Episodes

Kill Daddy: The Turley Ouija Board Murder (Ouija Boards Part 9)

Chris Amandier

24 Jul 2020 • 23 min read

The Turley Ouija Board Murder: In 1933, a girl shot her father on the orders of a Ouija board. Or was it her former-beauty-queen mother who encouraged the violence?

When playing with a Ouija board with her mother, 14-year-old Mattie Turley receives the message that she must kill her father so her mother can be free to marry a handsome cowboy.

Her mother, Dorothea, who had won a beauty contest in 1916 and had attended the London Academy of Music, had married instead of following her dream of being an actress. Shortly after the family moved to an isolated cabin in the mountains of Arizona, Dorothea began consulting the Ouija board and making strange demands because of it. Was she just manipulating the people around her for her own purposes, or was something more mysterious afoot?

Highlights include:
• The “American Venus” beauty contest
• A manipulative mother
• A stereotypical cowboy
• A Ouija-ordered murder
• Scandal at a girls’ reform school
• America’s creepy salute
• Misandry vs. misogyny

From The Press Democrat, Sunday, Sep 2, 1934

From The Decatur Daily Review, Sun, Jul 22, 1934

From The Daily Republican. Thu, Jul 23, 1936

From The Evening Review. Wed, Sep 23, 1936

Episode Script for Kill Daddy: The Turley Ouija Board Murder (Ouija Boards Part 9)

DISCLAIMER: I’m providing this version of the script for accessibility purposes. It hasn’t been proofread, so please excuse typos. There are also some things that may differ between the final episode and this draft script. Please treat the episode audio as the final product.

BACK in the year 1917, Dorothea Irene Kelynack’s pretty little head contained no thoughts of Ouija boards – nor, possibly, of much else. But that didn’t matter, for Dorothea was only 22, and had just won, over 50,000 girls in a nation-wide contest, the title of “The American Venus.”

