Corporal Maoma Little Ridings:1943, The Claypool Hotel, Indianapolis, Indiana

   

   She called him “Uncle Frank”. He called her “Husky” because she was so strong but he also called her his “Favorite Nurse” there at Warm Springs. “Uncle Frank” was Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his favorite nurse was Maoma Little Ridings. 

  Maoma Little was born on April 6th, 1910 in Abbeville, in Wilcox County, Georgia. Abbeville is a two and a half hour drive southeast of Atlanta. Her parents were Mae Hastey Little and Omar Leonidas Little. 

   Maoma Little grew up in Warm Springs, Georgia and worked at the Infantile Paralysis Foundation there. Infantile Paralysis was another name for polio and it’s devastating effects on children. But children were not the only people being killed or paralyzed by polio. Adults like Franklin Delano Roosevelt also contracted the disease. FDR sought treatment in Warm Springs as he recovered somewhat and learned to cope. He would remain paralyzed for the rest of his life but despite his disability would still do well in politics. 

   From 1927 until 1931, Maoma Little worked as a nurse at the clinic in Warm Springs caring for individuals stricken with polio. That was a very brave thing to do. Most people were terrified of polio and rightly so. In 1928, in New York City alone, there were 2,000 deaths attributed to polio. Luckily, today we have vaccines available to prevent polio deaths. But year after year, decade after decade, polio killed or  paralyzed millions. 

   Maoma Little left the Infantile Paralysis Foundation when she married Lawrence Sadlier Ridings in 1931. They lived in Washington D.C. and in Ithaca, New York during their marriage. The two later divorced but Maoma kept the name. 

   In 1940 she was living in Washington D.C. working for the Federal Housing Administration as an auditor. As World War II progressed Maoma joined the Women’s Army Corp. By 1943 she was a Corporal working in physiotherapy and was stationed in Indiana. Her previous experience at Warm Springs made her an excellent fit for the job of caring for recovering servicemen. 

  On Mother’s Day in 1943, she managed to get back to Warm Springs for a few days for a visit. It was to be the last visit with her family there. 

   In August 1943 Corporal Maoma Little Ridings had leave coming up. She decided to go to Indianapolis and spend the weekend relaxing in a hotel. The Claypool Hotel was a nice place to stay and close to shopping, restaurants and theaters. Union Station was a short walk and in those days trains connected all parts of Indiana to its Capitol. The Claypool was a nice place. Hollywood movie star and Indiana native, Carole Lombard, stayed at the Claypool while on a fundraising War Bond tour the night before her untimely death in an airplane crash in January of 1942. 

   

   Maoma Ridings checked into room 729 of the Claypool Hotel on Saturday August 28th, 1943 at about 5 p.m. as she had done several times in the past. The hotel was one block from Monument Circle at the corner of Illinois and Washington Streets. She was known as a good tipper. One bellboy reported having been given a very generous 25 cent tip by her at an earlier stay. (The Indianapolis Star Newspaper edition that reported the story only cost 4 cents.)

   Maoma ordered six bottles of Coca-Cola and some ice from room service. A bellboy, Alfred Bayne Jr. brought this promptly and Maoma gave him a quarter tip with her payment for the Cokes and 10 cents for the ice. (I was surprised that ice wasn’t complimentary then.) 

    Alfred Bayne Jr. also said that he saw another woman dressed in black in the room as well. He reported the mood in the room as cheerful. (An investigator asked if the woman in black could have been a man wearing women’s clothing. Bayne did not think this was the case. The woman appeared very feminine to him.) 

    Only three hours after checking in, Corporal Maoma Ridings would be found robbed, assaulted and murdered. A hotel maid, Mrs. Lillian McNamara, was making a routine inspection of rooms. After knocking and hearing no answer she entered and found the body of Corporal Ridings. She called the hotel operator to report the murder. At almost the same time another woman called the switchboard operator to ask for a hotel detective to come to Room 756, the room of Corporal Samuel Kaplan. The woman gave her name as Mary Bretback of 1854 Central Avenue. (One newspaper reported the room number as 566.)  Upon speaking with Kaplan and Bretback, hotel detectives felt that they were not involved with the murder of Corporal Ridings and Miss Mary Bretback was sent out of the hotel via the service elevator. Corporal Samuel Kaplan was also told to leave the hotel immediately. 

    Corporal Ridings’ death certificate reports that she died of an “Incised wound of the neck with severance of the left jugular vein with intensive hemorrhage. Blow on head, multiple lacerations and cuts on head, face and neck. (Cut on both wrists and radial arteries after death.) Caused by person or persons unknown. Murder.”

   Corporal Ridings was found nude from the waist down. This would appear then to be a sexually motivated murder. 

   The blow to the head did not fracture her skull. The cuts to the wrists were thought to be a clumsy effort to make her death appear to be a suicide. 

   The cuts all seem to have come from a broken pint bottle of whiskey. Maoma had presumably purchased this on her way to the hotel. A single woman in uniform might be judged harshly and harassed if she tried to have a drink in a hotel bar but enjoying a whiskey and coke on ice in the privacy of her own hotel room was another thing. She was a grown woman after all. 

    A coin was found in the pool of blood surrounding her head. It was a quarter. Had she been paying or tipping a bellboy when he attacked her?  Perhaps. The quarter could also mean nothing more than a coin had been dropped on the floor.

   Investigators followed the attacking bellboy line of thinking though. 

