LOUDOUN COUNTY, Va. — The scene was set with a captivating, almost poetic elegance, reminiscent of the opening of an Agatha Christie murder mystery. “On the frosty morning of Jan.
13, 1932, the hard-riding, fox-hunting socialites of Loudoun County Virginia awoke to find murder in their midst” - Time magazine, May 8, 1933. The murder of Agnes Boeing Ilsley, a former Fargoan, was far from fiction. Her death and the subsequent capture of her killer paved the way for significant changes in jury selection practices and marked a pivotal moment in the advancement of civil rights.
It also helped chart career paths for a Supreme Court justice and civil rights icon. A Minto girl Agnes Boeing was born on June 14, 1891, (some records list her birth year as 1890) in Wisconsin to Julius Boeing and the former Amelia Kruggel. The family, which also included Agnes’ younger brothers, John and Paul, moved to Minto, North Dakota, where Julius worked as a pharmacist.
By 1920, U.S. Census records show the family had moved to Fargo.
They lived at 726 Broadway, near where the Sanford Broadway Clinic is today. ADVERTISEMENT After attending a private girls' school in Illinois and receiving a bachelor’s degree in home economics from the University of Wisconsin, Agnes worked as an extension agent in Wisconsin and later at North Dakota Agricultural Colleges (now NDSU) in Fargo. According to Forum reports, she was “widely known” and respected by North Dakota women for her work in home economics as “a home demonstration leader.
” A Jan. 14, 1932, story in The Forum reported Agnes Boeing Ilsley, played “a prominent role in the early history of organization of homemakers clubs of the state, which now enlist about 10,000 farm women in their membership roles.” In 1927, Agnes, then 37, married Spencer Ilsley, 61, the son of the influential founder of Marshall and Ilsley Bank in Wisconsin.
As Spencer's second wife, Agnes was introduced to a life of luxury, spending time at their 200-acre hunting estate in the bluegrass country of Middleburg, Virginia. There, she became a renowned horsewoman, frequently participating in fox hunts with America's upper crust. It was at that estate that Agnes Boeing Ilsley’s life ended at the hands of a disgruntled former employee.
The murder In January 1932, Agnes, widowed following Spencer's death the previous year, was living with her maid, Mina Buckner, 60, in a cottage adjacent to the main house on her property. Newspaper reports suggested the women were staying there out of fear for their safety due to a recent conflict with a former employee, George Crawford, whom Ilsley had fired after accusing him of theft. Agnes asked her brother, Paul Boeing, to stay at the main house for protection.
On the morning of Jan. 13, Paul left the manor to join his sister for breakfast at the cottage when he discovered the bloodied bodies of Ilsely and Buckner, slain in their bedrooms. ADVERTISEMENT Both had been severely beaten.
Authorities say Ilsley’s car was missing and believed to have been taken by the murderer in his attempt to escape. It was later discovered near the Potomac River bridge near Arlington National Cemetery, about an hour away. Authorities immediately suspected Crawford, the former chauffeur, of being involved.
According to Time, Crawford had previously served five years on a Virginia chain gang for receiving stolen goods. He was also arrested several times for minor theft but was released on lack of evidence. A short time later, he was hired to drive for Ilsely, but she fired him when she suspected him of stealing liquor from the house.
It’s unclear whether he stole the liquor or why Ilsley and Buckner felt threatened enough by him to move into the cottage. No matter. The double murder of Ilsley and Buckner outraged the bluebloods of Loudoun County, who put their horses and hounds to hunting Crawford instead of a fox.
The search for George Crawford, who was Black, went on for nearly a year with no luck, “a fact which possibly saved him from a lynching,” according to Time magazine at the time. However, in January 1933, Crawford was found in Boston, where he was arrested for a petty larceny charge. Despite those charges, he claimed he was innocent of the Middleburg murders.
