The legend of convicted murderer Emma LeDoux and her most unconventional – and failed – method of trying to dispose of a body remains a public intrigue these 119 years later.
The curiosity into the 1906 murder of LeDoux’s estranged third husband, Albert McVicar, is no doubt fueled by the grisly artifact on display at the Haggin Museum in Stockton – the blood-soaked streamer trunk in which LeDoux stuffed his body.
The macabre relic is one of the most highly visited exhibits in the collection.
“A lot of people hear about it,” said Kelly Howard, a security officer at the museum. “People come in and visit, they see it, they ask about it, they tell their friends and they come down and see it. People are just fascinated by it.”
The saga began on March 24, 1906 when the trunk was discovered at Stockton’s Southern Pacific Railroad depot (demolished and replaced in 1930). The trunk belonged to 30-year-old Emma LeDoux who would make headlines for years.
LeDoux had the locked steamer trunk delivered to the station to be put aboard a train to Jamestown. Because she neglected to place a shipping label on it, the trunk remained on the dock unattended for hours until personnel were puzzled by what to do with it at about 10 p.m. It was heavy, weighing reportedly weighing about 200 pounds.
When they opened it they would find the folded-up body of Albert McVicar. The discovery, her arrest and the murder trial that ensued became the biggest Stockton news story of 1906 – until the San Francisco Earthquake struck the next month.
Emma Theresa Cole was born on September 10, 1875 in Pine Grove in Amador County. As of 1906 she had been married three times with the second and third husbands meeting with untimely demises.
Her first husband Charles Barrett escaped the fate of the others. That marriage only lasted from 1892 when she was 16 until their divorce in 1898. However, second husband William Williams died in 1902 under suspicious circumstances in Cochise County, Ariz. Nitric acid poisoning was the cause of death and Emma was under suspicion as she was the beneficiary of Williams’ life insurance policy of $2,000. There was no trial there, likely for a lack of evidence.
She married husband #3 Albert McVicar three months after Williams’ death. McVicar was reportedly enamored with Emma but the feeling wasn’t mutual and they soon separated.
The couple never got a divorce and she married in August 1905 to Sutter Creek resident Eugene LeDoux. She apparently never mentioned to her new husband that she was still married to McVicar and thus a bigamist.
Emma was known to leave home for weeks at a time, mostly on visit San Francisco and Stockton.
She murdered instead of divorced.
It’s believed she hatched a plan to kill McVicar to end the marriage by poisoning him rather than a divorce. She would suggest they get back together and lure him to a rendezvous in Stockton where they would go furniture shopping. On March 11, 1906 Emma and Albert rented Room 97 of the California House, a Stockton hotel built in 1894 and still standing at the northwest corner of Main and California streets.
The next day they bought furniture which was to be shipped to Jamestown. While in San Francisco she happened to buy some morphine – apparently she was an addict, according to her mom – and both were back on the train to Jamestown on March 15. The purpose of the trip was so McVicar could quit his job at the Rawhide Mine outside of Jamestown on March 21. Two days later the couple was back at the Stockton hotel.
Emma and Albert were reportedly drinking flasks of whiskey the night before his death. Prosecutors surmised that she got him so drunk that he wouldn’t know he was being poisoned.
LeDoux admitted stuffing Albert’s body – he possibly was still alive based on how he bled – into the trunk but denied poisoning McVicar. Her defense team claimed she was afraid of being fingered as the killer when someone else did it and thus planned to rid the body after shipping it to Jamestown.
During her trial she claimed a third man she named as Joe Miller was drinking with them and that he killed McVicar when she left the hotel for hours. When she returned she said she found McVicar dead.
Police were convinced that she made up the mysterious acquaintance but nobody believed her alibi.
In court it was proven that Emma purchased the trunk at the D.S. Rosenbaum store at Main and Sutter in Stockton and had it delivered to her apartment. She asked the delivery man to wait an hour while she packed it full of “dishes” for him to pick it up and deliver to the train depot in time for her to catch the 1:20 p.m. train to Jamestown.
She next purchased 25 cents worth of rope at the H.C. Shaw Company at the corner of California and Weber streets used to tie up the trunk to prevent it from being opened. The clerk joked to her that some folks might think a lady buying rope intended to hang herself with it.
When Emma and a man named Joseph Healey showed up at the depot at 3 p.m., both were panicked to see the trunk hadn’t been delivered.
When the trunk finally arrived she and Healey quickly secured it by wrapping the rope around it and ordered it to be placed on the train while they boarded. The trunk, however, was placed in the baggage car and removed as it was missing a shipping tag so it remained at the station.
Meanwhile, Emma and Healy took the train to the Bay area.
At about 10 p.m. depot personnel grew suspicious of the mysterious trunk, especially since it weighed about 200 pounds. The baggage master summoned Stockton Police who obtained a warrant to open the trunk. They found the folded up remains of Albert McVicar with his face pressed against wall and knees to his chest.
Police initially believed that McVicar had been clubbed to death due of the copious amount of blood inside the trunk. In fact, the Stockton Record reported as such with a headline that screamed, “A.N. McVicar slugged to death; his body thrust into trunk.”
Later it was determined the blood streamed from his nose, which either was broken or had been smashed against the wall of the trunk. An autopsy revealed that McVicar had been poisoned.
Sheriff Walter Frank Sibley of Stockton along with Constable John Whelehan tracked Emma down to the Arlington Hotel in Antioch. When they approached her Emma told them, “I know what you want with me, and I will go with you.”
Much of what was initially reported in the newspapers was made up. The Stockton Evening and Sunday Record were not immune from yellow journalism of the day. One silly article included commentary on a photo of Emma LeDoux that police confiscated in her apartment, reporting that her chin was “firm but too long and pointed to indicate a trustful or trustworthy disposition.”
The three-week trial of LeDoux was postponed temporarily because of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and didn’t begin until June 5. She was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to be hanged on October 19 at San Quentin Prison. She was awarded an appeal and received a stay of execution from the state Supreme Court.
In 1910, Le Doux was granted a new trial, but was in such bad health that she pled guilty. She was sentenced to life imprisonment and spent 10 years in San Quentin, before her parole in 1920. Now released, Emma was 40 and continued finding trouble. She violated parole when she supplied alcohol to underage boys and was arrested for being drunk in public.
In 1925 LeDoux married Napa County rancher Frederick A. Crackbon. He divorced her and later died in 1929. She then worked as a nurse in Oakland to help support her 74-year-old mother, and supplemented her income by swindling men in a lonely hearts pen-pal scheme. Then in 1931, going by the aliases of Grace Miller and Emma Crackbon and Grace Crackbon, Emma was arrested for possession of stolen checks along with a forger named Albert Thompson.
On April 21, 1931 she went to prison and in 1933 to the Tehachapi Institute for Women prison for parole violations, where she died on July 6, 1941 at the age of 73. She is buried in an unmarked grave in the Union Cemetery in Bakersfield.
McVicar’s mistreated corpse was shipped to the Highland Cemetery in Wichita, Kansas where he is at rest next to his parents.
