The Archive is where past stories and art will appear for a limited time. Catch them before they are gone!



Story for May 2015: How to Get a Cheap Statue

            Mr. Clayback, commonly known as “Old Man Clayback,” lived in Off Davis Hollow, Barry County, Missouri. He had served in the state militia during the Civil War, from which conflict he emerged as “a physical wreck.” In 1885, he came down with a severe case of what he took to be rheumatism. By 1888 he was paralyzed—an “ossified man,” as seen in all the finest traveling freak shows. Clayback’s doctor told him his case was incurable and advised him to make his peace with God.

            The prospect of death did not trouble Clayback, but he did not like the idea of his body becoming worm food. Get cremated, a friend advised. The very concept thrilled the old man’s soul and he requested that his relatives dispose of his body in this newfangled manner.

            In 1890 Mr. Clayback was coaxed on the Pale Horse, and his family had to figure out a way to cremate him. Someone remembered that a neighbor owned a lime kiln that was wonderfully suited for the purpose. They placed Clayback’s stiff remains in a large molasses mill evaporating pan so they could save the ashes, then placed the pan in the kiln (presumably after getting permission first from the owners of the kiln and the molasses mill). The kiln was built into the side of a hill, with the not necessarily desirable result that the Clayback family could watch the cremation process. First, the winding sheet caught fire; a quantity of steam came from Clayback’s ears, mouth, and nose. Yet the body itself stubbornly refused to burn. The next of kin shoveled more wood into the kiln. No good. Still more kindling; still no effect. Hours passed into three days of constant burning. The only effect the fire seemed to be having on Clayback’s corpus was that his face bore what was described as a peaceful—even satisfied—expression. The matter was becoming awkward. The Claybacks realized that the body must be drawn from the fire or the lime within would be ruined. They used grappling hooks to pull the evaporating pan out of the kiln. The corpse was still intact, but suffused with a lovely glow. When it was cool enough to touch, the family was surprised, and not a little delighted, to find that Clayback’s body had transformed into a marble-like substance, “a little lighter in color than the natural body, but retaining its natural shape, except on the back, which is a little flattened.” It was a perfect likeness, showing even a bullet wound and a foot injury he had received in 1870. The admirably practical family decided to display Clayback’s “statue” on a limestone pedestal.

P.S. This is one of the hundreds of absurd-but-true stories in my latest book! Order it from Amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/Gothic-Strange-True-Tales-South/dp/1455620157/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1423651303&sr=1-1-fkmr0&keywords=kevin+mcqueen+gothic 



Story for April 2015: A Billion Paupers               

     What to do with dead paupers? Something must be done with them. In cities of the long ago, undertaking firms would put in bids for contracts to bury the impoverished dead. The business would go to the firm that put in the lowest bid.

     In June 1899, Kansas City’s Health Board received four bids to perform this necessary service. Two undertakers offered to bury the indigent for $3.75 apiece plus a charge for ambulance service. Another firm promised to bury unclaimed corpses for $4.80 each and threw in free ambulance service. But the best offer came from an undertaking firm that bid to bury each corpse for only one billionth of a cent—plus free ambulance service! The generous firm would have to bury one billion bodies to earn one penny, and then they would not break even due to the free ambulance service. And, since Kansas City buried about ten paupers a month, it would take the mortician 100 million years to earn that penny.

     What the low-bidding undertaker expected to get for his trouble other than a moral victory is not clear. “It is the board’s duty to secure the service at the cheapest rate,” deadpanned Mayor Jones.

[This is a snippet from my new book! You can order it from Amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/Gothic-Strange-True-Tales-South/dp/1455620157/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1423651303&sr=1-1-fkmr0&keywords=kevin+mcqueen+gothic ]



Story for March 2015: Dubious Doctors

     One fine morning long ago, Mrs. Connery of Fairmount Avenue, Philadelphia, noticed that her baby’s knee was badly swollen. She called in T. B. Miller, M.D., billed as the ex-Dean of the Philadelphia University of Medicine Surgery. This august personage examined the infant and declared that it had somehow broken its leg. He wrapped the limb in bandages, applied liniment, and left, with the reassuring promise that he would be back.

     Dr. Miller returned the next day with five other doctors because he felt a consultation was necessary. The learned physicians concluded that the baby’s leg had mortified and must be amputated—with a saw!—to save its life. Dr. Miller said they would visit the Connery household with bonesaw in tow on the following Monday. As they left, the mob of medics recommended that the baby be strapped down in its crib.

     Mrs. Connery was not a doctor, but she was pretty sure such radical surgery was not warranted for a swollen knee, and she took her child to a doctor at Jefferson College for a second opinion. Several more doctors examined the leg and concurred that it was merely sprained, and amputation was decidedly not recommended.

     The worried mother sought a third opinion, this time from a man who had a reputation as a faith healer. He looked at the baby and said the child had somehow stuck a pin in its leg. “You go home and work the swelling from the right side to the left and it will come out,” he said. The faith healer, it turned out, was correct: the baby’s leg was neither gangrenous nor even sprained. Mrs. Connery kneaded her child’s swollen knee until a needle poked through, which she extracted with tweezers. The baby made a full recovery.

     However, on Monday, Dr. Miller and his band of colleagues appeared at the Connery household as promised, toting far more knives than seemed necessary, plus additional equipment—some of which seem more appropriate tools for a carpenter or the Three Stooges than a doctor—including hammers, chisels, extra saws, and a bottle of ether. Mr. Connery informed them that the child was on the mend and their services were not needed. One of the consultants, miffed, said that he came to amputate the child’s leg, and by cracky that’s what he aimed to do. He shouted that he had set the baby’s leg and saved its life and demanded a $25 payment. The irate father showed them the door, and they left grumbling, taking their saws, hammers, and chisels with them.

     If the reader thinks that the doctors exhibited eccentric behavior, bad diagnostic skills, and poor bedside manner, thereby hangs the rest of the tale. When the story got around, investigators found that neither Dr. Miller nor any of his five cohorts were real physicians at all. They were all lunatics who had bought bogus medical school diplomas!

     The problem was widespread in Philadelphia by the late 1870s. One man, William B. Smith of Fifteenth Street, developed an abiding interest in human anatomy, and read everything he could find on the topic. He even attended Philadelphia University for a couple of years, but no one could say whether he graduated. He was injured at his place of business, lost his reason, was sent to Kirkbride’s Asylum for the Insane three times, and had done a stint in the Pennsylvania Institution for the Insane. Despite Smith’s madness, in 1853  his family bought a gift of a diploma from the Philadelphia University of Medicine and Surgery in his name, which gave him the right to practice medicine. Fortunately for the city’s ill and lame, “Dr.” Smith never actually saw any patients.

     The authorities wanted to know where all these fake diplomas were coming from. In June 1880 they found that some of the medical colleges themselves were bogus. One investigator who spent $150 bought five degrees, including two doctors of medicine, one doctor of divinity, one doctor of laws, and one doctor of civil law. On June 9, the number one culprit was arrested: Dr. John Buchanan, Dean of the Eclectic Medical College of Pennsylvania, which later changed its name to the American University of Philadelphia. Under an alias, Buchanan was also Dean of Livingston University of America. Two other faculty members were arrested and another six abandoned the city.

     When the authorities raided Buchanan’s premises they found a half-ton of blank diplomas, just waiting to be filled out with the names of purchasers. Correspondence indicated that Buchanan’s concern had sold three thousand bogus degrees, and that the American University in particular had been operating as a diploma mill since 1867.

     Bondsmen put up Buchanan’s bail. He thanked them by vanishing like a shade and leaving them holding the bag. The one-time physician faked his own drowning and fled to Canada. He did this not only to escape the law, but also to cheat his bondsmen. But Buchanan proved better at shamming sheepskins than hiding from the authorities. On August 24, he turned up in Windsor, Ontario, cowering under the alias Fairchild. On September 10, he worked up the courage to cross into the USA and was quickly arrested at St. Clair, Michigan.

      His trial was short and none too sweet. On December 6 he was found guilty, fined $500, ordered to pay the cost of his prosecution, and spend ten months in prison for trying to defraud the government.

                “Dean” Buchanan confessed to his fraudulent career in March 1881, and told authorities the names of persons he had    done business with and the names of “wholesale druggists in Philadelphia who have sold his diplomas.” He admitted that over the years he had corresponded with 5,000 persons interested in purchasing phony medical credentials. According to a news account, in Buchanan’s confession he related “how diplomas were signed by the faculty; how, in one instance, three professors, for $5 each, signed 500 diplomas and how, for $350, diplomas which were to be sent abroad were certified by the Spanish consul. In all, about 10,000 names are tangled up in his disclosures.”

    He estimated that there were twenty-five diploma mills in America and Europe serving individuals who wanted to be doctors without undergoing the inconvenience of actually attending medical school. He thought 20,000 fraudulent doctors were currently operating (no pun intended) in the USA and another 40,000 in Europe. Buchanan also sang like a canary on such topics as abortion, snake oil patent medicine, and grave robbery—an activity in which he personally had participated. As icing on the cake, he explained how he faked his suicide.

     In October 1881, after his ten months were up, Buchanan was re-sentenced to a year in jail and a fine of $1,000 for his leading role in running the nation’s most notorious diploma mill. It was a lenient sentence considering how much incalculable pain and suffering undoubtedly was caused by the lunatics and incompetents who practiced medicine under his phony diplomas.

     After serving his sentence, the dubious doctor kept his nose clean for a while. But on January 19, 1885, he was again arrested in Philadelphia—along with his new business partner, Dr. Rebecca Russell—for selling diplomas which bore the forged signatures of “some of Philadelphia’s most prominent physicians.” Perhaps Buchanan thought nobody would notice.

P.S. My next book is due March 16, 2015! You can pre-order it from Amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/Gothic-Strange-True-Tales-South/dp/1455620157/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1423651303&sr=1-1-fkmr0&keywords=kevin+mcqueen+gothic



STORY FOR OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2014: The Strange Death of Jessie Boust

Genre: Historical Weridness

            Poor Jessie Boust! The daughter of storekeeper Charles Boust, she was the belle of Northumberland, Pennsylvania, until she went insane in 1885 at age eighteen. She was sent to the asylum at Danville in January 1890, but returned home after a month’s ineffectual treatment.

            On February 25, 1890, Jessie’s last night on this earth, she was overtaken with maniacal energy. She played “beautiful and weird refrains” on the family’s upright grand piano—and then she smashed it and other furniture as well. She retreated to her room, and all was quiet. Her family assumed she had worn herself out and gone to sleep.

            They learned the awful truth next morning when Mrs. Boust took breakfast to Jessie’s room and found her dead in bed. “Her features bore a look of agony and were horribly distorted,” wrote a reporter who knew that his readers craved such details. The doctor came and pronounced her dead of “congestion of the brain”—a vague nineteenth-century catchall medical term for any number of ailments, but usually meaning a stroke. The undertaker showed up an hour later. By then Jessie’s face had turned black. He countered this circumstance by squirting a gallon and a half of embalming fluid into a vein.

             Whatever was in that embalming fluid, it was good stuff. Ten hours after the treatment, Jessie’s grieving mother entered the parlor to gaze once more upon her daughter’s countenance and nearly fainted: Jessie seemed to be coming to life again! Her face had regained its natural color; her cheeks were apple red; and her grimace was gone, replaced with a winning grin.

            Mrs. Boust was convinced Jessie was merely in a trance (and had somehow managed to survive taking over a gallon of embalming fluid into her body). The undertaker and Dr. Sheetz reexamined the corpse and assured the family that she was most decidedly dead.

             Mrs. Boust still had her doubts. When Jessie’s funeral was held three days later the house filled with mourners, the minister preached a sermon, and then Mrs. Boust told everyone to disperse as there would be no funeral after all. She was certain Jessie was alive and refused to bury her.

            Days passed. Jessie remained in the parlor. Friends and relatives dropped by to pay respects and to stare. The body had not decomposed in the slightest.

            On March 25—by which time Jessie had been deceased an entire month—undertaker Bright gently persuaded Mrs. Boust to permit the burial on the grounds that it was such a lovely day. The formerly dismissed pallbearers were recalled and they carried Jessie to her waiting grave in the cemetery on the northern side of town. She remained lifelike and smiling right to the end, and as far as anyone knows she still is.



 

The Jester of the Grontoft: A Great Moment in the History of Nonchalance

                On March 2, 1922, the Atlantic was struck with a storm of horrifying power that Captain Hans Jorgenson of the Estonia later said was one of the worst storms he had ever encountered. Among the deadliest places to be during this storm was on the deck of the Norwegian steamer Grontoft, 700 miles from Cape Race, Newfoundland.

                The wireless operator on the Estonia received S.O.S. messages from the radioman aboard the sinking Grontoft, which was forty-eight miles away.  Depending on one’s point of view, the Grontoft’s radioman was either a very brave man or a very great fool, because his emergency messages included entertaining bits of the darkest comedy imaginable. “He talked as if he were going on a lark in port instead of to the bottom of the sea,” as one reporter described the man’s sense of humor.

                The Grontoft’s first message read: “God pity the poor sailors on a night like this. Ha ha ha ha!”

                Making light of the fierce 100 mph gale force winds, he wrote: “And say, the old man [the captain] thinks this calm will be over by nightfall. We sure need some breeze.”

                An hour later: “Well, the steward is making sandwiches for the lifeboats. Looks like we were going on a picnic.”

                Thirty minutes after that: “The old wagon has a list like a rundown heel. This is no weather for a fellow to be out without an umbrella.”

                Forty minutes later, the final message came at 12:10 p.m.: “We are sinking stern first. The decks are awash and some of our lifeboats have been smashed. Can’t hold out any longer. The skipper dictated that—He ought to know—Where did I put my hat?—Sorry we can’t wait for you, pressing business elsewhere.”

                Astounded at the Grontoft man’s nonchalance in the face of certain death, the Estonia radio operator responded with a line from Kipling’s poem The Ballad of East and West: “What dam of lances brought thee forth to jest at the dawn with Death?” But his witty counterpart never answered. At that moment, most likely, the ship went down.

                The Estonia traveled at full speed, but so fierce was the wind that it took the ship four hours to reach the spot where the Grontoft was last known to be. The sea had so comprehensively swallowed the ship that there wasn’t even any wreckage. The entire crew of thirty was lost, including the remarkable wireless operator—his name long lost to the ages, but a master of the comic art of understatement to the very last.

SOURCE:
Louisville Courier-Journal. “30 Go Down with Vessel in Gale.” 9 Mar. 1922, 1.



STORY FOR MARCH 2014: “Was This the Zodiac Speaking?”

Genre:  True Crime

WAS THIS THE ZODIAC SPEAKING?

                If you are a true crime buff, or if you have seen the 2007 film Zodiac, you are familiar with the Zodiac killer. For those who aren’t, the Zodiac murders comprise one of the great unsolved American serial killer cases. Zodiac (he gave himself the nickname) terrorized California between December 1968 and October 1970. Within that period, he wounded two people and killed at least five—possibly more, but we may never know for sure.    

                Zodiac sent ciphers to various California newspapers, notably the San Francisco Chronicle; most of the codes were broken, but none contained much more than taunting messages and threats. Zodiac also sent a number of letters and postcards to the papers, written in a distinctive scrawl, claiming (probably falsely) an ever-growing body count. The letters ceased in 1974, but one final letter was sent in 1978, long after the last confirmed Zodiac murder. Then he was never heard from again.

                Zodiac was never identified or caught, but for many investigators, authors, and true crime aficionados, the number one suspect is Arthur Leigh Allen (1933-1992), a truly frightening resident of Vallejo, California, who dwelled in his mother‘s basement. There is plenty of convincing circumstantial evidence pointing to Allen, though nothing damning, and there are opposing and equally convincing circumstances indicating that he was not the killer. Certainly, Allen seems to have wanted his acquaintances to think he was Zodiac. The big problem, to my mind, is that Allen was a convicted child molester, an offense for which he served time between 1974 and 1978. Child molesters molest children; they seldom attack adults, let alone kill them.

                While I have grave doubts that Arthur Leigh Allen was the killer, a while back I purchased three authentic documents with his handwriting to add to my archives. The first is a typed, signed 1967 letter from Allen to a San Andreas school official. He writes: “The purpose of this letter is to find out if I can use this course (Children’s Literature) and its units to count toward a pay scale advancement.” Allen taught at a grade school a few years before he was fired for molesting students.  Whether or not he was Zodiac, he was one disturbed guy.

                The second document is the second page of a form, dated March 29, 1967, evaluating Allen’s performance as a teacher and signed by Allen himself. His evaluator thought Allen made good use of audio-visual equipment and gave “evidence of academic competence,” but also felt that he needed to improve at lesson planning. Ironically, given the reason for Allen’s later arrest, he was rated outstanding in “ pupil/teacher rapport.” It should cheer all teachers to know that even alleged serial killers sometimes have to endure a peer evaluation process.

                The third and most interesting document is the second page of a job application Allen filled out in Vallejo on June 18, 1966. The document is a real rarity as it is covered with Allen’s natural penmanship. (After he became aware that he was a Zodiac suspect, Allen virtually ceased writing anything by hand, but in 1966, two years before the first Zodiac murder, Allen would have had no reason to attempt to disguise his handwriting.) Frankly, I don’t think it resembles Zodiac’s handwriting overall, though there are a few similarities that make you take pause. For example, Allen writes “Vallejo” exactly the way Zodiac did; he abbreviates “California” as “ Calif” the way Zodiac did, and the word looks nearly identical to way Zodiac wrote it.

                Handwriting analysts, however, have argued that Allen didn’t form the telltale letters K and D as Zodiac wrote them. Pro-Allen forces counter that he was ambidextrous and wrote the Zodiac letters with the hand he didn’t normally use, or that if he had a split personality it could account for differences in his penmanship. I’m no expert on handwriting analysis, so all I can say is that even if Arthur Leigh Allen always remains merely a suspect, it’s sobering to own something he touched with his own creepy hands.

 

STORY FOR NOVEMBER 2013: “A Petrifaction”

Genre: Historical True Crime

A PETRIFACTION

From Strange Tales of Crime and Murder from Southern Indiana

Available at: Amazon

Few things are more pleasurable to contemplate than other people at work. On the morning of September 30, 1902, Captain John Eigenmann of the Evansville Contract Company was providing that peculiar joy for spectators. Specifically, the captain was supervising the removal of gravel from the edge of the Ohio River at Water Street and Third Avenue. A steam shovel scooped load after load of sand from the site. Suddenly, Eigenmann noticed that something out of the ordinary had been exposed to the sunlight, something that hadn’t seen the light in a long time.

The extraordinary object was the well-preserved corpse of a middle-aged white man, about five feet, four inches tall. He weighed approximately 160 pounds. Except for some missing toes on his left foot, a hole in his abdomen and decayed flesh on the upper arms, he was in spruce condition; indeed, press reports describe him as being “petrified.” His face was perfectly preserved and he wore a ring on the little finger of his left hand. His name was never discovered, so let’s call him Johnny Victim.

 The discovery of a corpse where one does not expect to find it is always interesting, but curiosity grew when an inspection of Victim’s body revealed that he had been murdered. His arms were folded across his chest, and marks showed where a rope had been wound twice around the body in order to hold them in place. Other marks revealed that a rope also had been used to bind the man’s ankles together. Most telling of all was a bullet hole in his chest. It was evident to the most dunderheaded gawker that Johnny Victim most likely had been shot to death, bound and thrown into the river, where the tides buried him under layers of preserving sand.

