Shirley Gene Arthur, a 33-year-old man, vanished in southern West Virginia on November 22, 1963, during a period when a string of disappearances and mutilation murders had already created fear across Fayette and Wyoming counties. Arthur was from Mt. Hope, West Virginia, rather than Pineville itself, but Pineville was central to the final known hours of his disappearance. Online accounts describe him as a U.S.
Navy serviceman who had gone absent without leave and returned to West Virginia while dealing with personal problems. He was also known as a talented gospel singer who hoped to pursue music professionally. On the evening he disappeared, Arthur traveled to Pineville to spend time with his girlfriend and rehearse for an upcoming gospel concert. Accounts differ on exactly when he left her home, with one placing his departure at approximately 11 p.m. and another closer to 1 a.m. He apparently planned to hitchhike back toward home. His last reported confirmed sighting came around 2 a.m. in Sophia, West Virginia. Before he left, his girlfriend had given him a yellow apple to eat during his trip.
Arthur did not make it home. His family was not immediately alarmed because, according to later accounts, he had sometimes left unexpectedly and returned without warning. The disappearance took on a much darker meaning when human remains were discovered in the Pineville area near Indian Creek. Several young people gathering firewood came across a dismembered torso, and additional portions of the lower body were found nearby wrapped in a canvas tarpaulin. The head, arms, hands and feet were missing. An autopsy reportedly showed numerous penetrating wounds to the chest, any of which could have been fatal, apparently inflicted with a narrow blunt or pointed object that investigators compared to an ice pick. The remains also appeared to have been kept in cold storage before being discarded and were reportedly still thawing when examined. Investigators found partially digested food in the stomach, including a yellow apple. Because Arthur had been given a yellow apple shortly before he vanished, and because the unidentified victim was thought to resemble him in general age and physical characteristics, authorities considered the possibility that the body was Arthur’s.
There was, however, a significant problem with that identification. Arthur was reportedly a heavy smoker, while the lungs of the unidentified victim appeared unusually clean and did not show the condition investigators expected from a regular smoker. That discrepancy prevented authorities from conclusively establishing that the dismembered man was Arthur. One later account treated the remains as though they were eventually identified as his, but more detailed retellings of the investigation state that the identification was never confirmed. The unidentified victim was ultimately buried in a Wyoming County cemetery under the designation “Mr. X.” Consequently, the available online material does not conclusively establish that Arthur died on November 22, 1963; that is the date associated with his disappearance. His fate became intertwined with the legend of the “Mad Butcher of West Virginia,” an unidentified killer or killers suspected in a series of disappearances and dismemberment cases from roughly 1962 through 1964. The strongest comparison was to the December 1962 murder of Michael Rogers, whose body had been dismembered and scattered near Chimney Corner. The similarities in mutilation and disposal caused investigators and residents to question whether Arthur had encountered the same person responsible for Rogers’s killing.
The wider investigation generated suspects, but no one was ever convicted of killing Arthur, and the surviving online accounts do not document an arrest specifically for his disappearance. One frequently repeated suspect was Hugh Montgomery. A later account states that Montgomery came to police attention in 1964 after an incident at a local hospital. He allegedly demanded employment as a doctor, left after being refused, then returned with a sledgehammer and began damaging property. During the resulting arrest and investigation, police reportedly discovered several guns, a knife, a duffel bag and a meat grinder among items associated with him. Montgomery was said to have attended medical school for a period and to have served in the Air Force in a medical capacity. According to that account, he admitted having killed several people but denied being the so-called Mad Butcher, maintaining that those deaths occurred in self-defense because people were pursuing him. He was subsequently confined in psychiatric institutions for periods of time. The account does not establish evidence directly connecting Montgomery to Arthur, however, and there is no indication that he was charged, tried or convicted in Arthur’s disappearance or the unidentified Pineville torso killing.
Investigators also considered persons connected to the earlier Rogers murder. In that case, police reportedly focused on a man after bloody cutting tools, including an axe, knife and hacksaw, were found in his possession. The man had also reportedly worked for Greyhound, an intriguing connection because a military-style duffel bag found with Rogers’s remains had been traced to an owner who said he had lost it while traveling by Greyhound several years earlier. The suspect maintained that the bloodied tools had been used for butchering animals and denied being in West Virginia when Rogers was killed. He was never charged and later died by suicide. Whether that man had anything to do with Arthur is unknown. Other individuals were discussed over the years as possible Mad Butcher suspects, and later programs reviewing the case have described several plausible candidates, but none was established as Arthur’s killer.
Arthur’s disappearance therefore remains surrounded by two unresolved mysteries: what happened to him after the final reported sighting near Sophia, and whether the mutilated remains discovered near Pineville belonged to him at all. The yellow apple provided a striking circumstantial link, while the condition of the unidentified victim’s lungs argued against the identification. No recovered head, hands or other identifying remains resolved the question, and no suspect was prosecuted for Arthur’s disappearance. More than six decades later, the available accounts continue to place him among the possible victims of the unidentified “Mad Butcher,” but the evidence publicly described online stops short of proving either his death or the identity of the person responsible.
