Retrospect: Jay Co. hosted murder trial

Murder. Insanity. A love triangle. And dismemberment.

Not exactly everyday topics of conversation in Jay County.

Yet 50 years ago this week jury selection began in Jay Circuit Court for a trial that had every one of those sensational elements. And more.

The case was moved here from Marion due to overwhelming news coverage in Grant County.

On trial was 26-year-old Edith Louise Schmidt. She and her off-and-on boyfriend Glenn Everett Stewart were accused of murdering Schmidt’s husband, 30-year-old Larry Lee Schmidt, and dismembering his body in the basement of the Schmidt home over Mother’s Day weekend in May 1966.

Stewart was not yet on trial and would not testify in the case. He was undergoing treatment at a mental hospital and would remain there until 1969.

The first potential jurors were called on March 20, 1967, but it would be five days before a jury could be seated. In all, 44 potential jurors were quizzed by lawyers before Judge Burl Whiteman before 12 suitable ones could be found.

The trial itself would stretch into April and would involve key rulings over the admissibility of evidence. The Miranda case had only been decided the year before by the U.S. Supreme Court, and lower courts were still struggling to determine what statements by a defendant could be admitted and which ones were out of bounds.

Edith Schmidt had spoken with police in Tennessee when she and Stewart were located. There she had said she and her two children had been kidnapped by Stewart. Tape recordings of those conversations were eventually admitted as evidence because she was not a suspect in the murder at the time.

Defense and prosecution attorneys did their best to present competing views of the defendant.

She was, her lawyer claimed, “a pale timid woman, easily overborne.”

Prosecutors countered that she was “no frail timid woman but a murderess.”

On April 4, she was found guilty of first degree murder after the jury deliberated for more than five and a half hours. She was sentenced to life imprisonment but was eligible for parole.

Stewart was finally released from the mental hospital and stood trial as well. Not surprisingly, he entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. He was convicted of manslaughter and being an accessory after the fact.

Edith Schmidt mounted two appeals. Her first, based on the Miranda case, was denied in 1970.

But a second appeal successfully argued that because Stewart was the “principal” in the case and had been convicted of manslaughter, it was unfair for her to be serving a sentence for first degree murder. The Indiana Supreme Court reduced her conviction to manslaughter in 1973.