Historian Larry Tippin to sign new Pearl Bryan book at museum Oct. 25

Tuesday, October 16, 2018
Putnam County Historian Larry Tippin addresses an audience of nearly 100 during his 2017 presentation at the Putnam County Museum on the Pearl Bryan tragedy.
Banner Graphic/Eric Bernsee

After captivating audiences for nearly five hours while presenting two summer of 2017 programs on the notorious Pearl Bryan murder, Putnam County Historian Larry Tippin told his Putnam County Museum audience he was working on summarizing his voluminous material even more.

“So when does your book come out?” he was asked.

It now has.

A slide shown during Putnam County Historian Larry Tippin’s presentation shows the Bryan family burial plot at Forest Hill Cemetery. The flower-adorned grave at left, with only the stone base remaining, belonged to Pearl. Her headstone was damaged so much by souvenir hunters chipping off pieces that it was ultimately removed and later buried at the cemetery.

And the author will be available to sign copies of “The Betrayal of Pearl Bryan,” a newly published, limited-edition book, on Thursday, Oct. 25 at the Putnam County Museum, 1105 N. Jackson St., Greencastle. During the 6:30 p.m. event, Tippin will give a brief narrative of the process that went into the making of the publication. The event is free and open to the public.

“The Betrayal of Pearl Bryan” will be available for purchase starting Oct. 25 and is currently available for preorder. For more information, persons may call the museum at 653-8419.

Tippin’s study of the Pearl Bryan case is taken exclusively from thousands of pages of trial transcripts, depositions, contemporary newspaper accounts and other primary source documents. On Jan. 27, 1896, 23-year-old Pearl Bryan of Greencastle boarded a train bound for Cincinnati with Pearl apparently intent on convincing the father of her unborn child to do the honorable thing. Instead, he and an accomplice betrayed and killed her, in what many newspaper accounts described as the “Crime of the Century.”

Addressing the story in detail in June 2017, Tippin told nearly 100 onlookers that the Jan. 31/Feb. 1, 1896 murder of Pearl Bryan “is a very complex story that’s never really been told.”

“It’s like, ‘We’re not going to talk about it,’” Tippin said of the infamous case in which Pearl Bryan was murdered and her headless body discarded in a field near Fort Thomas, Ky., with two men being hanged as a result in Campbell County, Ky.

Although much was written about Pearl Bryan at the time, Tippin had two goals in mind when he dug into the case, tracking the story through 3,200 pages of Kentucky trial records, some so old and fragile they couldn’t be separated from one another lest they crumbled into dust.

Tippin, whose own family goes back to the 1830s in Putnam County, persisted through 4,000 pages in source documents and several visits to the scene of the crime, just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, in northern Kentucky.

Tippin vowed to present a thorough study of the Pearl Bryan tragedy with “actual, factual information,” saying he wanted to “make as many people as possible aware of the ‘Crime of the Century.’”

“I mean (it was in) every newspaper in the country,” Tippin said. “This was a significant story.”

With Pearl buried in Greencastle’s Forest Hill Cemetery, the story was so sensational passing trains would often let passengers get off to chip a piece from Pearl’s headstone or leave pennies heads-up on the monument. That went on so long, the headstone itself was ultimately buried.

Meanwhile, tourists so routinely visited the scene of the crime in Kentucky that local residents would set up shop and sell sandwiches and lemonade nearby.

Yet when he began his research locally, Tippin said, if you tried to find out about Pearl Bryan, information was pretty minimal. You could see where she lived in the two-story home (now used by Res-Care) along the east side of U.S. 231, just north of Primrose Lane. You can find her Forest Hill gravesite -- “or what’s left of it” -- or you could visit the library and thumb through a few files and see a couple old photos.

“That’s not enough,” Tippin stressed, the historian in him vowing to research the woman, the family and the crime much deeper and finding “an enormous amount of information on Pearl.”

Tippin said he has analyzed hundreds of newspaper articles, indexed and transcribed representative stories, located actual trial transcripts and made more than 3,000 digital images of those transcripts and depositions.

But because of multiple errors in some source documents, Tippin was forced to dive even deeper into his research, examining the lives of family members, the background of the men hanged for Pearl’s murder and even the late-Victorian Era climate in 1896 Greencastle.

Of course, the story reaches a crescendo with Pearl’s headless body being discovered by a Kentucky teenager and her identity being revealed four days later through her distinctive webbed feet and tiny shoes -- size 3 from Louis and Hays, a Greencastle shoe store.

The sensational and gruesome nature of the case and its unanswered questions is what has allowed the saga to reach folklore status and stay in the public eye so long, Tippin said.

“It’s 121 years later and we’re still trying to answer some of these questions,” he noted.

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