Jack Tracy-Page 6

Jack Tracy—Page 6

Jack Tracy during his later years

Tracy’s father died in 1986. As I mentioned before, he left everything to Tracy’s mother. [I have since learned that the father committed suicide, and, as previously noted, he left his estate to his second wife, not to Tracy’s mother.] Tracy sued for a half share in the estate, claiming that his father had been incompetent when the will was drawn up, but he lost the case. He filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 1992.

That brings us to what Bob Robinson told me all those years ago. It’s covered in the articles I downloaded from the Bloomington Herald Times.

Years after Death, Noted Sherlockian Still a Mystery

David Hackett, Herald Times Managing Editor

October 13, 2001

Jack Tracy loved a good mystery. He wrote mystery stories. He edited books on Sherlock Holmes. And he owned a Bloomington publishing house called Gaslight Publications, which he hoped would carry on the tradition of Holmes’ creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

But perhaps nothing this plump, private man did professionally surpassed the mystery of his own life.

Tracy died five years ago [in 1996] in a car wreck in Nevada, but his death was not widely reported. No obituary appeared in Bloomington, where he lived for many years, or even in his hometown of Frankfort, northwest of Indianapolis.

Nor has death ended what one associate calls “the endless speculation” that Tracy was more than a chronicler of morbid crimes—that he was a cold-hearted killer who stabbed to death his mother and got away with it.

“Oh, I have no doubt that he did it,” said Clinton County Prosecutor Louis Evans. “All the evidence pointed to him.”

I first came across Tracy’s name recently while looking through The Indiana Book of Records, Firsts, and Fascinating Facts by Fred Cavinder (1985, Indiana University Press). In the book, Tracy was touted as the “acknowledged Indiana expert on . . . Sherlock Holmes, by virtue of his writing four books on the subject, including Encyclopedia Sherlockiana (Doubleday, 1977) . . . he is one of only two full-time Sherlockians in the nation.” [The other one was probably John Bennett Shaw.]

In 1979, Tracy founded Gaslight Publications. Seven years later, a Herald-Times profile described Tracy’s business, operating out of a “cheerfully cluttered mustard-colored house on East Second Street,” as almost “too successful for its own good.” [That would have been 1986; the Herald-Times online archive only goes back to 1988, so I wasn’t able to get this article.]

Like his idol, Sherlock Holmes, Tracy’s success story was fiction.

Police alleged Tracy killed his mother, Marjorie Horner, because he needed the money. Tracy’s mother, a popular former elementary school teacher, was found dead in her home on February 15, 1993.

Although the 71-year-old Horner was stabbed numerous tunes, including repeatedly in the eye, Clinton County coroner Charles Bush originally ruled she died of natural causes.

How could a stabbing be ruled a natural death?

“I don’t want to criticize (Bush),” [prosecutor] Evans said recently. “Suffice it to say, he is no longer the county coroner.”

After the mistake was resolved and the case was reclassified a homicide, the investigation quickly focused on Tracy, who was then 48 years old and Horner’s only heir.

Frankfort police detective Jeff Ward, who headed the investigation, said plenty of evidence piled up against Tracy—including a motive.

“His mother was sending him money, which was basically what he was living on,” Ward said. “She was planning a trip to Japan and told him she needed the money and was cutting him off. She was murdered soon after that.”