-Oakland Tribune, Nov. 14, 1937

There are a few Ouija board murders I want to talk about, but today I’d like to talk about the Turley murder case.
The story starts in March 1916, when Dorothea Irene Kelynack, from Astoria, New York, is declared “an exact flesh-and-blood replica of the marble Venus of the Louvre” by the New York Evening World.
- The article said that Dorothea had “springing, supple lines” and “arresting charm” and a “perfectly modeled, perfectly managed body.”
A writeup in the Washington post was accompanied by a photo of her wearing a floor-length, gauzy and very “ruched” strapless dress, and then a table comparing her measurements (height, weight, waist and ankle circumference, etc) to the Venus de Milo and Venuses at Wellesley and Swarthmore.
- Apparently colleges collected women’s measurements in their scoliosis screenings, so it I guess they found a woman with the “same” measurements of the Venus de Milo and announced her the Venus of that college.
Apparently she talked about how she wore a loose corset, and enjoyed drinking wine at dinner and eating candy. She said that it’s important for women to have a career to keep “mentally alert”
At the time, she was performing as a singer in NYC. She’d studied at the London Academy of Music, and wanted to be a stage or screen actor. She’d apparently also spent time at colleges in Dublin, Leipzig, Paris, and Berlin.
When she was a kid, she was a tomboy. She said:
- “I believe that the tomboy has a better chance of becoming a Venus than the affected, artificial, repressed child whose one duty in life is to be ‘be a little lady,’”
She apparently received hundreds of letters and marriage proposals.
In early 1918, she ended up eloping with Ernest Turley, who was in the Navy.
In December 1918, while they were living in Boston, they had a daughter, Mattie, and a year or two later, they had a son, David.
They moved to California, and then in August 1933 they relocated to Arizona, because Dorothea had asthma and the Arizona air was supposed to be good for her lungs.
It sounds like they lived in a fairly rural area, in the White Mountains, near Springerville, Arizona. Their home was a small house that I saw described as a “shack” or as an “ugly rented cabin.” Apparently their only neighbors were cattle ranchers.
We don’t have a ton of information about how she felt about it, but based on everything we know about her, I’d be surprised if she was happy. She went from being basically a refined beauty queen in NYC to living in a small house with a military man in Great Depression-era Arizona.
Contemporary newspapers said that her husband’s salary wasn’t in keeping with her desire for a lavish lifestyle, etc, but that may just be sexism talking.
So in 1933, Dorothea supposedly started doing two things:
- Around September, a month after they’d moved to Arizona, she started playing around with a ouija board.
  - While going for a walk, she saw some “picture rocks” or artifacts from prehistoric indigenous people.
  - She asked the Ouija board about the rocks, and it said that gold was buried underneath them.
  - Supposedly she convinced Ernest to do some digging and dynamiting to try to find the gold, but they didn’t find anything.
  - Both Mattie and David later said that while their father was blowing up rocks, their mother was hanging out with a “young cowboy.”
  - This whole episode caused some argument between them, and supposedly they got into a few arguments over the next few months. One article claimed that she screamed at him: “Every time I look at you I want to kill you!” However, it doesn’t say who reported that he’d said that, and I wonder if the reporter was embellishing for a better story.
- So the other thing that happened shortly after they moved to Arizona is that Dorothea met a 22-year-old, cowboy named Kent Pearce, the young cowboy who Dorothea had been spending time with.
  - According to contemporary newspaper accounts, he was a “movie-type cowpuncher, big hat, neckerchief, tight pants, bow legs.”
  - I want to read a bit of from an article by Lynn Peril, from 2016, which is linked in the shownotes:
    - Like Dorothea before him, Pearce dreamed of a movie career. Mattie testified that her mother and Pearce frequently drove out of town for late-night petting parties, with 14-year-old Mattie and a friend of Pearce’s in the backseat. Once the foursome stayed out until morning. “I have a hell of a good time on the Mesa,” Dorothea told a neighbor.
  - That’s . . . Really screwed up. And this is around the time when I lose all sympathy for Dorothea.
  - I read one article that almost made it sound like Pearce thought both Dorothea and Mattie were attractive, which was really creepy.
  - Also, just in general, there’s a lot of stuff written about how attractive both Dorothea and Mattie were. For example, here’s an excerpt of a 1937 article talking about the case and describing the mother and daughter using the Ouija board together:
    - Mother and daughter, both strikingly beautiful, they faced each other across a small table. . . .The girl was only fifteen – but in her smooth oval face, tilted upwards, and in the gracious mood of her form, a precocious maturity was evident. Her eyes remained closed, but the eyes of her striking mother were open. They rested sometimes on the board, sometimes on the girl, with a sombre, inscrutable gaze.
  - Also, correction, she was fourteen what that happened (she turned 15 in December 1933).
Dorothea supposedly started asking her husband about his life insurance policies (he had two policies worth $5,000 each, which is almost $100K in today’s dollars.)
She and Mattie also apparently started questioning Ernest about the range of Mattie’s gun, asking how far away they needed to be to kill a deer.
Also, at the same time, Dorothea and Mattie were playing with the Ouija board together, and supposedly the board started saying that Mattie needed to kill her father in order to free her mother. The board told her that she wouldn’t get in trouble if she did it, etc.
- To me, this is pretty obviously Dorothea manipulating the board and her daughter.
- The particular session where the board said that Mattie must kill her father was on November 8, 1933.
- Tthey also used cards to confirm the command. Mattie said:
  - The queen of hearts was to stand for mother, the king for the cowboy she wanted to marry, the ten spot diamond for father and the ace of spades for death. Time and again, the king and queen came up together, and the ten spot and ace were paired. That meant death for daddy.
On November 17, 1933, a skunk crawled under the family’s house and started making a lot of noise and stinking up the place. The family couldn’t sleep, and the next day, was David’s birthday. When Dorothea and David were out buying groceries for a special dinner that night, Mattie stayed home with her father to try to help him catch the skunk, at Dorothea’s suggestion.
