Bernard R. Leuch was born in 1898 near Council Bluffs, Iowa. The family moved into that city around 1905 and, for over a decade after 1910, Bernard’s father was a deputy sheriff and then constable there. During World War I, Bernard served overseas in the aviation corps as a private (meaning he was not taught how to fly).
After the war, he took a job as a farm hand in central South Dakota. Oddly enough, his parents moved nearby and would later be buried in a small town there, about 45 miles southwest of Pierre. (His mother died in 1922, his father in 1932.)
Around 1921, Bernard married Lena Esther Tobey. About a year younger than Bernard, Lena was born in Custer County, Nebraska, east and north of North Platte. However, by 1920, the Tobey family had moved to a farm located about 65 miles northwest of St. Cloud, Minnesota. We don’t know how Bernard and Lena met, and it’s uncertain where they were married. However, the 1930 census shows the couple in St. Cloud with four daughters and a son. Over the next five years, they had two more children, including an infant Bernard, Jr.
Despite the privations of the Depression, the year 1935 was a bright one for Bernard. In May, he finally landed a job with the St. Cloud police force. Bernard had been a guard at the state reformatory near the city for a while, and he had always wanted to be a part of regular law enforcement. Bernard performed well as a police officer at first, and “was known as the best pistol shot in the organization.”
His home situation, however, appears to have grown a bit rocky. He and Lena still lived together, but evidence strongly suggests that they no longer slept together. Having had seven children in fourteen years of marriage, they perhaps wanted to avoid having any more.
Then, Bernard attracted the attention of a pretty young woman. She worked as a ticket clerk and usher at a local theater. Both would later claim that she was “a friend of the family.” She even boarded with the Leuchs for about four months, in 1935 or 1936.
We actually know almost nothing about “Miss Betty Irwin” (as she was almost invariably identified in news report). She lived in St. Cloud in 1935 or 1936, and Olympia (Washington) in 1938. Beyond that, she was supposedly 26 years old in 1938, and claimed to have a brother living in Bonners Ferry, Idaho. An exhaustive search of genealogical records was performed using that information. Since “Betty” is often a nickname for someone named “Elizabeth,” the search included that also. The system turned up zero credible hits anywhere in the upper Midwest.
But suppose Betty lied about her age, and was only 17 or 18 years old when she first met Bernard? With that assumption, a search suddenly produced five hits just in Minnesota, with more in the adjoining states. Of course, there’s still no reliable way to identify which “Betty Irwin” might have been involved in this case. But the results provide strong circumstantial evidence that Bernard’s new girlfriend did not want to admit how young she really was.
Sadly, Bernard’s infatuation with Betty grew and grew. The affair reached the point where it severely impacted his job performance. Thus, after a civil service review, Leuch was dismissed from the police force in March 1937. Their stories about the next few months conflict and the differences cannot be easily reconciled. However, the final result was clear: By the fall, Bernard was working at a pulp mill near Shelton, Washington. Betty Irwin had also settled in a boarding house there and they resumed their liaison. (Shelton, the county seat of Mason County, is located about 15 miles northwest of Olympia.)
Betty later maintained that, through all this, she did not know Bernard was married. But then Lena and the children joined him in Shelton, “shortly before Christmas” of 1937. Finally, the real situation could not be ignored. Betty moved to Olympia and took a job as a theater usher. At some point, she also told Bernard that she’d have nothing more to do with him unless he divorced his wife. Nevertheless, it’s clear that their romance continued. He eventually agreed to get a divorce and, on May 20, Betty gave him money to help with the down payment on a home for them in Shelton.
Late on the afternoon of June 1, 1938, Bernard rushed to ask a neighbor to call the police. He had been on a trip downtime and returned to find Lena sprawled on a bed, dead. She had, he said, committed suicide by shooting herself in the chest. The death weapon was Bernard’s .38-caliber Colt automatic pistol. He had retrieved it from a pawn shop to strengthen his application for the job of Shelton police chief.
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| Mason County Courthouse. Mason County Historical Society. |
Police interviews with the children and neighbors soon highlighted “a number of inconsistencies” in Bernard’s account. At some point, authorities learned of the love affair between Bernard and Betty Irwin. Thus, at the end of June, prosecutors stated that “a young Olympia woman” would “be an important witness at the trial.” They were not then willing to reveal her identity to the public.
The trial began on Monday, July 11, 1938, but five days passed before prosecutors put Betty on the stand. Naturally, her testimony about the long-standing affair caused a sensation, especially when she revealed that Bernard was “the father of her unborn child.” Bernard admitted that his wife had learned about the affair (it’s not entirely clear when, however). Moreover, they had quarreled about it earlier on the day of the shooting. But it was all Betty’s fault, he asserted. He had tried to break off the affair. She, however, had insisted and he could not resist her charms.
From start to finish, Bernard maintained that his wife had shot herself, either on purpose or accidentally. But by the time of the trial, Luke May and the police had been able to complete a full array of tests. The lack of powder residue on Lena clothes meant that the pistol had been discharged well away from her body. That and the bullet trajectory made suicide highly unlikely and an accident virtually impossible.
The jury convicted Bernard Leuch of first degree murder, with no recommendation for mercy. That made the subsequent death sentence mandatory. Leuch escaped from the Mason County jail to delay matters, but was recaptured in just a few days. After a failed appeal, Bernard was hanged at the Walla Walla penitentiary on August 4, 1939.
| References: Census records, city directory listings, and other genealogical sources were consulted extensively. Online sources included Ancestry.com and others. |
| “[Leuch Murder News],” Daily Olympian, Olympia, Seattle Times, Washington; The Oregonian, Portland; St. Cloud Times, Minnesota (June 2, 1938 – August 4, 1939).. |
| Luke S. May, Luke S. May Papers, Special Collections, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington (1969). |
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