Bystanders did the sensible thing and called for the coroner. It may have been the only sensible thing anyone involved in the case ever did, since the people who figure in this story displayed some of the strangest attitudes about finding a body that have ever been my lot to describe. First, after examining the flagrantly, patently, obviously and manifestly murdered corpse, Coroner John P. Walker declared that he had no jurisdiction over the case. Did he at least close off the area so that police could search for clues? Did he have the corpse taken to the morgue until it could be determined who had jurisdiction? Not at all—he said that Captain Eigenmann could have it. Finders keepers!

It is probably not placing too much faith in human nature to say that most of us, if given the corpse of a murdered human as a souvenir, would attempt to find its relatives or at least give it a proper burial. Eigenmann did neither. He decided that the proper thing to do was to sell Johnny Victim’s petrified body to whichever museum made the highest bid.  

The coroner’s decision did not sit well with Mr. Louis Lamb—not for humanitarian reasons, but because Lamb thought he should be the rightful owner of Johnny Victim. Lamb claimed to be the workman who found the corpse and underwent the dirty work of pulling it out of the river; he filed a replevin suit against Eigenmann on October 1—which was the day after the body was found—so we must admire his swiftness if not his greed. The point of the suit was to force Eigenmann to hand over Johnny Victim. Lamb also threatened to bring an injunction to prevent Eigenmann from making money by exhibiting the fossil until the matter was settled. Lamb was not the only person in Evansville who thirsted to possess a petrified cadaver; one newspaper report notes that the proud owner had “refused several offers for the body.”

                It appears that Coroner Walker’s refusal to do his duty raised official eyebrows, because on October 3 it was reported that he had been “asked to hold an examination on the body,” although “he has not yet decided to do so.” In the meantime, it seemed that anybody who wanted to come off the street and see Victim was allowed to; several people claimed to recognize the man, but as none of their tips proved fruitful it is possible they were just making excuses to get a peek at a stiff. One tip that seemed better than most came from an Indianapolis mortician, Edward Hisey, who thought that the body resembled his uncle Jacob, who had disappeared at Corydon in 1886, but this theory came to naught. Even the governor of the state, Winfield T. Durbin, took a peep at Johnny Victim since he happened to be in Evansville for a soldiers’ reunion and simply couldn’t resist.

Lewis Lamb proved that he wasn’t kidding about taking possession of the body when he filed a petition in the circuit court asking the indubitably dignified and bewhiskered Judge Mattison to appoint an administrator to take charge of Johnny Victim. Mattison refused this simple solution, and thus the matter had to be battled out in court. Captain Eigenmann was placed under heavy bond not to sell the corpse before the court made a decision.

The case seemed to get more surreal as time passed; for example, when a group of physicians drilled into Johnny Victim’s head, they found it to be utterly hollow. Litigation was pending in circuit court a fortnight after the body was discovered when the strangest thing of all occurred: the corpse simply disappeared. Nobody ever found it. Despite the fact that the object of all the controversy had vanished, Lamb’s suit against Eigenmann continued to be heard by the learned solons of the law, who probably felt that no amount of legal training or whiskey could have prepared them for such a case. On October 27, the case was thrown out of court, which I suppose means that if Johnny Victim’s corpse had ever resurfaced, it would have been Eigenmann’s legal possession to do with as he pleased, not excluding selling the body to a dime museum or making a yard jockey statue out of it. Although Lewis Lamb lost the case, he emerged from his legal ordeal richer in that he had a great story to tell his grandchildren about the time he fished a petrified murder victim out of the river and got cheated out of a potential fortune by a mean judge.

With this decision, the bizarre story dropped from the headlines and was forgotten. It leaves behind a number of nagging questions. Who was the anonymous murder victim? Despite the excellent description of the body given by the press and the fact that his face was in a perfect state of preservation, no relatives stepped forward and he was never identified. For that matter, who murdered him and why? Was his killer brought to justice for another crime? Who stole the body? What on earth did its abstractor do with it?

Story for October 2013: “The Devil and His Works”

Genre: Historical true crime

The Devil and His Works

                Reverend John Haviland Carmichael of Wellsburg, W.V., came to an end that starkly contrasted with his calling. He was ordained a Methodist minister in 1880, and after several years’ success in the South, he was transferred to Benkelman, NE. He went to the Detroit Conference in 1897 and moved to St. Clair County, MI, in 1899. Over the next decade he rose so highly in the eyes of the community that by 1906 he had become the pastor at three Methodist churches located in the rural towns of Rattle Run (near Columbus), Adair and China. The reverend lived his life as blamelessly as a reverend ought, and made his home in Adair with his wife and three children.

                On the morning of January 5, 1909, the fifty-six-year-old Rev. Carmichael told his wife that he had to go to his church at Rattle Run in order to arrange some revival meetings. She last saw him waving at neighborhood children as he rode away on a horse and buggy.

                A few hours later, Myron Brown was standing at a crossroads near the Rattle Run Church, waiting to keep an appointment. The freezing winter air forced him to the church for shelter. When he stepped inside he saw evidence of a recent, atrocious murder. Blood was splattered over the floor, the pews and the communion table. Shreds of blood-soaked clothing were strewn about and a wicked-looking dirk lay in plain sight. There was no trace of the minister. Brown summoned the Port Huron sheriff.

                The police noticed a rank smell coming from the church’s front and rear furnaces. An inspection revealed that each furnace contained part of a dismembered human body. The flames were doused and the body parts recovered. The corpse had been almost completely consumed by fire, but part of the trunk, a jawbone and some false teeth remained. Coins were found in the ashes, indicating that robbery had not been the motive. Police also found a hatchet head in one furnace, its handle burned away. One of the victim’s legs and both of his feet were not found in the furnace; baffled detectives assumed that the killer had taken them with him.

                On January 6, the day after the murder, Rev. Carmichael’s horse was found tied to a tree in Pine River, twenty miles from the Rattle Run Church. His overcoat was found in the carriage. These clues, along with the fact that Pine River was located on the Grand Trunk Railroad line, made it seem evident that a fiend had cruelly butchered the beloved reverend for reasons unknown and fled by train.

                But then further clues surfaced and all bets were off.

                Residents of Adair began to notice that two men were missing from town: Rev. Carmichael and Gideon Browning, a carpenter and part-time sailor. Police became interested when they discovered that the reverend had visited Browning the morning of the day before the murder. Browning’s nephew reported overhearing a conversation between the two, during which Carmichael had promised the carpenter a job where he would have to do nothing but “stand around and smoke cigars.” What he meant by this, Carmichael’s daughter claimed, was that he had written a manuscript called The Devil and His Works and he intended to make Browning his book agent. Despite its title and the occupation of its author, the work was both secular and lurid. Carmichael’s wife complained that he had written a couple of “trashy novels.” She stated: “I saw some of [his manuscript] once, a few sheets. I don’t remember what they said, but I felt called on to tell him he should not write such things. But he persisted.”

                Witnesses saw Rev. Carmichael and Gideon Browning conversing at the train depot at Adair on the morning of the murder; Browning boarded the train to Port Huron, a trip paid for by Carmichael, and soon afterwards the preacher rode off to the Rattle Run Church. Later that day Browning took the train back from Port Huron. Oddly, he did not ride all the way home to Adair, but instead got off at Hickey, where he inquired of two men the way to the Rattle Run Church, telling each of them that he had an appointment to meet someone there. It looked as though Rev. Carmichael had sent Gideon Browning to Port Huron on an errand, after which he met Browning at the church where one of them ended up dead, dismembered and stuffed into two furnaces.

                Although at first it was universally believed that the preacher had met a foul end, the belief was soon replaced by an even more unthinkable conclusion: Rev. Carmichael, pillar of the community, was himself the murderer of Gideon Browning. The false teeth and a stickpin found in one furnace were proved to have belonged to the missing carpenter. The reverend’s flock even had to face the disheartening possibility that their former shepherd had inherited a streak of insanity; Mrs. Carmichael revealed to the press that her husband’s sister was an inmate in a West Virginia asylum.

                Whenever a notorious fugitive is on the loose, the power of suggestion forces well-meaning souls to imagine they have seen him tramping down the sidewalk in their faraway towns. Not surprisingly, people in several states thought they had encountered the crazy preacher on the lam. Within hours of the murder a “highly nervous” stranger offered Frank Carrier of St. Clair, MI, two dollars if he would give him a boat ride across the river to Canada. Carrier managed to turn down the tempting offer. In Cedarburg, WI, a man resembling Carmichael had made himself conspicuous on Thursday, January 7, by refusing lodging at several hotels because their storm windows would make a quick and surreptitious exit too difficult. The ubiquitous madman was also spotted in Indiana, Chicago and Toronto, Ontario; all of these latter sightings took place within hours of each other.

                The Carmichael-spotters in Chicago had been correct. He stopped there on his way to Carthage, IL, where he arrived on January 8. There he hid out at Miranda Hughes’s boarding house under the assumed name John Elder—probably a pun, since he was an elder in his church and often was addressed as such by his parishioners. He appeared upbeat and hinted that he was a Catholic, probably to throw the curious off the ecclesiastical scent. He spoke with enthusiasm about building a woodworking factory in town.

                Early in the morning of January 11, after writing a letter to his wife and a lengthy confession addressed to the Port Huron sheriff, he went to a wooden shack behind the house and slashed his throat with a pocket knife. The cut was not sufficient to cause a quick death, and after several hours Carmichael died of exposure to the cold. The search for the missing reverend was over, but those left devastated by his actions wondered why he had murdered Gideon Browning, dissected the body, crammed the pieces in the church furnaces, then fled. Some thought the deranged minister had offered up Browning as a blood sacrifice to God. The true answer was found in the letter Rev. Carmichael had written to the sheriff, a masterwork of raging delusional paranoia: “The man had such a hypnotic influence over me that I felt that something must be done. I felt greatly ashamed that a man said to be short-minded could be able to compel me to yield to his will, but I said nothing about it.”

                Carmichael further explained his motive. Browning, it seemed to Carmichael, had the ability to appear at will in unexpected places: “Three times he came to the rear of my barn and talked to me through the manure hole; twice he was at the river when I went to water my stock, and each time I felt that he was doing something that he was proud of.” On one occasion, Browning had hypnotically persuaded the reverend to give him a buggy ride to Port Huron; there Browning asked Carmichael to buy a toy hatchet for his son. “I began to tell him to go and do his own buying,” wrote the preacher, “when he set his eyes upon me in the queerest sort of a look, something like the look of a snake’s eyes. Then I felt his influence tightening his grip on my mind….” Carmichael lost the battle of wills and purchased the hatchet. Another time, at the Adair train depot, Browning used his mental powers to influence Carmichael to walk on the rails. He poignantly described the humiliating experience: “All the while I felt as small as a bantam chicken.”

                At last came January 5, 1909, the day when the hapless minister could take no more. According to Carmichael’s final letter, Gideon Browning had told him that he wanted to get married that day at the Rattle Run Church, despite the fact that he already had a wife from whom he was separated. When the two met at the church, Browning kept encouraging Carmichael to stoke the furnaces hotter and hotter. Meanwhile, the preacher kept looking out the window, anticipating the arrival of the wedding party. At length, the carpenter laughed and confessed it had been a practical joke: “There ain’t no use looking, for there ain’t going to be no wedding. Well, elder, I wanted just to have a little fun. Consider yourself an educated man and look down on a poor ignorant fellow like me. And I just thought I would show him [sic] what I could do. I knowed if I could handle you I could handle other men, too, and make a big thing out of it.”

                After making a fool of Carmichael, Browning further demonstrated his powers of hypnosis by forcing the reverend to raise and lower his arm against his will. Then Carmichael noticed that Browning was holding a hatchet. Carmichael grabbed the weapon, but then Browning drew two knives from his pockets and started chasing the minister. In a state of panic, Carmichael threw the hatchet and slew his tormentor—or so he thought, for he came back to life as the infuriated reverend set to work stabbing him with one of the knives. A few more blows from the hatchet solved his Browning problem forever. Carmichael then exchanged clothes with the corpse, cut the body into manageable pieces, tossed them in the church furnaces and made his escape.

                Three days after Rev. Carmichael’s suicide, four Detroit physicians performed an autopsy on his body and found that the preacher had suffered from several brain abnormalities. Gideon Browning’s widow, who lived in Auburn, N.Y., stated for the record that her husband had no occult powers and had not been studying hypnotism. The New York Times found the case interesting enough to note editorially that it is impossible to hypnotize someone against his will, and also impossible to make a hypnotized person do something that he would not ordinarily do. Rev. Carmichael had mistaken his symptoms of insanity for hypnotism and turned on the man whom he fancied to be his persecutor.

The Devil and His Works

“Believe Pastor Not Slain, But Fugitive.” New York Times 8 Jan. 1909: 1.

“Carmichael Was Insane.” New York Times 15 Jan. 1909: 1.

“Dragnet for Carmichael.” New Orleans Daily Picayune 11 Jan. 1909: 11.

“Michigan Authorities Puzzled Over the Carmichael Mystery.” New Orleans Daily Picayune 8 Jan. 1909: 1+.

“The Michigan Church Crime.”  New Orleans Daily Picayune 12 Jan. 1909: 1+.

“The Michigan Church Tragedy Mystery Takes a New Turn.” New Orleans Daily Picayune 9 Jan. 1909: 1.

“Michigan Town Stirred by a Dark Crime.” New Orleans Daily Picayune 7 Jan. 1909: 1+.

“Preacher a Suicide; Confessed Murder.” New York Times 12 Jan. 1909: 1+.

“Search Chicago for Carmichael.” New York Times 10 Jan. 1909: 4.

“Seek Carmichael for Church Murder.” New York Times 9 Jan. 1909: 16.

“Topics of the Times: Murders and Hypnotism.” Editorial. New York Times 13 Jan. 1909:  8.



STORY FOR AUGUST 2013: “The Serial Killer in the Cemetery”

Genre: Historical true crime

The Serial Killer in the Cemetery

                Cincinnati’s Spring Grove Cemetery and Arboretum is considered one of the most beautiful burial spots in America. Founded in 1845, the cemetery is the final resting place of such notables as Union General Joe Hooker, abolitionist Levi Coffin and Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase.

                In the early twentieth century, Spring Grove housed not only the illustrious dead but also one of the infamous living. Nobody knew the name of the anonymous man who prowled among the gravestones, but there were many who desperately wished to know. He was a serial killer who existed seventy years before the term was invented and Spring Grove was where he watched and waited for his next victim. Since all self-respecting serial killers must have a nickname, I propose that this murderer be known henceforth as the Spring Grove Killer. This strikes me as being to-the-point yet vaguely poetic, as opposed to the vulgar, derivative name bestowed upon the killer by the contemporary press: “Jack the Brainer.”

                The first known victim was found at dawn on Monday, May 1, 1904, in Cumminsville, a suburb of Cincinnati. Mary McDonald, a slightly deaf thirty-two-year-old buttonhole maker, was found unconscious and dying between the parallel tracks of the Big Four Railroad near Dane Street, her left leg severed above the knee, her face mutilated, her skull fractured and her hair soaked with blood. An engineer noticed her and blew his locomotive’s whistle until he attracted the police’s attention. The unfortunate woman was taken to the hospital, where she lived long enough to give the police her name and mutter about “somebody on the tomb.” The police dismissed McDonald’s statement as a product of delirium. Due to her extensive injuries and the location where she was found, and because her breath smelled of whisky and the neck of her dress had been liberally splashed with the same, at first police believed she had gotten drunk and been hit by a train.

                But a closer inspection of the site shook their certainty. McDonald was found lying on the ground between two parallel tracks, but her blood was found in the inner rails of both tracks. She had sustained ghastly injuries to the head and was missing a leg, but presumably she would have been in even worse shape had she been hit by a train. Also, engineers were certain they had not run over anyone in the night. It began to look as though someone had hit her over the head, then arranged her body to look as though it had been run over. (Presumably her leg had been amputated by a passing train rather than her attacker.)

                Witnesses came forward who had had seen McDonald in her final hours. Around 10:30 p.m. on Saturday night, Mr. and Mrs. John Stagman saw her board a streetcar heading in the direction where she was later found. She appeared to be sober. A number of persons on another streetcar had seen Miss McDonald around midnight near the spot where her body was found, a lovers’ lane on Fergus Street next to Spring Grove Cemetery. She was in the company of a tall man wearing a slouch hat. Though they did not see the woman’s face, they were able to identify her by her dress. The two appeared to be drunk; the man had difficulty supporting McDonald, and at one point leaned her against a telegraph pole. When it was later realized that she had been murdered, police conjectured that the streetcar passengers might have seen the killer feigning intoxication.

                A railroad man who looked at the telegraph pole noticed that the man’s shoeprints were still there. He ran to inform the authorities of his potentially important discovery, but when he and a policeman came back to the pole two hours later the prints were gone. Someone had obliterated them with a large rock. Perhaps the killer had been watching the railroad man from a hiding place.

                Because there was no solid evidence of foul play, McDonald’s death was officially ruled an accident. About five months later, at 9:30 on the night of October 1, a nineteen-year-old shop girl named Louise (“Lulu”) Mueller walked down the lover’s lane on Fergus Street in order to meet her fiancé, Frank Eastman. The next morning a machinist named Patrick Shay found her body near the spot where Mary McDonald had met her fate. Her remains lay only near her parents’ home and two hundred feet from Spring Grove Avenue. Mueller had sustained injuries almost identical to McDonald’s except that neither of her legs had been severed. Although her body had been found in the weeds seventy-five feet from the railroad tracks, the police’s first instinct was to call Mueller’s death an accident. The theory was advanced that she had been hit by a train and then crawled to the spot where she died, but the coroner declared that she had died instantaneously. The inevitable crowd gathered to watch the police carry away the remains, and many later recalled the presence of a small bearded man who wrung his hands and cried “It was an accident!”

                An autopsy revealed that her skull had been crushed on the right upper side from the back of the head to the temple. In addition, her nose was broken and she was missing six front teeth. The killer had left a thumb-shaped bruise on the right side of her neck. Deputy Coroner O. C. Cameron found no evidence of rape; nor was the motive robbery, since Mueller’s purse contained money. Interestingly, a small box containing grains of cocaine was found a few feet from the spot where Mueller’s body lay, but it was never determined whether the find had anything to do with the murder, for the police foolishly allowed crowds estimated at thousands to wander the crime scene and play amateur detective, and undoubtedly much evidence was trampled on, carried away or destroyed.

                Inspecting the death scene, the police noticed that the sidewalk leading to the lover’s lane went past Spring Grove, and a high embankment in the cemetery rose up parallel to the sidewalk. A killer could hide among the tombstones on the embankment, peering down at passersby. Detectives theorized that the killer may have thrown rocks down on the heads of his victims, an idea that led to the papers dubbing him “Jack the Brainer.” (A few days later, on October 8, Mueller’s brothers found a bloody sharp-edged boulder hidden under a bush about forty feet from the murder site.) Near this high embankment the police found a pair of tennis shoes and a bare footprint in the mud, all size 7 ½. A bloody trail in the weeds and bushes near the embankment led to the spot where Mueller’s body was found. The authorities questioned Frank Eastman, who said that he had been detained in town and was late getting to the trysting place. When he did not see Lulu, he assumed she had given up waiting and gone home. His alibi was confirmed.

