In the early-hours darkness of **April 25, 1951**, the lifeless body of **8-year-old Caucasian female Jane Marie Althoff** was found slumped against the passenger door of a pickup parked at the Penn-Premier Shows carnival on Ninth Street in Trainer, Pennsylvania. She had vanished from the midway the evening before while trailing her brothers through a crowd of more than 2,000 fairgoers.
A coroner determined she had been choked or smothered four-to-five hours earlier; there were no obvious knife or gun wounds, and early reports differed on whether the child—described in contemporary accounts as a “white school-girl”—had been sexually assaulted. Noise from generators and rides had muffled any screams, allowing the killer to act unseen just yards from the bright midway.
Detectives noted “definite” grease stains on the **8-year-old Caucasian girl’s** blouse and collected a single fingerprint from the truck door along with two palm prints embedded in the seat vinyl. Carnival employees were lined up for printing; one set came back to **William Henry Redmond**, a 29-year-old Ferris-wheel operator with a record of molesting pre-teen girls. Redmond told police he had merely chatted with the child about free rides; lacking a full match to the seat prints, officers let him drift away with the show’s next jump. A Delaware County arrest warrant followed in **January 1952**, but by then the suspect had criss-crossed the country with travelling fairs, working as a trucker and seaman.
For decades the file lay dormant. In **1985**, State Police Trooper **Malcolm Murphy** reopened it after Trainer’s police chief—who had grown up hearing whispers about the case—asked for fresh eyes. Murphy discovered computerised vehicle data linking Redmond to Grand Island, Nebraska. When officers confronted the former showman at his trailer in **January 1988**, the emphysema-stricken drifter allegedly admitted he “lost his temper” with the little girl when she pestered him for more rides, then “put his hands on her throat.” He was extradited to Pennsylvania and formally charged with homicide, manslaughter, kidnapping, indecent assault and related counts.
Legal warfare stalled the trial. Redmond’s defence demanded the identity of a confidential informant who had pointed investigators toward a **second early suspect—Trainer’s former police chief Herman “Whitey” Triplett**. When Trooper Murphy refused, a judge barred him from testifying; prosecutors appealed, but hearings dragged on. Meanwhile, the frail carnival hand was judged no flight risk and released on **$1 bail**, returning to Nebraska to await further proceedings. He died of natural causes on **January 2, 1992**, still proclaiming innocence in public while, according to a cell-mate, smirking that authorities had him “on this one but not the others.”
Because the sole defendant died before trial and key evidence had been excluded, **no one has ever been convicted in the strangling of the 8-year-old Caucasian girl**. Redmond’s fingerprints—and his own statements—kept him the official prime suspect, but some investigators still wonder whether the prints implicating him on the seat could have belonged to a mechanic who serviced the truck, or whether Triplett’s rumored protection racket around travelling carnivals might have shielded another killer.
The child’s family, poor mill-workers who survived on **$80 a month**, could not afford a headstone; for more than seven decades **Jane Marie Althoff, 8, Caucasian female**, lay in an unmarked grave at Lawn Croft Cemetery. In 2024 local historians launched a fundraiser to give “little Janie” a stone at last—a small gesture of remembrance for a case that, despite a dramatic arrest and a suspect’s death-bed notoriety, remains officially unsolved.
