Jasper County Democrat, Volume 19, Number 24, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 June 1916 — Trask Acquitted of Murder at Frankfort [ARTICLE]

Trask Acquitted of Murder at Frankfort

Giles W. Trask, wealthy business man of Circleville and owner of a grain elevator at Tefft, Jasper county, was acquitted of the murder of Mrs. Minerva Evans, fortune teller, at Frankfort Saturday night, after a little more than two hours’ deliberation by the jury. The verdict was greeted with cheers and applauding by the large number of spectators who had assembled in the court room to hear the verdict. The muzder was committed on the night of May 3, and Trask claimed that he killed the woman in selfdefense; that she had hounded and blackmailed him out of several hundred dollars and that on his going to her home on the night of ttie murder she had drawn a revolver and threatened to kill him on his refusal to give her more money; that he wrested the revolver from her hands and she then started toward him with an axe. He struck her with a hammer he had purchased in a ten cent store at Kokomo on the same day, intending to take the hammer to Tefft to use in making some little repairs on his elevator, he testified. Mrs. Evans was found in a pool of blood in front of her home with het skull crushed in from several blows from an axe ..or hammer, and she died without regaining consciousness. Trask was arrested the same morning in the yards of the Glover Leaf railroad. He is said to have first denied any knowledge of the woman, but later admitted that he had killed her in self defense.