"My Mother Was Murdered!"

Main Menu

Resources

Sponsor

Wisdom Writers » Relationships » "My Mother Was Murdered!"

The death of Sherry Lewis's mother was never investigated. That's how she knows it was murder.

She was a young woman when her mother, Olive Lewis, was found on the floor of her childhood home in the small town of Clinton, Arkansas with a fatal bullet wound to the head. Her brother was the first to inform her that her mother committed suicide - and subsequently also gave her their mother's rationale for her apparent choice. He gave two people blame for their mother's death. She recognized the distortion immediately, but couldn't correct it with the truth - not just yet.

Her mother's death was the turning point in Lewis' young life that launched her on an odyssey to determine the truth, eventually working with her now-grown children to investigate the circumstances that led to her mother's death. The one thing she knows for certain is that it wasn't suicide - it was murder. She has been working for 45 years to get the case investigated by the authorities, but to no avail. Her main problem was that the people who would investigate it are the very people who covered it up.

"They told me she had shot herself" said Lewis, author of Is It Still Murder? from Tate Publishing (www.tatepublishing.com). "But I was in close contact with her by phone and all the Christmas preparations she was telling me about were there in plain sight. The house was abundant with the toys she had bought for my children - her grandbabies - and the outfits she was making them on her sewing machine, not quite finished."

Lewis took her sister to visit the coroner, Dr. John Hall, MD, where he told them "This was no suicide, but the most blatant murder he'd ever seen in his life," she said. "He reminded us that her arthritic hands could barely hold a skillet - much less a big gun like that. If she wanted to kill herself, she could just use her insulin needle. Instead, she took her insulin shot that day as she did each day, to live. Why would someone who was thinking of suicide take her medication? He insisted that this was no suicide."

Still, Hall issued a death certificate that stated it was suicide.

"The cover-up began there," Lewis said. "Someone had already gotten to him."

Yet, Lewis' family members harshly tried to deter her inquiries, with relatives from both sides telling her to "leave it alone." When she pressed the local police officer who took charge of the crime scene, Carroll B. Evans, why he declared her mother's death a suicide, he replied, "We just figured."

"I thought it was absurd that ‘We just figured' was the basis for calling my mother's death a suicide, so I begged the governor to personally intervene and demand an investigation," she added. "Gov. Orval Faubus discouraged me, saying in his letter to me that it would only ‘point to family members, thus better left alone.'"

His sentiments were echoed by prosecutor Stephen James and Mayor James Beavers, who both indicated Lewis's mom was likely murdered, but they didn't want to pursue it because they didn't want to ruffle feathers. Lewis said Beavers replied, "These guys are all my friends."

Later, Lewis challenged the finding of suicide in court and won, changing the designation to cause of death - "Undetermined." She thought the finding would encourage an investigation, but it only increased the anger toward her. For years, she was told that her father had pulled the trigger, and she believed it because he had a history as a drinker and a wife beater. However, he had done neither for 13 years, so it still didn't have the ring of truth for Lewis.

Sherry was told years later that someone else other than her father was at her mother's house just prior to her death, but the lid had been pulled tight on the case. Neither her family nor the police would talk about it. Although many of the key witnesses have since died, her brother Clell Lewis, Carroll B. Evans, Stephen James and James Beavers still reside in the area.

A request for records was denied on the basis that all reports regarding the death of Olive Lewis were lost in a flood in December of 1992. Attempts to reach Clell Lewis, Evans, James and Beavers were unsuccessful.