Williams, Wilkes 1864-1927

WILLIAMS, LARRABEE

Posted By: Sharyl Ferrall - IAGenWeb volunteer
Date: 3/6/2012 at 18:37:34

Wilkes Williams Passes Saturday; Victim of Assault
by W.C. McNeil

Died at his home in Grand Meadow township, August 6, 1927, Wilkes Williams, aged sixty-four years and six months.

He was born in Grand Meadow township, February 3, 1864, and was the son of Judge Elias H. Williams and Hannah Larrabee Williams. At the age of eleven years he had the misfortune to lose his right arm by the accidental discharge of a gun.

His father, a college bred man, took Wilkes into close association wherever his business might call him and tutored him in the sciences and languages. Later his education was given over to Prof. Hossfeldt, a German scholar, who later entered the consular service under an appointment from President McKinley.

By inheritance Wilkes was possessed of the student mind, by cultivation and environment life to him found recreation and its maximum of pleasure in the old library of his father. With fluency and the proper accent he spoke three or four languages - English, German and Norwegian. His memory was an encyclopedia of the past and a storehouse of the present. In his passing the community has lost a distinguished scholar and its kindliest personality.

Just why in that old pioneer home in the shadows of the evening the assassin should strike down this man whose life brought harmony into the community and love and respenct to all who knew him, has not been answered. Somebody did this cruel thing and society must either bear the odium or find the perpetrator of the fiendish deed. Fate sealed the lips and palsied the hand that sought to disclose the identity of the assassins; and for days semi-conscious lived over and over the tragedy that has left those that loved him in horror and helplessness.

The funeral was held from the home on Monday afternoon conducted by Rev. R.F. Galloway of this city. Interment was made in the family plot in Postville cemetery.

~Postville Herald, Thursday, August 11, 1927

~Contributors note: It would be 19 years before the murderer of Wilkes Williams would be found. In November 1946, the Clayton county grand jury indicted Henry C. Miller for first-degree murder in connection with Williams’s death. Miller was at the time serving a life term imprisonment in the state penitentiary at Fort Madison for the killing of Christian Ruckdaschel, who was killed Mar. 9, 1940. It was the similarity of the two murders that led the state agent to believe that Miller was also the slayer of Williams. Christ Ruckdaschel was the gg-grandfather of the contributor.