M.A. Kleen

On a warm, wind-tossed Saturday in April 1968, a quiet Mattoon High School senior walked into a Coles County corn crib and left five children dead—the worst mass murder the county has ever known. This article traces the grim hours that came next, from the frantic search and overnight flight to the dawn arrest in Charleston, and the courtroom reckoning that left the family with little sense of justice.

“Violence is the greatest obscenity against man,” the Journal Gazette editorialized. “We are stunned. We are shocked. We are appalled. But we can’t tell you why such things happen.” Any murder is a tragedy, but murders involving children are particularly horrifying. In the spring of 1968, Coles County experienced its worst mass murder before or since when a young man from Texas took the lives of five children from the Cox family on a warm but windy Saturday afternoon.

Thomas Charles Fuller II was a below average student, 5-feet, 8-inches tall with dark hair and brown eyes, “very quiet and polite,” but “a loner” and “sullen as a preacher.” The 18-year-old senior at Mattoon High School had recently moved from Texas to Mattoon with his parents, William and Lucy Fuller, and three siblings. He was a member of the junior ROTC program and dated 16-year-old Edna Louise Cox, a pretty girl with brunette, bubble flipped hair.

The Cox family lived in a two-story, white clapboard farmhouse eight miles northwest of Mattoon in North Okaw Township. William Junior (1923-2010) and Lydia Mary (1929-2006) Cox had a large Catholic family with nine children at home: Kenneth Winford, Theresa Jean, Edward Louis “Louie”, Mary Katherine “Cathy”, Gary Lee, Edna Louise, Billie Colleen, Timothy Leroy “Timmy”, and Patricia Ann “Patty”.

The children had two married half-sisters: Marie Rose Cline and Christine Beahl, and two adult half-brothers: Robert Joseph and William George. Christine and Robert lived elsewhere in Illinois, and William was serving in the U.S. Navy.

The trouble began around Christmas when Fuller asked William Cox, a construction worker for R. R. Donnely & Sons, permission to marry his daughter. William declined, citing Fuller’s age, his lack of employment, and a desire for Louise to finish school. Fuller, who believed Louise’s family was persecuting her with burdensome chores while they were “always laying around,” fumed.

“Perhaps I’ve always wanted to kill…” he later wrote in his diary. Among other wild fantasies, he planned to kill her entire family, then the couple would flee to Canada. According to Fuller’s friend and classmate, Sammy Lee Davis, Fuller contemplated the plan for weeks.

On Saturday, April 27, 1968, around six months after Fuller and Louise began dating, Fuller hitched a ride to the Cox farmhouse and arrived around 11:00 a.m., but did not eat lunch with the family. He was wearing a green Army jacket with a PFC rank sewn on the sleeve, a gray t-shirt, khaki pants, and brown suede boots. A pocket knife was tucked into one boot and a .22 caliber pistol in a leather holster.

After lunch, Fuller claimed that a sibling struck Louise. When she chased her assailant upstairs, four others followed and ganged up on her, kicking and beating her. Lydia Cox, her mother, would not let Fuller run upstairs to help. Fuller stepped outside, he said, because he couldn’t stand to hear Louise screaming. Louise testified at trial that her siblings had “pulled her hair, hit her and tickled her”.

Shortly after, William Cox took Timmy, 15, to help fix a truck at his brother’s house while Lydia heated up two pies for an afternoon snack. When 14-year-old Patty accidentally leaned too close to the gas stove, her blouse caught fire and burned her back. Lydia frantically called Marie to come take them to Mattoon Memorial Hospital, which she and a neighbor did around 4:15 p.m., leaving the remaining children alone.

According to Fuller, Louie, 16, and Gary, 7, bugged him to go outside and shoot birds with his .22 caliber pistol, and he reluctantly agreed after Louise told him Billie Colleen, 12, would help her with the dishes. Fuller took the boys past an old wooden double corn crib approximately 200 feet from the house. Five-year-old Kenneth, the youngest, followed, and Theresa and Cathy went to play outside.

Fuller later described watching himself commit the murders as though he was having an out-of-body experience. Louie egged him on to shoot the birds. “Go ahead, shoot, shoot,” Louie said, but Fuller turned his gun on the boys instead. He shot Louie first, then Gary, and then Kenneth; all three in the head. Kenneth died instantly, he said, but he had to return to Louie and Gary to finish them off. The boys’ bodies were later found outside the northwest corner of the corn crib. Kenneth lay west of the crib. At that point, Fuller returned to the house to get a drink of water.

“Where’s Louis?” Louise asked.

“Out back,” replied Fuller. Fuller then lured nine-year-old Theresa and eight-year-old Cathy to the corn crib by asking them if they wanted to shoot rats. Instead, he shot Theresa twice and Cathy multiple times in the head just inside the crib’s southern entrance. He then returned to the house for another drink of water. “Shot some birds,” he told his girlfriend. Billie later recalled him saying, “I’ve killed five little birds. Come on out and see.”

It was 5:00 p.m. when Marie and Lydia returned home. Without saying goodbye to Louise, Fuller asked Marie for a ride back to Mattoon. She dropped him off at the corner of 33rd Street and DeWitt Avenue around 5:20, and Fuller wandered the streets until he ran into his 17-year-old friend Samuel Lee Davis near the Penn Central train yard near Moultrie Avenue. There, Fuller confessed to murdering the Cox children “Because he [Davis] knew it was going to happen.”

