THE HORRIFYING CASE OF THE ASHCROFT SISTERS

          This is only a story........Riverbrook, Oklahoma does not exist.  Two sisters in their 20s, Eleanor and Margaret Ashcroft disappear.......the case began as a missing person's case........,
In the summer of 1921, the disappearance of the Ashcroft Sisters sent shockwaves through Elmore County, Oklahoma.  It began as a missing person case that would unravel into one of the most disturbing documented incidents in the state's history.  The facts as they were recorded, tell only part of the story.  The rest lies buried in silence, in forgotten documents and in memories of those who tried desperately to forget.  
          It was June 17, when Eleanor and Margaret Ashcroft were last seen walking along the perimeter of their family's property on the outskirts of the small town of Riverbrook.  The town itself is unremarkable.  A collection of wooden structures, a general store, a post office, a church and a handful of residential homes nestled between rolling hills and dense woodland.  The Ashcroft residence stood apart.  A victorian farmhouse built in 1887 situated on 15 acres of land that bordered Blackwater Creek.
          According to police reports filed on June 19, 1921, the sisters had gone on their customary evening walk.  When they failed to return for supper, their father Thomas Ashcroft, a respected physician in the community, reportedly searched the property before alerting neighbors.  By nightfall, a search party had been organized, but yielded no results.  The official search lasted for three weeks before being formerly abandoned.  What makes the case particularly unsettling is not merrily the disappearance itself, but the circumstances surrounding it.  The inexplainable behavior of the family in months leading up to the event.  The contradictory statements from witnesses, and the discovery made in 1967, would cast the entire narrative in a different light. 
          The following narrative has been pieced together from fragmented sources, local newspaper clippings from the Riverbrook Gazette, police statements, personal correspondence between family members that surfaced decades later, and interviews conducted with surviving residents in 1962.  The interviews in 1962 were taken by historian Dr. James Holloway for his never published manuscript, "Forgotten Tragedies of Rural Oklahoma".  
          The Ashcroft Family had been residents of Riverbrook since 1914, when Dr. Thomas Ashcroft had relocated his medical practice from Tulsa, Oklahoma.  His wife Virginia, was described by neighbors as reserved but polite.  The two sisters Eleanor 28, and Margaret 26, lived with their parents despite being of marriageable age.  This was something that generated mild gossip in town, but was explained away by their devotion to their ailing mother.  The Ashcroft property was notable for its isolation.  The nearest neighbor's home was over a mile away, but the two properties bordered each other.  The Ashcroft house itself, was surrounded by a thicket of elm trees that obscured it from the main road.  Visitors to the Ashcroft home were rare, thought Thomas's position as the only physician in town, meant he was well respected and frequently called upon to attend to the 412 residents. 
          In the months before the disappearance, several town's people reported changes in the Ashcroft household.  Virgina, who had occasionally attended church services at the Riverbrook Methodist Church, stopped attending all together.    Thomas began closing his practice early on Thursdays and Fridays without an explanation.  Perhaps most notably, the sisters who had previously been seen regularly in town purchasing supplies or borrowing books from the small community library, became increasingly reclusive.  Meredith Wilson, the Ashcrofts closest neighbor, told Dr. Holloway in 1962, something changed in the household around March of 1921.  She said the curtains of the house were always drawn.  Thomas stopped acknowledging neighbors when he'd pass by in his automobile, and the girls, who used to be so young and lively women, seemed to age years in the span of weeks.  Eleanor in particular.  The last time she saw Eleanor, she wouldn't meet her eyes.  She had been so confident before. 
          The day of the disappearance had been unusually warm for June.  According to meteorologist records, temperatures reached 92 degrees F.  According to Thomas Ashcroft's statement to Sheriff Miller, he indicated that he had been in town attending to a patient with pneumonia and returned home at approximately 6:30 p.m.  He found his wife asleep in her bedroom and no sign of his daughters.  Thomas also claimed in his initial statement, the sisters often walked along Blackwater Creek in the evenings, so he assumed they had lost track of time.  It wasn't until darkness fell that he became concerned.  By 9:45 p.m. he had walked to the Wilson residence to require if they had see his daughters.  
          The search that ensued was initially focused on the creek area with locals speculating that perhaps one of the sisters had fallen into the creek, and the other one attempted to rescue her.  However, the creek was shallow in June, rarely exceeding three feet in depth, making drowning unlikely for two adult women.  No signs of struggle were found along the banks.  No personal items were recovered, and tracking dogs, brought in from the county seat lost the scent approximately half a mile from the house, at a point where the sisters' path intersected with an old logging road.  
