The Shoebox and the Hammer:

Unraveling the Twisted Mystery of Montana's "Shoebox Annie"

Introduction

Every mining town produces its ghosts, and Anaconda, Montana, produced one of the more disquieting specters in the region's folklore: a small, aging woman who peddled soap, shoelaces, and bootleg whiskey from a cardboard shoebox in the working-class neighborhood known as Goosetown. Residents called her Shoebox Annie. Her legal name was Mary Eleanor Smith, and for decades after she left Montana, children in Anaconda were warned away from the corner of Alder and Commercial streets where her house once stood. The stories that clung to her name were the kind that towns tell to frighten one another: buried bodies, boiling flesh, and a magpie trained to steal jewelry. Separating the folklore from the documented record requires patience, because in this case the documented record is nearly as unsettling as the legend, and the two are not always easy to pull apart.

A Bootlegger in Goosetown

Mary Eleanor Smith settled in Anaconda's Goosetown neighborhood in the 1920s, where, according to local recollection gathered by Montana Historical Society historian Ellen Baumler, she became a fixture of the district's street-level economy, selling small household goods and moonshine from a shoebox she carried door to door, a habit that supplied her enduring nickname during the Prohibition years when she carried her bootleg product in a shoebox. Baumler's account, drawn substantially from Alice Finnegan's oral-history collection of Goosetown residents, describes a woman both tolerated and feared by her neighbors, one whose visits were said to end in petty theft and whose house was the subject of persistent, unverified rumors about foul odors and hidden remains beneath the floorboards. Baumler is careful to note that the folklore around Smith was not baseless invention; it developed, retrospectively, into something considerably more serious than a neighborhood eccentric's reputation.

The Anaconda Disappearances

The documented criminal history attached to Smith begins not in Montana but follows her son, DeCastro Earl Mayer, a man who used at least a dozen aliases over his life, including "C. C. Skidmore" and "Earl Montaigne." Mayer's Montana record started early: he was committed to the Whittier State School for boys in California in 1912, and by 1917 he had been convicted in Bozeman of automobile theft and sentenced to four and a half to nine years at the Montana State Prison, from which he was paroled in August 1920. It was during the years that followed, while Mayer moved between Anaconda, Butte, and points in Idaho and Utah, that two Montana residents vanished under circumstances that would only be reconstructed, imperfectly, more than a decade later.

The first was Ole Larson of Anaconda, who disappeared in 1921 after reportedly selling oil stocks with Mayer and accepting an invitation to a meal at the house Mayer shared with his mother on East Commercial Street. The second was a woman identified in most contemporary accounts as Mrs. Ernest (Dorothy) LaCasse of Butte, who came from Seattle to visit Smith's household and was never again seen in that city or anywhere else. The sources disagree on the year of LaCasse's disappearance: a 1938 wire report placed it in 1923, while a 1960 article in The Montana Standard placed it in 1921. Neither figure has ever been independently confirmed by a surviving official record, and the discrepancy is itself a small emblem of how thinly documented the Montana end of this case remains. Author Courtney Ryley Cooper, who investigated the matter for his 1935 book on American crime with help from Thurston County coroner Hollis Fultz, wrote that in each instance the door on East Commercial Street opened and closed, and a human being disappeared. No bodies were recovered in either case, and Anaconda and Butte investigators of the era, working on a theory that the victims had been dismembered and their remains destroyed with acid, were unable to make an arrest.

The Bassett Disappearance in Seattle

The case that ultimately drew law enforcement's attention back to Montana began not there but on the shores of Puget Sound. In July 1928, James Eugene Bassett, a thirty-four-year-old Naval Department stenographer from Annapolis, Maryland, arrived in the Puget Sound region en route to a post in Manila. Needing to sell his new Chrysler roadster before departure, he was approached by a man calling himself "Mr. Clark," who arranged to buy the car pending his aunt's approval. On September 5, 1928, Bassett drove to Seattle to complete the sale and was never seen again by his family. A telegram, purportedly from Bassett, arrived that evening claiming he had met a friend and was leaving for Vancouver, but investigators quickly found the message implausible, since Bassett had no known acquaintances in the region and had left without luggage.

Eight days later, Oakland police stopped a blue Chrysler matching Bassett's description and arrested its occupants: Decasto Earl Mayer and a woman identifying herself as his mother, Mary Eleanor Smith. In their possession were Bassett's wristwatch, wallet, and cufflinks, along with a rare gas-operated pistol. Search of the rented house Mayer and Smith had occupied outside Seattle, always referred to by investigators as "the little brown house," turned up burned clothing remnants and a hidden set of Bassett's Maryland license plates, but no trace of his body. Absent a corpus delicti, Seattle prosecutors could not sustain a murder charge; Mayer and Smith were instead convicted twice over of grand larceny for the theft of the automobile and personal effects, Mayer receiving a life sentence as a habitual criminal and Smith a term of roughly eight and a half years.