According to a fairly lurid article, supposedly Dorothea and David left Mattie” holding her loaded shotgun and eating an apple.”
Ernest went to milk their cow, and she followed him, still holding her loaded gun. Then when he headed back home, Mattie hung behind. Suddenly two shots rang out, and Ernest had been hit. When Ernest turned around, he saw Mattie on her knees holding the gun.
Mattie was extremely upset about having hurt him, and rushed over.
He assumed it was an accident and admonished her, saying “You should be more careful. Let this be a lesson to you.” before sending her to get help.
Dorothea and David were just getting home as Mattie was leaving, and Mattie told them that she’d accidentally shot her father. She explained that she’d tripped, which had made the gun go off.
A few hours later, the doctor and some neighbors had come over.
Cowboy Kent Pearce supposedly held the lamp as Dorothea took care of Ernest.
Mattie was hysterical and people felt bad for her.
The cops came and seemed to believe Mattie’s story. But one cop was suspicious, because the bullets had traveled downward in Ernest’s body as if she’d been standing with the gun at her shoulder. If Mattie had been shooting from below, they would have gone upwards.
When he brought up his suspicious, Mattie confessed that she had intentionally shot her father because the Ouija board told her to.
She testified that:
- “ I remembered how important it was to Mother for her to marry her handsome cowboy, so I raised the gun quickly again and shot both barrels.”
When asked about the Ouija board session, she said she and her mother had used the board together, and the board had spelled out “Daddy must die” and when she asked who was going to kill him, it said “MT” which her mother said meant Mattie Turley.
Mattie also said:
- “I asked Mother if I had to do what the ouija board said, and she told me there was no escaping its command.”
- She also said: “Mother told me that the ouija board could not be denied and that I would not even be arrested for doing it.”
- This to me really feels like Dorothea was behind all of this, and her plan went awry as soon as Mattie confessed.
- Mattie later said that she almost lost her nerve and didn’t shoot, but then when she thought about “how much it would mean” to her mother, she did it.
When Dorothea heard about the confession, she flipped out. She said the cops had interrogated Mattie and browbeat her to the point that she would have confessed to anything.
Mattie said she wasn’t mistreated; she told the truth because she thought it was the right thing to do.
Dorothea maintained that the shooting was accidental.
Initially, it seemed like Ernest would survive.
It sounds like Mattie didn’t have much of a trial, if it even was a trial–I think it was just a court hearing? On December 22, 1933, she pleaded guilty to an attempted murder charge, and the county attorney reccomended that she be sent to the State School for Girls for 6 years. The attourney seemed somewhat sympathetic, and said that “she is very much broken up over the whole affair.”
- So that’s what happened. I tried to find out what I could about the state school for girls, which was opened in 1928, but there’s not a lot of information about it, probably because it was only around for about 8 years.
- The Arizona State School for Girls was in Randolph, Arizona, which is a historically black area that grew as black agricultural workers left Oklahoma and settled in Arizona. We have an image of “Okies” as white farmers, but many were black.
- It sounds like the school housed girls with mental health issues in addition to girls with criminal pasts.
- The school closed in 1936.
- Records from the attorney generals office claim that it was shut down by the state to save money, but I found a dissertation by an intern who worked at a county juvenile court, which was published in 1963, which told a different story:
  - The school was abolished by the legislature in 1935 due to scandal caused by alleged sexual relations between the girls and prisoners from the state prison in Florence who took care of the maintenance work for the school.
- The girls were moved to a privately run religious institution that I think was affiliated with a convent.
I wanted to read another little bit of Lynn Peril’s article:
- “They thought I wouldn’t take the rap,” [Mattie] said. “But I killed Daddy and I want to pay for it. That’s the only way I can show the world and him how sorry I am.” When she was taken away to begin serving her sentence at the grim-sounding State School for Girls, Dorothea told her, in what Mattie called and cold and sarcastic tone: “I thank you for your cooperation. Be a good girl.”
So meanwhile, back in December of 1933, Ernest’s conditioned worsened. He’d started out at a local hospital, but then he was was brought on a US Marines plane to a naval base hospital in San Diego. While in the hospital there, he said “When I’m able I’m going back to Arizona to prosecute my daughter to the full extent of the law for her attempt to murder me.”
He died in San Diego on December 26, 1933, a little over a month after he was shot, and four days after Mattie’s hearing.
This was a big problem for Dorothea, because suddenly this was a murder case, and Dorothea was held as an accomplice with $5000 bail.
As for Dorothea, her trial got tons of news coverage and was described as a “worldwide spectacle.” To read a bit from a 1937 Oakland Tribute article that described Dorothea’s trial:
- Mother and daughter faced each other across a crowded courtroom, and Mattie stuck to her story. Young Pollard Wiltbank, the “apprentice” cowboy, swore that Kent Pearce and Mrs. Turley spent most of their time together, on outings, in each other’s arms. A neighbor woman testified that the accused had said she loved Pearce and wanted to marry him. Pearce, on the stand, denied hopes of marriage – but Mrs. Turley was sent to prison for 20 years.
Another article I read said she got 25 years, but at any rate it was a long time.
As a reminder, her jury was made up of 12 men, since women weren’t allowed on juries at the time–it sounds like some states started letting them serve in the late 1930s. Supposedly the jury was made up of cowboys and ranchers, which doesn’t seem like a sympathetic audience for a rancher’s murder case.
It really sounds like the main evidence against Dorothea was Mattie’s testimony. Mattie said that she’d been directed by the Ouija board to shoot her father so “mother could marry a handsome cowboy.”
But to the end, Dorothea insisted that Mattie had shot Ernest accidentally.
Apparently Mattie’s brother, David, told her: “Now you’ve done what you wanted to do to her” (meaning his mother) “I hope you’re satisfied.”
- I haven’t been able to find much else that seemed to accuse Mattie of plotting her mother’s demise, though Lynn Peril’s article says:

