Everyone assumed it was a heart attack that caused the death of wealthy Washington Township farmer Leonard L. DeLong, who died suddenly the day after his 52nd birthday in 1904.
His sons had lingering suspicions about their father’s death, finding it odd their father died 30 minutes after consuming a whiskey with quinine water. And, after he recently made out a new will.
They obtained a court order to secretly exhume their father’s body almost four months after his death. DeLong’s vital organs were sent to an expert in poisons at a lab in Des Moines for a chemical analysis of the stomach where strychnine was found.
Sufficient evidence from this was taken by the DeLong brothers and the lab professor to the governor who listened to the facts and who, after the meeting, issued a $200 reward leading to who laced Leonard DeLong’s whiskey with strychnine.
This was the first time Clarke County citizens knew DeLong’s death was not from natural causes. The sheriff and county attorney focused on those closest to DeLong, settling on his son-in-law Clark Williams.
In November 1905, an Osceola grand jury indicted Williams for murder. The murder trial was set to take place in February 1906 in Osceola.
It was reported then Williams was sick with appendicitis-like symptoms and was to ill to stand trial if he did not improve. He was put on trial in May after he recovered.
In May 1906, Judge Hiram Evans dismissed the case against Williams saying the evidence presented at the trial was not as strong as that presented to the grand jury and was insufficient to convict.
Williams and his wife Sylvia DeLong divorced before 1930 and she remarried. Williams died in Des Moines in 1947 at the age of 74, and is buried in the same cemetery as Leonard DeLong, the man he was once accused of poisoning.