From what Lyle says, Trout Shue behaved very oddly when his wife's death was discovered and at her wake, doing apparently everything in his power to keep anyone from examining her (broken) neck. He also bragged about wanting to outlive seven wives (hence the book's rather odd title), and had been married twice before. (One wife got the hell out of Dodge and divorced him while he was serving time for horse-stealing; the other wife died under unknown circumstances.) So there were reasons for the community to be suspicious.
Mary Jane Heaster apparently went to the county prosecutor and told him her ghost story to pressure him into having the corpse exhumed for an autopsy. At the trial (as Lyle reconstructs it from the newspaper accounts, since the transcript has vanished), the prosecution didn't ask the witness about the ghost story, the defense did--trying to discredit her by making her look insane. Which strategy seems to have backfired.
I'm dubious about Lyle's theory that Mrs. Heaster consciously and deliberately lied about being haunted by her daughter. The folk tradition of murdered people appearing to friends and loved ones to demand justice is very, very old, and it's perfectly possible for people to have dreams that they are convinced really happened. Lyle's only (circumstantial) evidence that Mrs. Heaster lied and lied again and then committed perjury is that coincidence that the story about the fake haunting in Australia appears on p. 1 of the same edition of the newspaper in which the report of Zona's funeral appears on p. 3. Lyle is committed to rationalism, that not only must there be a rational explanation, but all actors must be making conscious rational choices about their behavior, and while I approve of being rational and assessing evidence rationally, you can't impose your rationality on your subject, especially when there's not a shred of other evidence to suggest Mrs. Heaster was deliberately lying.
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momijizukamori
no subject
Date: 2016-12-07 09:01 pm (UTC)Mary Jane Heaster apparently went to the county prosecutor and told him her ghost story to pressure him into having the corpse exhumed for an autopsy. At the trial (as Lyle reconstructs it from the newspaper accounts, since the transcript has vanished), the prosecution didn't ask the witness about the ghost story, the defense did--trying to discredit her by making her look insane. Which strategy seems to have backfired.
I'm dubious about Lyle's theory that Mrs. Heaster consciously and deliberately lied about being haunted by her daughter. The folk tradition of murdered people appearing to friends and loved ones to demand justice is very, very old, and it's perfectly possible for people to have dreams that they are convinced really happened. Lyle's only (circumstantial) evidence that Mrs. Heaster lied and lied again and then committed perjury is that coincidence that the story about the fake haunting in Australia appears on p. 1 of the same edition of the newspaper in which the report of Zona's funeral appears on p. 3. Lyle is committed to rationalism, that not only must there be a rational explanation, but all actors must be making conscious rational choices about their behavior, and while I approve of being rational and assessing evidence rationally, you can't impose your rationality on your subject, especially when there's not a shred of other evidence to suggest Mrs. Heaster was deliberately lying.