Virginia governor John Garland Pollard requested Massachusetts governor Joseph Ely send Crawford back to Virginia to stand trial. Ely signed the papers, but before Crawford could head south to Middleburg, NAACP attorneys asked the federal court to assess the legality of Crawford being sent back and tried in Virginia. Judge James Arnold Lowell granted the group’s writ of habeas corpus, thus forbidding Virginia from getting Crawford back.
He reasoned that Virginia (the former capital of the Confederacy) still did not allow African-Americans to serve on juries; therefore, the Supreme Court could void Crawford's conviction as contrary to the 14th Amendment, which provides all citizens “equal protection under the law.” ADVERTISEMENT Lowell said, “The whole thing is absolutely wrong. It goes against my Yankee common sense.
I’d rather be wrong on my law than give my sanction to legal nonsense. They say justice is blind, but it is not blind as a bat.” The battle moved from the courthouse to Congress.
Representative Howard Smith, whose district included Loudoun County, demanded Judge Lowell be impeached for either being “ignorant or flagrantly incompetent” in his legal knowledge, thus releasing to the world “a self-confessed murderer of the most vicious type.” Despite Smith’s comments, Crawford never confessed to the murders and Lowell did not release him from jail. He was still being held behind bars in Massachusetts pending further court proceedings.
The extradition case went to the Supreme Court and Congress voted to begin impeachment proceedings against Judge Lowell. Eventually, an agreement was reached to return Crawford to Virginia. A civil rights fight Charles Houston, the NAACP's legal counsel and Dean of Howard University’s law school, fought on behalf of Crawford.
Houston assembled an impressive all-black team of lawyers, researchers, and aides (including future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall and acclaimed attorney Oliver Hill, who were law students then). But the legal dream team wasn’t exactly welcomed to the South with open arms. According to a 2019 report about the case, entitled “Loudoun County Courthouse Path to Freedom, Justice and Racial Equality, “Despite their impressive degrees, their obvious ability, and the praise they received in the press and from all their colleagues in the Courthouse, the Crawford legal team could not find any lodging or public place to eat in Leesburg (Virginia) and had to take their meals in the back of a small black-owned barbershop.
” While preparing for the case, Houston determined that there was too much evidence pointing to Crawford’s guilt to fight for his innocence. Instead, they sought to save his life. ADVERTISEMENT They challenged the fairness of the jury selection process and how it led to the systematic exclusion of Black people from selection for either grand or trial juries.
“They relentlessly, but politely and professionally questioned the senior judge and other officials who were responsible for selecting people for Loudon’s jury list, creating an official record that clearly demonstrated the entire biased process,” according to the 2019 report. Crawford was found guilty, but his life was spared. He was sentenced to life in prison.
But in the civil rights community, it was seen as a victory since it showed a black man tried and judged by a white judge and jury in the South being given a lesser sentence. The case also laid the groundwork for future civil rights cases. A few years later, the U.
S. Supreme Court ruled that biased jury selection was unconstitutional. What happened next? Two weeks before Crawford was sentenced to life in prison in December 1933, Judge Lowell, who fought for Crawford’s right to a fair trial, died after an illness of 10 days.
His death ended the impeachment inquiry against him. The young law students who served on Crawford’s legal team, Thurgood Marshall and Oliver Hill, both claimed his case was the watershed moment in their lives when they committed to working for civil rights. The murder victim, Agnes Boeing Ilsley, was buried in Milwaukee next to her husband.
But she lived on in the memories of the people of Loudoun County after she was gone. ADVERTISEMENT Nicknamed “Pokie” by those in her tight circle of friends, she was said to be “universally beloved by the villagers of the community,” and according to reports in The Forum, did not live ostentatiously. “She wore little jewelry, ordinarily went about in sports costumes, and did not divulge in such nighttime gayeties as the quiet nature of the place affords.
” Instead, she chose to ride her horses and work on restoring an old mill on her property. Known for her "sunny disposition," Agnes Boeing Ilsely, the Minto girl and former champion of North Dakota homemakers, led a simple life with her horses and likely never imagined she’d find herself at the heart of a case that would significantly shape civil rights in America..
