Daniel Rubin: After the massacre of all but a boy, family lives to tell the tale

The headline in the Inquirer needed but a single word to sink the hook:

Horror!

Eight persons lured one by one to a barn and then killed with an ax: a father, mother, four children, family friend, visiting aunt. A German farmhand gone missing.

The events of the day became known as the Murders in the Neck, for the canal-laced district at the tip of South Philadelphia. The "most horrible" murders in the city's history, the paper called them on April 12, 1866, after a neighbor stumbled upon the bodies.

Maybe because only one child survived - William Deering, age 10 - the ghastly murders have captivated Susan Kushner.

Or maybe because that boy was her great-grandfather.

Anton Probst, a solitary, morose Civil War deserter, would be arrested a few evenings later while walking toward West Philadelphia, his hat pulled low on his brow.

After the murders he'd fed the horses, shaved, picked out some of Christopher Deering's clothes, then sat down at the tenant farmer's kitchen table and devoured a butter sandwich. He grabbed two pocket watches, two pistols, and $17, then set out for a favorite Northern Liberties brothel. The motive, he'd soon confess, was robbery.

Justice moved quickly in those days. Within the month Probst was tried, and in June he'd hang from the gallows at Moyamensing Prison.

Tuesday was the 143d anniversary of the murders. Kushner observed the day "just reflecting on who they were." Speaking from her home outside Indianapolis, the 49-year-old is one of more than 60 descendents of William, who at the time of the killings was living with his grandparents in West Philadelphia, where he attended school.

Kushner was about William's age when she came upon an old clipping from the Philadelphia Bulletin in the family Bible. The article pictured her father, about 25, and an aunt, and focused on the treasure some believed was buried on the family farm.

The Deering family slaughter long intrigued her father. For years he enlisted Susan and her brother Michael to accompany him by train from their Bensalem home to Center City, where he'd pore through old maps and papers at the Philadelphia Free Library and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

The former Philco engineer had hoped to write a book about the killings, but got sick at age 59, and had to put down his quest. His daughter carried on. She shared her archives with a young writer named G. Jordan Lyons, whose account of the killings, The Philadelphia First Ward Horror, has just been published.

Reading about a distant massacre has had an unexpected effect on her, she said. "I feel I am grieving for them," Kushner said. "It brought them to a special place within me."

Today the Deering family lies buried in a mass grave at Holy Cross Cemetery in Yeadon under a statue of the Blessed Mother. Their bodies were moved from a church graveyard at 10th and Moore in the 1950s for the construction of St. Maria Goretti High School. This continues to trouble Kushner.

She has asked the archdiocese if the family can put a marker on the grave, in part because during her research she was horrified to read how her ancestors' bodies had been put on gruesome display before burial and thousands of people bought tickets to the spectacle.

I sought out Roger Lane, a Haverford College historian who has written at length about Philadelphia deaths, to explore how such a sideshow could happen.

During that period, he said, "nothing was too gruesome to be exploited commercially."

Robert E. Whomsley, director of the Catholic Cemeteries Office, told Kushner that the family could not put up a marker because it would be unfair to the rest of the 8,471 adults and children buried in the grave.

Kushner wonders if more attention should be paid to her people's near-annihilation. Dark as it is, it's a chapter of the city's history. "This is a whole family that no one knows about," she said.

Whomsley has invited her to visit, which she said she would, this summer, with scores of other descendants of what was once this city's most horrific mass murder.

"It will be kind of a family reunion," she said.