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No first murder, no first murder trial, and no saloon-era killing is recorded for this township in any carrier reached — the documented homicide record opens in 1989. The test was run where such a record would live: neither county history's township chapters (Chapman 1880, Howard 1907, both read for this build) prints a killing on this ground; the banked crime record's earliest matter is of other kinds — a tavern licence, a court action over the White City Inn in 1937 (litigation, not bloodshed), a funeral the town hosted in 1934 for an executed outsider. Against that silence stand the two cases that open the documented record: the Pelley murders of 29 April 1989 and the Stroud murders of 14 September 2000, each carried whole in the banked remainder file. A coroner's instrument exists that could move the opening earlier — the St. Joseph County Coroner's Records Index, 1879–1960, held by the South Bend Area Genealogical Society — located, not read; it is named here as the row's strongest settler, with the Tribune file and a court-record mention sweep behind it. Until one of them is read, the leg prints the negative at its exact strength: no first murder is known, which is a statement about the record, not about the township's nineteenth century.
Principal sources: the banked this history lk-rem-crime and lk-rem-crime-tests; Chapman (1880) and Howard (1907) township chapters as read for this build; the SBAGS coroner index, located (sbags.org), named as settler.