The Burning Barrel:Fred Grabbe·Charlotte Grabbe

Fred and Charlotte Grabbe owned a large farm in Clark County, Illinois, outside the town of Marshall. By the summer of 1981 their marriage was ending. Fred was seeing another woman, Vicki McCalister, and a divorce that would have split the farm was on the way.

Charlotte disappeared on July 24, 1981. For three years there was no body and no charge. The break came in 1984, when a private investigator tracked down McCalister. She told investigators she had watched Fred strangle Charlotte in a machine shed on the farm, then force her body into a 55-gallon drum, burn it on the bank of the Wabash River and dump what remained into the water. To test her account, specialists examined a tree beside the spot she described. Its growth rings showed petroleum damage dating to the summer of 1981.

Grabbe was charged in November 1984 and convicted of murder in 1985, although Charlotte’s body was never recovered. An appeals court overturned that verdict in 1986 because of trial errors, including the admission of claims that he had committed earlier murders and the refusal to give an accomplice-witness instruction. A second jury convicted him again in 1988, and he was sentenced to 75 years. After nearly thirty-eight years in custody, Grabbe was released on parole in July 2022 at the age of eighty-three.