Bunice Tyner was a Marion businessman who owned a handful of taverns in Marion and the surrounding area from 1941 up to his murder in 1960. Tyner also owned Wimpey’s Café at 106 S. Court Street, but the business was actually operated by his wife, Louina. The amusements in local taverns in those days, popular since WWII, were pinball and jukebox machines. Also, slot machines, which were technically illegal, but often tolerated under the right conditions. Continue reading
Tag Archives: murder
On December 4, 1974, Dr. Ripley’s chiropractic office at 1825 W. Main Street was full of patients awaiting treatment. At 9:30, an hour after the office should have opened, an unanswered telephone prompted one of the patients to answer it. Upon opening a hallway door he discovered the body of Dr. Donald Ripley. Ripley had been shot seven times with a .45 caliber hand gun. Most of the efforts to uncover his murderer centered around a mysterious, well-dressed black man, but his killer was never found and remains one of Marion’s cold cases to this day. Continue reading
On June 1, 1974, 13 year old Frances Buckner, a resident of Creal Springs, was spending time in Marion with her father, Robert Buckner, who lived on the Public Square. They decided to walk down E. Main Street to Small’s Market at 1005 E. Main to buy milk. Frances outpaced her father who had health issues and was last seen about a half a block from Small’s. She wasn’t seen again until five nights later.
Her nude body was found lying in the street in the 500 block of E. Marion Street around 11 p.m. under a street light. Someone had thrown a rock through a local resident’s window to alert them of her presence. Continue reading
When 48 year old, divorcee and mother of two, Virginia Barbaro, failed to show up for work at Tony’s Steak House on Friday, August 17th, 1973, her friends went looking for her. She was discovered to have been murdered at some time in the early hours of that day in her apartment located over Boatright’s Electronics on the public square. Suspicion shifted quickly to an ex-boyfriend, 43 year old, disabled coal miner Boyd Moore, who lived in Christopher. Moore’s body was found that same afternoon not far from his home, with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Located near his body was a suicide note confessing to the death of Mrs. Barbaro. Continue reading
The bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Clay Collins lying in pools of their own blood with a gunshot thru the temple of each head was the sight that greeted two night policemen who entered the Collins home at 104 North Russell Street about two thirty o’clock Tuesday morning. Continue reading