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Introduction: In this article, James Pylant begins a true-crime story that has a Halloween connection, showing that some family history has a dark side. James is an editor at GenealogyMagazine.com and author for JacobusBooks.com, is an award-winning historical true-crime writer, and authorized celebrity biographer.

The Rusk family dreaded Halloween and the memories it brought.

The ghoulish holiday fell on their grandmother’s birthday, though it was for her death that she was remembered. Samantha Olds had turned 75 on Halloween Day, 31 October 1925, less than four weeks before her brutal slaying. Every year, a local newspaper revived the story – a triple murder case – in all its gruesome glory, unaware that the victim’s descendants still lived in the area.

Those descendants never discussed the murders, not even among themselves.

When long-lost first cousins traveled from out of state to meet them, they were turned away. The tragedy had also deeply affected their Aunt Edna. Though she lived far from the scene, the horror hadn’t faded with time. “She would just go into a rage – a screaming, crying, uncontrollable rage,” said her grandson.

The Rusk grandchildren have long since passed, but the notoriety of their grandmother’s death endures. It wasn’t just the local paper that kept the story alive; fictional accounts of the crime appeared in the pages of detective magazines, retold with lurid embellishments. Here is what actually happened.

On 9 December 1925 in rural Erath County, Texas – nearly 80 miles southwest of Fort Worth – two hunters, Elvis Riggs and Ben Aycock, ventured into the cellar of an abandoned farmhouse to set traps. Inside, they found a bloody feed sack suspended from two log beams overhead. A hole in the fabric exposed its contents: a human ear.

“It’s somebody’s head!” cried Riggs.

Dislodging the bag, Aycock opened it and found it contained the severed head of a teenage boy.

The killing had been recent; the face retained almost its natural color.

Word of the grisly discovery spread quickly, causing a frenzy. Sheriff Med Hassler received so many inquiries that special long-distance telephone operators were brought in to handle calls.

He also requested help from the Texas Rangers.

At a funeral home in Stephenville, the county seat, the head was placed on a satin pillow in a coffin, the crudely severed neck obscured by a shroud. The coffin was displayed under glass for public viewing, in hopes that someone would recognize the boy.

At least 6,000 people streamed through the funeral home before Ida Gristy told investigators, “It’s Bernie Connally. He lived with his mother and stepfather, F. M. Snow, in the Selden community.”

Sheriff Hassler and Sergeant Stewart Stanley of the Texas Rangers made the nine-mile trip from Stephenville to the ramshackle farmhouse in Selden where Bernie Connally had lived. There, they found the teen’s stepfather, F. M. Snow, a slender, balding, gaunt-faced man who looked older than his 44 years.

“Where is your stepson, Bernie Connally?” Hassler asked.

“Bernie is with his mother,” Snow answered. “My wife and her mother and Bernie left about two weeks ago for Waco,” he said. They made the 85-mile trip on November 27 to sell property.

Hassler then told Snow of his stepson’s death: his severed head had been found and positively identified. Snow, appearing shocked, was concerned about contacting his wife. Snow explained that he had taken the trio by wagon about two dozen miles to Iredell so that they could take the night train to Waco.

Hassler and Stanley drove to Iredell to verify the story, but the train station’s record showed no such stop there on that date. Driving back to Stephenville, the two lawmen spotted Snow and his horse-drawn wagon on the side of the road, with a cow and calf tethered behind the wagon, which was loaded with furniture.

Snow was arrested and taken to Stephenville – but only briefly. “From nowhere, a crowd was gathering,” Stanley said. He sensed citizens were preparing for a lynching. Sheriff Hassler quickly whisked Snow away to the Tarrant County Jail in Fort Worth.

The next day, Hassler and Stanley returned to the Snow farmhouse with a search warrant in hand. Inside, they were struck by a harsh odor. A ray of light from a window caught the shininess of a new nail head in the floorboard. A closer inspection revealed several new nails and blood stains. Prying loose a board unleashed a swarm of flies from below; it was a space that had recently held something decomposing.

In the fireplace, they found a small, charred bone, one or two teeth, and strands of hair in the still-warm, blood-clotted ashes. Scouring the property, they found two piles of ash dumped in the yard. Both piles contained bones.

Meanwhile, investigators were also in Waco, looking for Snow’s wife, Maggie, and mother-in-law, Samantha Olds, but no one had seen them. With evidence mounting and F. M. Snow’s story beginning to unravel, he confessed. He also led investigators to a local ranch where he left Bernie’s headless body.

In Selden, no one knew the Snows very well. An impoverished woodchopper, “Old Man Snow” was a strange, reclusive drifter who could be “awful mean.” He and his wife, Maggie, had been married for only six weeks.

The two had met while toiling in the cotton fields of southeastern Erath County. They began spending time together and became inseparable. Maggie, Samantha, and Bernie moved into Snow’s farmhouse a few weeks before the 6 October 1925 wedding.

But after six weeks of marital bliss, he flew into an uncontrollable rage and butchered his wife, stepson, and mother-in-law. According to the following newspaper article, a cow was the spark that led to the bloodbath.

This article reports:

Sheriff M. T. Hassler and District Attorney Sam Russell, who will present the case to the grand jury, will appear before that body with a lengthy signed confession to the triple slaying, decapitation and cremation by F. M. Snow, 46, tenant farmer…

The shooting occurred, Snow said, on November 27, and resulted from a quarrel between him and his wife over a cow getting into a cotton patch. Connally stepped into the brawl with a shovel handle, he contends, and his wife was shooting at him with a rifle. The same shot which killed his wife, he said, also killed his mother-in-law.

Snow makes no effort to explain the fact that he burned the bodies of the two women and carried that of the boy six miles away to a mountaintop, there to chop his head off with a double-bladed axe. “I was just mad,” is all he will say on this point.

No one knew the victims very well. They were new to the community. “I never felt he had much chance,” said a Waco resident of Bernie.

Still, Bernie was better known than his mother and grandmother. “Them women was awful close-mouthed,” said a neighbor.

And for a good reason. They didn’t want anyone to know about their past.

In Part 2, we’ll learn about that past, as well as the conclusion of Snow’s story.

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Note on the header image: an AI-generated image depicting (left to right) F. M. Snow, Bernie Connally, Maggie Snow, and Samantha Olds. Credit: James Pylant.

Editor’s Note: This story is adapted from James Pylant’s book, Blood Legacy: The True Story of the Snow Axe Murders (Stephenville, TX: Jacobus Books, 2008).