In a Nutshell
In November 1933, on a family ranch in Apache County, Arizona, Mattie Turley shot her father, Ernest, twice in the back. She was 15 years old. She first called it an accident, then told the sheriff that her mother, Dorothea, had ordered the killing and that a Ouija board had spelled out the command. As Mattie put it, “the board could not be denied.” Ernest died of his wounds about six weeks later. Mattie pled guilty to attempted murder, was sent to a state reformatory, and was paroled three years later.
The Whole Bushel
By Mattie’s account, her mother, Dorothea Irene Turley, worked the planchette during the sessions, and the Ouija board told the girl to “shoot Daddy after he milked the cows” and promised that no one would find out. Dorothea, who had once been named a “modern Venus” by a New York newspaper, was by then involved with a younger cowboy named Kent Pearce, and Mattie said the board’s message was that Ernest had to die so her mother could marry him. On the stand, Mattie said her mother had pressed her to obey the order and had promised she would face no arrest for it. Mother and daughter turned over playing cards to confirm the instruction, and on November 18, 1933 the teenager shot her father, a former US Navy chief gunner’s mate, in the back. He was taken to a hospital and died weeks later.
Mattie’s first story was that the shooting was an accident. She told the sheriff she had been walking about 30 feet behind her father when she tripped and the shotgun went off. Investigators found the wounds could only have been made by someone standing upright about 10 feet away, and Mattie confessed.
Dorothea was arrested and charged with assault with intent to commit murder. She denied it all. By her account she had never spoken to Mattie about harming Ernest, and the girl had turned on him only because she resented his strict household rules. At her 1934 trial the court refused to let the defense present evidence about Mattie’s character, and Dorothea was convicted largely on her daughter’s testimony and sentenced to 10 to 25 years. The Arizona Supreme Court reversed that conviction in 1936, ruling that keeping out the character evidence had been prejudicial, and the charges against her were dropped.
The case is often called the first murder carried out on the orders of a Ouija board, though neither mother nor daughter was ever convicted of murder, and an earlier 1930 killing in Buffalo, New York, has also been tied to the board. What the courts weighed was the testimony of a teenage girl and the instructions her mother had given her.
Show Me The Proof
Girl Admits Killing Father After Ouija Seance With Mother
Prison Doors Clang Shut on Mother Who Sat in on Ouija Board Session That Drove Daughter to Kill Father
‘Ouija Board’ Slayer Freed