                Police arrested two men, painter William C. Wilson and one-legged expressman Theodore Salmon. The latter, who made his living by hauling freight in a wagon, owned a stable located near the crime scene. Wilson and Salmon admitted they were acquainted with Louisa Mueller and Frank Eastman; in fact, Salmon and Eastman were not on good terms. Wilson and Salmon further confessed that they had been drunk and in the vicinity on the night of the murder. Witnesses had seen Salmon talking to a woman at the Spring Grove entrance to the lovers’ lane about an hour before Mueller was murdered. The suspects told conflicting stories which failed to match statements made by two women, Stella Pierce and Lily Key, who had been with Wilson and Salmon earlier on the fatal evening. Salmon’s crutch and wagon appeared to be spattered with blood. (A microscopic examination revealed that it was actually red paint.)

                Things were looking very bad indeed for Wilson and Salmon. They were arrested on suspicion of murder on October 5 and formally charged on October 8. While they were in jail, their innocence was proved beyond doubt when the killer claimed his third victim on the night of Wednesday, November 2.

                The body of a young blonde woman was found on the morning of November 3 in a vacant lot in Winton Place, near Spring Grove’s entrance. Though they should have known better by then, some policemen believed she had been struck by a train or streetcar. She bore wounds and mutilations identical to those of Lulu Mueller; her jawbone had been crushed, several teeth had been knocked out, and brain matter seeped from a vicious head wound. Disturbingly, the dead woman’s eyes were wide open. It appeared the murderer had again attempted to make it look as though his victim had been killed in an accident. A streetcar transfer punched at 9:40 p.m. was found in her hand, and there was debate as to whether it had been planted. It seems unlikely that she would clutch the transfer while being beaten into unconsciousness. If the Spring Grove Killer placed the ticket in her hand, he may have been cleverly trying to give the impression that she had been hit by a streetcar, yet he placed the body 237 feet away from the tracks. The streetcar could have bounced her so far only if she had been made of India rubber. An autopsy later confirmed that she had been hit on the head with a club or hatchet and had died instantaneously. If we read between the lines of the press reports, the autopsy also confirmed that the woman was the only victim who conclusively had been sexually assaulted. This discovery had a chilling effect on the accident theory.

                A bloody trail in the grass and on the sidewalk made it clear she had been attacked at the elevated embankment by the sidewalk. The murderer had carried her to a thicket, and from there dragged her by the heels to the dumpsite. A large pool of blood showed where he had briefly stopped and rested before completing his gruesome chore. Mysteriously, the woman’s stockings were full of burrs of a type that did not grow on that side of the city. Some thought the Spring Grove Killer had collected them elsewhere and scattered them on her stockings to make it seem as if she had been killed in some other location. The burrs, and possibly the transfer, meant that the perpetrator had started planting false clues at his murder scenes in order to confuse detectives. Another possibly false clue was a pair of canvas shoes wrapped in a newspaper left near the victim’s hat, about 150 feet from the body. Among the accumulating gawkers was the same small bearded man who had made a memorable spectacle of himself at the discovery of Lulu Mueller’s corpse. He seemed as agitated as before, but by the time the police realized who he was, he had disappeared. His identity was never discovered.

                Also among the crowd was Mrs. Millie Bartlett, who had been walking down Winton Road when she heard that another murder victim had been found. Out of curiosity, she joined the throng and realized to her horror that she recognized the dead woman’s blue hat. Thus the victim was identified as Mrs. Bartlett’s eighteen-year-old sister, Alma Steinway (spelled Steingeweg in some accounts). She had been a member of the choir at Winton Place Episcopal Church and made her living as a “hello girl”—that is, a telephone operator for the Park Telephone Exchange in Cumminsville, a division of Cincinnati Bell, which offered a $1,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of its employee’s murderer. She worked the night shift, and was on her way home when the killer attacked. On November 5, her white casket was borne by six female telephone operators to her grave in the German Protestant Cemetery near Fairmount. Added to her battered remains were three of her teeth and part of her jawbone, all of which had been knocked out by the force of the fatal blow. The coroner presented these fragments of Alma to her brother Edward Steingeweg.

                Steinway’s many admirers were checked out by the police. They came to the conclusion that her murderer had been a stranger, and obviously the same man who had killed McDonald and Mueller. A streetcar conductor named Frank Limle told the police that on the night of Monday, October 31, Steinway had gotten on his car accompanied by a short, stout man roughly forty years old, wearing a slouch hat and sporting about a week’s worth of stubble. They had ridden together to Winton Road and gotten off together there along with other passengers. The short man did not ask for a transfer ticket, and Limle idly wondered why he had taken a streetcar for such a short distance. The same thing occurred on Tuesday night, then again on Wednesday night, November 2. But on that third night, Steinway and the little man were the only two passengers who got off at that stop. Limle suspected that the man was the killer, and that he had ridden three nights in a row just waiting for a chance to leave the streetcar alone with Steinway. Limle claimed that he could identify the man if he ever saw him again. Of course, the fact that the mysterious man had gotten on and off the streetcar at the same time as Steinway could have been only a coincidence. It strained credulity that even “Jack the Brainer” would have murdered a woman just moments after being seen with her in a public place. Within a few days the police had tracked down everyone who had been on the streetcar that night, and the mysterious man turned out to be “a prominent citizen of Winton Place,” despite his menacing appearance. The press withheld his name.

                Police confidently reported on November 4 that they expected to make an arrest that afternoon. But no arrests came then or ever, and the police had to concede defeat. One of Alma Steinway’s brothers vowed that he would spend the rest of life hunting down the murderer.

                For several weeks no strange-looking man could tread the sidewalk without being suspected of secretly being the Spring Grove Killer, as the pages of the Cincinnati Enquirer amply demonstrate. Within about six months of the attack on Mary McDonald, eleven women reported being accosted near the cemetery. Many sightings of the killer were the product of hysteria, while others were probably legitimate. On the night of November 10, a stranger grabbed nineteen-year-old Lillie Rodefield and tried to drag her into Spring Grove. She was so terrified that she was unable to fight back, but luckily her brother George had seen the attack from the window of a nearby streetcar station. He gave the stranger a comprehensive beating, and had the police not arrived in time, Lillie’s attacker might well have been lynched by the gathering mob. The man turned out to be Henry Swears, a florist’s employee. The police thought they had caught the Spring Grove Killer for sure this time, but records showed that Swears had been hospitalized during the attacks on Mueller and Steinway. The police reluctantly concluded that Swears was not their man.

                Even the daughter of Samuel Hannaford, former mayor of Winton Place, did not consider herself safe with the fiend lurking about. Dorothy Hannaford reported that as she waited for a streetcar on the cemetery side of Spring Grove Avenue on November 2, she suddenly had an uncomfortable feeling. Turning, she saw a shadowy man in dark clothes and a black hat sitting like a ghost on the picket fence surrounding the cemetery: “He startled me, and I wondered how he managed to keep perched up there. He was looking at me steadily and I began to feel uneasy as if something was wrong.” The man continued his bizarre balancing act but did nothing overtly menacing, probably because a young man across the street was waiting for a streetcar. Miss Hannaford was very grateful when her car arrived. Considering that Alma Steinway was murdered only a couple of hours later near the spot where Miss Hannaford had her disquieting experience, it is likely that she escaped a horrible death that night.

                Another woman who may have actually met the Spring Grove Killer was Josephine Hewitt of Cumminsville, who was attacked in late November by a man near the area where the first three victims were fatally injured. Hewitt was not prepared to submit meekly, however. When the man seized her throat she punched him in the left eye, then drew a revolver. The panicked attacker ran away into the darkness, Hewitt firing at his fleeing form until all chambers were empty. She ran home and called the police, but detectives could find no trace of the stranger. Hewitt did not get a good look at him and could say only that he was “rough looking” and appeared to have emerged from Spring Grove Cemetery. If her assailant was in fact the killer, it’s a safe bet he kept a low profile until his eye healed.

                In November 1904, the American Magazine offered some opinions about the series of crimes that seem curiously ahead of their time. The writer believed the Spring Grove killer was a sadist, “one whose natural love for the opposite sex is substituted by an uncontrollable desire to torture. Sadists usually begin by torturing animals and hurting a human being only when they think it won’t end in murder. This is as far as they usually get. It is only the sadist with brains and courage who becomes a murderer. The impulse comes on gradually and lasts several days, giving plenty of time to plan crimes…. Whoever the man is the police will probably not catch him by the ordinary methods. Some accident will reveal him if he is caught at all, it is thought, or he may accidentally be caught in the act of another crime….”

                 The writer had a good grasp of the mental workings of serial killers many decades before such monsters became common. FBI profilers such as John Douglas and Robert Ressler have noted that serial killers have an urge to tempt fate by placing themselves in the police’s investigation, perhaps by calling in tips or by joining neighborhood watch groups. The American Magazine’s writer noted a little over one hundred years ago: “Doubtless [the Cincinnati murderer] is one of the men who are contributing to the reward and is one of the men who now carry revolvers at night patrolling the town and looking for the murderer.”

                At this point the murderous attacks in Cumminsville came to a halt. Perhaps the Spring Grove Killer was scared off by the patrols; perhaps he had second thoughts after potential victim Josephine Hewitt fired a few shots at him. Perhaps he simply could no longer find victims near the cemetery, his favorite hiding place, for by November 1904 the area had such a bad reputation lone women refused to go there. (The American Magazine’s writer observed that “not a girl within miles would stir from her house after dark these days.”) Or perhaps the police unwittingly put the killer in jail for some other, less serious crime. Perhaps he temporarily moved away from the area when scrutiny became too intense. Whatever the reason for the cessation of his attacks, the citizens living near Spring Grove slowly relaxed, thinking the worst was over. A little over five years passed with no further Cumminsville atrocities.

                Then on New Year’s Eve, 1910, thirty-six-year-old Anna Lloyd, secretary for the Wiborg-Hanna Lumber Company, was found dead and mutilated in the snow. Like McDonald, Mueller and Steinway, she had been bludgeoned and was found near railroad tracks, which led panicked citizens to believe the Spring Grove Killer was back. But there were key differences: Lloyd had been gagged and, unlike previous victims, her throat had been slashed. The snow around her body was bloody and disturbed for several yards, indicating that she had struggled with her attacker. The gagging and the trampled snow suggested the assailant had spent some time with his victim, while the Spring Grove Killer had been notorious for his lightning-fast attacks. Another significant disparity was that her body was found in North Fairmount rather than in Cumminsville proper.

                On October 25, 1910, thirty-six-year-old Mary Hackney was found murdered in the sitting room of her Canal Ridge house near the railroad tracks at Dane Street. Like the Brainer’s three certain victims, she had been bludgeoned; unlike them, she had also been slashed. Her skull had been fractured in eleven places with a carpenter’s hatchet and her throat had been so deeply cut that she had been nearly decapitated. In a manner eerily reminiscent of the Axman who would commence terrorizing New Orleans only a year later, the killer left the bloody hatchet behind on the rear porch. Mrs. Hackney’s purse containing $8.75 was found nearby, so the motive appeared not to be robbery. The coroner found undigested coffee in her stomach. The Hackneys’ chickens had not been released from their coops, and she had not yet done her morning washing. These signs indicated that she had been murdered very early in the morning. Police had three prime suspects: the victim’s husband, Harley Hackney, an ex-soldier from Williamsburg, KY; a boarder who called himself Charles Eckert, but who was later revealed to be a runaway named Charles Nabor; and milkman Herman Schwering, who had called on the house early on the day of the murder.

                Eckert and Schwering were arrested, questioned and released for lack of evidence, but things looked mighty warm for Mr. Hackney for a time. He was suspected because his late wife had been in the habit of confiscating all of his pay except for one quarter per week which she generously let him keep for his own personal use. Also, Eckert claimed that a few days before the murder, Mr. Hackney had told him that wished he could be rid of his wife and rejoin the army. Investigators were puzzled by Hackney’s callous attitude concerning the murder of his wife. When a man expressed interest in buying his chickens, the less-than-bereaved widower joked: “We’ll kill them with the same hatchet [used to demolish Mrs. Hackney’s head]. No, we won’t. The coroner has that.” On the subject of his wife’s insurance money, Hackney told a Cincinnati Enquirer reporter: “It won’t take all that money to bury her, and you can bet I am going to be on hand and see that I get what is left over.” The coroner believed the murderer was left handed, and Mr. Hackney happened to be left handed.

                Despite these intriguing facts, and the fact that the Enquirer spent days reprinting for public consumption every rumor and innuendo obtainable from nosy neighbors, Mr. Hackney was able to prove that he had been at work when his wife met her killer. Bloody fingerprints had been found in the house on a portion of a rear door casing; the police cut it out and took it to headquarters. The prints did not match Mr. Hackney, Eckert or Schwering. Perhaps this piece of evidence still rests forgotten in a dust-covered box in the storage bins of the Cincinnati Police Department.

                The Enquirer stated on October 28: “The police are watching a man who is said to have acted suspiciously after the murders of Lulu Mueller and Alma Steingeweg some years ago. He is said to have disappeared immediately after the murders for some days, and it is said that he was working within a short distance of the Hackney home when the woman was killed.” The man was never identified in print and nothing came of the clue. In the end, the murder was never solved.

                A year after Mary Hackney’s murder, on October 11, 1911, a woman was found lying in a back yard on Agnes Street, Cumminsville. She was seventeen-year-old Edna Hogg, and she was bound, gagged and unconscious, but alive. The press stated that her injuries were believed to be fatal but appears not to have run any follow-up stories. A note written in a barely literate scrawl was found pinned to her dress: “Sorry we did not have acid to throw on her, too. From the one you did not like.” (Did “you” refer to the authorities or to Miss Hogg? If the latter, it suggests that the attacker and his victim were acquainted.) After this incident all was quiet in Cumminsville and the Spring Grove Killer terrified people only in local legend. Gradually he was forgotten. Perhaps his bones now nourish the worms in the same cemetery from whence he once spied on his victims.

                After so many years and so few clues, all we can do is speculate. It is clear that the same man killed McDonald, Mueller and Steinway in 1904, while the attacks after the six year respite have significant differences from the earlier slayings: Lloyd and Hogg had been gagged, Lloyd and Hackney had been slashed as well as beaten, Hackney had been murdered indoors rather than near Spring Grove Cemetery, Hogg was left with a written message from her assailant. The three later attacks cannot safely be attributed to the Spring Grove Killer. The same man (though not necessarily the Spring Grove Killer) may indeed have murdered Lloyd and Hackney, as the doctor who did an autopsy on Hackney reported that the two women suffered nearly identical injuries. On the other hand, there had been an attempted sexual assault upon Lloyd but not upon Hackney.

                Almost three years after the death of Alma Steinway, another man was apprehended on suspicion of being the killer: Christ Koehl, a painter by trade. Not long after the murders, Koehl had moved to Portsmouth. Allegedly he told his coworkers that he had traveled from Cincinnati; they noticed that he refused to discuss the murders, and that he wore white shoes and a brown coat, which they thought matched one description of the Spring Grove Killer. When this was pointed out to him, Koehl quickly disposed of the clothes. When his suspicious fellow painters asked him about his past he offered a vague reply, and then abruptly took off for Columbus on the excuse that he had received a telegram stating that his mother was dying. Allegedly, after Koehl fled Portsmouth a bloody hammer was found in his room.

                Koehl’s coworkers informed the Columbus police about him, and over the next year the authorities narrowly missed catching him once or twice. At last Koehl, age twenty-two, was arrested on West Broad Street on September 14, 1907. Koehl protested that he had lived at 3006 Bendville Avenue, New Orleans, all his life until June 8, when he went to Louisville, KY, for three weeks. Then he had moved to Columbus, where he had gotten a job as a mechanic. The only time he had ever been in Cincinnati was when he was en route from Louisville to Columbus.

                Whatever evidence there was against Koehl—and it seems pretty thin—was not enough to impress the authorities in Cincinnati, one of whom, Chief Millikin, sent a letter to Columbus noting that no good description of the murderer had ever been released. It was true that the police had been given a pair of white shoes that allegedly had belonged to the killer, but the Cincinnati detectives had “traced the ownership and proved conclusively that he was not the man.” The hapless painter’s coworkers were mistaken, in other words. Soon afterwards, Christ Koehl was set free due to lack of evidence.

                What information can we deduce about the Spring Grove Killer after all these years which may yet lead to his identification? The perpetrator of the 1904 killings probably lived very close to Spring Grove. It is hard to believe he stayed outside for long periods in the November cold just waiting for prey. Though the area near the cemetery was not well lit, it was full of activity: a streetcar stop was located nearby, people went to and came from work, and sweethearts strolled down the lovers’ lane. After the second or third murder, the killer must have known the area would be under constant scrutiny. Likely he lived in a house or apartment near the cemetery, from which he could comfortably watch for potential victims and to where he could escape quickly after committing a crime. Possibly he had a job that gave him an excuse to be out in the cemetery after hours, such as night watchman or gravedigger.

                The Spring Grove Cemetery Association kept a small shelter house in a corner of the cemetery, and it was theorized that the killer might have hidden there before and after his murders. Detectives found that the rear door of the house was blocked only with a light wooden bench, which meant the murderer could easily have traveled in and out of Spring Grove that way rather than by scaling the fence. One Mr. Emerson, who ran an automobile shop, stated that he had seen a man pacing inside the building around 8:00 on the night Alma Steinway was slain. Emerson did not get a good look at him but thought he was carrying a club and nervously snapping his fingers. A streetcar driver saw a man of the same general description at 8:40, leaning against the fence behind the cemetery’s shelter house. He was standing in the same position when the driver made the return trip at 9:02, only a few feet from the spot where Steinway was murdered around 9:30. The streetcar’s headlight illuminated the stranger for mere seconds, but the driver saw that he was a stoutly built man of medium size who wore dark clothes. His face was not visible, for his coat collar was turned up and his slouch hat was pulled down low. A few more details were added by a third witness, Frank Crotty, who saw the man up close and personal as he ventured past Crotty on the sidewalk around 7:50 p.m. Crotty claimed the man was about 5’8”, weighed about 150 pounds, was clean-shaven and in his mid-thirties. Crotty also noticed that the stranger wore new shoes. The heel prints of new shoes had been found at the Steinway crime scene, and an old pair of badly worn canvas shoes wrapped in a newspaper was left behind. (The shelter house was used in the daytime by a florist named K. Wolff. It will be remembered that suspect Henry Swears worked for a florist, though I have been unable to determine if Wolff was his employer. Perhaps the police, who often showed staggering incompetence when investigating the murders, dismissed Swears as a suspect too soon. As he does not turn up in the 1910 Ohio census, it could be inferred that he abandoned the state when the heat was on.)

                A viable alternate theory is that the murderer might have been a railroad man since the three canonical victims were found dead near railroad tracks. Or perhaps the killer was a hobo who regularly rode into Cumminsville on the train, went to his favored hiding spot, murdered his victims, then rode the rails out of town afterwards. Since trains run on fixed schedules, it might not be coincidence that the murders of McDonald, Mueller and Steinway each took place around the beginning of the month. Finally, assuming the later murders were the work of copycats, the researcher looking for the serial killer’s identity must seek someone who went to jail, died, fled town, or was otherwise incapacitated after November 1904.

The Serial Killer in the Cemetery

“Arrest is Expected This Afternoon.” Louisville Times 4 Nov. 1904: 1.

“Arrested for Cincinnati Strangling Mysteries.” Columbus Evening Dispatch 14 Sep. 1907: 1.

“Arrests Made in Murder Case.” Cincinnati Enquirer 6 Oct. 1904: 5.

“Bloody Bowlder [sic].” Cincinnati Enquirer 9 Oct. 1904: 9.

