In the 1950s, the stereotypical sixty-five-year-old woman was said to enjoy cooking, knitting, decorating, keeping a clean house, and spending time with her grandchildren. Maud Crawford may have looked the part of an older domestic goddess, but she was instead a woman ahead of her time.
Valedictorian of her high school class, Maud also achieved the highest score on the bar exam despite not having attended law school. In 1927, only ten years after women were able to practice law in Arkansas, she became the city of Camden’s first female attorney and later became the town’s first woman to serve on the City Council. The trailblazing Maud was also active in many service organizations, having served as President of the Camden Business and Professional Women’s Foundation, the American Legion Auxiliary, and Pilot Club International, the sister organization of Rotary International before women were admitted. She was also named Camden’s “Woman of the Year” for 1954.
Maud Crawford’s accomplishments were amazing, but they are not why she is remembered. She is instead the subject of one of Arkansas’ greatest mysteries, having disappeared in 1957. Her fate remains a mystery after sixty-seven years.
Maud Crawford
For over forty-one years, Maud Crawford had worked at the Gaughan Law firm, later renamed the Gaughan, McClellan, and Laney law firm, in Camden, Arkansas, one hundred miles south of Little Rock. She began as a stenographer but quickly proved she had a great legal mind. After passing the bar, she became a lawyer at the firm for nearly thirty years, specializing in title work and estate management.
Maud did not argue cases in the courtroom; she instead worked in preparing the briefs handled by her colleagues in preparation for trial. Partly because of this, but more due to her being an older woman, those who did not know her assumed she was the office secretary, rather than a bona fide attorney.
Lady Lawyer
Maud and her husband Clyde had no children, but she still performed the mother role in many respects. To supplement her income and because of the shortage of furnished rooms in Camden, she rented out rooms in their large fifty-year-old colonial-style home to young single women.
On the evening of Saturday, March 2, 1957, Maud was uncharacteristically the only person at the home. The four young women who were renting rooms at the time had left for the weekend.
The Crawford Home
Maud spoke to her cousin, Martha Robins Carver, on the telephone at 8:30 p.m. She and her husband Howard were expected at the Crawford home that evening, but Martha had called to say they would be staying overnight with a friend and would arrive the following day.
Martha said her cousin was disappointed that she would not be arriving that evening, but was otherwise in good spirits. Maud gave no indication that anything was askew.
Martha Robins Carver
Maud’s Cousin
Two-and-a-half hours later, Clyde arrived home after his usual nightly routine of attending a movie followed by drinking beer and watching the late news at a local liquor store. He found the house and Maud’s belongings intact but no sign of his wife.
Clyde Crawford
Maude’s Husband
Maud’s purse with $200 in checks and $137 in cash was on a living room chair. The green beans she appeared to have been shelling for dinner the following day were in the dining room.
When Maud had not returned by the following evening, police began a search, but their efforts turned up few clues as to what could have happened to her.
Maud had invited thirty women to her home for a tea party scheduled several days later. Police did not believe the respected, and, in the word of many Camden residents, revered, community and civic leader had disappeared of her own accord.
No Maud
Police briefly believed Clyde was responsible for Maud’s disappearance. The couple lived very separate lives as friends said they rarely socialized together and had few common interests. Going back many years, the women who had rented rooms at the Crawford home said Clyde and Maud had always slept in separate beds but also said they never saw them arguing with one another.
Clyde was a self-employed cabinet maker and floor finisher who worked out of a shop in a garage at the back of their home. He did excellent work that earned him modest money at best. He was largely dependent on his wife as she was the household’s breadwinner.
Maud’s salary provided for about all the couple had; she had little in savings and investments. Furthermore, her life insurance policies were being held as collateral against personal loans.
Investigators determined Clyde had no motive, financial or otherwise, for harming his wife and cleared him of involvement.
Clyde Cleared
In the photo, Clyde tentatively pets the couple’s Dalmatian, Dal, and with good reason; Dal was not real fond of him. It was not anything personal; Dal just did not take much of a liking to anyone other than Maud. Clyde, as well as Maud’s friends and acquaintances, said Dal was very protective of her.
When Clyde arrived home after Maud had spoken to her cousin, he said Dal was acting normally. He believed if someone had forcibly taken Maud, Dal would have been agitated and neighbors would have heard his frantic barks.
Because Dal was not in distress and because there was no sign of forced entry into the home, police believe Maud left her home with someone she knew and trusted.
Dal and Clyde
The McClellan in the Gaughan, McClellan, and Laney law firm for which Maud Crawford worked was an inactive partner, United States Senator John McClellan, who had lived in Camden. At the time, he was chairing a highly publicized Senate investigation into organized labor’s alleged links to the Mafia.
With her husband cleared of involvement, police considered that Maud’s disappearance may have been linked to organized crime because of her ties to Senator McClellan. However, no evidence was found suggesting such involvement.
