In 1924, passion drove a Little Egypt pastor and his parishioner to poison their spouses

On July 30, 1924, the Rev. Lawrence Hight delivered a moving eulogy for Wilford Sweeten. “Brother Wilford was an unbeliever in Jesus Christ and God, and I was sent that he might be redeemed,” Hight said.  “I am unworthy to preach the sermon over the body of this good man.”

The irony of Hight’s words would shortly come back to haunt him. On Sept. 24, he was charged with providing Elsie Sweeten the poison that killed her husband, which she administered in a serving of homemade tomato soup, and with poisoning his own wife, Anna Hight. The Tribune pronounced it “the strangest tragedy southern Illinois has ever known.”

Wilford Sweeten and his widow were members of the Methodist church Hight pastored in Ina, a hamlet in Little Egypt, an inverted triangle at the southern tip of Illinois. Rumors circulated that something was going on between the pastor and Mrs. Sweeten, who had been warned by her great-aunt: “They are talking about you and Pastor Hight.”

Elsie accompanied him on a circuit of the small-town churches he served. According to testimony at the pastor’s trial in December 1924, “Hight was caught slipping late at night out of Mrs. Sweetin’s cottage” at a church camp meeting, a Tribune correspondent dispatched to Little Egypt to cover the trial wrote. Tribune stories commonly spelled the name as “Sweetin,” but other sources, including family gravestones, spell it as Sweeten.

“Hight seemed too attentive to Sweetin that gossip broke forth which finally led to the exhumation of bodies and the finding of arsenic.”

The Tribune attempted to address the motivations for romantic crimes in an editorial published shortly after Hight was charged.

“Passion is a madness,” it wrote. “It is a formula, as old as the human race, and as old as the shifting and blindness and savagery of love.”

Love was replaced by hatred by the time Hight and Sweeten were convicted and sent to prison. “I’d have been glad to take my thirty five years,” she told the sheriff handcuffing her after the sentences were handed down. “I’d a’ been glad to take it, if they’d only hanged the preacher.”

When the murder charges were first handed down, the citizens of tiny Ina were outraged.

“The poison murders … have stricken horror into these simple people and have aroused in them a demand for vengeance,” a Tribune correspondent sent to examine the downstate community wrote.

“This is a community of old  pioneer stock that came through almost insurmountable hardships in Kentucky and Tennessee with Daniel Boone,” the Tribune reported. “The Ina villagers are a people strangely taciturn and unemotional. Their eyes are cold.”

In Mount Vernon, where the trial was held, the mood was ominous. “The deputy sheriff declared the prosecutor told him to ‘get all the deputies you can get ahold of.’”

While awaiting trial, Sweeten and Hight were separated for their own safety. But first, authorities put them in a cell together hoping that, by eavesdropping, they could nail down their case.

The preacher was heard urging Sweeten to admit to the murder and ask for forgiveness. She refused, offering instead to babysit Hight’s children while he was behind bars. The sound of kisses could be heard. “I love that woman, and I think she reciprocates that love,” Hight said, his voice cracking with emotion, as he was taken back to his cell.

Neighbors in the small town had always been puzzled by Hight. “No one appears to know just where he came from,” the Tribune’s correspondent wrote. “He has said he ‘got the call’ 13 years ago.”

He raced horses at state fairs before marrying Anna. Their marriage was an unhappy one.

“I did not love my wife,” he said. “My wife nagged me. She was never satisfied with anything I bought her, and learned from Elsie that Wilford was indifferent to her.”

Elsie Sweeten’s childhood was truncated. At 11, she was sent out to work at various odd jobs. At 17, she married Wilford Sweeten. They lived on a farm, then he got a job in a mine. She was upbeat. He was dour and  undemonstrative. He criticized her in the presence of their three sons.

And so two people, resentful of their mates and starved for affection, came together.

He was smitten the first time she walked down the aisle of his church. Hight winked at Sweeten. Elsie put her hand on her heart. He nodded back.

“I felt myself slipping,” Hight said, “and I went the way of all flesh.”

The two began to meet in a little grove behind the Sweetens’ house. “Night after night we would go there, and for hours she would lie in my arms, and we would forget everything but each other,” he told a reporter.

“It was suggested that they run away together, but he didn’t want to give up preaching, and she didn’t want him to. Finally she asked him what would do the work, and he said he knew a way.”

The evidence in the case was damning, including testimony from a pharmacist who sold arsenic to Hight, who said he had a problem with rats.

Sweeten maintained her innocence, and said Hight was falsely accusing her of murdering her husband.

“I expected him to say that,” she said. “If he can’t have me, he doesn’t want anyone else to have me.”

At their trial in December 1924, her lawyer put the jurors’ choices bluntly: “Send her to the gallows or send her home to her children.”

The Tribune reported that Hight’s attorney initially planned to prove that his client suffered from an “ailment that makes solid citizens of middle age feel like Romeos.”

Whatever defense evidence the jury actually heard, they didn’t buy it. Hight and Sweeten were both found guilty and sentenced to prison.

Sweeten requested laundry duty in prison. In 1925, she filed an appeal, arguing her case should have been separated from the minister’s. The appeal was granted and Sweeten was given a new trial. Hight was taken from his cell to the courtroom where Sweeten was retried, where he would be on hand should his testimony be needed.

The trial was another sensation in Ina, where many of the town’s 400 residents flocked to the courthouse. Though much of the testimony was the same from the first trial, the jurors quickly came to a different conclusion, finding Sweeten not guilty.

A free woman, she moved to Chicago and was twice more married.

Hight was returned to prison. He was paroled in 1952 and returned to Mount Vernon, where he died seven years later.

Having confessed to the crimes, he said his conscience was clear.

“I’m just a human being, after all, but since my confession, I am sanctified, and in harmony with God once more,” he said. “I am happy.”

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