Mattie was angry with [her mother and] her father because they “didn’t want her to use rouge or to run about at night with cowpunchers or to cross her legs the way she did or to wear such short dresses.” She tried to pin the blame on her mother, Dorothea said, “because some of the cowboys didn’t like me.”

I’m not sure if I understand that logic, but if she was trying to get her mom in trouble, this was kinda a weird way to do it, since she ended up locked up too and she was the one holding the murder weapon. My sense is that this is more a reflection of David’s sorrow at his family being broken up and wanting to not hate his mother. At this point, I think he would have been around 13 or 14.

In prison, Dorothea worked at the prison library, I guess because she was so well educated.
On May 20, 1935, Dorothea made a plea to the supreme court for her conviction to be overturned.
In June 1936, after she’d spent 2 years in prison, the State Supreme Court granted Dorothea was a new trial.
The judge dismissed the first degree assault charges because the attorney general said that there wasn’t enough evidence to have a second trial. The attorney general had taken on the case because the county attorney, who should have prosecuted, was one of Dorothea’s lawyers for the first trial.
So Dorothea was acquitted, and on September 12, 1936, Dorothea walked free.
She told reporters that she planned to secure her daughter’s release from the state school and bring her “back East.”
David had been sent to live with Dorothea’s mother in Ridgewood, NY (in Queens.) Dorothea said that she and Mattie would go live there with them.
But it turns that Mattie didn’t want to go live with her mother. I can’t imagine why . . .
- She initially refused to see Dorothea, but then saw her and told her that she never wanted to see her again.
So, in April 1938, Dorothea sued Thelma Branford Bailey, who’d been the superintendent of the reform school where Mattie had been for $7,500. She claimed that Mattie’s mind had been “poisoned” against her. She didn’t win the lawsuit.
Dorothea died in 1973, when she was 78 years old, and it’s unclear what happened to Mattie and David.

