The official record of this case has remained unchanged for more than fifty years; Elizabeth Newman revisits the tragedy that still leaves her with unanswered questions.
On the afternoon of January 31, 1971, fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Swearingen (now Newman) stormed away from her home at the corner of Shibley and Kibler Roads in Van Buren. According to Elizabeth, she was startled when her stepfather, Arkansas State Trooper Ed Blackard, returned from a morning hunt with a sack of quail, since she had assumed he would stay overnight at his cabin. She recalls he had been drinking, was agitated, and began pacing through the house, raising his voice and demanding she clean and cook the quail. She refused. Later, when her mother, Kathryn, who was the Crawford County deputy tax collector, came home from visiting her elderly father, Elizabeth remembers hearing tension rise between them, as she says she’d heard many times before.
Elizabeth adored her mother. She loved Ed too, although that relationship was not without its troubles. “I think a lot of people probably felt the way about Ed that we did. Which is that he had a dark side, but he had so many positive qualities,” Elizabeth says.
Elizabeth recalls that Ed and Kathryn had separated once, and that he worked hard to reconcile. She remembers feeling optimistic, believing that even with Ed’s drinking and volatility, the impetus for the separation, there was a real chance he’d changed.
On that last day of January, however, Elizabeth had heard enough.
The low that day was thirty-three degrees, certainly not barefoot weather. Yet, Elizabeth had run out, without her shoes or coat, slamming the door behind her. To make matters worse, the road she walked was gravel.
As she trudged along, Dr. J.C. Hubbs, the town’s veterinarian and someone she worked for part-time, stopped to see if she needed a ride home. She declined. A short while later, he returned, still concerned about her walking barefoot in the cold. According to Elizabeth, who had walked to a nearby pasture, she climbed over a fence and accepted the ride to the Hubbs’ home to warm up.
As they drove back toward the intersection of Shibley Road and Kibler Road, Elizabeth remembers seeing an ambulance in the driveway of her home. At fifteen, she assumed it was something minor, perhaps an injury from a fall or an argument gone too far.
At the Hubbs’ home, Mrs. Hubbs made cocoa and gave her slippers. Before long, two men arrived to interview her: her stepfather’s supervisor with the Arkansas State Police and the Crawford County deputy coroner. Elizabeth recalls giving them the best account she could, still unaware of the severity of what had happened.
“Dr. Hubbs treated me with such kindness on that day… No one could have treated me with more kindness or a gentler hand,” Elizabeth says.
Fifteen is a tender age. When she arrived at Crawford County Memorial Hospital (now Baptist Health-Van Buren), she learned her mother was dead. Ed had been declared DOA. Elizabeth’s world split into before and after.
Bill Vickery, the Crawford County sheriff and a friend of Kathryn’s, arrived at the crime scene and began an initial investigation. The sheriff’s department had received a call from Kathryn, asking for an ambulance and reporting that she and Ed had shot each other. However, when the Arkansas State Police took over the case, they surmised that Kathryn had shot Ed, then shot herself.
For Elizabeth, that conclusion created a wound that decades could not close. In her mind, if her mother had intentionally taken her own life, it meant she chose to leave Elizabeth behind, and that was impossible to reconcile with the mother she knew.
Elizabeth didn’t speak openly about the shooting for years. After a brief stay with an aunt out-of-state, she moved in with her grandmother and returned to school in Van Buren. She found a new crowd, kids who didn’t know her history and didn’t ask questions.
What eventually steadied her life was education. As Ed’s stepdaughter, Elizabeth qualified for Social Security benefits that allowed her to pursue college. “I give all the credit in the world to education for pulling me up by the bootstraps of what could have been a really dismal life.”
At the University of Arkansas, an anthropology class led her to sociology, where she first heard academic language that helped her make sense of the difficult dynamics she remembered from her childhood. That understanding shaped her entire career. Over decades of teaching in Missouri, Wisconsin, and Arkansas, she taught more than 15,000 students, always mindful of those who, like her younger self, were trying to understand the forces shaping their lives.
But Kathryn was never far from her mind.
In the early 1990s, Elizabeth was living in Missouri. Her best friend in Arkansas mentioned a conversation with a woman named Boots Runion, who had been close to Kathryn and her children. According to Elizabeth, Boots did not believe Kathryn had taken her own life and encouraged her to contact retired Crawford County Sheriff Bill Vickery. Elizabeth remembers Bill Vickery as someone who knew her family well. In her recollection, he had once taken her to the hospital after an incident during her childhood.
When she reached out to him, she says he shared the files he had kept over the years. There were many.
Elizabeth also obtained portions of the Arkansas State Police case file — no easy task. In her book Reclaiming Kathryn, what she found only deepened her questions. She describes discovering misspelled names, sometimes twice on the saie page; crime scene photographs that were referenced but no longer part of the record; and tests mentioned in reports that were missing from the file. She also recalls that Kathryn’s clothing and Ed’s service revolver were unaccounted for. And while Ed’s autopsy was detailed, Kathryn’s was noticeably limited by comparison.
To Elizabeth, there were gaps everywhere, more holes than certainty.
Once she gathered all she could, she sat down to write. It took her ten months to finish the manuscript. “I never cried while I was writing, but every night when I would finish about three a.m., I’d close it all down and I’d go online and pull up some music that was evocative of my Ozark heritage, and I’d weep.” The tears stopped when the book was finished.
Reclaiming Kathryn does not definitively answer what happened that day; there may never be a definitive answer. But it does shine the light on inconsistencies, missing evidence, and investigative shortcuts.
At a recent talk with criminology students at Langston University, Elizabeth was asked if the Arkansas State Police had contacted her concerning her book. She says they have not.
Today, she remains reflective about her life after the tragedy. She’s grateful for the family that took care of her, the career that gave her purpose, the loving man she married, and her children.
She remembers her mother sitting at the piano, playing hymns by ear, and herself harmonizing. She remembers her mother’s smile, her gentle answers to hard questions, her laughter. She remembers being held in that light for fifteen years. And even now, the light shines on.
In the end, Elizabeth wrote her book because the record left her with questions, because so much remained unresolved in her memory, and because her mother’s story felt larger than what fit into a two-page summary.
Reclaiming Kathryn became her way of honoring the woman she lost and giving shape to the questions that had stayed with her for more than fifty years.
You can find Reclaiming Kathryn locally at Chapters on Main in downtown Van Buren, Arkansas, as well as online retailers.
