Anna M. Milroy: 1943 Murder

Warning: Graphic Content

The rape and murder of Anna Milroy.

Anna Milroy was born on Valentine’s Day in 1927 to Helen and Lester Milroy. A little analysis and speculation suggest that Anna was named for her father’s younger sister Anna who died in 1911 at the age of 5 and when Lester was 12. Three other daughters in that family died young, at ages 2, 20 and 23.

Anna Milroy was working on the farm of Dan Cronin, Jr. in the summer of 1943 anticipating her junior year at Sutton High. She came to town that Saturday evening and was with her sister Wilma and friend Barbara Carl. The girls stopped at the Yost Service Station for gasoline when Anna excused herself to go to the restroom. When she did not return, Wilma and Barbara searched the station but did not find her. They guessed that Anna had found another way home but when they discovered she was not at home on Sunday, they sounded the alarm.

It was not until noon on Monday that Ray Carlson discovered Anna’s nude, battered body in a ditch south of Sutton. A chisel had been driven into her skull. Contemporary accounts placed the location of the body as eighteen miles south of Sutton, but reliable memories put the site as much closer, just a couple of miles south of town.

Late that afternoon a blood-spattered car was seen parked in Sutton. State Sheriff Lloyd Mengel arrested Private Joseph MacAvoy, a soldier at Harvard Army Airfield who was out on bond after attacking a woman in Hastings. MacAvoy had recently been demoted from Sergeant to Private in Army disciplinary action.

MacAvoy signed a detailed confession by 5:30 Tuesday morning in which he admitted meeting Anna at the gas station claiming she had accompanied him willingly and they had gone for a ride in the country. At some point things went wrong between the two. He denied raping Anna but evidence supported that charge. He admitted striking the girl with a crank and dumping her body before returning to Harvard.

Officials charged that he had returned to the body on Sunday and may have found her still alive and then drove the chisel into her head. He never confessed to that part of the charge. County Attorney S. W. Moger filed charges of first degree murder and murder in the perpetration of a rape. MacAvoy’s attorneys and his mother attempted to prove that injuries he had suffered as a youth in Brooklyn had contributed to his behavior.

Joseph MacAvoy was convicted of first-degree murder on December 11th after only 75 minutes of deliberation by the jury. He was sentenced to die in the electric chair on December 30.

Here the story takes an odd twist. The Nebraska electric chair had not been used since 1929 and had fallen into disrepair. Details are blurred but apparently the source of parts to fix the chair was the U.S. Army and someone in that bureaucracy determined that the army was busy with other business in 1943 and that conducting a world war took priority over a Nebraska execution. (Seems reasonable.)

All obstacles were overcome by early 1945 and Wardon Neil Olson conducted the execution of Joseph Thomas MacAvoy on the morning of March 23, 1945.

The murder of Anna Milroy is the huge blot on the relationship between Sutton and the nearby military installations during World War II. There were probably a number of other occasions when local citizens found valid cause to regret the presence of the nearby army and navy installations but World War II brought the military world into the heart of U.S. live as most other conflicts have not.

Family Connection

Anna was my double 6th cousin once removed from my maternal Milroy family.

SOURCES (1):

• [1]Sutton Nebraska Museum
  https://suttonhistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-1943-murder-of-anna-milroy.html