“Box Contained Cocaine.” Cincinnati Enquirer 7 Oct. 1904: 7.

“Bulletins.” Louisville Times 7 Nov. 1904: 1.

“Christ Koehl is to Soon Go Free.” Columbus Evening Dispatch 17 Sep. 1907: 3.

“Cincinnati Does Not Seem Anxious.” Columbus Evening Dispatch 16 Sep. 1907: 3.

“Cincinnati Mystery.” New Orleans Daily Picayune 12 Oct. 1911: 2.

“Cincinnati’s Murder Mystery Still Unsolved.” Louisville Times 5 Nov. 1904: 7.

“Clews Only Deepen Mystery.” Cincinnati Enquirer 5 Oct. 1904.

“Clubbed to Death.” Louisville Courier-Journal 4 Nov. 1904: 1.

“Find Girl Unconscious in ‘Murder District.’” Louisville Courier-Journal 12 Oct. 1911: 1.

“Fog Concealed Assassin…” Cincinnati Enquirer 4 Nov. 1904: 12, 4.

“Fourth Victim.” Louisville Courier-Journal 2 Jan. 1910, Section II: 10.

“Girl Repels the Ripper.” Iowa Recorder [Greene, IA] 23 Nov. 1904.

“Husband of Mary Hackney Closely Questioned…” Cincinnati Enquirer 27 Oct. 1910: 9.

“In the Cemetery.” Cincinnati Enquirer 8 Nov. 1904: 12.

“The Mueller Murder Mystery.” Cincinnati Enquirer 4 Oct. 1904: 3.

“Mutilated Body of Young Wife.” Cincinnati Enquirer 26 Oct. 1910: 8.

“Mysterious Murderer Who Hides Among the Grave Stones.” American Magazine supplement, San Francisco Examiner 27 Nov. 1904: 8.

“No Solution…” Louisville Times 4 Nov. 1904: 4.

“Not Blood on Crutch.” Cincinnati Enquirer 7 Oct. 1904: 7.

“Police Believe the Girl was Murdered.” Louisville Courier-Journal 2 Oct. 1904, Section    II: 4.

“Positive Proof of Foul Crime…” Cincinnati Enquirer 5 Nov. 1904: 9.

“Scene of Hackney Murder…” Cincinnati Enquirer 31 Oct. 1910: 12.

“Shoes May Furnish a Clew…” Cincinnati Enquirer 7 Nov. 1904: 10.

“Stoutly Built Man With Slouch Hat…” Cincinnati Enquirer 6 Nov. 1904: 9.

“Subpoena Served on Hackney.” Cincinnati Enquirer 30 Oct. 1910: 9.

“Suspected of Two Murders…” Columbus Evening Dispatch 15 Sep. 1907: 3.

“Suspects Let Go By Police.” Cincinnati Enquirer 28 Oct. 1910: 14.

Tesch, Jeffrey K. “ ‘Murder Zone’ Killer Paralyzed the Queen City in Ripper-like Fear.” Louisville.com. 4 Oct. 2004 <http://louisville.com/indexdisplay.html?article=9339>.

“Thousands of Morbidly Curious…” Cincinnati Enquirer 3 Oct. 1904: 10.

“Tragic Fate of Mary Hackney Seems Near Solution…” Cincinnati Enquirer 29 Oct. 1910: 18.



STORY FOR JULY 2013: “The Wimpiest Battle of the Civil War”

Genre: History

The Wimpiest Battle of the Civil War    

                The Battle of Painter Creek wasn’t exactly the sort of Civil War encounter that is commemorated in history books, or becomes the subject of stirring books or movies.

                It started out promisingly. A large Confederate force led by Col. Joseph Porter engaged in a fight against several Union regiments headed by Gen. John McNeil near Macon, Missouri, on August 8, 1862. Porter and McNeil had already clashed at Kirksville on August 6, and many rebels had been killed or captured. Porter retreated southward into the woods. McNeil was determined to pursue and capture him, hence the clash at Painter Creek when the forces met again.

                The Union soldiers took position on high knobs and rained fire down on the Confederates. Porter’s men fired back, refusing to budge; in the opinion of Charley Coleman, a civilian witness, Porter could have driven off the Federals if he had tried, but was cautious because he had a number of panic-stricken new recruits in his regiment and was trying to save them.

                The two sides traded heavy fire for hours. Said Coleman years later: “From the terrific discharges of musketry we [civilian eyewitnesses] imagined the ground must have been covered with the slain. I didn’t see how human flesh and blood could last a minute under such a riot of smoke and fire.”

                At dusk, the knobs echoed with the sound of a Union bugler: the Northerners were on the retreat. Civilians commenced the grim task of burying the hundreds of dead soldiers they imagined must be littering the battlefield. When they arrived, they found that despite the ferocious firing, nobody on either side had been injured or killed! The only corpse was that a Confederate raw recruit who had jumped off his horse before the battle started and drowned in a creek. The Battle of Painter Creek had been such a yawner that even during the height of the conflict, teacher Lizzie McKittrick insisted that her students keep at their lessons even though the sound and the fury of the conflict were audible in the schoolhouse.

SOURCES

 “Not One Hurt…” Louisville Courier-Journal 26 Dec. 1909. Section I: 4.



STORIES FOR JUNE 2013: “Reuben Field, Prodigy” and “Marvelous Griffith”

Genre: History/Biography

Reuben Field, Prodigy

From More Offbeat Kentuckians

Available Here

          Bath County, Kentucky, once produced a citizen who made Rain Man look as dumb as a box of hair. The unlikely prodigy was the son of Skidmore Field, a blacksmith, and his wife Harriet Elizabeth Templeman Field. (In many accounts the family name is given as Fields.) The well-respected couple lived in a town called Pittsburgh, located on White Oak Creek and were destined to have three daughters and a son. The girls were Louisa (born 1843), Elizabeth (born 1848) and Mary Franklin (born 1856). The wonder of the family, however, was their son Reuben, born April 17, 1851. (Or 1852, according to the 1880 Johnson County, Missouri, census.)

          It was soon obvious that Reuben was no ordinary boy. For one thing, he was a glutton almost from the cradle. Bath County historian J. A. Richards wrote, “He early developed a voracious appetite that he always proceeded to gratify regardless of consequences. Nothing short of a forcible withdrawal from the table would stop his consumption of all the provender he could hold in his capacious stomach.” A neighbor recalled the entertaining sight of Reuben eating beans by the double handful straight out of a garbage barrel intended for feeding hogs. On another occasion, finding himself in the center of an acre of sugar cane, little Reuben sucked the juice out of every single cane stalk. Field enjoyed potables as much as edibles, if not more, with the result that he was a heavy drinker at a time of his life when most boys were playing pirate and doing handstands on the church steeple.      

         In temperament Reuben was wild and intractable. Efforts to educate him proved impossible; at school he refused to learn and as a result was a lifelong illiterate. Late in life he remarked that if he had gone to school, he “would have become as big a fool as other people.” He spent most school days as a truant, and whenever forced to attend classes would scare other children with snakes and frogs. He also enjoyed terrifying onlookers by running between the legs of nervous horses.

           In young adulthood, Reuben Field was fat, almost entirely uneducated, and seemingly a half-wit. An obituary recalled him as being “an overgrown country lout with boorish manners and silly mind.” His appearance was uninviting, as he had tiny crossed eyes and weighed 200 pounds though only 5 feet, 10 inches tall. He was also blessed with an oversized head and a thin, scraggly beard. Matters were not improved by his daily habit of smearing his face with grease from a jar that he carried around for said purpose. He had “a look the reverse of intelligent,” the Courier-Journal once remarked. However, Field had been blessed with a bizarre gift for mathematical computation that made him a marvel to all who encountered him. He was a prodigy, or to use the politically incorrect term, an idiot savant—a person who, despite being intellectually challenged, is brilliant in one specialized area.

          His gift developed gradually. When he was about eight years old, Fields commenced startling neighbors by doing simple arithmetic problems mentally. Before long, writes Richards, he “became a sort of local wonder as an adept in addition, multiplication, etc.” A schoolmaster who knew Reuben as a boy stated that at first Field needed a night or so to solve math problems, but due to his astonishing memory he soon became what was then called a “lightning calculator.” He could solve the most difficult mathematical problems very quickly, sometimes instantaneously, and entirely in his mind.

        The family moved to Fayetteville, Missouri, when Reuben was still a boy, although he appears to have spent considerable time commuting between Fayetteville and his relatives in Bath County. By then his talent had developed enough that he was soon the talk of his new surroundings. One of the earliest newspaper accounts I have found regarding his career comes from the Waukesha [Wisconsin] Freeman of February 17, 1870: “Reuben Field is a mathematical prodigy who lives in Missouri. He is a mere boy, has never been to school, and is possessed of no capacity for education. However, he gets drunk young as he is. But he can give the square of 12 figures, mentally, in three minutes’ time.” From this little item we make three deductions: before he turned twenty, Field’s fame was widespread; he was already an alcoholic; and his mental processes had become very fast, at least as far as math was concerned.

        Reuben’s way with numbers is the stuff of legend, and stories abound concerning his freakish mental calculations. If read a lengthy column of numbers, he could instantly calculate the sum and he could remember the order in which the numbers were called. The Kansas City Star recounted a time when someone tested Reuben’s ability: “After having called several columns of figures for addition he went back to the first column, saying it was wrong and repeating it, purposely miscalling the next to the last figure. At once Field threw up his hand, exclaiming: ‘You didn’t call it that way before.’”

       If provided with the date, month and year of a person’s birth, Reuben could instantly tell which day of the week the birth fell upon. Family Bibles and perpetual calendars proved him correct. He was able to calculate immediately how many grains of corn of a certain length it would take to reach from the earth to the moon. “It is immaterial whether there are 10 or 700 figures in [the problem],” declared the Courier-Journal in a November 1891 article. “Whether multiplication or subtraction, addition or division or a combination of all these, he will give you the answer, without the aid of paper or pencil, before the echoes of your voice in propounding the question have fully died away.” If given the circumference or diameter of a locomotive’s wheel and the distance between any two points, Field could immediately determine the number of revolutions the wheel would turn within that distance. Or the reverse: if told the distance and number of revolutions, he could calculate the circumference or diameter of the wheel. If given the dimensions of a brick and then the dimensions of a hypothetical wall, Field could instantly declare how many bricks of that size it would require to make up the wall. The Courier-Journal declared that if asked to multiply 59,746,989,223,615 by 94, subtract 73,275, and divide the result by 57 ½,  “Reub” could give the correct answer nearly instantaneously.

      Once Field was asked: “The circumference of the earth is, in round numbers, 25,000 miles. How many flax seed, allowing twelve to the inch, will it require to reach around it?”  He had the answer in less than a minute. (19,008,000,000, in case you were wondering.)

      Naturally, Field was in great demand among businessmen. Surveyors beseeched him to help with their calculations. Merchants would hire him to do their invoices. In the fall of 1873 the Fayetteville tax collector had Reuben look over his records; several months later, in summer 1874, he could still remember every number in the taxman’s ledger. A wholesale firm in Kansas City hired him for a single day as an experiment after he told them he could do the work of ten clerks. By the end of the day he had proved that he certainly could, and the firm gave him $45—pay sufficient for ten men. It was a rare occurrence, however, when Field accepted money for his computing skills. The childlike prodigy usually asked only for some piece of merchandise such as a pair of boots. On one occasion he accepted a bar of perfumed soap as payment. Rumor held that he ate the soap.

      Then there was the time the government of Bath County called on Reuben to provide aid with his highly specialized skill. As told by historian Richards,

Bath County was indebted to the Big Sandy Railroad in a large amount, the bonds for which were held by a New York firm. The debt had been running and accumulating interest a great many years and a member of this firm was sent to negotiate a compromise with the county. The compromise was effected, the calculations were made and all the papers drawn and approved by the parties to the contract. The County Judge sent for [Field] and stated to him the whole business in a way he could understand it and though not being able to read or write he made the entire calculation by mental process and it tallied to the cent with the calculations made by the parties.

        In addition to these feats, Field had some sort of internal clock that allowed him to tell the exact time of day or night without consulting a watch. He never owned a watch and would have been unable to tell time with one if he had it; because he was illiterate, he was unable to distinguish numerals as well as letters. (To put it another way, Field knew the numerical value of, say, the number 220, but if shown the numbers written on a piece of paper he did not recognize them.) People would experiment by waking him up in the middle of the night and asking the time. He was never wrong.

       The press enjoyed informing readers about the wonder known as Reuben Field, often comparing him to Tom Bethune, a blind and probably autistic former slave who became a celebrity due to his phenomenal talent at playing piano. The St. Louis Republican sent a reporter out to visit him at his home in Fayetteville in July 1874. The following edifying dialogue took place.

    Journalist: “Reub, I hear that you can tell what day of the week any given date was or will be. Is that so?”

      “Yes, sir.”

      “What was July 1, 1868?”

      “Wednesday.”

      “Correct. What was the 22^nd of January, 1848?”

      “Sunday.”

      “What day will the Fourth of July come on this year?”

      “Saturday.”

       “New Year’s?”

       “Friday.”

       “All right. I have also heard, Reub, that you can tell the hour at any time of day or night. Is that so?”

       “Yes, sir.”

        “What time is it now?”

        “It is 17 minutes past 2 o’clock, railroad time—sun time is 13 minutes slower.”

        The reporter repeatedly tested Field’s ability to tell time without a watch and was satisfied. Perhaps in the mood to show off a little, Field asked a passing citizen to write down and read aloud a column of numbers. There were thirteen two-digit numbers in all. Reuben immediately added them, and proved that he could repeat the numbers in the order they were written. He could also do it backwards.

       Scientists and mathematicians who tested Field invariably found that his near-instantaneous calculations were correct. “The most learned mathematicians have tried to trap him, but without success,” said the Courier-Journal in 1891. “He always instantly gave a correct answer to their most difficult and complicated problems…. While expert accountants who have witnessed his feats have sometimes questioned the correctness of his answers, they have always found, upon investigation, that they were in error and Field was right…” The paper further noted that the savant had a perpetual idiotic grin and glassy eyes that lit up only when doing his mental calculating.

     In April 1892 the Scientific American printed a letter describing his feats, sent by reader N. T. Allison of Columbus, Kansas:

[…H]is reasoning powers have never developed beyond those of a child of the most ordinary intellect. In the face of these facts, however, he has the keenest perception of the relation of numbers and quantities, and is able, as if by instinct, to solve the most intricate mathematical problems. He does not know figures on a blackboard, but he understands them perfectly in his mind…. Once in my office I asked him the time. He replied at once: “Sixteen minutes after three.” In order to test him, I drew him off upon some other question, not letting him know my object, and when seventeen minutes had passed, I looked at my watch and asked him the time. He said: “Twenty-seven minutes to four.”

       In 1887 Field displayed his skills before Governor Crittenden of Missouri and other celebrities of that state, all of whom “unhesitatingly pronounce[d] him one of the greatest wonders of the century.”

      To what did Field credit his seemingly miraculous power? He could not explain it except to say he thought it was a gift from God, and “liable to be taken away from him if not properly used.” He believed that if he were to try to use his talent to make money he would lose it; therefore he refused the tempting offers of many a circus owner or business firm. (Only once was he persuaded to go onstage, but Reuben’s manager unwisely told the audience in his introduction that Field was a fool in all matters except math. Reuben exclaimed “You are a fool yourself; I’m no fool!” and left the stage, never to return.) Field also shunned literacy, telling a reporter that he feared he would lose his talent if he ever learned to read and write. However, noted the Courier-Journal, he evidently did not fear he would lose his gift due to drunkenness. “Reub loves his toddy and indulges freely. Already his face is bloated from the effects of whisky, and it is only a question of time until he will fill a drunkard’s grave.” In 1874 Field enigmatically attempted to explain his mathematical instincts to a St. Louis Republican reporter: “You commence at the bottom and work up—I commence at the top and work down; it is easier falling out of a tree than climbing out. If I could read and write, I shouldn’t know any more than you do.”         

      Field refused to work, although the 1880 Johnson County, Missouri, Census lists his occupation as “natural mathematician.” He lived with various family members and acquaintances, leaving for another host whenever he sensed that he was wearing out his welcome. Sometimes his benefactors had to resort to subterfuge in order to get him to leave, as related by local historian Richards: “When the good woman of the house felt that he had overstayed his time, he was told about some neighbor who had just slaughtered a hog, or had procured a new supply of hominy, both of which he loved, whereupon he would take off for a visit there until the hog and hominy were gone.”    Field never married, claiming he would do so only if the Lord commanded it. “Even then,” said the Kansas City Star, “it is doubtful if any sane woman would have had him for a husband.”

        After a lifetime of amazing people, sometime in the early twentieth century Reuben Field vanished from the record. John A. Richards writes in his history of Bath County that the place and date of Field’s death were unknown. However, due to the magic of backbreaking research, I can relate the story of the prodigy’s final days. He had moved to Jackson County, Missouri, and in 1907 was committed to the county poor farm by court order. With the onset of poor health came the loss of his mathematical skill. He died of apoplexy at the county hospital at Little Blue on November 27, 1913. “Death now holds the secret of Rube Field’s wonder,” remarked the Kansas City Star.

     Field’s relatives were unable to care for his remains, so he was buried in the cemetery at the county poor farm. It is a matter for metaphysicians to ponder whether his ghost can instantly compute the number of grains of dirt that fill his grave.

Marvelous Griffith

From Forgotten Tales of Indiana

Available here

Also, soon to be available as an e-book! Watch this website for details.

         “I lay claim to being the mathematical wonder of the United States,” said Arthur F. Griffith. Few would have argued with him, as he had by then become nationally famous as “Marvelous Griffith” for his ability to do complicated mathematical equations mentally and accurately. He was what was then called a “lightning calculator,” and his feats were the stuff of legend.

         Griffith was born in Syracuse, Indiana, in 1880, and grew up in Milford. He displayed an affinity for math from early childhood, when he would count the grains of corn as he fed the family’s chickens. When he went to school, he boggled his teachers’ minds with his impromptu and difficult calculations. He first came to public attention in 1898. It was noted that unlike many mathematical savants, who tend to be monomaniacal, surly and socially backward, Griffith was pleasant, had a good sense of humor and was able to converse on a number of topics other than math. Like most of his kind, Griffith had a phenomenal memory. He could remember and discuss math problems he had worked out long after the fact. Unlike many math prodigies who are unable to explain how they do what they do, Griffith articulately discussed his mental “systems.” According to one account, he wrote “ten short methods for addition, two for subtraction, eighty for multiplication, six for division, seventy for mensuration, and more than 400 for fractions, decimals, denominate numbers, percentage, interest, involutions, evolution, and miscellaneous propositions.” He made arrangements to publish an explanation of his systems and mental shortcuts for calculation, but the book appears never to have seen the light of day.

         On one occasion a skeptical financial editor asked Griffith to calculate 14,551,915,228,366,851,806,640,625 times 68,719,476,735. Ten seconds later, Griffith had the correct answer: 999,999,999,985,448,084,771,633,148,193,359,375. “I work that by my own shortcut rule—number 142—for multiplication,” said Griffith, seemingly unaware that his explanation explained nothing at all to the average person. Forget billions and trillions, quadrillions and quintillions; Griffith could handle calculations up in the vigintillions (a number followed by sixty-three zeroes).

