Murdering Holiness: The Trials of Franz Creffield and George Mitchell

Ashley Thomson is a full librarian at Laurentian University and co-editor or co-author of nine books, most recently Margaret Atwood: A Reference Guide, 1988-2005.

In 1904, Franz Edmund Creffield, head of a small sect of “Holy
Rollers” based in Corvallis, Oregon, was jailed for committing
adultery with Donna Starr, one of his followers. On his release in 1906,
he was gunned down in Seattle, Washington, by George Mitchell, Starr’s
brother. In the subsequent trial held in Seattle and followed
exhaustively by the local media, Mitchell was acquitted. Both his
defence and local newspapers’ claims were founded on the “unwritten
law,” a 19th-century code of masculinity and gender relations that
justified vigilante retribution based on “the right of a man to avenge
sexual dishonour when his wife, daughter, or sister was seduced.”

Upon acquittal, Mitchell in turn was shot dead by Esther Mitchell,
another sister and also one of Creffield’s followers. She never went
to trial but instead was declared insane and was put away in an asylum.
After her release in 1909, she lived quietly in Oregon, and then in 1914
married James Barry, a man 10 years her senior who earlier had opposed
the sect. Three months later, she committed suicide.

There, in barest form, is the dramatic story recounted in these pages,
written in seamless, sparkling prose by a husband-and-wife team from the
University of Toronto. Both are associated with the Centre of
Criminology, and he with the Faculty of Law and the Department of
History, she with the Department of Sociology.

But the book is far more than a lurid story. Those interested in
religious, gender, and legal history, as well as the role of the press
at the turn of the last century, will find much to learn in this book,
set as it is within these larger historical contexts. The research
behind it was prodigious and the copious footnotes are almost as much
fun as the main text. Complete with a list of dramatis personae and a
map of the area, Murdering Holiness is one of those rare books that
deserves to win a big prize.