The 1963 murder of Harding College associate professor Ruby Lowery Stapleton remains unsolved. How to honor her has been figured out by the university.
Harding will be naming its newly renovated writing center after Stapleton in October. A dedication is planned for Oct. 23, but no time has been set yet.
“Words can’t describe how excited and thankful we are to Harding University for doing this,” Stapleton’s great-niece, Catherine Rathe, said. “It really truly is an honor. ... It’s been a long time coming.”
Stapleton graduated from Harding College in 1924. “She continued working at the college until her death in 1963,” Rathe said. “She worked in the English Department. Her father was very involved in the college. He helped kind of start the college. He was on the board of trustees.
“When the college moved to the facility in Searcy, she [Stapleton] helped move the things. She physically helped moved the printing press and she cleaned rooms and she provided food for all the workers and the people helping, so she was just very important in the starting of Harding in Searcy. She even student taught when she was in [school] – she was teaching math, I believe – and she went on to teach English. She taught there until she passed away in 1963, until she was murdered.”
Rathe called Stapleton “just a huge part” of the college. “I mean, her life was like God first, Harding second, family third, pretty much, that’s what everyone says, and I grew up hearing about my Aunt Ruby just because she was such an amazing woman. She was like a go-getter, she was quick-witted, was very driven, just a lot of those outgoing qualities and characteristics of women that you really just didn’t see too much of back then. She was just very different, head strong.”
Rathe said she would go to Harding for years and look at Stapleton’s picture that hangs in Brackett Library “and I would wonder why she didn’t have more of a memorial. I thought it was kind of wrong that they didn’t explain who she was because she was such a big part of the college.”
“Also, a little side story: She sold a bunch of land to Harding, where I guess it’s where the American Heritage Building now stands,” Rathe said. “She sold all that land to Harding, so she had several homes and some plots of land that she sold. She lived there on Center Street. She actually moved the house that she was living in. Harding razed it and moved it over to make room for this new building and ended up selling that one as well.
“She was just a huge part of Harding so we are very honored and thankful that finally she is getting the honor that she deserves. She had actually sold the land just a few months prior to her murder, and that’s another motive of the murder is money. So she did receive quite a bit of money from the college that we think may be possibly tied into the murder.”
Stapleton disappeared from a Searcy laundry mat Oct. 8, 1963. Her body was found 11 days later in Bull Creek near Beebe. She was 59 years old. A funeral service was held for her Oct. 23 in the Harding College auditorium.
Rathe wrote a book about the murder titled “The Washeteria Mystery: Who Killed Ruby?’ It is available on Amazon and other online bookstores.
The case is still cold, Rathe said. She said that in 1993 her cousin, Heather Bates, and her mother, Ruby’s daughter, got to see some of the investigative file on the murder, and they took some notes.
“No one has really done anything that I know since the ‘60s and ‘70s,” Rathe said, adding that Bates went back in 2014 to retry to get the file and was told no because the Arkansas State Police was working it as an unsolved case and couldn’t release the file. Bates asked, “OK, what are you doing? We were unaware that you were still working this file and it’s not closed.”
According to Rathe, there was a big legal battle and Bates finally got the records after the Arkansas Supreme Court concluded in 2017 that there had been little done by the state police since 1965, so the investigation wasn’t still open and active. “She won ... because they couldn’t show they were working on it, they literally weren’t, and so the case went cold pretty quickly and the evidence has been lost.”
“I have talked to the division commander [of criminal investigations for the state police], I guess the one that is charge of all the cold cases,” Rathe said. “The other day I had a conversation with her and she did a symposium recently in Fayetteville, Ark., talking to the police about how they mishandled Ms. Ruby’s case. They used Ruby’s case as an example of what they did wrong and what not to do, and so that’s been nice that we’re also helping them organize their files a little better, I guess. They’re learning from their mistake and they are willing to say that they made a mistake because they lost the evidence and they lost first the files.”
What is known about the crime, Rathe said, is that Stapleton had left her son Glen’s house with his laundry and went back to her house and checked in on her niece, who was attending Harding at the time.
“She said, ‘Do you want to go to the laundry mat with me?’ And she said, ‘No, I’m going to stay home,’” Rathe said. “Ruby went over to the laundry mat about 9 p.m. and spoke to a few people and the people next door were closing up their business and left. She was in the middle of doing her laundry, like literally had just put the coins in, when she was taken against her will at the laundry mat.
“And there was a man that drove by who saw her being led out of the laundry mat by two men and he noticed that there was somewhat of a struggle but it wasn’t enough for him to stop. He thought, ‘Well, maybe she’s inebriated’ or something like, ‘it’s just a little argument’ or something, so she was taken and found 11 days later laying [naked] in a dry creek bed.”
She said Harding was closed for a couple of days by then-President George Benson when Stapleton disappeared and search parties were sent out. “I think everyone in that town was searching for Ruby, like all the students. I talk to people today who were freshmen back then that had her as a professor and they even searched for her, so that’s been really cool to talk to people who were actually her students and searched for her.”
Stapleton reportedly was spotted in the creek by a squirrel hunter Oct. 19. Examiners concluded that she had likely died from suffocation because a wad of cotton about the size of a “clenched” fist was found in her mouth cavity.
“They found her and I guess the rest is history,” Rathe said. “There were a lot of suspects interviewed. Her husband was under a microscope. He had a lot of motive and was doing a lot of side things that were not good, so they did suspect him. But I don’t know why they just couldn’t make an arrest. I guess they just couldn’t pin it on the actual person.”
Stapleton’s estranged husband, Ray, actually died five years after she did, Rathe said.
Rathe published her book a couple of years ago, and authors Deana Hamby Nall and Mike Allen also have published a book on the murder titled “The Abduction of Mrs. Ruby Lowery Stapleton” this year as a follow-up to the true crime bestseller “A Murder in Searcy,” which was published in 2021. “A Murder in Searcy” is about the 1974 murder of Fern Cowen Rodgers.
“I did print the police files word for word in the back of the book,” Rathe said of her book. “It’s just like half of the book is my experience growing up with it and my research and my interviews and then the second half is all of the statements.”
Rathe did not go to Harding but said that her mom and dad did, and Bates did her “own crusade” when it came to getting their aunt recognized by Harding. “They were going to do a scholarship in Ruby’s name and then all of a sudden when they started figuring out who Ruby was, they said, ‘We are going to do something way bigger’ and they decided on the writing center, which is amazing. It was really Heather who got that ball rolling honestly.”
“... Ruby was a big part