Not Innocent: The Idiot Magazines (Part 2)

Here’s the second of the magazine stories about the murder, this one with a more typically lurid cover. Sex and violence are always successful salesmen…

By Louis Adams

The quickest way for a man to make enemies is to cheat at the game of love.

Once too often the handsome farmer plucked at forbidden fruit – and he died.

Frost was just beginning to sparkle in the fields two miles south of Silverton, Oregon, as Emanuel Kellerhals Jr. burrowed deeper under the comforting warmth of the bedcovers to shut out the chill of the night on February 17,1955.

He was tired from his day’s work and as he closed his eyes he was momentarily annoyed by the slam of a car door. The sound came from the direction of his neighbor’s driveway across the road. “Erv Kaser’s home early tonight,” he muttered to his wife.

Suddenly the tiny bedroom reverberated to the shattering roar of a shot close by. “What was that?” Mrs. Kellerhals asked in alarm, rising to a sitting position. Kellerhals jumped from bed and rushed to the window.

From where he stood, the now thoroughly awakened man could see his neighbor’s sprawling hop farm. Parked in the driveway by the house was Ervin Kaser’s sedan.The dome light was burning.