I want to talk a little about some of the gender stuff going on here. Most of my sources for this are historical newspaper sources from the 1930s, though I did look at 3-4 websites as well. While googling, I saw that this case is definitely not very well known, but it’s been used by small sites with gender-related focuses to back up their points.
So, first, there’s a “misandry” site that reprinted many of the historical articles, though it didn’t really have any commentary. I think this was just supposed to be a straight-up example of “misandry”
- What do you think of when you hear the word “misandry”?
- To me, it’s definitely a tongue-in-cheek term. It’s supposedly a counterpart to misogyny, but of course it’s not misogyny’s opposite, since misogyny has been a major societal force for a long time and it still drives and motivates many people and movements today.
- Whereas misandry is a term that I’ve heard mostly used by queer women in the context of jokes, but tbh I don’t think I’ve heard someone say it out loud since like 2014 or 2015. The “misandry” blog post that reprinted some of these articles was from 2011.
- While many homophobic people have called queer women men-haters, in my experience it’s actually straight women who hate men the most, because they have to be with them. Like how many murder cases are there of queer women killing men, and how many murders cases are there of wives murdering their husbands?
So then on the other side of things, I accidentally clicked into a mens rights activist site that had a write-up of the case as an example of how men have been historically marginalized, etc. I didn’t read it very closely because it’s just an example of someone trolling through history, finding one of the rarer cases of domestic violence driven by a wife rather than a husband, and trying to use it as an argument that white men are a traditionally marginalized group, which is ridiculous.
- Though to be clear, domestic violence can be perpetuated by people of any gender, toward partners of any gender, but if we’re looking at the wide view of history, I think we can probably agree that white men are generally not a marginalized group.
But my point in bringing up these two examples is that there’s a reason why people on both feminist and misogynist camps bring up this article: it’s because it’s really easy to profile Dorothea as a petty, materialistic woman who wasn’t being kept in the custom she was used to and who wanted luxury, adoration, and a hot young boyfriend. And she was willing to tear up her family to get it.
It’s extremely hard for me to sympathize with Dorothea, because I believe Mattie’s testimony over Dorothea’s, and it’s so screwed up to use your own 14-year-old child as a murder vicitim.
I think we can probably agree that Dorothea is a bully who just happened to underestimate her daughter’s conscience, and who maybe thought she’d used the Ouija board to scare her daughter into obeying her.
But while reading these articles, I couldn’t help wondering what her marriage was really like. The articles all depicted Ernest as a hard-working vicitim who was just trying to give his family, in particular his wife, a good life. And that may be true. Maybe Dorothea was just a scheming, evil wife. But they lived in a really remote location, and the press was really prejudiced back then, just like it is now, so who knows? Maybe Dorothea was driven into the arms of a younger man because her husband was cruel?
We’ll never know, but I think it’s important for us to remember that in this story, as in any story in history, we’re really only getting one side of the story. And in this case, the story is Mattie’s, which is the side that happens to match the story that the press and courts wanted to be true.
One of my sources, the December 22, 1933, edition of The Monroe News-Star from Monroe, Louisiana, printed a huge article that takes up the whole top part of the page, called Do Good Wives Go On Strike? on page 2, above the continuation of the Turley murder case story that had started on the front page.
- The article was a syndicated article, so it wasn’t written by someone in Monroe, it was acquired through a newspaper service like many historical articles that I see are.
- The author of the article was Kathleen Norris, a popular novelist and newspaper writer who was one of the highest-read and highest-paid female writers of her time. She wrote 93 novels, and a lot of them were bestsellers.
  - According to Wikipedia, “Norris used her fiction to promote family and moralistic values, such as the sanctity of marriage, the nobility of motherhood, and the importance of service to others.”
  - One digression RE: Kathleen Norris that is interesting enough to talk about is that there’s a picture of her in 1941 at an “America First Committee” rally at Madison Square Garden giving what looks like a Nazi salute (picture linked in the shownotes). She was one of the big four organizers of the America First Committee.
    - The America First Committee was formed in 1940 as an anti-interventionist group that opposed America’s entry into WWII.
    - From the beginning, it had pretty mixed messages. Initially it was just about not intervening, but pretty quickly, it attracted antisemetic and pro-fascist leaders. It dissolved in December 1921, after Pearl Harbor, but at its height, it had 800,000 members and was one of the largest anti-war groups in US history. Modern-day right-wing people like Pat Buchanan (and later on, the Trump administration) adopted the “America First” slogan from this group.
