Death of a Colporteur

Book excerpt: On September 18, 1885, the body of a seventeen-year-old boy was found in a hastily dug grave beneath a culvert on a country road south of Dixon, Illinois. It was the remains of one Frank Charles Thiel, a young colporteur of Bible salesman, who hailed from the City of Elgin, seventy-five miles east of Dixon. The young book agent had been brutally murdered. The following narrative is a history of the events surrounding the murder of Frank Thiel that eventually grew into a major news story and subsequent murder trial in Lee County, Illinois during the autumn and winter of 1885-86. Over 130 years after the murder the road where the body was discovered is still named "Bloody Gulch Road."