          Virginia Ashcroft, bed ridden with what Thomas described as nervous exhaustion, was never formerly interviewed by authorities.  Her absence from the investigation raised a few eyebrows at the time.  Women of her standing were often shielded from distressing matters, but would later become a point of contention among those who revisited the case.  By early July, the disappearance of the Ashcroft sisters had been regulated to occasional mentions in the Riverbrook Gazette.  The prevailing theory became that the sisters had voluntarily left town, perhaps to seek opportunities in one of Oklahoma's growing cities or even to travel west to California.  This theory was bolstered by Thomas Ashcroft himself.  In late July he told Sheriff Miller that he had discovered come of his daughters' clothing and personal items missing, suggesting they had packed before leaving.  This explanation satisfied most Riverbrook residents.   Many young people in the post war years left their communities for urban opportunities.  Yet there were inconsistences that troubled a few observers.  Neither sister had accessed their modest savings accounts at the Riverbrook bank.  No train station within 50 miles reported selling tickets to women matching their descriptions.  Neither had collected the mail order packages that arrived at the post office on June 21st, according to the post master's wife.  Then for two years life in Riverbrook continued on as if nothing had happened.  
          Thomas maintained his medical practice, though he became increasingly selective about which patients he would see.  Virginia was rarely spotted outside the home.  In September of 1923, the Ashcrofts (sisters also?) sold their property and relocated reportedly to Arizona due to Virginia's health issues.  The Ashcroft house remained empty for almost a year before being bought in 1924 by Martha Johnston, who would own it until 1958.  The case might have been forgotten entirely if not for a severe storm in April of 1967, which caused significant damage to the old Ashcroft property.  By then it was owned by a retired couple named Davis.  The storm uprooted one of the massive elm trees that had stood for generations near the eastern side of the property approximately 200 yards from the main house.  
          On April 17, 1967, Mr. Davis was cleaning up after the uprooted tree and discovered what appeared to be human remains.  The tree roots had torn up a significant portion of earth, revealing what would later be identified as skeletal remains.  He notified the office of Sheriff Walter Pruitt.  The Sheriff filed an official report which stated that the bones appeared to have been in the ground for many years, and noted that the remains were found alongside deteriorated fabric consistent with women's clothing from the 1920s era.  
          Subsequentially investigations were done and the long dormant case was reopened.  Forensic examination confirmed that the remains belonged to at lease one adult female in her late 20s at time of death.  The cause of death could not be conclusively determined due to the condition of the remains.  The medical examiner noted unusual markings on the cervical vertebra consistent with potential strangulation, perhaps most disturbing was the discovery of a small metal box buried alongside the remains.  Inside was a journal, its pages largely destroyed by decades of exposure to the elements.  However, several passages remained legible and the handwriting was confirmed by former neighbors to belong to Eleanor Ashcroft.  one of the few complete entries dated May 3, 1921 reads, "Mother's condition worsens daily.  Father says the newest treatment will help, but I have my doubts.  The basement room is prepared, Margaret doesn't know yet.  I cannot bear to tell her what I've heard at night".  Another fragmented entry dated June 1,  "the sounds from below are unbearable.  Father says its necessary.  Says mother needs complete isolation for the treatment to work.  Margaret has begun to ask questions.  I've told her nothing, but she suspects the locked door, the trays of food that return untouched.  The final legible entry was dated June 15, just two days before the disappearance of the sisters, "I found the key.  Tonight when father leaves for his meeting in town, Margaret and I will see for ourselves whatever is happening in that room and it must end".  These fragments transformed the understanding of the case entirely. 
          Local authorities attempted to locate Thomas and Virginia Ashcroft only to discover that Thomas had died in 1946 in Phoenix, Arizona.  Virginia's fate was less clear.  No death certificate was found and no records of her existed after the family's departure from Riverbrook.  In Arizona it was discovered a Virginia Johnson was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, and her husband Thomas Johnston came regularly to visit her.  A nurse made some comment about Virginia and after that Thomas Johnson stopped visiting her and she was eventually moved out of that hospital.  There is no proof of this incident ever happening. 
          The investigation that followed revealed several disturbing facts that had been overlooked in 1921.  Thomas Ashcroft's medical credentials, which had never been questioned during his time in Riverbrook, proved to be impossible to verify.  The basement of the Ashcroft home was examined in 1967, which contained a small room with unusual modifications.  A heavy door with external bolt locks, and walls that had been lined with some form of padding were now largely rotted away.  Most telling were the statements from the Ashcroft's nearest neighbor, Meredith Wilson, and other neighbors who recalled that Virginia Ashcroft had begun to display unusual behavior, which Thomas had explained to concerned friends, that his wife suffered from female hysteria and required his specialized care at home.  No one had seen Virginia after February 1921.  Thomas assured the community that she was recovering slowly under his constant attention.  
          Harold Jenkins, who had worked briefly as an assistant in Thomas's medical practice in early 1921, provided a telling statement to investigators in 1967.  Dr. Ashcroft was very secretive about his wife's condition.  He said Ashcroft mixed strange compounds in the back room, things that he had never seen used in standard medical practice.  Once he heard sounds coming from the doctor's bag, like glass vials clinking together, and the doctor became very agitated when Jenkins mentioned it.  He was then dismissed the following week with no explanation.  The investigation could not conclusively determine that the remains found in the tree roots, belonged to Eleanor or Margaret Ashcroft.  Nor could it locate the remains of the other sister.  The case officially remains unsolved, classified as a suspected homicide with no possibility of prosecution due to the presumed death of all parties involved. What happened in the Ashcroft home during those spring months of 1921 still remains a mystery.  
