October 2004                                                        The Megaphone                                                                  Page 3

Elwood's Gun-Girl

Isabelle Messmer

Dear Megaphone Readers,

   In the January through June issues of this years’ Megaphone, I brought to you the news accounts of Elwood’s Gun-Girl. Until now I never told of her family living here in Elwood.

   I left that to family privacy and just kept to the story of Isabelle. However, in August of this year, Isabelle’s niece spoke to the Elwood Pipecreek Genealogy Society. Janice Barnes from Elwood told the group stories of growing up and gave us an inside look at Isabelle Messmer and some of the experiences she had. Isabelle’s family consisted of her mother and step-father, Frank and Ethel Decker, and step-brother and step-sister, Robert and Anne Decker.

   Her father, John Franklin Decker, died in Elwood in 1950. Ethel died in Noblesville (not sure of the date). Robert died in Elwood in 1975 and Anne died in Florida in 2000. Isabelle died in Tampa, Florida, in 1984 at the age of 67. With the immediate family past on, Janice felt comfortable telling her memories of Isabelle.

Sincerely,

Nancy  Sumner '66

Elwood  

Family Stories of Isabelle

by Janice Barnes

Isabelle is my aunt, my dad’s half sister. My father really didn’t like her. He had to live her story, her history. He forbid us to talk about her. With all the articles that had been written, he told us to tell any one who asked about her that we didn’t know her. He didn’t want us kids to have to live through what he had to live through when he was a kid. We were never allowed to call her Aunt, it was always Isabelle.

We lived on 7^th Street and my grandma lived about 3 or 4 houses down from us and Isabelle would come in at night to Grandma's house or in the evening. Dad wouldn’t let us kids down there because he didn’t know what she might be up to. He feared for our safety. She had a trailer that she pulled for a long time and she took pictures from the back of it. She would take photos of people, like portraits I guess. She had a colored lady who traveled with her. Dad would not let us go near her or Grandma while she was in town.

She had this Dalmatian dog called Flipper and she used to feed it two pork chops each day. Grandma would call and ask if we would go to the store for her. Isabelle would give us 50 cents, and to a little girl, I must have been 5 or so, that was a lot of money. We would go down to Swanfelt’s store to buy 2 pork chops for that dog. Well one time I went down there to get some pork chops for the dog and Mr. Swanfelt would not cut them. He didn’t have meat in a case, he would just cut what you needed when you wanted some. He said, “I know your mother needs more than two chops. Now what are these for?” I told him for Isabelle’s dog and he refused to give me any pork chops! Well I went home crying and told them he wouldn’t cut any pork chops for a dog! Well Isabelle went down there, and I don’t know what she said to him or what took place, but whenever we went down there from then on we got two pork chops! 

When my dad was just a kid, about 16, he had an old Ford out in the back yard, it didn’t run and had no tires. She ask him if she gave him the money would he fix it for her so she could get out of town. He said OK and fixed the car. Well, that should have been a clue for the police because everyone knew that he didn’t have any money! After the car was fixed, he smuggled her out to the car about 2:30 in the morning and they left.  She hid down in the floor board and she had a gun and she put it in the seat. She told him, "If we get caught, I’m going to point this gun at you and tell them I forced you to get me out of town." So he took her to Ohio and dumped her out at some hotel.

When I got a little older, we moved to So. 25^th Street and she would come into town. One time she came into town and her car was hot and over heated. She called my dad to come fix it so she could get back out of town!    

I remember one time when she broke out of prison, she came to my grandma’s house on No. 7^th St. My grandpa had built a kitchen and a bathroom onto that house and there was a wide enough space between those walls that when they took off the woodwork she could hide in the walls during the day so the police couldn’t find her. They would sneak her out during the night so she could go to the bathroom and eat and stuff. And she stayed hid in the walls for about 3 days!

Then one time I remember, my grandpa got sick and my dad’s other sister, Annie, called Isabelle and she came back for a visit. Isabelle was going to give my grandpa whiskey, he was in a coma but he was mumbling and Isabelle thought he wanted whiskey and she was going to give him some. The nurses and my auntie told her no, but she was going to any way. Auntie called Dad and he came up to the hospital and Isabelle pulled a gun on him. Everyone said, "She’s gonna shoot you." "No, she won’t shoot me!" he said. So Dad just grabbed the gun from her, picked her up and threw her out the hospital doors and threw her gun at her and told her to go home. She left town and she wasn’t even there for my grandpa’s funeral. That caused a big stink in the family. 

A few years after that Grandma got sick and Isabelle was living in Noblesville at the time. She came into town, got Grandma and emptied out the house and took Grandma to Noblesville to live with her and her colored man friend. When  Grandma died, we all went to the funeral, she was buried in Noblesville and after that we never saw Isabelle again for many years. In 1974 my auntie Ann called Isabelle to tell her my dad was sick with cancer. Isabelle called my dad but he wouldn’t have any thing to do with her because she was living with a colored man. She called him back and said, “Robert, this is Isabelle, don’t hang up on me 'cause I’m not living with a colored man any more!”  But she came to Elwood when my dad died in 1975. My husband went to pick her up at the airport and he had never seen her in his life. But he knew who she was when he saw her. She stayed with us for about a week but never wanted to go out, she was always afraid to go out. She was an old lady by then and very small and had jet black hair. And as I remember she always wore some time of animal print fabric.

She wrote to me several years after that and kept in contact. One year when my husband and I went to Daytona, Fla., and we went on to see her in Tampa. She always told my auntie Ann that she was poor and lived in one room over a bar. But by then she had married and lived in an apartment. And I was surprised to see her place. She had it all decorated in animal prints. She loved to sew and paint. She

made curtains and furniture covers with wild animal prints. She was very talented and it was something to see. We were never allowed to mention any thing about her past to her husband. He didn’t know of any of it.  Some time had past and we hadn’t heard from her, so we called. Her husband said she’s not here . . . she’s in the ground! That’s the first we had heard that she had died.

I was visiting with my aunt Ann and looking at some pictures. I asked her if I could take some home with me to make copies and send them back. She said she would do it for me, but I guess that she just forgot about it. When she died I asked about the pictures and her family didn’t know anything about them. So I don’t have any pictures of Isabelle or my grandparents. When I was young, my dad didn’t want any of that around and so now I don’t have anything.

Janice Barnes

August 19, 2004