a bit and wasn’t a drinking man.” She thought that the former miner might be headed to Tennessee to visit his mother. Gladys Lester also told the police that when he went on these trips, Earl often took a sawed-off .22 caliber rifle with him – the same caliber gun that made the hole between his eyes.

The Henrico County Police were stumped as to what happened. Chief W. J. Hedrick said the police had found weighted bodies before, but “never had a case that looked so much like murder but could be suicide.” The large block of concrete was the heart of the mystery. The police said Lester apparently would have had to “drag the block to the middle of the trestle, chain it to his neck, and – in a bent-over position because of the chain stretching only 15 inches from his neck to the weight – shoot himself. Then, according to that hypothesis, he would have toppled into the canal.” Lester’s wife, Gladys, didn’t believe it and said of Lester, “he was strong in his arms, strong all over, but he didn’t have any strength in his back.” Lester’s death certificate specifies, “gunshot wound to the head” as the cause of death, and the medical examiner noted there was no water in Lester’s lungs, indicating he was dead when he hit the water. If he had shot himself, leaning over the bridge, where was the gun? And how did the crippled ex-miner manage to drag a hundred-pound concrete weight across the trestle? – something that his family was convinced Lester could never physically manage by himself.

 

Richmond Times-Dispatch, April 26, 1963.

 

Someone suggested an experiment: a similar rifle be purchased, cut down like Lester’s, and dropped off the College Siding trestle to see how it might drift in the canal. Instead, on April 27 the Henrico Police requested the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad close the gates at Nine Mile Lock and drain the section of the canal at College Siding. A frustrated Chief Hendrick said if they don’t find the gun, “we’ll have to settle on homicide.” The canal was drained and Henrico detectives donned hip boots to wade around in the muddy bottom but never found Lester’s sawed-off .22 rifle.

The medical examiner said it was his opinion that the bullet hole in Lester’s forehead was made from a distance – inconsistent with somebody shooting themselves. Dr. Lardizabal felt the issue of the chain around Lester’s neck was also indicative of murder, saying the victim’s neck was sixteen inches and the chain only allowed fifteen and a half inches.  Lardizabal maintained this arrangement was the work of someone else who wasn’t concerned about tightness and discomfort. Chief Hendrick disagreed, saying if Lester was going through “all that,” (meaning dragging the concrete block and chaining himself to it), “whether it was loose or tight wouldn’t make any difference.” Further confounding the suicide theory, Lester was known to have been wearing a watch and carrying his wallet when he left the house, and neither were found on his body.

 

The intersection of Huguenot Road and River Road can be seen from the College Siding trestle.

 

The canal continued to give up its dead with the discovery on May 11 of James McClare of 17 South Davis Street, whose body was found lodged underwater near the Virginia Electric and Power Company plant at 12^th and Byrd Streets. The cause of his death was listed simply as “drowning.” Back in Henrico, the police (sounding somewhat exasperated) finally gave up and declared Earl Lester’s death at College Siding a suicide. “Chief Hendrick said all evidence points conclusively to suicide. There was no one single piece of evidence uncovered to indicate this, he said, ‘but we know it was suicide.’” Earl Lester’s body was shipped back to the mountains and buried in a cemetery in Montcalm, West Virginia.

It has been a long time since the coal cars halted traffic at the River Road Shopping Center, and most strollers on the UR Eco-Corridor have no idea that the nicely landscaped path was once a railroad siding. The curved College Siding bridge across the canal, replete with “No Trespassing” signs, today only serves to carry car traffic to homes on the other side of the railroad tracks. Below the bridge, the canal is a poisonous-looking pea soup green and its impassive quiet surface offers no hint regarding what lies below.

Earl Lester knew how to disappear, so was this an elaborate suicide followed by the ultimate act of self-obliteration? Or did Earl have help in engineering his dive into the quiet green water of the canal and other hands lugged that concrete block out on the tracks? Was it possible that a wooden stocked .22 rifle, lightened by the removal of part of the barrel, simply floated to the surface after the huge splash of that concrete block hitting the water and drifted off down the canal?

Earl Lester’s death certificate states as the cause of death, “gunshot wound to head,” and the section with the rather mild title, “Describe How Injury Occurred,” has been filled out with the terse notation, “Shot in head with .22 caliber firearm,” after which someone has added to the form, “concrete slab chained to neck.” The chilling description of his body yields nothing to explain Earl Lester’s mysterious end, sixty years ago at College Siding.

 

-Selden