As the sun went down at the Cox home, Lydia sent Louise to holler for the other children to come inside. The yard was eerily silent. Louise and Billie saw their sisters lying on the corn crib floor and ran back into the house. “Theresa and Cathy must have fallen from the rafters,” they frantically reported. Lydia phoned her husband to come home right away.

As William pulled up to the driveway, he saw Billie trying to flag down help. It was worse than he feared. The girls’ bodies were cold and lifeless. He discovered the three boys nearby. Unable to comprehend what happened, the Cox family first called the Mitchell-Jerdan Funeral Home and George Jerdan arrived at the house before the police.

Shortly before 7:00 p.m., Samuel Davis and his mother walked into the Mattoon police department and reported that an acquaintance told him five Cox children had been murdered. Within minutes, Coles County Deputy Sheriff David O’Dell was on his way to the Cox residence. This triggered a chain of events culminating in a massive manhunt involving over 100 officers and volunteers. Roadblocks stopped traffic at all roads leading into Mattoon, but Thomas Fuller had slipped away.

He walked all night along the railroad tracks until he ended up twelve miles away in Charleston. George Bosler, an Eastern Illinois University security guard, and Jack Turner, a Charleston police officer, saw Fuller at the intersection of 4th Street and Lincoln Avenue around 6:30 a.m. and took him into custody. Fuller surrendered without incident. In a matter of hours, he appeared before a judge and Coles County State’s Attorney Ralph D. Glenn (1929-2018) charged him with five counts of first-degree murder.

Funerals for the five children were held at Immaculate Conception Catholic Church and they were interred in identical white coffins at Calvary Cemetery on 19th Street in Mattoon. Sister Rosita, principal of St. Mary and St. Joseph parochial schools, cancelled classes the day of the funerals. 

When asked how she felt about Fuller now, Louise replied, “I hate him, I hate him, I hate him.”

At first, Fuller pleaded not guilty to the murder charges, but after hearing damning preliminary testimony, he decided to change his plea. On October 24 at around 2:30 p.m., his public defender told the judge, “The defendant, Your Honor, wishes to withdraw his previous plea of not guilty and enter a plea of guilty.” The decision shocked members of the press, who had prepared themselves for a long and sensational trial. The Journal Gazette had to stop their printing press and recall delivery trucks in order to get a story about the change of plea into Thursday’s evening edition.

On Tuesday, December 10, 1968, Circuit Judge Harry Ingalls Hannah (1890-1973) sentenced Fuller to two consecutive sentences of 70 to 99 years in the Illinois State Penitentiary at Joliet. William Cox was outraged, believing that Fuller’s crime warranted the death penalty. “Why in hell can’t he die the way my babies did?” he shouted as he was escorted to the elevator after being restrained by two sheriff’s deputies.

After the murders, William Cox struggled to come to terms with what happened, became a Jehovah’s Witness, and wrote about his family’s experience in Awake!. Thomas C. Fuller is currently prisoner #C10244 at Graham Correctional Center in Hillsboro. All his attempts at early parole have been denied, and members of the Cox family have fought to keep it that way. He is not scheduled to be released until 2056.

Donate

---

Sources

Sawyer, Diane. The Mattoon Murders. Jonesboro, Ark: Southern Publishing Co., 1982.

Cox, William. “A Tragic Saturday That Shattered My Family.” Awake!, October 22, 1986.

“For Friends the Vigil Was Lonely.” Journal Gazette (Mattoon) 29 April 1968.

“Slayings Trigger County’s Biggest Manhunt.” Journal Gazette (Mattoon) 29 April 1968.

“Youth Held—5 Children Killed.” Wausau Daily Herald (Wausau, WI) 29 April 1968.

“Youth Charged in Mattoon Slayings.” Decatur Herald (Decatur) 29 April 1968.

“Fuller Charged With 5 Slayings.” The Decatur Review (Decatur) 29 April 1968.

“Girlfriend Says Accused Slayer Hated Family.” Journal Gazette (Mattoon) 30 April 1968.

“Accused Youth Was Refused Permission to Marry Cox Girl.” Decatur Herald (Decatur) 30 April 1968.

“Cox Family Looking for New Home.” Journal Gazette (Mattoon) 3 May 1968.

“Fuller Pleads Innocent.” Journal Gazette (Mattoon) 13 May 1968.

“Glenn Says He Will Ask Death Penalty.” Journal Gazette (Mattoon) 14 October 1968.

“Cox Family May Testify in Murder Trial.” Journal Gazette (Mattoon) 15 October 1968.

“Testimony Quotes Fuller: ‘I Did It’.” Journal Gazette (Mattoon) 24 October 1968.

“Fuller ‘Didn’t Want to Murder’.” Decatur Herald (Decatur) 5 November 1968.

“Fuller Tells Why He Killed Children.” The Decatur Review (Decatur) 7 November 1968.

“I was Real Hot, a Dry Hot…I Cried on Sunday.” Journal Gazette (Mattoon) 7 November 1968.

“Three Cox children testify.” Journal Gazette (Mattoon) 9 November 1968.

“Fuller ‘Planned to Kill’.” The Decatur Review (Decatur) 9 November 1968.

“Fuller Draws 70 to 99 Years.” Journal Gazette (Mattoon) 10 December 1968.

“The innocence lost” in Mattoon Sesquicentennial. Journal Gazette (Mattoon) 17 August 2005.

“Man seeking parole in 1968 Mattoon murders.” Herald and Review (Decatur) 13 June 2014.

“Fifty years later, they remain ‘Taken Before Their Time’.” The News-Gazette (Champaign) 2 May 2018.