Senator John McClellan
In 1969, the Ouachita County Probate Court ruled, “It is the finding of the Court that Maud R. Crawford is deceased and has been dead since March 2, 1957, as a result of foul play perpetrated by person or persons unknown.” Clyde Crawford died the same year.
Maud Is Declared Dead
For nearly thirty years, Maud Crawford was presumed by many to have been murdered by the Mafia until reporter Beth Brickell began researching her disappearance in 1986. Brickell’s nineteen-article investigative series was published from July to December in the Arkansas Gazette, now the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the primary newspaper of the Natural State.
The articles, which Brickell later made into a book, espoused a new theory in the case that confounded Camden by shifting the focus from organized crime. Instead, Brickell implicated one of Camden’s wealthiest and most powerful men in the disappearance of the town’s most accomplished woman.
Cover of Beth Brickell’s Book
Camden’s wealthiest family were the Bergs. By the 1930s, businessmen brothers Leo and Henry had become multimillionaires from land and oil investments. They formed a partnership called Berg Brothers. It was profitable despite their different personalities.
Leo, who died in 1931, had served as Camden’s mayor. Whereas he was well-liked and respected, his brother Henry was described as crafty and sly.
Henry Berg
Henry Berg and his wife Rose had no children. When Henry died in 1950, he left her with an estate valued at approximately $20 million, consisting of roughly 39,000 acres of timberland, oil royalties, city properties, stocks, and bonds.
Maud, a friend and neighbor of Rose, had drafted and witnessed Henry’s will. Upon Rose’s passing, 1/4 of the estate’s interest was to go to her nephew Mike Berg, the only child of Leo Berg and his wife Annie.
Rose Berg was said to despise her nephew. She is believed to have later amended her will by bequeathing the entire estate, interest included and then valued at over $25 million, to three nieces on her side of the family, Jeanette Simpson, Marian Pelatson, and Lucille Glazer. Maud is believed to have witnessed Rose’s codicil.
Rose and Henry Berg
With Niece Lucille Glazer
In July 1955, Rose Berg, plagued for years from symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, was declared legally incompetent, and Maud Crawford was appointed as the executor of her will, as well as her guardian.
Rose Is Declared Of Unsound Mind
If Henry Berg’s will was written as believed, his nephew would have been omitted from 3/4 of the estate’s interest. If Rose Berg had amended the will as believed, he would receive nothing. Brickell’s articles contend that neither scenario was suitable to the already wealthy nephew, who had assumed leadership of the Berg Brothers business interests following his uncles’ deaths. He believed he was entitled to his aunt’s entire estate.
Henry Myar “Mike” Berg was a powerful man, having been appointed Arkansas State Police Commissioner in 1955. Crafty and sly, the same words used to describe his namesake uncle, were also applied to him.
Mike Berg
Brickell found numerous questionable deeds were created for Rose Berg’s estate in 1950, but not recorded for several years. A deed filed in the Hempstead County Courthouse in Hope, Arkansas, on July 2, 1953, and recorded on August 5, transferred timber assets belonging to Rose to Hugh Moseley, a timber owner who worked for Mike Berg. A second deed with the same July 2 date transferred the identical timber holdings from Moseley to Berg but was not recorded until September 28, 1957, nearly seven months after Maud Crawford’s disappearance.
Several other deeds found in the Ouachita County Courthouse in Camden transferred additional assets over a period of years from Rose Berg to Mike Berg. One deed with a questionable signature of Rose, conveyed over 20,000 acres of timber in fifteen counties, as well as properties in Camden and an estimated one-hundred-fifty active oil royalties to her nephew. This deed, dated June 8, 1951, was not recorded until September 8, 1954, over three years later. By that time, Rose Berg’s mental state had deteriorated to the point that she required twenty-four hour nursing care.
Properties Owned By Rose Berg
Between all of the deeds, Rose handed over 21,000 acres of valuable land to her nephew, whom she was said to loathe. Rose’s friends and family did not believe she, in her diminished state, could comprehend what she was signing and that the deeds were faulty. They believed Mike Berg had done a dirty deed by tricking his ailing aunt into giving him her fortune.
Shady Nephew?
Brickell’s articles contend that Maud Crawford concurred, believing Mike Berg took advantage of his aunt’s incompetence. Before she vanished, Maud was believed to be attempting to make the deed transfers null and void and to have Rose’s will stand as either originally written or as Rose had amended it.
The nieces believed to have been named in Rose’s amended will said Maud, shortly before her disappearance, told them she, as executor of Rose’s estate, intended to bring a lawsuit against Mike Berg to expose the fraudulent deeds. Before she could take action, she disappeared, as did Rose’s will.
Maud Likely Intervened
Following Rose Berg’s death in 1962, Mike Berg received the bulk of his aunt’s fortune after settling a claim with her nieces, by granting each $187,500 in exchange for a relinquishment of all claims to their aunt’s estate. Without Maud to vouch for them, the nieces feared they would receive nothing if they contested.
