Large flyer offering $3750 Reward for Murderer of Sarah L. Linn in February 1919

Glenville, WV: County Court of Gilmer County, 1919. Fair. 13 x 8.25 inches, printed on thin pulp paper, fair copy with some neat repairs to splits at the folds on verso using pH-neutral document repair tissue tape; somewhat tanned. The following information about the murder is culled or quoted from an article by Abby Hudson that appeared in the Glenville State University newsletter, The Phoenix, on Nov. 30, 2022. Sarah Linn, known to all as "Sis" was born in 1853. She came from a prominent local family, and graduated in 1877 from the local state normal school, and became a schoolteacher in Glenville and surrounding communities. She was married in 1905, but her husband abandoned her and she was granted a divorce in absentia in 1909. When she was about 66 years old and possessed of considerable property, now part of the campus of Glenville State University, she was mysteriously, murdered. She was discovered beaten to death by a group of people that included a banker, who was her nephew, and several other people who hadn't seen and heard from her in a number of days. They looked in the window of her house with a flashlight to find chairs turned over, the table upset, paper strewn all over the floor. Upon discovering an open door on her back porch, everyone entered to find her body. A bloody club was found nearby. No valuables were missing. It was the most sensational and bloodiest murder ever committed in Gilmer County, and the reward was eventually upped from $3750 to $5000. One possible motivation may have been that she made money on the side selling wine from 1909 to 1919 in the bootlegging tradition of West Virginia. Since then, there have been reports of her as a ghost gliding around the Glenville campus, most experiences with her occuring at Clark Hall, because five years after the murder officials from Glennville Normal School purchased the Linn property, razed the house and made new structures there, including Clark Hall. The motive for the murder has never been uncovered, nor has the murderer ever been identified.