          The prevailing theory developed by investigators in 1967 and expanded upon criminologist Dr. Rebecca Hayes in her 1968 analysis, "Domestic Shadows:  Hidden Crimes of Rural America", suggests a disturbing scenario.  Hayes insists that Virginia Ashcroft may have been suffering from a legitimate mental or physical condition that her husband attempted to treat using unorthodox, possibly experimental methods.  The basement room, she suggests, was a makeshift treatment room.  She also suggests that it evolved into a prison.  The sisters upon discovering their mother's condition, threatened to expose Thomas's activities.  The psychological profile that emerges from Rebecca Hayes says Thomas Ashcroft was a man whose professional identity was inextricably linked to his ability to cure his wife, when conventional treatments failed.  He likely turned to more extreme measures, possibly influenced by the controversial psychological practices of the era.  The sisters discovery presented an immediate threat both to his professional standing and his freedom.  Whether Virginia was already deceased by June of 1921, remains unknown.  The journal fragments suggests she was alive but in distress. 
          One theory proposes that Thomas murdered one sister, likely Eleanor, based on the journal ownership and forced Margaret to assist in the burial before later disposing of her as well.  An alternative suggests that Thomas may have convinced Margaret that Eleanor's death was an accident, maintaining control over Margaret through manipulation or threats until they left Riverbrook, at which point Margaret may have met a similar fate.
          The Ashcroft case exemplifies how rural isolation can conceal tragedy in a small community, where a doctor's word was rarely questioned, where women's nervous conditions were accepted without scrutiny, and where the disappearance of adult women could be explained away as voluntary  departure.  The truth remained buried quite literally for decades. 
          The property changed hands several times after the 1967 discovery.  Locals reported that no owner has stayed longer than 5 years.  The house itself, was demolished in 1972 after repeated failures to sell it.  Today, the land remains undeveloped, a conspicuous empty space among the otherwise populated area that Riverbrook has become.  In 1969, a memorial stone was placed in the Riverbrook cemetery for Eleanor and Margaret Ashcroft, though no remains are interred there.  Local residents occasionally leave flowers an acknowledgment of the communities failure to protect two of it's own.  The most unsettling aspect of the Ashcroft case is perhaps not what we know, but what remains unknown. 
          The full contents of Eleanor Ashcrofts journal, the fate of Virginia Ashcroft, the exact circumstances of the sisters' final moments, these details are lost to time, buried effectively as the remains beneath the elm tree.  Dr. Hayes in the conclusion of her analysis offers this sobering reflection.  The walls of the Ashcroft home contained secrets that the community chose not to see.  This willful blindness, this collective explanation, rather than confront the possibility of horror occuring in their midst enabled Thomas Ashcroft to literally get away with murder. 
          The case files, including photographs of the remains and the journal fragments, were archived in the Oklahoma State Police records in 1968.  A fire in the records department in 1969 destroyed many of these materials, leaving only photocopies of select documents.  Dr. Holloway's manuscript, which contained the most comprehensive collection of witnesses statements, was never published due to his sudden death in 1964.  His research notes were donated to the University of Oklahoma at Norman's, historical archives and  were reportedly misplaced during the departments relocation in 1965.  This pattern of lost evidence has led some to suggest that the full truth of the Ashcroft Case was deliberately obscured.  While there is no concrete evidence of such a conspiracy, the timing is certainly for anyone who might have wished the case to be unsolved.  What we know with certainty is limited.  Two women vanished vanished in 1921.  Human remains were discovered in 1967.  A journal suggested troubling circumstances within the Ashcroft household and a doctor with questionable credentials created a prison within is own home for at least one family member. 
          The town of Riverbrook has since been absorbed into the expounding boundaries of a larger neighboring city.  (what city?)  Few residents today know the story of the Ashcroft sisters.  The elm trees that once surrounded the property have mostly been cleared for development, though locals claim that one particular section remains persistently undeveloped due to construction complications.  In 1968, an elderly woman appeared at the Riverbrook Cemetery, placing flowers at the newly installed memorial stone.  When approached by the groundskeeper, she identified herself only as a former friend of the Ashcroft family.  She was described as well-dressed with a notable tremor in her right hand.  Before leaving, she placed a small object beside the flowers, it was a tarnished house key.  The groundskeeper, finding this behavior unusual, noted the woman's license plate and reported it to Sheriff Pruitt, who discovered the car was registered to a Margaret Johnson of Amarillo, Texas.
          The investigators traveled to the address listed, but found the house vacant.  Neighbors reported that an elderly woman had indeed lived there briefly, but had moved out suddenly the previous week, leaving no forwarding address.  The investigation into whether the woman might have been Margaret Ashcroft, somehow survived the events of 1921, was never concluded as resources were diverted to more pressing cases.  The possibility that Margaret Ashcroft survived, perhaps coerced into assuming a new identity and living with the knowledge of what had happened to her sister and mother, adds another layer of horror to an already disturbing case.  Is she was indeed the woman at the cemetery, what prompted her to return after nearly 50 years of silence?  And why did she disappear again so quickly?  In the absence of definite answers, the Ashcroft case has become a cautionary tale about the darkness that can exist behind respectable facades.