At age eighteen, Katherine Cross was left to bleed to death.
Her family inscribed this haunting epitaph onto her tombstone: “Murdered by human wolves.”
For over a century, people have pondered this inscription on a grave in forlorn cemetery outside Konawa, Oklahoma.
The tombstone became a legend, inspiring speculation about its meaning.
One author even fictionalized the story of the tombstone with a novella about how Cross had been pursued and ravaged by werewolves.
But truth is more terrible than fiction. Mythical monsters didn’t kill Katherine Cross; human beings did. And other human beings refused justice.
Thanks to Scott Cross, an Oklahoma pastor, I’m able to tell you a bit of the real story. I hope this may do some tiny bit of honor to Katherine and to the efforts of her family to bring truth to light.
Katherine was the oldest sister of Scott’s grandfather.
She was, says Scott, raped by her schoolteacher.
It was 1917, and the trauma of her story has lived in Scott’s family, passed down from one generation to the next.
When Katherine told that she was pregnant, she was effectively kidnapped and forced to have an abortion.
A local physician, Dr. Abraham Yates, performed the abortion, but then allowed her to bleed out, refusing medical attention. Yates was assisted, says Scott, by the very teacher who had raped Katherine, a man named Fred O’Neal.
Scott’s telling of the story is significantly corroborated by newspaper accounts at the time.
Yates was initially charged with murder. In reporting this, the Seminole County News wrote that Katherine Cross had been pregnant, and that Yates performed “a criminal operation” on her—i.e., an abortion.
A local schoolteacher named Fred O’Neal was said to have assisted Yates. And O’Neal was described as “the father of the child” that was carried by Katherine.
It wasn’t the first time Yates had been arrested. Just a couple months earlier, another eighteen-year-old named Elsie Stone had died after one of Yates’ “operations.” Yates was apprehended and arrested while singing in the church choir at a revival meeting. Fred O’Neal was also arrested and charged with procuring the procedure.
At trial, friends of Stone testified that she too had been impregnated by O’Neal.
The jury acquitted Yates. (It’s worth remembering that, at that time, the jury would have been all male. Oklahoma didn’t allow women to serve on juries until 1952.)
As for O’Neal, the jury deadlocked 11-1 for conviction, which meant O’Neal went free.
After the trial involving Stone’s death, the pending charges on Cross’s death never went to trial.
We’ve seen this pattern countless times: powerful men aren’t held to account.
In Scott’s words, the Cross family was poor. They were sharecroppers and couldn’t afford to pursue legal justice.
They lost their daughter and then they also lost their home. The owner kicked them off the land. Apparently, their presence was an unwanted reminder of the community’s grotesque injustice.
Grief-stricken, the family moved away. But before they did, they found their own way to give voice to truth.
They chiseled it into stone: “Murdered by human wolves.”
This is completely gutting.
And how many have lived this injustice?
Thank you for documenting this.