Death Behind Closed Doors: The Gray and Llewellyn Tragedy

New Philadelphia was shaken in 1910 when a secret meeting between two familiar residents ended in scandalous death.

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James B. Gray (1856-1910) was born in Tuscarawas County and spent his early years in Goshen Township, growing up in a large household with his parents and five siblings. He married Anna Maria Demuth (1857-1924) in 1879, and in 1880 the couple was living in Goshen Township, where James worked as a farmer. Over the next two decades, the Grays raised a large family, and by 1900 had settled in New Philadelphia with their seven children, and resided in a rented home on West Ray Street while James worked as a grocery shipper. By 1907, they bought a home on the 300 block of Tuscarawas Avenue and James was employed as a superintendent in a coal mine in Roswell. It was likely through his employment that he met “Kitty” Llewellyn (1869-1910), the wife of a coal miner.

Sarah Katherine “Kitty” Llewellyn was also born in Tuscarawas County and was the daughter of Henry Garabrandt (1831-1896), a farmer, and Sarah Bair (1832-1898). Kitty married William Harmon (1864-1943) in 1887 when she was 17 years old, and the couple had two children before their marriage ended. She then married John Llewellyn (1851-1929) in 1892. John was a Welsh-born coal miner, and in 1900 the family lived in Barnhill, Tuscarawas County, where they raised Kitty’s children from her first marriage. A decade later, in 1910, the Llewellyns resided in Roswell where John worked in the coal mine superintended by James Gray.

On the afternoon of Wednesday, November 16, 1910 the bodies of James Gray and Kitty Llewellyn were discovered in a rented room at Benson Grimm’s (1854-1911) boarding house at the corner of Miller Alley and East Front Street in New Philadelphia. Gray checked into the room nearly twenty-four hours prior in what authorities later called a clandestine meeting. The scene that met Grimm when he forced entry, prompted by a lingering smell of gas and silence behind the door, was a horrific one. James and Kitty were side by side on the bed, fully clothed but lifeless, with one of Gray’s arms draped beneath Llewellyn’s neck. A gas stove, still hissing gas into the room, explained their deaths.

The discovery of the bodies set off a flurry of police and official activity. Patrolman Fred Smith (1882-1913) thought he was responding to a pair of drunkards, but arrived to find the decomposing bodies in the stifling, gas-filled room. Chief Ernest Lockard (1876-1939), Prosecutor Edward Bailey (1860-1927), and Coroner Milton Romig (1842-1927) followed, and each stated that the scene was the most terrible of their careers. Blood was forced from Kitty’s nose and her face and hair were matted with it. Both bodies were swollen and discolored from decomposition and exposure to the gas. Gray had arrived at the boarding house alone, according to a boarding house witness, and had requested a room to rest despite living just a few blocks away.

While no definitive explanation emerged, the circumstances surrounding the deaths of James Gray and Kitty Llewellyn suggested a private rendezvous turned tragic. The secrecy of their meeting, evidenced by Gray renting the room alone and Kitty arriving later, pointed to a relationship they sought to conceal, perhaps romantic in nature. Investigators ruled out a suicide pact, though gave no evidence as to why, and leaned instead toward accidental asphyxiation from the gas stove in the closed, poorly ventilated room. Whether seeking solace, escape, or a moment of intimacy, their meeting ended in their deaths—quiet and shrouded in mystery.

The deaths of James Gray and Kitty Llewellyn left two families in mourning and a town whispering of scandal. Both led ordinary lives until that fatal meeting brought them to the Grimm boarding house and both James Gray and Kitty Llewellyn were buried in the East Avenue Cemetery in New Philadelphia. Their deaths raised questions, fueled gossip, and left behind grieving loved ones and a community struggling to make sense of a secret encounter that ended in death.

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© Noel B. Poirier, 2024.