          On another occasion, Griffith computed—just for the joy of it, it appears—the compound interest on a dollar at 6 percent from the time of the birth of Christ to the present. “This was the most difficult problem I have ever figured out,” he remarked. “It took me a half hour.” He noted that if John D. Rockefeller was worth $600 million, the compound interest he had calculated would be sufficient for more than 20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Rockefellers. Here are a few of the many brain teasers devised by Griffith; he did not provide the answers, as he assumed people would enjoy trying to figure them out. Have fun!

• In how many different positions can the fifty-two cards in a deck of cards be arranged? (“The number will be astounding,” said Griffith, “and if one contents himself working out the problem by the old long rules I am afraid he will not get through the task soon.”)
• What is the weight of the ground one mile deep under the United States?
• What numbers up to 1,000 will ever be the remainder after dividing by 1,001, if the dividend is a perfect cube? Ditto, if the dividend is a perfect fourth power?
• If all the states and territories were arranged in one row, how far would they reach and in how many different positions could they be in one row?
• How many different numbers with thirty digits will always divide 1,073,741,824 out even?
• Suppose it had rained all over the United States 17 percent of the time from the birth of Christ to the present time, raining forty-five drops to the square inch a second, and had taken 800 drops to make a pint, and we had all that water here, how much water would it make and how deep would it be?

     Professors at Indiana State University took their homegrown genius to visit mathematicians at Yale who, after seeing Griffith strut his stuff, declared that he was among the dozen or so most notable prodigies in history. His skills were tested at such universities as Harvard, Chicago, and Northwestern; it was found that he could raise a figure to the sixth power in eleven seconds, multiply three figures by three figures in five seconds and multiply nine figures by nine figures in eight seconds. During the Harvard test, he answered correctly every question put to him, “the fabled ‘fourth dimension’ alone being barred.”

     Arthur Griffith enjoyed having his abilities tested in less academic surroundings as well. On three occasions, he won races against adding machines; on a bet, he did the work of fourteen clerks in three hours at the state auditor’s office in Springfield, Illinois. Eventually, he became a vaudeville entertainer. On Christmas Day 1911, he died of apoplexy in a hotel bed in Springfield, Massachusetts, en route to an engagement in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He was thirty-one years old.  

SOURCES

Reuben Field:

Allison, N. T. “Another Mathematical Prodigy.” Scientific American 30 Apr. 1892: 276.

Colangelo, Drema. E-mails to author. 10 Oct. and 11 Oct. 2003.

Coshocton [OH] Morning Tribune. “Rapid Calculator Dead.” 29 Nov. 1913: 4.

Kansas City Star. “Bury Prodigy as a Pauper.” 28 Nov. 1913: 2A.

---. “A Wizard of Figures Dies.” 27 Nov. 1913: 1.

Louisville Courier-Journal. “A Lightning Calculator.” 1 Nov. 1887: 4.

---. “A Mathematical Prodigy.” 30 Nov. 1891: 5.

Richards, John A. A History of Bath County, Kentucky. Yuma, AZ.: Southwest Printers, 1961.

Waukesha [WI] Freeman. “Reuben Fields is a mathematical prodigy…” 17 Feb. 1870: 1.

“Worse Than the Lightning Calculator.” Originally in St. Louis Republican. Reprinted in Herald and Torch Light              [Hagerstown, Md.] 15 July 1874: 1.

Marvelous Griffith:

Louisville Courier-Journal. “Child’s Play for Arthur F. Griffith…” February 18, 1906, I, 6.

---. “Indiana’s Lightning Calculator Dies.” December 26, 1911, 3.

New Orleans Times-Picayune. “Marvelous Griffith…” December 26, 1911, 1.





STORY FOR MAY 2013: “The Denmead Horror”

Genre: History

The Denmead Horror

                New Brunswick, New Jersey, circa 1887, probably was not a place accustomed to sensations. Imagine, then, the excitement that was unleashed in mid-January when Mrs. Mary Ann Brundage of Piscataway came to town. She was intent on seeing her sister Cornelia, who had been the mate of Samuel Denmead for a number of years. But the Denmead family refused to let her in the house, and the increasingly angry and fearful Mrs. Brundage wanted to know why.

                The Denmeads had local reputations for eccentricity. They had lived in New Brunswick for a little over forty years, and had long forbidden any outsiders to enter their Commercial Avenue home, a board-covered house that fell under the architectural style known as “ramshackle.” The dwelling—calling it a “house” actually affords it too much dignity—was an ugly one-room affair with only two windows (both covered). The building was enclosed in boards that slanted downward from the roof. The family originally consisted of four brothers, Robert, John, Henry, Samuel, and a sister who had the good sense to stay away from her siblings. The patriarch of the family had left a fortune of $400,000 to Samuel, but he proved an easy mark for swindlers and lost most of his inheritance. As a result, he developed a morbid fear of signing his name on any piece of paper. He had collected a mountain of checks over the years, but was afraid to sign them. 

                Cornelia Denmead had had a melancholy personal history. Her mother came from a wealthy family, the Goodfellows of Piscataway. Around 1840, Cornelia married a shoemaker named William Ayres.  She had a son by him, but in 1844 Mr. Ayres was led astray by a temptress from Perth Amboy and he abandoned Cornelia, taking with him a generous amount of her property. In the divorce settlement, Cornelia got custody of their son, but her former husband kidnapped him. She spent hundreds of dollars advertising in newspapers across the country for his return and fruitlessly searching orphanages. Her mind was never the same afterward, and for a time she was an inmate at Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum.  After her release from the institution, she was much sought after by gentleman callers owing to her great physical beauty. Eventually Sam Denmead came courting; he must have seemed a rock of stability in comparison with Mr. Ayres, although he was so startled when her sister—the aforementioned Mary Ann Brundage—entered the room as he was proposing that he jumped out the window. Her family strenuously objected to the courtship, so Sam and Cornelia ran off together in 1857, perhaps to elope—or perhaps not. Whether they were ever actually married is a dark mystery, but for the sake of convenience I will refer to her as Mrs. Denmead.

                The couple moved into the later-to-become-notorious New Brunswick house which some papers uncharitably described as a “hut.” There they joined Mr. Denmead’s brothers Robert and John, and they all lived a hermitlike existence in the tiny shack for years. Then they were joined by two more people. Neighbors saw brother Henry and “a large, fat woman” entering the house in 1872; neither had been seen since around 1877, and it was thought that death had removed them from this domestic paradise. Despite Sam’s financial incompetence, the Denmead brothers collectively were worth about $50,000. Their sister had bought a nice home for them in 1885, but the residence stood empty as the brothers refused to abandon their squalid hovel. Sam owned one other house, described as “palatial,” but would not live there.

                Of the house’s inmates, only Sam and his wife Cornelia would go out in public, and even so Sam ventured outside only rarely. By contrast, Mrs. Denmead was a familiar spectacle on the streets of New Brunswick, gathering such refuse as empty bottles, cans, bits of wire, old clothing and scraps of iron into a basket and carrying her treasures home. Despite her education and family connections, she made extra money working as a washerwoman.  A news correspondent noted that she “played [music] and sung charmingly in the homes where she worked as a servant.” She would return to the hovel every night after work, and nothing could induce her to come outside. Mrs. Brundage had not seen her sister since December 1886, hence the frantic visit to New Brunswick. Passersby had noticed sickening odors wafting from the Denmead residence, giving rise to gruesome rumors.  Was Mrs. Denmead sick? Had she died and been buried in the house? Had she been murdered? What was going on in that house, anyway?

                When word got out that the Denmeads refused to allow Mrs. Brundage into the house, the hermits were beset by citizens determined to either torment the eccentric brothers or somehow make money off of them. In the former class were people who tried by any means to get a peek into the house. Sam Denmead sought to discourage their vandalism by standing guard at the door with a shotgun. In retaliation, the mob threw rocks at the house until the police broke up the festivities. Among the more exploitive citizens were hucksters who took advantage of Sam’s financial naiveté and stolid refusal to come outside. One shameless person charged him several hundred dollars to paint an old buggy, and Sam paid it. The Overseer of the Poor, a man named Wright—who also was refused admittance to the house—discovered that one of the policemen assigned to guard the house had been extorting large sums of money from Denmead. The Overseer arranged to have a temporary dwelling constructed on the estate, but still the brothers declined to move. A New York Times correspondent unsuccessfully attempted to enter the shack by crawling under the boards that covered it. Sam agreed to speak with the reporter, stating that his wife was alive but sick. The reporter shouted out Mrs. Denmead’s name several times, but received no reply from within the house.

                After weeks of more or less gentle persuasion, Mrs. Brundage determined to take legal action against those Denmeads. She announced that she would get a search warrant and the police would find out what had been going on the house whether the Denmeads liked it or not.

                March 10 was the big day. An immense crowd gathered: no citizen of New Brunswick had ever seen the inside of the Denmead shanty and few could claim to have seen two of the brothers, Robert and John, neither of whom had ventured outside in decades. Ironically, once legal permission to enter the residence had been gained, the authorities seemed afraid to enter. Perhaps cowed by the satanic stink issuing from within, the police, the inspector from the Board of Health, and even Mrs. Denmead’s relatives all had second thoughts. By late afternoon no one had proven brave enough to go inside. At last newspaper reporters took the initiative, as they shall always do if they think a good story is at stake, and shamed the authorities into performing their unenviable duty. It was decided to serve a warrant on Sam Denmead on a charge of criminal neglect for failing to provide medical attention for his wife, punishable as a felony under New Jersey law. Police Chief Fouratt, a detective named Charles Oliver, and a battery of lawyers and policemen walked to the door, knees trembling.

                Their admission came in stages. First, polite knocking. No answer. Next came insistent pounding. Somebody realized that the door was barricaded. Out came the axes. After a few blows the men heard a sound that no one outside the house had heard in many, many years: the voice of ultra-reclusive John Denmead, saying “You can’t get in here.”

                Chief Fouratt replied, “But I have a warrant for Sam, and I must get in.”

                “Sam isn’t here.”

                “It makes no difference. I must get in anyway.”

                “This is no place to go into,” John whined. But he did let them in, with cries of “Don’t step on the dog.” The door had been the one thin line of defense between the plaguey stench inside the house and the bright, pleasant world outside. When John opened the door, the odor of decomposition burst out, full-bodied and virile and looking for noses to assault. The investigators instinctively stepped backwards and one nearly fainted. The men regained their courage and stepped into the tiny, unlighted abode. When their eyes grew accustomed to the dark they saw John Denmead, tall and elderly with a long white beard and a cleanly shaven upper lip. He wore a filthy cap and had a nasty handkerchief tied around his neck. His clothes were so old and worn that they had faded into a uniformly dull gray. He was about sixty years old and had not been seen by anyone other than family members since 1845. John lit an oil lamp for the authorities, who then could see the source of the stink.

                In a primitive bed made of two feather mattresses lying on boxes and covered with rags and old, discarded clothing lay the eyeless, shriveled bodies of Cornelia and her brother-in-law Robert Denmead, dead several months at least. The papers described their remains in extravagant, almost loving detail. Mrs. Denmead’s body was clad in a long, patched muslin gown and she wore a dirty macramé cap, its ribbons tied under her chin with tape. The exposed skin of her face, hands and feet was hard and dried out, but the rest of the body was “soft and pliable.” Her sister, Mrs. Brundage, insisted on seeing the remains and expressed her opinion that Cornelia had never been legally married to Sam Denmead. Worse, she thought Cornelia “was nothing but the mistress of the three men.” As for her bedmate, his face had served as snack for desperate rats, but enough was left of his remains to make it evident that when alive Robert must have cut a frightening figure. His body from the ears down was covered with tough, long gray bristles. The hair on his head stood straight up, Stan Laurel style, and his shriveled hands were folded across his chest. He was dressed in a ragged suit. Adding to the sense of unease, investigators noticed that the bed in which the bodies lay was the only one in the house, leading them to conclude that Sam and John Denmead had been sleeping with the dearly departed every night. One witness, a lawyer named Berdine, was so staggered by the sight that he had to be carried out to a carriage.

                The decaying corpses were only part of the house’s remarkable décor. There were only a few rough pieces of furniture, including a bureau, but plenty of rags, bones and decaying vegetables strewn about, and even hanging from posts. Boxes contained old letters, coins, shin plasters, badly worn jewelry, hats and bonnets, shoes, staples, spikes, empty bottles, silver plates, rusty and broken hardware, swords, accordions. A barrel was filled with New Jersey newspapers dating from 1814 to 1840. The cramped house was so full of garbage and junk that explorers barely had room to turn around, and it was heated only by a stove so tiny that one investigator sat on it, thinking it a chair. The dog mentioned by John Denmead was lying on the floor, sick and barely able to move. (A saloonkeeper named Becker adopted the neglected bull terrier in an attempt to draw curious patrons to his establishment.) A box contained deeds to land in Philadelphia, New Brunswick, and Somerset County, New Jersey. A New York Times reporter commented, “Apparently Sammie had enough native shrewdness to turn his money into property, which would give him an income and could not be stolen.” Despite the longstanding rumors that the brothers had hoarded money in their hut, no cash was found. In an exquisitely dramatic moment, searchers found an old daguerreotype of Mrs. Cornelia Denmead which proved that the stories of her beauty when a youth had not been exaggerated. The house’s occupants (living and deceased), their collection of junk, and all of their furniture had been packed into a single room measuring about twelve feet by twelve feet. A Police Gazette reporter commented that a jail cell was more spacious than the Denmead manor.

                A curious throng of about 500 waited outside, and so many people leaned on the house that its board covering broke. The rumor quickly spread that the two rotting Denmeads within had died of highly contagious smallpox, and formerly enthusiastic onlookers scattered like dandelion seeds before a tornado. The rumor was untrue, and some thought Sam Denmead himself had started it to make the crowd leave the premises. The folks watching the action at a distance had to be satisfied with seeing Sam and John arrested and taken to jail. John in particular was a figure of unusual interest as he blinked in the only bright sunlight he had seen, and breathed in the only clean air he had smelled, in four decades.

                A reporter visited the brothers in their separate jail cells which, being clean and spacious, lacked all the comforts of home the Denmeads were accustomed to, such as darkness, filth, sick dogs, and liquefying corpses. Sam commented, with great pathos, “I would rather be in the little hut.” He made other statements varying from the suspicious to the deranged. He claimed that his wife Cornelia had been injured some months before when naughty lads scared her on the street and she accidentally ran into a post; if any bruises were found on her body, he said, they were due to the mishap. When the reporter asked him why he kept overripe corpses in his house, Sam said: “Are they dead? I hope not, I hope not. I kept them there because I wanted to look at them.” Then he confirmed the police’s theory concerning the household’s sleeping arrangements: “We slept with their bodies.”

                The morning after the interview, the brothers were taken to the jail’s washroom and instructed in the proper use of soap and water, but not without a struggle, for Sam “fought like a tiger” when the jailers tried to bathe him, at least according to one report. A conflicting report states that once he resigned himself to his fate, he submitted to his cleansing with a sense of stoicism much to be admired by our present generation. He and John were given new clothes by the jailer.

                Thanks to the telegraph and wire services, within a day almost every reader of the nation’s dailies had heard all about “the Denmead Horror,” as the press called it. On March 11, New Brunswick schoolchildren and adult laborers skipped their lunch hour to gawk at the brothers’ charnel house/living quarters. On the same day, County Physician Dr. Rice released autopsy results. Robert Denmead had been dead so long, and his body so thoroughly decomposed, that it was impossible to determine the cause of death. (Robert had died a month or more before Cornelia, so the poor woman had been forced to share her deathbed with his decomposing body.) Cornelia’s outer skin had rotted away, but Dr. Rice was able to determine that she had suffered from both peritonitis and pleurisy. There were no marks of violence on her head, but her stomach was dilated and “did not contain enough food to fill a thimble.” Her intestines, as well as Robert’s, were completely empty. Dr. Rice concluded that both had starved to death. When the doctor announced his findings, public opinion about Sam Denmead, low to begin with, became positively subterranean. It was remembered that when Mrs. Denmead took ill, her former employers had offered Sam food to take home to her, and he refused. Based on the physical evidence and statements made by Sam Denmead, the experts guessed that Robert died around Christmas 1886, and that Cornelia had died in mid-February 1887. 

                The police theorized that Sam had neglected his wife and allowed her to starve after she got sick. It was a fact that he had made a recent attempt to hire a judge to draw up a will for her that was in his favor, though at the time Mrs. Denmead was dead and decaying in bed. Citizens who were more kindly disposed toward Sam Denmead thought he had not intentionally murdered her or allowed her to die through neglect; they believed that after his wife died a natural death, he did not alert the authorities about her passing because he wished to forge her will. But the process took longer than he thought, and he was stuck with her body and had no easy way to dispose of it. This theory did not explain why he had kept the corpse of Robert around as well. The police also kept busy in a futile search for the bones of brother Henry Denmead and his female companion, whose remains were rumored to have been buried under the hut. New Brunswick must have been a thrilling place that week.

                  Sensations grew afresh when the Denmeads were taken to court on March 12. The brothers were cleaned up and in new clothes, and thus were unrecognizable. John was particularly amazed by the courthouse. When he had first gone into seclusion, construction of the building had just started; now, like Rip Van Winkle, he returned to the world of light decades later to find the courthouse completed and the village grown into a city. During the proceedings, the brothers were formally charged with “keeping a nuisance”—quaint legalese for keeping two rotten relatives in the house and not reporting their deaths. They were also charged with murder or manslaughter through criminal neglect. Dr. H. R. Baldwin aired a sinister theory: perhaps Mrs. Denmead had not taken sick at all. He noted that despite the deplorable condition of her outer body, her stomach and intestines had remained in mint condition, suggesting the presence of arsenic. Dr. Baldwin had her body reopened—yet another indignity for the corpse, but she was used to it by then—and sent her stomach, liver and other organs to chemists to search for traces of poison just in case Sam was a murderer and had thought death by mere starvation was not fast enough to suit his purposes. After this, her remains were given a much deserved and long overdue decent burial at St. James’ Cemetery in Piscataway. If it should happen that the chemists found poison in the corpse, Sam’s attorney offered a novel alternative theory: Mrs. Denmead, sick, neglected, starving and stuck in a bed with the moldering Robert, became so disgruntled with her lot in life that she committed suicide via arsenic. The attorney pleaded that the Denmeads be given bail, but the request was denied, and the brothers were returned to jail.

                 Things looked pretty serious for the Denmeads, but then everything started going their way. On March 15, the Coroner’s jury deliberated for an hour and announced that both Robert and Cornelia had died of natural causes, “hastened probably by not having had the proper medical attendance during their sickness.” Yet the authorities decided not to charge the brothers with criminal neglect. If we read between the lines of the press reports, it appears that the court concluded that the brothers were insane, and therefore were not to be tried or given any punishment. They were not even indicted for the one crime of which they were manifestly guilty, violating health ordinances by keeping dead bodies unburied. 

                Despite the perfunctory solution—or non-solution, depending on your point of view—to the case, there are nagging loose ends. Were there traces of poison in the bodies of Robert and Cornelia? The possibility was raised, then abruptly dropped, and the press never reported the chemists’ findings. What happened to Henry Denmead and his female companion, who entered the Denmead domicile in 1872 and had not been seen outside the house for the past decade?  And what about Sam’s attempt to have a will drawn up in his favor after Cornelia was already dead? It is difficult to think of an innocuous explanation for that action, but the police seemed content not to explore such questions too deeply.