Mike Berg remained on the Arkansas State Police Commission until shortly before his death in November 1975. He was never charged with any involvement in Maud’s disappearance or with any sort of financial fraud.
Mike Berg Is Never Charged
Thomas Gaughan was a partner in Maud’s law firm and a friend of Mike Berg. Brickell’s articles contend that he and Maud also clashed over Rose Berg’s estate as Gaughan believed Mike was entitled to it all.
Brickell believes Gaughan may also have had involvement in, or knowledge of, Maud’s disappearance, but no proof has been found to confirm these suspicions.
Thomas Gaughan
Maud’s Law Partner
Odis Henley was the original detective assigned to the Maud Crawford case. He told Brickell he found evidence of Mike Berg’s involvement and determined that Maud, one-to-two months before she disappeared, accused Berg to his face of pilfering his aunt’s estate by taking advantage of her diminished mental capacity.
Henley claimed when he notified his superiors of his findings, he was removed from the case and all of the files he had compiled vanished.
Odis Henley
Shortly after the articles were published in 1986, the investigation into the disappearance of Maud Crawford was reopened. Investigators sought to interview Jack Dorris, who had been a carpenter and bodyguard for Mike Berg and whom Detective Henley had long believed was involved with Berg in Maud’s disappearance.
Ill with cancer, Dorris died before he could be questioned. Following Brickell’s articles, police named Dorris, along with Mike Berg, as the prime suspects in Maud’s disappearance.
Jack Dorris
Mike Berg’s Bodyguard
Between 9:30-10:00 on the evening of Maud’s disappearance, while Clyde was still out, several neighbors had seen a large black car pull into the Crawfords’ driveway. Two men were inside the vehicle.
Among Mike Berg’s many business ventures was owning a Cadillac Agency. Detective Henley found that Mike access to a 1948 black Cadillac Fleetwood.
In her articles, Brickell reports that relatives of Doyle Wilson, manager of the Mike Berg Cadillac Agency, told them he saw Berg and Dorris in the Cadillac on the morning after Maud disappeared. That struck him as unusual because he said the car was seldom used, having been sitting in the basement beneath Mike Berg’s office for quite some time. Shortly after Maud’s disappearance, Wilson said he again saw the car back in the basement. This time, there appeared to be blood on the back seat.
Henley found that the car had previously belonged to Rose Berg before her deteriorating health prevented her from driving. Afterwards, Mike Berg had acquired the vehicle and had given it to Jack Dorris. Automobile records show the title was transferred to him in July 1954.
By the time Detective Henley learned of the Cadillac, it, like Maud Crawford and his files on her case, had disappeared and was never found.
Model of Jack Dorris’ Car
Another suspect in the disappearance of Maud Crawford is Lyle Dews, who had worked for Mike Berg as a timberman. Two people, whose identities were not revealed by Bricker, told her that Dews told them that Mike Berg had paid him and two other unnamed men $1,000 each to kidnap and kill Maud Crawford. A woman said Dews confessed his involvement to her in either 1958 or ’59, one-to-two years after Maud’s disappearance, while a man said he conveyed the same account in to him the late 1960s.
At the time of Brickell’s 1986 articles, Lyle Dews’ brother Jack was Ouachita County Sheriff. The results of three polygraph tests administered that year showed Dews was truthful when answering that he did not kidnap or kill Maud and did not know who was responsible, but that he lied when he said he had not told people he had done so. He claimed not to have remembered saying he had killed Maud; his only explanation was that he was drunk in both instances.
Subsequent polygraphs were given to the two people who said Dews had confessed to them. One person passed, while the results for the second were inconclusive due to his deteriorating health and medications he was taking for high blood pressure.
Lyle Dews died in 1999.
Lyle Dews
A Safeway Grocery store in Camden was in the early stages of construction at the time of Maud’s disappearance and according to Dews, was believed to be a safe place to dispose of Maud’s remains. Brickell’s sources said Dews claimed Maud was murdered in a local hotel room and then buried in the store parking lot, which was paved the Monday following her Saturday evening disappearance.
Camden’s former Safeway Store is now occupied by an independently owned furniture store.
Does Maud Crawford Lay Beneath
Camden’s Former Safeway Store?
Investigators believe many of Beth Brickell’s findings, but the reopening of the case in 1986 produced no further clues to support them.
All of the suspected participants, witnesses, and investigators in the Maud Crawford disappearance are now also deceased. No charges were ever filed against anyone.
No Arrests Are Ever Made
Maud Crawford’s remains have never been found.
The Mystery Of Miss Maud
Sources:
- Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
- Camden News
- The Charley Project
- The Disappearance of Maud Crawford by Beth Brickell
- The Doe Network
- Encyclopedia of Arkansas
Sounds like the nephew of her client.
I also wonder if her husband was involved as well