    - Famed aviator Charles Lindberg was a member, and a prominent anti-war activist, who was really admired in 1930s Germany, so much so that in 1937, he was invited to tour the German air force, or Luftwaffee, as it ramped up. Though he was still publicly anti-war, after his trip, he advised the US Army that the US had fallen far behind and needed to beef up its air corps. Lindberg was widely viewed of anti-Semitic because of some of the anti-war speeches he continued to give, even after his visit to Germany.
    - Children’s book author Dr. Seuss actually created about 400 political cartoons for a New York tabloid called PM, and many of those cartoons were focused on criticizing the America First movement and saying that the group was pro-Nazi. There’s one from October 1941 that shows a woman wearing a sweater that says “America First” reading a book called Adolf the Wolf to two upset-looking children. She says “. . . And the Wolf chewed up the children and spit out those bones . . . But those were Foreign Children and it really didn’t matter.” (Though to be clear, he also published some cartoons that advocated the internment of Japanese Americans in concentration camps so not all of his advocacy was good. I guess he later regret it and wrote Horton Hears a Who as a book about how Americans’ occupation of Japan, and it was supposed to be an allegory and apology.)
    - So anyway, back to Kathleen Norris: What was this salute that Kathleen Norris gave at the America First Committee Rally? It was supposedly something called the Bellamy salute, which was popularized in the United States in 1892, and to me at least, it’s practically indistinguishable from the Nazi salute.
    - Sidenote, the Bellamy salute was supposed to be a palm up salute, but all the pictures I found from the 19th century shows it as a palm-down salute.
    - In 1920, Italian fascists adopted a similar salute, calling it a Roman salute, and of course the Nazis followed suit in 1923.
    - The Bellamy salute became controversial, though groups like the Daughters of the American Revolution argued that America should keep its Bellamy salute.
    - People said that interventionists took pictures of anti-interventionists doing the Bellamy salute to make them look like Nazis, though I think it’s really fair to ask why they continued doing the Bellamy salute even in the early 1940s, 20 years after the Nazis had started using it, and when some Americans had started condemning it as being too close to the Nazi salute. It seems really pointed to me that they kept doing it, especially since they could have plausible deniability. The Bellamy salute was discontinued in 1942.
    - Much like eugenics, it kinda feels like the Bellamy salute was something Americans started, Germans adopted because they thought it was a good idea, and then after Americans joined WWII, Americans had to rewrite history a bit for optics reasons.
    - But you can take a look at the Wikipedia page for the Bellamy salute if you want to see a bunch of American schoolchildren looking like Hitler youth.
    - By the way, when I was reading about the Bellamy salute, I remembered something that I’d totally forgotten. So because I went to public school, every school day from kindergarten through 12th grade started with the American pledge and the Texas pledge, and every classroom had both flags hung up above the blackboard in the front of the room.
    - We were told that we had to stand for the pledge, and the normal way to salute was to put your right hand over your heart. But I remember that there was a second accepted way, where you could hold your right hand straight out, with your palm up and your elbow tucked against your waist.
    - It’s basically the configuration you get if you had your hand on your heart and dropped it. But I wonder if that was a revised version of the Bellamy salute, where they had to change it so it didn’t look like the Nazi salute.
- So back to the article that Kathleen Norris wrote: it’s a fairly conservative article, underscoring that divorce is bad and women should stand by their man, etc, but the main thrust of the article is that wives should be allowed to have fun things to look forward to, like trips and vacations with the family and with their female friends, to lighten the drudgery of the household work.
- To read a bit of it:
  - To know that in a few months she is going up to visit her sister in Canada, or that she and Betty are to have the car and ramble away toward the Lakes for three weeks, makes all the home drudgery light, and preserves her in the ridiculous delusion under which she descended years ago; that she got the best man in the world.
- And then later, the article closes with:
  - The children scramble for books, slam doors, are gone. A fly buzzes in the kitchen; another in the bedroom. The bathroom is all tumbled towels and spilled water; the breakfast table sticky with cups and melting butter; magazines and cigarette ashes are scattered about the sitting room; there is dust everywhere. This is mother’s daily situation. Any woman who has been married nineteen years has faced it alone almost seven thousand times.
- So even though this article has some a sort of almost feminist veneer if you squint at it, it’s no surprise that the Monroe News-Star was fine with printing it alongside and article about a supposedly evil and unhinged wife. And after all, it contains lines like “It is strange that so many fine men pick superficial, cold, little gold-diggers for wives and so many self-centered men get good women.”