                One loose end, however, was resolved most unexpectedly. The reader will recall that Cornelia’s first husband, William Ayres, triggered her descent into insanity by kidnapping their son. After the Denmead Horror became front-page news coast to coast, the missing son turned up in the form of forty-seven-year-old Thomas Henry Ayres, a wealthy farmer of Sunnydale, Kansas, who revealed that his villainous father had died in Lacon, Illinois, in 1861. It turned out he had not been quite such a long-lost son after all. He had tracked down his mother’s whereabouts in 1871 and had visited her in New Brunswick, begging her to abandon both Sam Denmead and her life of degradation, but she had refused.

            In short order, Mr. Ayres proved that he was the direct of Cornelia Denmead; he left the city a wealthier man than he had been when he arrived; the Denmead Horror passed from memory; and New Brunswick would know no more such sensations for a generation, when another family of eccentrics named Stevens would figure in an unpleasantness that came to be one of the most celebrated unsolved crimes of the 1920s, the Hall-Mills Murder Case. 

Sources:

Louisville Courier-Journal. “Beats Charlie Ross.” 15 Mar. 1887: 2.

- - -. “They Starved to Death.” 12 Mar. 1887: 5.

- - - .“Too Horrible For Belief.” 11 Mar. 1887: 2.

National Police Gazette. “Dead in a Den.” 26 Mar. 1887: 6.

New York Times. “The Denmead Heir.” 23 Mar. 1887: 5.

- - -.  “Denmead’s Ghastly Hovel.” 12 Mar. 1887: 2.

- - -.  “The Denmeads in Court.” 13 Mar. 1887: 14.

- - -.  “A Long Lost Son Appears.” 22 Mar. 1887: 5.

- - -.  “New Brunswick Excited.” 10 Mar. 1887: 2.

- - -.  “No Case Against the Denmeads.” 16 Mar. 1887: 5.

- - -.  “No Proof of Neglect.” 18 Mar. 1887: 5.

- - -.  “A Sickening Revelation.” 11 Mar. 1887: 2.

Trenton [N.J.] Times. “Denmead’s Fortune.” 12 Mar. 1887: 4.





STORY FOR APRIL 2013: “The Head on the Mound.”
Genre: Historical true crime
From Murder in Old Kentucky
Purchase it at Amazon


The Head on the Mound

    At dusk on Friday, September 18, 1936, a tenant laborer named Stanley Isaacs was walking home after a long day’s work at cutting corn in Madison County, Kentucky. Possibly Isaacs was whistling a tune, as men tend to do after working hard, and imagining that all was right with the world. As he sauntered by a sugar cane patch located on Percy Maupin’s farm near Stegner Lane, six miles from Richmond, Isaacs received his first hints that something was awry in the scheme of things. He glanced at a pair of black women’s shoes that he noticed had been lying in the ditch since Wednesday. Today, however, a mephitic reek permeated the air near the shoes. A pair of dogs ran out of the nearby cane patch and tried to attack him. Isaacs decided to investigate.
    When Isaacs parted the sugar cane about forty feet from the road, he saw the bloated, almost nude body of a woman lying on her back. She was clad only in dirty gray panties and stockings. Even worse, the woman’s head and right hand were missing. The left arm had been hacked off at the shoulder. Obviously the killer had intended to remove all means of identifying the body via fingerprints or facial recognition, but Stanley Isaacs did not pause to contemplate such forensic niceties. He ran to call the cops.
    Detectives had few clues with which to identify the body. They estimated that the victim was about 5 feet 4 inches and weighed 150 pounds. Estimates of age varied from between twenty and forty years old.  The body appeared to have three bullet wounds in the stomach, but this detail was not confirmed in later reports. The head had been removed with a dull blade. The police estimated that the body had been dumped on Wednesday since that was when the women’s shoes had turned up in the nearby ditch. After the coroner’s inquest the unknown body was buried in a potter’s field near the Union City poor farm. In one of those gruesome details that make history such an interesting subject, the Jane Doe had to be buried in a packing crate because her body was too swollen to fit in a casket.
    Another piece of the puzzle was discovered on the afternoon of Sunday, September 20. A farmer named Harry Brotherton went sightseeing at the area where the body had been dumped. He decided to do a little exploring of his own, and was rewarded when he found the woman’s head on Mrs. Sid Noland’s property, 400 yards from the spot where the mutilated torso had been discovered. The head was resting atop a small mound, easily visible and just waiting to be found. The skull bore signs of having been struck with a blunt object and was virtually fleshless. Still it yielded a couple of clues: the victim had brown hair and probably wore dentures, since the upper jaw had only three teeth and a missing partial plate. All of the lower jaw’s teeth were missing. Because so little hair was found, the police theorized that the killer shaved the victim’s head to prevent detectives from determining hair color. Investigators dunked the head in a galvanized bucket of embalming fluid, which was placed on the back porch of Turpin and Lackey’s Funeral Home. Grotesquely, it stayed there for well over a month. The “Cane Patch Murder,” as the press came to call the story, is freighted with horrors.
    Early candidates for the victim’s identity included two missing Kentucky women, Allie Underwood of Estill County and Bell Johnson of Cynthiana. Underwood weighed 140 pounds, had lower false teeth and a partial upper plate. Johnson, though only eighteen, also had a false plate. Interestingly, she had a tattoo on her left arm, which might have accounted for said limb’s being removed from the murder victim.
     The women’s shoes found near the body turned out to be among the most important clues. They were distinctive black oxfords with built-in arches and their serial number proved they had been purchased at the E. V. Elder department store in Richmond. This indicated that the victim had been a local woman, thus ruling out Underwood and Johnson. Sure enough, it was reported on September 26 that Mrs. Underwood at least had turned up alive. She had gone into hiding in Harlan County after witnessing an unrelated murder.
     The mystery did not remain for much longer. In late September the police dropped vague hints that the focus of their investigation had shifted to “somewhere in Ohio.” A month later the police identified the body as that of a missing local woman, fifty-one-year-old Ethel Denny. Her husband, a forty-three-year-old former Madison Countian named Parkie Denny, was arrested on October 26 at the home of a relative, Iva Denny, in Moberly, Madison County. Parkie was a thin, bearded, unkempt farmer who bore an astounding resemblance to Shane MacGowan, lead singer for the Irish punk rock band The Pogues. (“I’ll probably break your camera,” Denny jokingly said to news photographers.) The day of his arrest Denny told investigators that his conscience was troubling him, and he wrote his confession:

I, Parkie Denny, of West Alexandria, Ohio, hereby make the following statement voluntarily and of my own free will in order to do what I feel is right. I killed my wife Ethel Denny (formerly Ethel Yates) in Madison County, Kentucky, some time in the month of September 1936, on a Monday night in my own automobile while parked on a lane between the Speedwell and Richmond-Irvine pikes. I killed my wife by striking her on the head with a hammer. Then I dragged her body through a fence into a sugar cane patch and there I cut her head off. Then I took her head some distance away, about 300 yards, and hid the head in a corn shock. I drove back to my home in Ohio, arriving there Tuesday afternoon.

    When asked why he did it, Denny said “I was dissatisfied with life,” adding, “I got tired of her. She was too old.” He and his wife had had a fearsome argument in his distinctive car, a black Model T Ford coupe with red wheels, just before he killed her with the hammer. The police examined his car and found a smorgasbord of evidence corroborating his story, including ineptly cleaned seats streaked with blood, a hammer, a hatchet and a corn knife with traces of blood on the blade. Ethel Denny’s cranium evidently had been removed from the corn shock by hungry animals wishing to sample human head.
    Despite the evidence against him—including a voluntarily produced written confession—Denny pleaded not guilty when indicted before the grand jury on October 28. He went a step further by pleading temporary insanity when he went to trial on February 8, 1937. His lawyer, O. P. Jackson, had claimed that he would be able to obtain “sufficient evidence” from Ohio insane asylums. This evidence was not forthcoming, and friends, relatives and physicians offered conflicting testimony about Parkie Denny’s sanity. Notably, although Denny pled insanity, his own expert witnesses did not refer to him as insane, stating that at most he was “of low mentality.”
    Dr. Alson Baker of Berea testified that he had been the Denny family physician for years, and he defended the accused with what would probably be considered fighting words outside of the courtroom. Dr. Baker stated that in his opinion Denny had always been of below average intelligence. “I consider him a moron,” said the doctor, adding that Denny had the intelligence of a ten-year-old child. Two other doctors, O. F. Hume and M. M. Robinson, both of Richmond, agreed that while Denny was not very bright, he was not insane.
     One fact that emerged was that the accused did not return to Ohio alone after the murder. His nineteen-year-old niece Mary Annis Denny had accompanied him. Although at first the police refused to tell how they came to suspect Denny, they later admitted he had confessed to his niece. She was given immunity against prosecution and testified against him at the trial, stating that while riding to West Alexandria she had noticed blood on the windshield of her uncle’s automobile. Parkie Denny told the girl that her Aunt Ethel had gone to Illinois, but after a few weeks in Ohio he confided to Mary Annis, “I’ve made away with her. She’ll never be back.” Soon afterwards, the frightened niece hurried back to Richmond on a train. Denny followed her a week later and was arrested at her father’s house, but not before he had asked relatives to burn some clothes belonging to Mrs. Denny and to bury her ring.
     Not surprisingly, the jury rejected Denny’s insanity plea and found him guilty on February 9. He was sentenced to die in the electric chair. He displayed no emotion whatsoever; a newspaper headline called him “the calmest person in [the] courtroom.” Defense attorney Jackson appealed for a new trial on the grounds that Commonwealth’s Attorney G. Murray Smith had made prejudicial statements to the jury. Jackson particularly objected to a statement Smith had made during his final argument: “This jury should not give the defendant in this case a life sentence, because he will get out in eight years and kill some other woman.” Judge W. J. Baxter agreed with Jackson and Denny was retried twice during the May term. Both times the jury agreed on Denny’s guilt but failed to reach a unanimous verdict as to his punishment. The first jury voted eleven to one for the death sentence. During the second of the May trials the jury was made up of Clark Countians who voted nine to three for life imprisonment.
     Parkie Denny went on trial for murder for the fourth time in October 1937. Again he pleaded insanity, apparently hoping that if he did it often enough people would start believing it. This time the jury of Fayette County natives was able to reach a unanimous verdict in only two days: Denny was guilty and would die in the electric chair. As always, Denny showed so little interest in his fate that one might have mistaken him for a spectator at someone else’s trial. The press remarked about his bizarre appearance. While in prison, Denny cultivated his slovenly beard and grew his bushy hair to an unusual length by the standards of 1937. Some thought he was trying to make himself look deranged, but Denny was an actor who forgot to stay in character. Jailer Lucien Moody testified that he behaved normally and got along well with other inmates.
    As the date of execution drew closer, Denny absurdly claimed that he was innocent although blood evidence had been found in his car, he had admitted guilt to his niece, and once arrested for the murder he confessed both verbally and in a document written without coercion. At none of the four trials did his lawyers even attempt to repudiate the written confession. When Denny was arrested officers found on him two letters he had written to relatives, one signed “Ethel and Parkie” and one addressed to Ethel’s brother and signed “Sis.” Both letters repeatedly used the phrases “we” and “us” and described fictional road trips the couple had taken. Both letters were dated October 21, 1936, though Ethel Denny had been murdered in mid-September. Denny never explained how his wife had been able to write letters on prosaic subjects more than a month after her death.
    Some would argue that Denny did not deserve the death penalty since he was, in the words of his own doctor, a moron. This begs the question of whether an IQ test should be given to all convicted murderers. If so, below what point on the scale should a criminal be considered not responsible for his actions? Denny may have been a moron, but he was able to hold down a job and function in society, and he was shrewd enough to befuddle detectives by removing his wife’s hands, shaving her hair and attempting to hide her head. He also wrote the two letters “signed” by Mrs. Denny in order to fool relatives into thinking she was still alive. These actions indicate that he knew right from wrong and wanted to avoid capture and punishment.
    Shortly after midnight on September 2, 1938, Parkie Denny was electrocuted at Eddyville after a last meal of steak, potatoes, eggs, butterscotch pie and coffee. He went out calmly and indifferently, protesting his innocence and probably hoping for happiness in the new Ohio that lay beyond the tomb. Rumor held that when asked if he had any final requests he replied, “Yeah, gimme a blonde!”
    In 2001, Ramona Layne Stylos, another of Denny’s nieces, published a book entitled Bearwallow Road: A Kentucky Childhood. She remembered visiting her “warm and friendly” Uncle Parkie in the Madison County jail when she was eight years old. Mrs. Stylos wrote: “This time of the murder, the trial and the execution left a pall over our family for a very long time, but Uncle Parkie’s name was hardly ever mentioned in our house after his death…. At night, after the rest of the family was asleep, I would think about it… I would think about Uncle Parkie and wonder how an ordinary man, who was always nice and friendly to me, could do such a thing.”
   Time alters all things, with a little help from man. The Bluegrass Army Depot long ago took possession of several farms in that section of the county. The government’s land acquisition included the lonely lane where the murder occurred and the nearby cane patch where the body of Ethel Denny was discovered. Indications are that nerve gas may not be the only scary thing present at the Depot. Local legend maintains that the now-restricted area is haunted. Allegedly, some employees have seen a car with bright headlights prowling in the vicinity of the cane patch late at night. Invariably the car vanishes after a few seconds or whenever it is approached. It appears nobody has ever gotten a close look, but witnesses claim that they can tell by the car’s shadowy outline that it is a very old model. Perhaps if some intrepid persons get close enough they will see that the ghost car is a mid-1930s black Model T Ford coupe with red wheels. And that speculation seems as good a way as any to end this story.

STORY FOR MARCH 2013: “Love Swings a Mallet”

Genre: Historical true crime

The story previously listed for March 2013, "Love Swings A Mallet," will be featured in the upcoming book "Indiana Murders." Watch this website for details!



STORIES FOR FEBRUARY 2013: “Paupers for Sale” and “No Smoking Allowed”

Genre: Politically incorrect history

Paupers for Sale

From Forgotten Tales of Kentucky

Purchase it at this link to Amazon.com

                When were human beings no longer sold like livestock in the USA? Almost everyone thinks such practices ceased in 1865, after the Civil War ended and Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which officially abolished slavery. But it appears that few people have read the Thirteenth Amendment very closely.

                Consider the case of John Hanson, a black vagrant sold into servitude at auction in front of the Louisville courthouse. Dick Zable, a vault cleaner, made the highest bid at two dollars (which suggests that nobody thought Hanson’s services were worth very much). For putting up this princely sum, Zable had the legal right to own Hanson for the period of one year, “subject to the law which governs the contract between apprentice and master.” Zable put Hanson to work tending to his horses. After the sale there was serious talk of auctioning off a white vagrant named Mack.

                So when did the auctioning of Hanson occur? On June 14, 1882—seventeen years after the passing of the Thirteenth Amendment.

                Naturally, this did not escape unnoticed by the national press. Most papers roundly condemned the act—imagine, a person sold into servitude (albeit temporary) so long after the war!—but in fact, as the New York Sun pointed out, it was perfectly legal. “The recent sale,” said the paper, “…has surprised many persons who were not aware or had forgotten that the Constitution of the United States distinctly recognizes the lawfulness of slavery or involuntary servitude as a punishment for crime.”

             Section One of the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in December 1865, reads as follows (my italics): “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” In other words, as the Sun put it,

              There is nothing in the constitutional prohibition to prevent a State from making slavery the penalty for very trivial offenses. The fact that this has not been more generally attempted in the Southern States shows how the sentiments of the people have grown away from the old slave system. Besides, if a law was passed imposing slavery as a punishment on black culprits it would have to apply to white culprits also; and the possibility of a Negro owning a white slave would seem unpleasant to the ordinary legislator.

                Hanson’s sale was not the last time in Kentucky that a human was sold into servitude. The Bowling Green Times announced in late 1884 that Columbus Ford, “the most incorrigible and irrepressible colored vagrant in the state of Kentucky,” would be sold at auction if he did not choose to stay in the county poorhouse. I am not certain whether the auction came to pass, but in June 1887, Mollie Jackson, a white pauper, definitely was sold to the highest bidder for thirty days at Paducah, McCracken County.

           On February 9, 1895, the services of two black women, Sarah Jackson and Bettie Fishback, were sold at public auction at Georgetown, Scott County; the highest bidders were Henry Jackson and Richard Coleman, who, for a cumulative bid of $3.05, won the labor of the women for a period of six months. Newspapers from around the country, especially in the North, protested that the days of slavery had returned to the South—overlooking the fact that the men who bought the women’s services were themselves black. The Chicago Journal called the auction “demoralizing.” The New York Advertiser said, “Such trafficking in human flesh and blood should be stopped….[N]o person, black or white, should be permitted to be sold into servitude even for an hour.” (The Northern press raised a similar outcry when two black vagabonds were auctioned at Lebanon, Marion County, in late October 1897). The Georgetown Press responded to criticism of the sale:

             Some of the philanthropists of the North are unnecessarily disturbed. Letters have been received asking if it is possible that the report is true. There is no need for unnecessary concern on the part of those tender-hearted people. There was neither oppression nor cruelty in the transaction. The women were street-walkers of the lowest class, and had they been consulted would doubtless have preferred to be disposed of in this way to confinement in jail. They had no money with which to pay a fine, and wouldn’t work if it was offered to them. Some of the good people of the North would do an important favor to suggest some satisfactory plan for dealing with such characters.

                Several weeks later, in March 1895, another black vagrant, Sol Williams, was sold at the courthouse door in Paris, Bourbon County, for $31 for a period of six months’ servitude. But when an attempt was made to sell a pauper at Maysville, Mason County, in August, Judge Hutchinson ruled that vagrancy is not a crime and refused to allow the auction. In a similar incident, Josh Jones was due to be auctioned in Somerset, Pulaski County, in July 1900; he avoided the punishment only because the judge, T. Z. Morrow, like Judge Hutchinson at Maysville, believed the law was unconstitutional and “out of all proportion to the gravity of the offense.”

                Not every Kentucky official was so generously inclined, however; Deputy Sheriff M. H. Williams allowed the auction of a white hobo, Lawrence Peak, at the Elizabethtown courthouse in Hardin County on August 3, 1896. His purchaser, John Cecil, got six months’ worth of work out of Peak for $12.75.

                Arch Hays, a farmer who lived near Taylorsville, Spencer County, purchased at auction the services of a black vagrant, Sy Lewis, for nine months for only two dollars around August 6, 1901.

                An interesting case occurred at Shelbyville, Shelby County, on September 6, 1902, when Sheriff R. Walter Briggs auctioned off a year’s worth of servitude by Fisher Million, described as a “worthless Negro” who “enjoys the distinction of never having worked a day in his life.” Perhaps the residents of Shelbyville were in no mood to be charitable with Million since he had infected the town with smallpox in 1900, costing the city several thousand dollars in health care costs. The winning bid was made by David Murphy—who happened to be black—for a whopping four dollars. The well-respected farmer told Million that he would be treated well and would have plenty to eat and wear, but also vowed that he would make the hobo work even if he had to apply a whip: “Murphy afterward said he would have bid as high as $20 on the vagrant Negro. He said he bought him from a purely speculative standpoint, intending to make him work, and that no sentiment whatever governed him in making his strange purchase.” Not only that, but an eyewitness reported: “Many Negroes attended the sale, and the fact that the vagrant was purchased by one of their color completely changed sentiment among them, and instead of mutterings which would have been the case had he been bought by a white man, the result meets with their hearty approval.” For all that, Murphy soon received a threatening letter from a black organization at Hampden, VA.

