"Whatever happened to . . .?" is a weekly series updating some of the most newsworthy and interesting local stories covered in The Plain Dealer. Have a suggestion on a story we should update? Send it to John C. Kuehner at jkuehner@plaind.com.

Today, we answer this question:

Whatever happened to solving the 1959 Christmas Eve homicide of Charles R. Clark in Mentor?



This sensational case that made front-page headlines in newspapers across the region is closed.

Spokeswomen for the Lake County Prosecutor's Office and the Lake County Sheriff's Office both said Clark's killer was never found.

Charles Clark, a $10,000-a-year engineer at Reliance Electric, was shot once in the right temple through a kitchen window in his Mentor home at 6:40 p.m. as he helped his wife open a can of pumpkin for a Christmas dinner.

The 35-year-old father of four was a Boy Scout leader and was dressed in his Scout uniform when he was shot and killed. He was planning to go caroling in the neighborhood with his scouts later that evening.

Clark was also a Sunday school superintendent at a Methodist church in Mentor.

His wife, who was 30 at the time, initially told Mentor police she had received crank calls from an anonymous man who wanted to date her. She said he was mostly incoherent.

Suspicions fell on Floyd Hargrove, 34, a Painesville truck driver who was turned in as a suspect by his friend, John Ozinger Jr. He said that Hargrove had told him he bought a .22 caliber rifle in Chardon and intended to kill Charles Clark.

Hargrove, one of six men Lois Clark admitted to Lake County Prosecutor Edward R. Ostrander as having affairs with, was an Air Force rifleman who won a sharpshooter's medal while he was in the service.

He initially admitted -- under a "truth serum" administered by psychiatrist Stanley Wallace at Hargrove's own request -- to murdering Clark. He said he crept behind their home and, from 40 feet away, fired the fatal shot. Hargrove said he then drove to Kirtland Hills and threw the rifle in the Chagrin River.

Newspaper accounts said Hargrove admitted killing Clark because, "I thought if Chuck were out of the way, Lois and I could be married."

At his trial in June, 1960, Hargrove swore than he never owned the gun and denied he threw it in the river. He did admit to asking Lois Clark to divorce her husband in the summer of 1959, but she told Hargrove "she would not intentionally hurt anyone, her husband included ... and leaving him would have been an intentional hurt."

Hargrove also said in court he confessed to the Christmas Eve slaying under threats that his love life with Mrs. Clark would be made public. "I told them what they wanted me to," Hargrove to an assistant prosecutor. "I would have confessed to the Chicago fire if they had asked me."

Hargrove also said Ozinger lied when he testified that Hargrove told him he bought a gun in Chardon Dec. 23 with the intention of killing Clark.

One of Hargrove's attorneys said he thought a rifle had been planted in the same location after Hargrove named the spot, and told jurors, "The type of investigation (law officials) conducted was a combination of a Keystone cops and Three Stooges comedy."

On June 8, 1960, the jury found Hargrove innocent of the slaying, a verdict that left Hargrove smiling but shaken, Clark's parents from Rochester, N.Y. bitter, and Lake County Prosecutor Ostrander shocked and amazed.

A juror told a Plain Dealer reporter, "We didn't rule out the possibility that he could have done it, but the state didn't prove its case."

The case remains in the Lake County Prosecutor's Office the way Ostrander left it after the verdict -- a murder case closed and marked unsolved.

The verdict also enabled Lois Clark to collect $105,298 in life insurance. She said at the time that she had no intention of marrying Hargrove and was considering relocating to California.