   Robert Wolfington was another bellboy at the hotel.  He reported receiving a quarter tip from Maoma that evening after he also delivered ice to room 729 at approximately 5:30 p.m. It was August and likely very hot and humid then. Ice would have been melting fast. 

   Robert Wolfington was from Lebanon, Indiana. He and his family were well regarded and he had no criminal record there. Robert Wolfington had been in the Navy but had been medically discharged. The newspapers reported that he suffered from seizures. Another bellboy at the Claypool said that Wolfington had once attempted suicide by swallowing lye in the year before. Was this just gossip? Lye is a caustic burning substance used to unclog drains. It causes severe burns when swallowed and also when vomited. It’s hard to believe that Robert Wolfington could have recovered and have regained his job as a bellboy in such a short time with such injuries. 

   There’s a concerted effort here, it seems, to smear this man. There were no reports of his having attacked a woman before. No one reported that he was violent. No one reported that he was seen with blood on his uniform. Cutting someone’s jugular vein will result in arterial spray. Blood comes pumping out of the wound like water from a garden hose under pressure. It’s going to be incredibly messy and it will be difficult for the perpetrator to avoid getting bloody. The faucet taps in the room had blood on them from someone who washed up after the murder, it seems. But, the perpetrator would potentially have blood on their clothes and shoes. 

   The perpetrator would have had to change into clean clothes after this murder or leave the hotel covered in blood. Unless the perpetrator was already naked or nearly so when committing the crime. 

   No one reported that Robert Wolfington seemed upset or agitated that evening. A server at a nearby drugstore served him a sandwich that evening. Wolfington was there at the time that he reported he had gone on break to the police. 

   Police also followed up on a dry cleaner’s tip about a man who brought bloody trousers in soon after the murder. The dry cleaning establishment was located on the 200 block of North Illinois Street. The man explained that he had gotten a nosebleed after a “friendly scuffle” with his wife.  He said they both ended up with bloody noses. Police seemed thoroughly satisfied with that answer which seemed reasonable and understandable to them. It was not reported if that story was actually corroborated by his wife. The bloody-nosed owner of the trousers was named as Lucian Wilson in the paper. He worked at Curtiss-Wright, a factory making propellers in Indianapolis. 

   Another clue was discovered in the following days.  A skirt described as a W.A.C. uniform skirt was found on North Tibbs Avenue by a milkman, Francis Siegmann, while making his rounds. North Tibbs is a street about a 25 to 35 minute walk to the west of downtown Indianapolis and the Claypool Hotel. It was reported that Police were not inclined to think it was involved in the case as two skirts were found in Corporal Ridings hotel room. Could she not have owned three? Was this other skirt even a real uniform skirt? It would have been odd to discard an article of clothing in 1943. Everything was rationed, scarce, recycled and reused. I wish they had looked into the skirt a bit more.  Was it the same size as Corporal Ridings’ other skirts? 

   One thing that I would like to put forth is that it seems like everyone is assuming that Corporal Maoma Ridings would have had to have opened the door to her attacker. The assumption is that the person had a key or was admitted by Corporal Ridings. But, this could easily have been the work of a stranger. We are used to hotel room doors that automatically lock now days. When we go to a hotel today we use the secondary interior lock or chain mechanism to make sure that no one can get in. But most people probably wouldn’t have properly locked their hotel room door until they were going to sleep at night or were using the bath or shower. Corporal Maoma Ridings had just had a friend visiting for a drink, “the woman in black”. She may not have locked the door just yet that evening. A stranger could have been walking the halls testing for unlocked doors and found Corporal Maoma Ridings alone in her room. Let’s not forget that Corporal Ridings was also robbed during this assault and murder. 

   What if the killer was “the woman in black”?  Maybe. Did this woman savagely kill Corporal Ridings and then leave the hotel wearing one of the Corporal’s skirts? Where did the bloody black clothes go? Why discard the skirt where it could easily be found? And what is the motive? I tend to doubt that this was the work of a woman. It bears the hallmarks of a rape and murder perpetrated by a man. 

   The two bellboys, Alfred Bayne Jr. and Robert Wolfington have both passed away. Lucian Wilson, owner of the bloody trousers has presumably also passed away. I thought his name would be easy to search but there were several men of a similar age named Lucian Wilson. Mary Bretback and Corporal Samuel Kaplan were not easy to narrow down either. There were many people with similar names. More than likely they are deceased. I wish they had talked a bit more with the wife of Lucian Wilson and those bloody trousers. It seems like a nosebleed would result in more blood on a person’s shirt than on their pants. But, who knows? 

   Corporal Maoma Ridings was well liked by the other W.A.C. Nurses and Physiotherapists at Camp Atterbury. They had not had a great deal of time to get to know each other as the Camp had only been founded in late 1942. But they said she got along well with everyone there. Some had even spent weekend leave with her in Indianapolis in the past. She didn’t really have any enemies. Her hometown of Warm Springs, Georgia remembered her fondly as well. Corporal Ridings is buried there at the Warm Springs City Cemetery. 

   The Claypool Hotel would be the site of another murder of a young woman in 1954. The murder of Dorothy Poore was solved, though, and her murderer was sentenced to life in prison. In 1967, the hotel was demolished. An Embassy Suites and later Circle Center Mall occupied the spot. A very popular ghost tour stops by that corner to discuss the murder these days.

   Corporal Maoma Little Ridings was serving her country. She was smart, well traveled and kind. She was generous. She had a very bright future ahead of her. Her murder has never been solved. 

   Rest in Peace Corporal Maoma Little Ridings.