                On November 28, 1902, three black beggars—two women, Belle Griffin and Emma Reed, and a man named Charles Anderson—were sold at auction in Lancaster, Garrard County. Anderson’s services were sold for seven dollars, while Griffin and Reed brought five dollars apiece. Anderson and Griffin were sold into servitude for one year, but Reed got three years.

                Bruce Marcum, white, a “young, robust, and able-bodied man about twenty-seven years of age,” was sold at public auction by the sheriff of Breathitt County on April 8, 1903. Deputy Sheriff Berry Turner “performed the duty with all the skill of a professional auctioneer, calling attention to the health and physical qualities of the young man, and impressing upon the crowd the value of the young man’s labor.” The winning bid for six months of Marcum’s servitude was $6.50, placed by William Griffith. Marcum was the nephew of attorney and United States Commissioner J. B. Marcum of Jackson, but his family connections did not save him from the auction block.

                 Another white male to be sold at auction was Dock Aubury of Meeting Creek, Hardin County, described as being “a strong, able-bodied man without means of support and too lazy to work.” Aubury had recently gotten married and made the mistake of moving in with the bride’s family and then refusing to work. When the in-laws got sick of his mooching, they instigated proceedings to have him tried as a vagrant. On December 3, 1906, blacksmith J. J. Johnson of Rineyville bought Aubury for one measly dollar before a large and sarcastic crowd. This means that Johnson got Aubury’s services for a year at a cost of less than half a cent per day. “The town and county would be much benefited if more of such prosecutions were made against the worthless lot of loafers that can be found on the streets here at any time,” remarked the Elizabethtown News. However, Aubury’s servitude did not last long. On December 9, the judge ruled that the jury which convicted Aubury had been improperly instructed and the grateful pauper was set free. I wonder if he moved back in with his wife’s family.

                Lest anyone think the auctioning of hobos was strictly a Kentucky phenomenon, I have found cases of vagrants being sold at public auction in such places as Augusta, KS, in February 1887; Fayette, MO, on March 28, 1892; and in Lackawaxen Township, PA, in January 1899. Undoubtedly, there are many more examples waiting to be discovered.

               The clause in question remains in the Thirteenth Amendment. Does this mean you can be sold into slavery if you should become a pauper? Of course not—I think. Pay your debts on time; that’s my advice.

No Smoking Allowed

From Forgotten Tales of Indiana

Purchase it at this link to Amazon.com.

               Perhaps the sensible and even-tempered reader feels that antismoking zealots have gone too far; after all, recently they tried to have smoking banned outside public buildings as well as inside them; in some places, there was talk of banning smoking inside private residences. However, this was child’s play compared to the antismoking laws enacted in Indiana over a century ago.

                Do-gooders wanted to make it more difficult for boys to obtain cigarettes. In May 1905, the Indiana Senate passed a law banning the sale and use of cigarettes—more or less as a joke, according to the newspapers. When the bill went to the House, a foolhardy man employed in the tobacco industry predicted that it would never become a law “because money would be used freely to defeat it.” The politicians in the House understood this to mean that they could easily be bribed. Taking umbrage at perceived slurs on their integrity, the House members passed the bill. In other words, a bill that started out as a joke became the law in Indiana due to spite.

                But not only did the law prohibit the manufacture and sale of cigarettes within the state’s borders, it also made the mere ownership of a cigarette a punishable crime. As might be guessed, the Anti-Cigarette Law proved immensely unpopular both within the state and without, partly because it interfered with personal liberty and partly because violators faced Draconian penalties. Within days after the law was enacted, two men in New Albany were arrested for the dire crime of owning cigarettes; one was released after his friends paid a $35.00 fine on his behalf, but the other found himself facing a thirty-five-day term in jail. In July, Edward Hammel, a traveling salesman of patent medicines, was arrested at Lafayette for smoking and given a fine of $25.00 and costs. He had not sufficient funds and was sent to jail for twenty-nine days. On October 2, Chester Phillips and Charles Caesar were arrested for thoughtlessly smoking near the New Albany police station. Tobacco and papers were found on their persons, which ensured even harsher treatment: they were fined $35.00 each. A number of people from out of state, who had never heard of the law, found themselves getting punished for lighting up.

                The hard-luck champion appears to have been John McCormick of Marion, who on May 10 was fined $37.00 merely for having one cigarette paper in his possession. He was unable to pay and was sent to jail for forty-seven weeks.

                William W. Lowry, an Indianapolis lawyer, was so determined to test the law’s constitutionality that he entered the Marion County Courthouse defiantly puffing away on a cancer stick and informing the deputy prosecutor that he had a thousand more at his house. Lowry was indicted immediately. He made bond and returned for his trial on May 13, vowing that if found guilty he would take the case to the state Supreme Court. A jury refused to convict him.

                The constitutionality of the law was further tested in a more absurd fashion. E.S. Danby of Anderson wrote to Governor Hanly in late July stating that his pet chimpanzee had been addicted to the Evil Weed for years and a doctor had informed him that the chimp’s health would be greatly affected, if not endangered, if he didn’t get some smokes. Here was a legal dilemma, to be sure. The law said nothing specifically about non-humans. Was it, then, a violation of the law to allow a monkey to smoke? Did it set a bad example for men and boys if the primate were allowed to continue indulging his bad habit? The governor answered Mr. Danby—with, I suspect, all the dignity a governor can muster under such circumstances—that he had “no power to suspend the law in respect to chimpanzees or anyone else.” As it turned out, Danby was correct: the monkey died on August 3, and the doctors who performed an autopsy found that “the tracheal muscles [were] rigid and contracted and also the intercostal and abdominal muscles [were] in a condition showing that they had been deprived of a sedative produced by cigarettes that could not be replaced by other narcotics.”

                The Anti-Cigarette Law engendered so much legal chaos and ill feeling that the Supreme Court of Indiana ruled on April 26, 1906, that the law was valid but construed it as “not applying in the case of a person who brings cigarettes into the state in the conduct of interstate commerce, and not forbidding persons to smoke cigarettes, but only to sell them or keep them for sale.” In other words, the court determined that the law should be aimed at dealers rather than smokers, so Hoosiers again had the right to smoke cigarettes, but not to sell them. Eventually the sale of cigarettes was again made legal. At least one person in jail for smoking, John M. Lewis of Anderson, had his conviction reversed, and the day after the Supreme Court ruling, crowds of the nicotine-famished gathered in Jeffersonville for a public smokefest. Thoughtful folks in New Albany wondered whether people who had been fined or served time for smoking were illegally prosecuted and entitled to compensation. That can of legal worms, it appears, was never opened.

SOURCES:

Paupers for Sale:

Louisville Courier-Journal. “Georgetown’s Negro Vagrants.” February 21, 1895: 4.

--- . “Human Being’s Price is One Dollar.” December 4, 1906: 2.

--- .  “Kentucky News.” January 9, 1885: 7.

--- . “Matters in Kentucky.” November 2, 1897: 4.

--- . “Negroes Sold at Auction.” March 30, 1892: 1.

--- . “Negro Farmer Purchases a Black Brother…” September 7, 1902. Section III: 1.

--- . “Negro Vagrant Will Be Offered For Sale…” September 5, 1902: 1.

--- . “Odds and Ends of State News.”  March 21, 1895: 4.

--- . “A Pauper Bids Herself In.” January 11, 1899: 4.

--- . “The Sale of a Vagrant.” June 15, 1882: 6.

--- . “The Sale of Vagrants.” February 21, 1895: 4.

--- . “Sets Aside Sale of White Man.” December 10, 1906: 1.

--- . “Shelbyville.” October 4, 1902: 8.

--- . “Slavery as a Punishment for Crime.” New York Sun. Reprinted in the Louisville Courier-Journal, July 12, 1882: 2.

--- . “Taylorsville Vagrant Sold Into Servitude.” August 7, 1901: 1.

--- . “Their Services of Little Value.” February 10, 1895: 3.

--- . “Two Negro Women Sell For $5 Apiece.” November 29, 1902. Section I: 1.

--- . “The Vagrancy Law.” July 13, 1900: 4.

--- . “Vagrancy Not a Crime.” August 28, 1895: 1.

--- . “A Vagrant Sold.” August 5, 1896: 5.

--- . “Will Sell White Man.” November 26, 1906: 4.

--- . “A Woman to be Sold for Vagrancy.” June 4, 1887: 2.

--- . “Young White Man Sold for Vagrancy.” April 13, 1903: 6.

New York Daily Tribune. “Sold Into Temporary Slavery.” June 4, 1887.

No Smoking Allowed:

Louisville Courier-Journal. “Chimpanzee Died for Lack of Cigarettes.” August 4, 1905, 8.

———. “Cigarette Smoke in the Air Again.” April 28, 1906, 3.

———. “Doesn’t Apply to Act of Smoking.” April 27, 1906, 1.

———. “Gay Old Monk Must Have Cigarettes…” July 28, 1905, 2.

———. “The Indiana Cigarette Law.” Editorial. April 28, 1906, 6.

———. “Must Serve 29 Days…” July 10, 1905, 2.

———. “No Clemency for Indiana Men…” October 3, 1905, 8.

———. “Sent to Jail for Forty-Seven Weeks.” 11, 1905, 9.

———. “So Anxious to Smoke Cigarettes He Will Test the Law.” May 13, 1905, 7.

———. “Why the Cigarette Law Was Passed.” Editorial. May 12, 1905, 4.



STORY FOR JANUARY 2013: “The Maxwell Trunk Murder”

Genre: Historical true crime

The Maxwell Trunk Murder

                There is no guarantee of lasting fame for poets, novelists, artists—or murderers. Some infamous slayings remain in the public consciousness longer than others. We can be thoroughly bad, attain a temporary measure of notoriety, and with the passing of time still end up as obscure as Ozymandius. For example, everyone is familiar with Jack the Ripper’s dark deeds, yet probably not one person in a hundred thousand has ever heard of the contemporaneous Maxwell Trunk Murder even though it was the subject of much excited talk from our great-great-grandfathers. Jack the Ripper, whoever he was, made the cut—pardon the ghastly pun—and attained criminal immortality; Maxwell did not.

                On March 30, 1885, a twenty-five-year-old “girlish-looking, blonde young man” from London checked into the Southern Hotel in St. Louis, Missouri. Claiming to be a doctor and a nobleman, he signed the guest register with the imposing name Walter Henry Lennox Maxwell, and the duly impressed staff gave him room 144. Four days later the hotel received a telegram from another Englishman, wealthy merchant Charles Arthur Preller, asking if Maxwell were registered there. The staff replied that he was. On April 3, the twenty-nine-year-old Mr. Preller showed up and checked into room 184. The hotel staff noted that Maxwell’s manner was “very effeminate, which he even carried so far as to walk with short, mincing steps like a woman.” A witness later described Preller as being “of a retiring, almost effeminate nature.” The staff also observed that both Maxwell and Preller seemed “dudish” and “dandified,” not unlike the currently notorious Oscar Wilde, and spent a lot of time together in Preller’s room. The innocent staff jumped to the obvious conclusion that Maxwell and Preller must be “good friends and old acquaintances.” If the incident happened today we would probably draw a very different inference, but these were the days before the advent of Freud.

                On April 6, Mr. Maxwell disappeared from the hotel. He paid a week’s rent in advance before his disappearance, so it was several days before the staff realized he was not returning. In the meanwhile a distinctly unappetizing reek was coming from Maxwell’s room which gained strength and pungency with each day. Upon inspecting room 144, the staff found that the smell emanated from a zinc trunk Maxwell had left behind. Porters, bellboys and the like have learned through hard experience that trunks make attractive receptacles into which murderers can stuff their prey. On April 14, the hotel staff forced open the small trunk and found that it was in fact a makeshift casket. The ripe corpse of a man was folded inside; he was clad only in pants, his tongue protruded, his skin was black with decomposition, he had a cross cut into his chest and his head had been severed in order to make for easier packaging. The killer had written a mysterious message and pasted it on an inside wall of the trunk, right behind the victim’s head: “So perish all traitors to the great cause.” An artist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch held his nose with one hand and with the other sketched the open trunk and its contents. The drawing was widely reprinted in the nation’s papers and undoubtedly disturbed many a reader’s breakfast of oatmeal and marmalade.  The trunk was hurried off to the morgue, but the smell lingered in the hotel corridor long after it was gone.

  The trunk housing Preller, as drawn by a newspaper artist. From the Louisville Courier-Journal, April 16, 1885.

                A second trunk of Maxwell’s was found at the hotel. Probably to the relief of the Post-Dispatch’s artist, it contained only papers. Seven trunks belonging to Preller were found in his room, containing passports for Russia, Spain and Mexico and hundreds of dollars’ worth of clothes, tapestries and rugs. It was evident that Preller had been much wealthier than Maxwell.

                The coroner’s solemn duty was to determine whether the less-than-spruce man in the trunk was Maxwell or Preller. The corpse’s dark hair and eye color revealed it to be Preller rather than the blue-eyed, blonde Maxwell. Close inspection showed that Maxwell had shaved Preller’s handsome moustache, perhaps to make identification of the body slightly (very slightly) more difficult. A chemist later detected the presence of chloroform in the body. Evidently, Maxwell had waited until Preller was asleep, then held a cloth saturated with the powerful anesthetic under his victim’s nose until death overtook him.

               The wounds on Preller’s body were probably made by his killer’s spirited attempt to cram the corpse into the tiny trunk. It appeared that Maxwell intended to smuggle the chest out of the hotel, but panicked and fled, leaving behind not only the body but also his own personal items and bushel baskets of incriminating evidence including prescription forms showing that a few days before he disappeared, he had visited a St. Louis druggist, Mr. J. A. Fernow, who told detectives he had sold Maxwell six ounces of chloroform. A partly filled bottle of the drug was found among the fugitive’s abandoned possessions. At the inquest held on April 18, a salesman positively identified Maxwell as the customer who had purchased a trunk on April 6—the same trunk that housed the body of Preller. 

                As the investigation unfolded, little pieces of the false identity Maxwell had created for himself were stripped away. He turned out to be neither a doctor nor a baronet, but rather a struggling solicitor and the son of a schoolmaster in Hyde, England. On June 10 it was ascertained that his real name was Hugh Mortram Brooks, so from this point he shall be called Brooks rather than Maxwell in the narrative. Brooks had a girlfriend named Whitaker back in Hyde; the locals considered her “much too good for him,” as they felt Brooks was a fool and a ne’er-do-well. A couple of months before the murder Brooks had turned up in Chicago so “dead broke,” as he put it, that he offered to write for a newspaper in order to make enough money to pay his hotel bill. But a witness who saw Brooks on a train heading west the day after he fled St. Louis noticed that the formerly indigent Englishman somehow had attained plenty of cash.

                As is true of the majority of murderers, Brooks’s crime consisted of one-third diabolical cleverness and two-thirds incompetence. Despite his head start of over a week, the day after the body was found he was traced to San Francisco, where he had purchased a foppish hat. There he called himself Theodore Cecil Dauguier and claimed to be a French Army officer, but whenever spoken to in French he always replied in English. From San Francisco he had sailed to Auckland, New Zealand, on the Australian steamer City of Sydney. Technology was on the side of the law; cablegrams could move much faster than steamers, and Brooks was arrested in Auckland as he minced down the gangplank on May 6. He hired a couple of attorneys right away, presumably using money stolen from his victim. He needed the attorneys very badly, as some of Preller’s clothes were found in his possession, including two handkerchiefs embroidered with the initials C.A.P. and a bloodstained shirt.

               On June 6, United States Consul Gamble sailed from San Francisco to return Brooks to the scene of his crime. The New Zealand authorities turned Brooks over to United States officers on June 18, and on August 10 the steamer Zealandi arrived in San Francisco with the officers and the extradited prisoner. He was jailed in the city for safekeeping, still feebly claiming to be a Frenchman. He would admit only to having known Preller, something he could not credibly deny since he had some of the victim’s clothing.

               While Preller was obviously dead, bizarre theories surfaced a few weeks after the corpse was discovered in the trunk. The Boston Herald published an interview with a local physician, transplanted Englishman Dr. E. H. Graham-Dewey, who claimed that Brooks had visited the city just before his ill-fated trip to St. Louis, and while in Boston had expressed more than ordinary interest in procuring a cadaver. The doctor told Brooks that the law restricted the sale of bodies only to medical schools. Three days later, according to the doctor, Brooks turned up and confided that he had succeeded in stealing a corpse. The inference was that for some reason Brooks had taken the body with him to St. Louis. This would explain why the corpse in the trunk did not have a moustache, as did Preller. Graham-Dewey thought perhaps Brooks and Preller were playing a gruesome practical joke, and that Preller would come out of hiding if Brooks were arrested. The fact that Brooks fled to New Zealand suggests that if it were a prank, it was an unusually elaborate one.

Arthur Preller. From the Louisville Courier-Journal, April 17, 1885.

              A second possibility, suggested by the St. Louis Republican, was that Brooks had brought the corpse with the intention of experimenting on it, but once it began to decompose he realized he was going to have a hard time getting rid of it. (This theory requires us to suppose that Brooks had no idea that an unembalmed corpse would go bad after a few days.) He and Preller fled the city in the belief that it would be easier to leave the body behind than to explain how they got it in the first place. The newspaper theorized: “A corpse in one’s trunk at a leading hotel would obviously be enough to frighten any man who had come by it without murder when he considered the certainty that, being found with it, he would be arrested as a murderer, with a case of circumstantial evidence against him.” This speculation made little sense to anyone afflicted with sobriety.

              Others proposed the more reasonable conjecture that Brooks and Preller were trying to pull off an insurance fraud. The gaping, asteroid-sized hole in this theory was that there was no insurance policy favoring Brooks in the event of Preller’s death. Brooks himself capitalized on this lame theory, boldly stating from his San Francisco jail cell on August 13 that the whole thing was an insurance swindle and that, given time, he would produce the living, breathing C. Arthur Preller!

              He never made good on his promise. In fact, two days later the St. Louis police exhumed the body of Preller and found that “the remains, which were embalmed before burial, were found to be in an excellent state of preservation and looking even better than when interred,” according to a news account. This meant some of his acquaintances might be able to positively identify his body in court. Brooks arrived in St. Louis on August 16 as a crowd estimated at 3,000 waited to catch a glimpse of him at the train depot. He had refused to speak a single word about his case on the long ride from California, and he continued to maintain a policy of absolute silence.

                Any doubts that “Maxwell” was actually Brooks disappeared on October 24, when Brooks’s father Samuel arrived at the St. Louis jail and identified the prisoner as his son. The old man admonished him, “It would have been better for you to be dead than here, and I did not believe the report until now. Your poor mother is nearly dead, and the family is all but ruined.” Brooks the Younger seemed more annoyed than comforted by his father’s visit, and Brooks the Elder convinced himself that his son must be innocent, and if not innocent, then insane. 

