In the summer of 2022, I wrote a couple of columns here in the News Journal exploring the details of a tragic incident from late 1965 where a Corbin woman was brutally murdered in her home just days before Christmas. The initial column was titled “Who Killed Miss Flora Inman,” and little did I know when I wrote it that here I’d be, going on three years later, still obsessing over the answer to that very question.
My initial column explained that Inman, a 63-year-old Williamsburg native who had been an educator in the Corbin school system for many years at the time of her death, was the victim of a heinous crime while she was alone in her home on Master Street on the night of Sunday, Dec. 12, 1965. According to the investigation that was conducted at the time, she was likely decorating a Christmas tree when someone she recognized came to the door, asking to be let in. The most popular theory is that the person was asking to use the phone, as an open phone book was found at the scene.
What happened next remains a mystery, but it led to Inman being bludgeoned with a large flashlight, having a flower pot broken over her head, and then being stabbed over 60 times. A 1965 newspaper article said that two knives had actually been left inside her body, with one being lodged in her temple and the other protruding from her chest.
The next morning, when Inman failed to report to work at the nearby East Ward School, Principal Paul Gibbs and another co-worker walked to her house to check on her. What they found was a scene so grisly I can only imagine that it left them both traumatized for the rest of their lives.
Police conducted interviews with neighbors, but nobody could be identified as the perpetrator. Fast forward to January of 1967, when police take Winona Suter into custody and formally charge her with Inman’s murder.
Who is Winona Suter, you ask? Turns out, that is not a short answer…
After conducting some pretty exhaustive research, mostly of online newspaper records, I was able to figure out that Suter was originally from the Robbins family that moved into the Corbin area from Harlan County. The father was employed by the railroad, so I am assuming that at least has something to do with why they came here.
Suter had been married and had children, but the marriage apparently ended in divorce. She ended up in a mental institution. She was out on a holiday leave in 1965 and staying with her parents in Corbin when the Inman slaying occurred. The Robbins were neighbors to Inman, and were questioned about the crime along with the rest of the neighborhood.
Suter returned to the hospital after the holidays, and in December of 1966, her father petitioned to have her released into his custody. During the interim period, she was apparently considered a top suspect in the murder of Flora Inman.
Not long after Suter and her father returned to Corbin, a warrant is served for her arrest. She is indicted by a Knox County Grand Jury, but is ultimately ruled unfit to stand trial. There seems to have been some serious debate over whether or not she was actually mentally well enough to stand trial, with both her father and herself asking that she be found mentally competent, but the end result was that she was sent back to the state hospital in Danville to receive continued treatment for her apparent mental illness.
Nobody ever stood trial for the brutal killing of Miss Flora Inman.
So, why do I bring all of this back up now? Well, last week, out of the blue, I received an e-mail from someone claiming to be a family member of Winona Suter, who died in 1993. This person told me that she had not been responsible for Inman’s murder 60 years ago, and that someone else had actually offered up a deathbed confession about ten years after the crime had been committed. Now, there is obviously no way to validate the claim of the supposed deathbed confession, but I am extremely confident that this person who contacted me was, in fact, a relative of Suter’s.
Unfortunately, I was not able to obtain any other information from this person other than what was stated above, but the whole exchange renewed my curiosity about the case. I reactivated a couple of online accounts so that I could look up some old records again. I made a couple of phone calls to folks I had discussed the topic with back in 2022. I ended up spending the better part of the weekend looking into all of this again in hopes that something new might jump out at me.
What I was left with was a couple of new contacts, a few more potential theories, and this column, which you are now reading.
While I feel that I have made at least some positive progress in recent days, the simple truth is that it is going to be just about impossible for any definitive answers to be provided in the case of the killing of Miss Flora Inman without the presence of any physical evidence, all of which I am pretty sure is long gone. It’s unfortunate, because it would be really great to know, for sure, if Winona Suter was actually to blame. If not, it would be really great to finally clear her name and perhaps discover who the actual killer was.
Frustratingly, we will probably always be left with a big question mark when it comes to the question of “Who Killed Flora Inman?” While it is certainly easy to point the finger at Suter as the culprit, the fact of the matter is that we don’t know with absolute certainty. Personally, I think that the level of violence points toward a large man as the killer, but Inman was described as being a very small woman. If Suter had a bigger build, then I suppose it’s possible she could have done all of this. Something just doesn’t feel right about that explanation, though. Not to me, at least.
There are some other, more minor details that I was able to learn during my latest dive into one of Corbin’s biggest mysteries. I read that investigators were able to determine that Inman had scolded some neighborhood boys for playing in her backyard about an hour-and-a-half before she was killed. I wonder, exactly how old were these boys? Could they still be around today? Did Inman’s slaying have anything at all to do with the fact that she had run them off her property, if that is actually what happened?
I also read that another neighbor, Mrs. Frances Willis, told authorities that someone had tried to force their way into her home the night before. Also, East Ward School itself had apparently been entered and a few items carried off.
I also learned just how panicked the local community was after the killing. It’s not really surprising that this would be the case, but with no suspect in custody, people were truly terrified over the possibility that some psychopath could still be out there looking for their next victim. To make matters worse, a power blackout apparently occurred about a week after Inman’s murder. It was reported that, during the blackout, a friend of Inman’s received a phone call in the middle of the night. When the phone was answered, a male voice could be heard saying that he had been the one who killed Inman, and that he would be coming for her next.
Chilling.
I mentioned earlier that I had written two columns on this subject in the summer of 2022. The second one came about a month after the first, and was titled, “Detective work is tough: Who killed Miss Flora Inman, part 2.” After this past weekend, my opinion is not changed. Detective work is tough, and it is also very time consuming. For this reason, I am not able to go any further with this at this point in time. However, if you are out there and you know something about this case, then feel free to reach out to me at tsherman@corbinnewsjournal.com. I really hope that we will know the whole truth one day, but I feel that it’s a long shot at best.