Sources consulted RE: the Turley Ouija Board Murder

Websites RE: the Turley Ouija Board Murder

Kathleen Norris doing the Bellamy salute: https://twitter.com/MoviesSilently/status/1048320703194255360
Good picture of Dorothea Turley: https://www.flickr.com/photos/chain12/49670170433/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_United_States_juries
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-dr-seuss-satirized-america-first-decades-donald-trump-made-policy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Norris
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellamy_salute
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_salute
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/17889624/dorothea-irene-kelynack-american-venus/
https://www.hilobrow.com/2016/08/25/planet-of-peril-7/
http://www.city-data.com/forum/phoenix-area/192459-how-do-you-remember-phoenix-stories-851.html
https://repository.arizona.edu/bitstream/handle/10150/551304/AZU_TD_BOX224_E9791_1957_88.pdf?sequence=1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randolph,_Arizona
https://repository.arizona.edu/handle/10150/611636
https://azmemory.azlibrary.gov/digital/api/collection/statepubs/id/33747/download
https://azmemory.azlibrary.gov/digital/collection/agopinions/search/searchterm/state%20school%20for%20girls
https://azmemory.azlibrary.gov/digital/collection/agopinions/id/12080
https://reallifeishorror.blogspot.com/2015/11/real-life-ouija-board-murders-dorothea.html
https://unknownmisandry.blogspot.com/2011/12/donna-turleys-clever-tactic-to-murder.html
https://knowledgenuts.com/2013/07/30/the-first-murder-by-ouija-board/
https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2017/01/death-from-beyond-bizarre-cases-of-ouija-board-killings/

Historical articles and advertisements RE: the Turley Ouija Board Murder

The Monroe News-Star (Monroe, Louisiana) · Fri, Dec 22, 1933 · Page 1-2
The Decatur Daily Review (Decatur, Illinois) · Sun, Jul 22, 1934 · Page 32
Longview News-Journal (Longview, Texas) · Sun, Dec 24, 1933 · Page 22
Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, December 29, 1933, Page A-7, Image 7
The Coshocton Tribune (Coshocton, Ohio) · Wed, Dec 27, 1933 · Page 1
Corsicana Daily Sun (Corsicana, Texas) · Fri, Dec 22, 1933 · Page 2
Pampa Daily News (Pampa, Texas) · Fri, Dec 22, 1933 · Page 1
The Salt Lake Tribune (Salt Lake City, Utah) · Sat, Dec 23, 1933 · Page 8
The Salt Lake Tribune (Salt Lake City, Utah) · Thu, Dec 28, 1933 · Page 2
The Decatur Daily Review (Decatur, Illinois) · Sun, Jul 22, 1934 · Page 32
The Paris News (Paris, Texas) · Wed, Jan 31, 1934 · Page 8
The Wellington Leader (Wellington, Texas) · Thu, Feb 1, 1934 · Page 12
The Daily Capital News (Jefferson City, Missouri) · Thu, Jun 14, 1934 · Page 10
The Marshall News Messenger (Marshall, Texas) · Mon, Jun 11, 1934 · Page 8
Stockton Independent (Stockton, California) · Sun, Jun 10, 1934 · Page 13
The Pasadena Post (Pasadena, California) · Mon, Jun 11, 1934 · Page 2
Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, July 08, 1934,Page B-3, Image 19
The Press Democrat (Santa Rosa, California) · Sun, Sep 2, 1934 · Page 7
The San Bernardino County Sun (San Bernardino, California) · Tue, Apr 30, 1935 · Page 13
The Nebraska State Journal (Lincoln, Nebraska) · Wed, Jul 1, 1936 · Page 10
The Press Democrat (Santa Rosa, California) · Tue, Jun 30, 1936 · Page 1
The Daily Republican (Monongahela, Pennsylvania) · Thu, Jul 23, 1936 · Page 4
The Evening Review (East Liverpool, Ohio) · Wed, Sep 23, 1936 · Page 5
The Whittier News (Whittier, California) · Sat, Sep 12, 1936 · Page 1
The Anniston Star (Anniston, Alabama) · Sat, Feb 6, 1937 · Page 2
Mrs Turley Files Suit for 7500-Evening star., April 20, 1938, Page A-5, Image 5
The Whittier News (Whittier, California) · Sat, Apr 21, 1934 · Page 5
The Gallup Independent (Gallup, New Mexico) · Fri, Jun 1, 1934 · Page 6

Check out the shownotes for the rest of the series to see all of the sources used.