The Confession

The case lay dormant for nearly a decade. Then, in the spring of 1938, days before her scheduled release from the Washington State Penitentiary at Walla Walla, Smith confessed. She had confided details of Bassett's killing to a cellmate, Margaret Fawcett, who relayed the information to prison officials; a state trooper subsequently posed as a clergyman to draw out further admissions. Smith's handwritten statement described how Mayer had struck Bassett with a hammer after forcing him to write a false telegram, how the body was dismembered in a bathtub, and how the remains were divided and buried in wooded areas between Cathcart and Bothell, Washington, the head placed separately in an abandoned woodchuck hole. She would later write of the killing, without remorse, that the pieces would never be found.

Confronted with his mother's confession, Mayer initially denied it, then signed a statement agreeing to plead guilty, which prosecutors were later able to use against him despite his attempt to retract it. Both were charged with first-degree murder and brought to trial in King County Superior Court in the fall of 1938. During the proceedings, two previously unknown witnesses, a father and son who had encountered Mayer's car stalled near Cathcart on the night of the killing with blood-stained sacks in the rumble seat, corroborated key elements of Smith's account, strengthening the state's case despite the continued absence of a body. Before the trial concluded, Mayer took his own life in his King County jail cell, stuffing his throat with paper and cinching a belt beneath his chin. Smith withdrew an insanity plea, pleaded guilty to first-degree murder, and, at the request of Bassett's own grieving mother, was spared the death penalty and sentenced instead to life imprisonment.

In letters written from prison, Smith also implicated her son in the deaths of Larson and LaCasse and referenced a third victim in Idaho, though she refused to disclose burial locations for any of the alleged Montana victims, and no charges were ever filed in connection with those cases. A skeleton later discovered beneath a Seattle building in 1960 prompted renewed speculation that the remains might belong to LaCasse, but the identification was never confirmed, and the mystery of her disappearance, like Larson's, was left formally unresolved.

Legacy and Unanswered Questions

Mary Eleanor Smith was paroled from the Washington State Penitentiary in 1953 due to failing health and lived out her final years in a nursing facility, dying in Spokane in 1966 at the reported age of one hundred. What she left behind in Montana was not a court record but a neighborhood memory, one that Goosetown residents carried into the postwar decades and that Ellen Baumler later helped preserve in writing. The absence of any Montana prosecution means that, strictly speaking, the deaths of Ole Larson and Dorothy LaCasse remain unsolved disappearances rather than adjudicated homicides. What can be said with confidence, based on the Seattle proceedings, is that Smith and her son operated a pattern of predation built around the sale of used automobiles, and that Smith's own handwriting, however self-serving or unreliable a confession extracted under strained circumstances may be, named Montana victims by place and approximate year. Historians examining the case are left, as investigators were in 1938, without physical proof for the Montana allegations, and the honest accounting is that Shoebox Annie's Montana victims, if they existed as described, were never formally found.

Works Cited

Baumler, Ellen. "Shoebox Annie." Montana Moments, Montana Historical Society, 26 June 2013, ellenbaumler.blogspot.com/2013/06/shoebox-annie.html. Accessed 7 July 2026.

Cahill, John. "The Old Hag's 'Perfect' Crime That Took 10 Years to Solve." Port Arthur News, 22 Jan. 1939, p. 24. Rpt. in St. Estephe, "Mary Eleanor Smith & Son: Serial Killing Team – 1938," Unknown Gender History, 22 Sept. 2011, unknownmisandry.blogspot.com/2011/09/mary-eleanor-smith-son-serial-killing.html. Accessed 7 July 2026.

"Gas Killer Suspect Caught in Oakland." Berkeley Daily Gazette, 14 Sept. 1928, p. 1. Rpt. in St. Estephe, "Mary Eleanor Smith & Son: Serial Killing Team – 1938," Unknown Gender History, 22 Sept. 2011, unknownmisandry.blogspot.com/2011/09/mary-eleanor-smith-son-serial-killing.html. Accessed 7 July 2026.

McClary, Daryl C. "James Eugene Bassett Disappears While on a Trip to Seattle on September 5, 1928." HistoryLink.org, 29 May 2011, www.historylink.org/File/9805. Accessed 7 July 2026.

McClary, Daryl C. "Decasto Eugene Mayer and Mary Eleanor Smith Are Charged with the 1928 Murder of James Eugene Bassett on May 12, 1938." HistoryLink.org, 31 May 2011, www.historylink.org/File/9808. Accessed 7 July 2026.

"Mother Names Son in Four Murders." Daily Mail, Hagerstown, MD, 5 May 1938, p. 1. Rpt. in St. Estephe, "Mary Eleanor Smith & Son: Serial Killing Team – 1938," Unknown Gender History, 22 Sept. 2011, unknownmisandry.blogspot.com/2011/09/mary-eleanor-smith-son-serial-killing.html. Accessed 7 July 2026.

Quinn, Frank. "Sketch of Woman Arrives Here in Probe of Seattle Mystery." The Montana Standard, 13 Dec. 1960, p. 1. Rpt. in St. Estephe, "Mary Eleanor Smith & Son: Serial Killing Team – 1938," Unknown Gender History, 22 Sept. 2011, unknownmisandry.blogspot.com/2011/09/mary-eleanor-smith-son-serial-killing.html. Accessed 7 July 2026.