              Brooks’s arraignment came on November 14. He pled not guilty in the Criminal Court and then returned to his cell. He did not go on trial until May 1886; just before he did, he presented his novel defense to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch with the approval of his attorneys. He could hardly deny having killed his friend, so he took the only open route by claiming it was an accident. Preller suffered from “a private disease,” Brooks said. He dropped heavy hints that a venereal disease resulted in a stricture in Preller’s urethra. The treatment required the insertion of a catheter. Brooks had prescribed chloroform to help Preller sleep through the uncomfortable procedure. (It will be remembered that Brooks, a.k.a Maxwell, had pretended to be a licensed physician.) Preller willingly took the drug, said Brooks, despite the fact that prescribing chloroform for mild pain is somewhat akin to killing head lice with napalm. But alas! Brooks did not realize that Preller had a heart condition, and the dose proved fatal. Then Brooks took the perfectly reasonable actions of beheading the corpse, cramming it in a trunk, spending the night in the room with the remains, and the next morning grabbing the defunct’s money and clothing and escaping to New Zealand.  Who wouldn’t have done the same, under the circumstances? (Actually, Brooks claimed not to have robbed the dead man as he had plenty of his own money, a lie effortlessly exposed by prosecutors.) The shaving of Preller’s moustache and the arcane message pasted inside the trunk—“So perish all traitors to the great cause”—were not evidence of premeditation, claimed Brooks, but the fruits of drunkenness and fear.

                Needless to say, this feeble yarn did not survive scrutiny when Brooks went to trial on May 21. The first witness for the prosecution, J. A. Frazer of Toronto, was a professional artist who well remembered the face of Preller. When Frazer visited St. Louis at the request of the police, the body was again exhumed for his inspection. He recognized the well-preserved corpse immediately, even noting that the body bore a scar over the left eyebrow identical to one Preller had. Cross-examination failed to shake Frazer. But the prosecution’s real bombshell was exploded on May 24, when it revealed that detective John McCullough, who had been arrested for forgery, had spent forty-seven days in the cell adjoining Brooks’s. Despite the fact that McCullough had a less-than-sterling character, the prosecution considered him a good enough witness to put on the stand, for the talkative Englishman had voluntarily made many damning admissions to his new friend.

                Brooks had wished aloud before McCullough that he could hire someone to falsely testify in court as to his financial solvency before he left Boston for St. Louis. He said that he had wanted to accompany Preller on a trip to New Zealand, but the wealthier man had told Brooks that he could only afford a ticket for himself. This angered Brooks, and “he made up his mind on account of [Preller’s] meanness to fix him,” as Detective McCullough put it. Brooks confessed to McCullough that he had intentionally killed his friend with chloroform, and the motive was robbery. He took about $700 from Preller, after which he went on a wild spending spree, buying everything from a pair of binoculars to a spot of fun at a house of ill fame with a girl named Grace, to whom he boasted that he “had just killed a man.” (To add further insight into Brooks’s character, although he had agreed to pay Grace twenty dollars for her services he gave her only five, “telling her that was enough.”) After all of these adventures he had sailed to Auckland, no doubt confident that his cleverness had won the day.

Brooks, aka Maxwell. From the Louisville Courier-Journal, April 17, 1885.

                Brooks’s attorney, Mr. P. W. Fauntleroy, cross-examined the detective with vigor. He succeeded in making McCullough look like a sleazy character, but even a sleazy character is capable of telling the truth sometimes. As a reporter wrote, “[T]he direct testimony was not materially shaken, and the opinion prevails that that the chances of the defendant for acquittal have nearly vanished.” After McCullough’s damaging testimony, the defense had little choice but to put Hugh Brooks himself on the stand. This was accomplished on May 26 and May 27, and resulted in removing whatever doubt might have remained concerning the prisoner’s guilt. Under oath, Brooks swore to the absurd story he had released earlier to the press: that he had attempted to perform minor surgery on Preller to relieve the latter of his embarrassing “private disease.” (His attorney Fauntleroy added, in classic blame-the-victim fashion, that Preller had insisted on the gassing and the operation.) Brooks testified that the death was accidental and that, horror-stricken, he had run away with Preller’s money and left the body behind. He admitted he had bought some luxuries with the money, and at last explained the meaning behind the strange message he had left with the body: “My idea was that the authorities would find it, and that it would puzzle them until an autopsy should be held.” Apparently he wanted to make the murder look like a political assassination.

                The prosecution, anticipating that Brooks would tell this fairy tale on the witness stand, proceeded to tear apart his story. Physicians and police had exhumed Preller’s well-preserved corpse yet again and performed an examination to see if he had even had a venereal disease—meaning that they surgically removed a very personal portion of Preller’s anatomy that he probably had treasured when alive. They found no trace of the “private disease” or the stricture alluded to by Brooks. (The defense demanded the opportunity to have the piece of Preller examined by its own medical experts.)

                The prosecution also provided plenty of additional evidence that Brooks was a pathological liar. A couple of examples: when shown a forged medical school diploma, Brooks stated that he wrote it merely as “an exercise in penmanship;” when it was pointed out that no catheters were found among his medical equipment, he claimed that he threw them overboard in a fit of disgust en route to Auckland. During cross-examination, the prisoner’s vocabulary consisted mostly of “I don’t know” and “I don’t remember.” It was now so patently obvious that Brooks had committed the cold, premeditated murder of his companion for money that his fellow prisoners ostracized him. “[H]e seems to feel that everybody has abandoned him to his fate,” remarked a reporter in an article datelined May 30. “His vanity has been sorely wounded, and, as that was what chiefly sustained him, he has nothing left to buoy him up.”

                The case went to the jury on June 1. Judge Van Wagoner instructed the members of the jury that if they believed the State’s case, they should return a verdict of murder in the first degree; but if they believed that the death was unintentionally caused by Brooks’s incompetence with the chloroform, they should find him guilty of manslaughter in the fourth degree. Furthermore, if they believed the chloroform had been administered with care and that the death had been caused by Preller’s alleged heart condition, the prisoner should be acquitted. The judge added that a verdict of guilty could be returned on circumstantial evidence—a wise thing for him to say, since most people erroneously believe “circumstantial evidence” is synonymous with “inadequate evidence.” On June 5, the verdict was announced: Hugh M. Brooks was guilty and must hang for the murder of Preller. The Louisville Courier-Journal remarked, “[He] will receive on the scaffold the punishment he has so richly earned, and which in his own country—England—would long since have been meted out to him.”

                But Brooks was not hanged anytime too soon. The verdict was followed by two years’ worth of appeals and legal wrangling. It is an object lesson for anyone who believes American justice was swifter in the good old days than it is now. Brooks was to have been executed on August 17, 1886; then the date was moved to September; in September he received a postponement of two months to allow attorney Fauntleroy’s appeal to the Supreme Court of Missouri, which on January 31, 1887, granted a stay until April 1. This was extended still further, and on June 20 the court affirmed the decision of the lower court. The re-convicted Brooks must be hanged on August 12. The date was pushed back to August 26 so the defense could appeal to the United States Supreme Court, but in July Fauntleroy decided it would be useless to try to convince the higher court that there had been a violation of the Constitution. Fauntleroy said that his client’s execution was inevitable and that he would make no further efforts to rescue Brooks from the beckoning hangman.

                August 26 came and went; no hanging. On October 12 the United States Supreme Court declared that it would hear Brooks’s appeal after all. Nothing more was heard of the case until January 10, 1888, when the press announced that “The Attorney General of Missouri yesterday in the Supreme Court moved to dismiss the appeal of Hugh Brooks…. The ground of the motion is lack of jurisdiction, and if it be sustained, Brooks will be promptly hanged.” Thirteen days later the case came bouncing back to the Supreme Court of Missouri because the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the appeal. Defense attorney Fauntleroy, who must have re-entered the case, stated that his client’s only hope now was executive clemency—that is, a pardon from Governor Albert Morehouse. When Brooks received the bad news, the jailers put him on a suicide watch although he had converted to Catholicism in December 1887. His captors might rightly have been more worried about his smoking habit. A physician expressed concern because the prisoner smoked forty to fifty cigarettes per day of a brand liberally laced with morphine. (During the same period—1888—the soft drink Coca-Cola contained a smattering of cocaine, and opium, morphine and laudanum were readily available over the counter in any drugstore or in patent medicines. It must have been glory days for drug fiends.) Perhaps Brooks found his spiked cigarettes a way of coping with his impending death sentence, but the doctor was afraid he might literally smoke himself to death.

                The prisoner’s father, Samuel Brooks, tried to get the sentence commuted. He won much sympathy for his son and for himself, but the press of his business forced him to return to England in March, pleased with how nicely treated he had been in the USA. He wrote an appeal to the American public that had been published in newspapers, started petitions in America and England and had even met personally with Governor Morehouse. He left St. Louis convinced he had done all he could.

                On April 2, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to re-hear Brooks’s case; the date of the hanging was set for July 13. On June 28 the Governor stated that he would not grant Brooks’s lawyers a sixty-day respite but would listen to appeals for commutation of the sentence. He heard many, including appeals from Brooks’s attorneys, clergymen and the condemned man’s mother and sister, who had arrived in early July. The July 13 deadline came and went; still no hanging. On August 3, Governor Morehouse received an application from the British government for a postponement of Brooks’s execution on the grounds that both murderer and victim were English subjects. Perhaps the appeal that affected the Governor most came from his own daughter, a dedicated humanitarian who urged that the sentence be commuted to life in prison. It should be noted that she had met the prisoner’s pitiable father, but not the calculating, egotistical prisoner himself.

             In the end, Governor Morehouse did not take his daughter’s well-intended advice. An ugly incident had taken place in Missouri a few years previously under Governor Thomas Crittenden, who had pardoned Charles Stevenson, a murderer from Nodaway County. Stevenson was a master carpenter and made toys for the governor’s small daughter in the penitentiary’s workshop. The girl had taken ill in 1884 and on her deathbed asked her father to promise he would pardon Stevenson, “who had been so good to her.” After all, how bad could a guy who made toys for a little girl possibly be? Of course Crittenden could not refuse, and on his last day in office in 1885 he paroled Stevenson, who had served seven years of a twelve-year sentence. It seems like a heartwarming story straight out of McGuffey’s Eclectic Reader, and no doubt Crittenden, his daughter and anti-death penalty advocates thought they had done the humane thing. Upon his release Stevenson returned to Nodaway County, and less than a month later he shot a young German, who suffered miserably for two days before his candle flickered and went out. A lynch mob broke into the jail at Maryville and hanged Stevenson from a bridge only a few hundred yards from the residence of the present governor, Albert Morehouse.

          Perhaps Morehouse remembered that wrongly paroled corpse swinging within sight of his house when his own daughter attempted to talk him into commuting Brooks’s sentence. Despite the pleadings, petitions and requests from the British government, he finally decided he would not interfere with the law. Brooks received word on August 9 that he would be hanged the next day. He spent some time with his father confessor and chain-smoked those narcotic cigarettes.

         Justice, far too long delayed, finally came on August 10, 1888, three days after Jack the Ripper committed his first murder in Brooks’s home country. The former “Walter Henry Lennox Maxwell” walked to the gallows with fellow prisoner Henry Landgraf, who had shot his girlfriend in March 1885. An Englishman to the end, Brooks wore a Prince Albert coat to his hanging. Right up to the last moment, Brooks nervously hoped for the arrival of a telegrammed reprieve; Landgraf had no such expectations. Bystanders noted that Brooks was ashen-faced and trembling as the noose was adjusted. After the trap was sprung, the executed men were taken to the morgue, photographed and subjected to autopsies. Brooks was buried in Calvary Cemetery.

        Notorious murderers often fascinate women, and Hugh Brooks was no exception. Scores of beauties had attended his trial and visited him while he was imprisoned. Until the police forbade her to do so, “a notorious courtesan of St. Louis” had daily supplied Brooks with dinner and champagne in his cell. Perhaps she had not heard about Brooks’s shortchanging of poor Grace, her sister of the street. Women’s interest in “the little chloroformer,” as the press dubbed him, did not end with his death. An “unknown but beautiful lady” paid a man named John Shevlin generous wages to guard Brooks’s grave in Calvary Cemetery every night. The precaution paid off when Shevlin foiled an attempt by miscreants to steal Brooks’s body on the morning of September 7, 1888. He fired a pistol and the resurrectionists fled, leaving in their wake only a shovel, rope and a cloud of graveyard dust.

       In another respect Brooks generated interest from beyond the grave. Within a few years the Southern Hotel was having trouble with room 144, where Brooks killed Preller. The chamber had achieved great notoriety. Some people adamantly insisted on staying in the “murder room” just so they would have a thrilling story to tell friends. More timid travelers would refuse to rent the room. The hotel proprietors endured so much grief that they finally changed the room’s number from 144 to 133 in hopes of fooling the unwary, and “every employee of the hotel, from bellboy and porter to clerk, was sternly cautioned not to give any information whatever about the room.”

       Curiosity seekers were bad enough, but then rumors emerged alleging that the room was haunted. Guests who did not know about the room’s history would go to the hotel office “at all hours of the day and night, and without vouchsafing an explanation would demand a change of room. They would always be accommodated without question of any kind.” In January 1889, a reporter for the St. Louis Republic (not the more famous Republican) caught wind of a recent incident that had occurred in the room. The credible witness was a “prominent businessman of well-balanced mind, sound intellect, and good, broad common-sense, unclouded by any of the ‘isms’ that occasionally cloud the perception or incline one to belief in the supernatural.” The man, who claimed to be unaware of the hotel room’s infamy, noticed that bellboys would leave the room as fast as possible, not even waiting for their tips. Around 10 p.m. every night the lights were turned off in the outside corridor and the employees could not be persuaded to go through the darkened hallway “at any price.”

      On the first night of his stay, the businessman was repeatedly awakened in the night by tapping on the bed’s headboard. It always came in a pattern: one tap, a brief pause, then two taps in quick succession. The next evening, he noticed that the dresser drawers refused to stay shut. On the third night, the traveler was awoken by the sound of an explosion in the fireplace even though the chambermaid had cleaned the hearth of all debris. He thought it sounded like a firecracker. The explosion was followed by a second, louder one, and then by a third that was the loudest of all. “I arose, dressed, lighted the gas and looked at the hearth. It was completely filled with a slaty substance that looked like ore of some kind, and one of the large cubes that made up the hearth was torn from the brickwork or tiling. Pieces of slate were thrown across the room.”

     That was too much for the businessman, who went downstairs and asked the night clerk to come see the odd debris. The clerk “refused with a sickly smile.” The traveler returned to the room and encountered no more phenomena, though he did not get any sleep. The next day he demanded and received a room change.

      The reporter ended his article: “The manger of the hotel, Mr. Lewis, had nothing to say when the story was told him by a Republic representative, nor could he suggest any explanation.”

SOURCES:

Louisville Courier-Journal. “Afraid That Maxwell Will Commit Suicide.” 28 Jan. 1888: 4.

- - - .  “Application for a Respite.” 4 Aug. 1888: 6

- - - . “Clearing Away.” 16 Apr. 1885: 1+.

- - - . “A Dark Crime.” 15 Apr. 1885: 5.

- - - . “A Deep-Dyed Villain.” 25 May 1886: 1.

- - - . “Down They Go.” 11 Aug. 1888: 1+.

- - - . “For His Boy’s Life.” 8 Apr. 1888: 4.

- - - . “Guarded By a Beauty.” 8 Sep. 1888: 5.

- - - . “The Ghost Room.” 25 Jan. 1889: 2.

- - - . “History of a Crime.” 19 Apr. 1885: 4.

- - - . “Identified At Last.” 25 Oct. 1885: 12.

- - - . “Improved By Burial.” 16 Aug. 1885: 5.

- - - . “Law-Breakers’ Deeds.” 24 Jan. 1888: 2.

- - - . “The Law’s Clutches.” 7 May 1885: 1.

- - - . “Living a Lie.” 28 May 1886: 4.

- - - . “Longer Life For the Trunk Murderer.” 8 July 1887: 5.

- - - . “Maxwell Again Convicted.” 21 June 1887: 2.

- - - . “Maxwell Breaking Down.” 31 May 1886: 1.

- - - . “The Maxwell Murder Case.” 13 July 1885: 5.

- - - . “Maxwell Pleads Not Guilty.” 15 Nov. 1885: 2.

- - - . “Maxwell Sentenced.” 15 July 1886: 4.

- - - . “Maxwell, the alleged…” 14 Aug. 1885: 1.

- - - . “Maxwell-Preller Mystery.” 24 Apr. 1885: 6.

- - - . “Maxwell, the Trunk Murderer.” 5 July 1885: 12.

- - - . “Maxwell’s Arrest.” 16 June 1885: 4.

- - - .  “‘Maxwell’s’ Father Goes.” 26 Mar. 1888: 4.

- - - . “Maxwell’s Hopeless Case.” 9 July 1887: 3.

- - - . “Maxwell’s Last Chance.” 29 June 1888: 1.

- - - . “Maxwell’s Last Hope.” 3 July 1888: 4.

- - - . “More Light on the St. Louis Trunk Murder.” 11 June 1885: 4.

- - - . “Murder or Manslaughter.” 2 June 1886: 1.

- - - . “Murderer Maxwell Becomes a Catholic.” 28 Dec. 1887: 4.

- - - . “A Mystery No More.” 19 May 1886: 1.

- - - . “A New Hope For Maxwell.” 4 July 1888: 5.

- - - . “The News.” 6 June 1886: 2.

- - - . “News and Comment.” 24 Sep. 1886: 1.

- - - . “News and Comment.” 10 Jan. 1888: 1.

- - - . “The Penalty Is Death.” 6 June 1886: 4.

- - - . “Ready For the Jury.” 1 June 1886: 4.

- - -.  “The St. Louis Sensation.” 17 Apr. 1885: 2.

- - -.  “The St. Louis Sensation.” 22 May 1886: 1.

- - -.  “The St. Louis Trunk Murder.” 19 Aug. 1885: 2.

- - -.  “The St. Louis Trunk Murderer.” 13 Oct. 1887: 2.

- - -.  “The St. Louis Trunk Murderer Gets a Stay.” 1 Feb. 1887: 4.

- - -.  “To Save His Neck.” 27 May 1886: 1.

- - -.  “To-Day They Must Die.” 10 Aug. 1888: 2.

- - -.  “The Trunk Murderer.” 17 Aug. 1885: 1.

- - -.  “The Trunk Murderer.” 23 Aug. 1885: 10.

- - -.  “The Trunk Murderer.” 10 Feb. 1888: 1.

- - -.  “The Trunk Murderer Arrived.” 11 Aug. 1885: 2.



STORY FOR NOVEMBER 2012: “A Sharp Retort for Professor Turner,” from The Axman Came From Hell and Other Southern True Crime Stories (Pelican Publishing, 2011)
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Genre: Historical true crime

A Sharp Retort for Professor Turner

    The bright summer morning of Sunday, June 7, 1925, was a hectic time at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge because it was finals week. At eight a.m., Raymon G. Markham, a graduate student, approached the south door of the Arsenal, a poorly lit, crumbling red brick building with iron barred windows that seemed the ideal setting for a murder. The dour and reputedly haunted building of 1835 originally had been built for storing army weapons, but almost a century later it was used for LSU’s chemistry and agronomy (scientific agriculture) classes. Markham peered through a broken window in the door before entering. As he looked into the gloom, he noticed something at the bottom of a stairway that he took to be a pile of papers. When his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he realized it was a man lying on his side in a substantial pool of blood. In terror, Markham accosted the first person he saw, a vocational student named Emile J. Raffo who was walking across campus in the innocuous pursuit of milk and doughnuts.
The injured, barely conscious man was a well-liked professor of agronomy, Oscar Byrd Turner. He had been hit in the head repeatedly with a dull, rusty hatchet: struck once on top of the head, once in the back of the neck, and twice in the chin. One wound extended from the lip to the forehead. Despite the dullness of the weapon, Turner’s assailant had struck him with such force that the professor had nearly been decapitated by one of the three hatchet blows to his throat. Turner was unable to speak to Raffo and Markham. The latter, who happened to be Turner’s graduate assistant, remembered later that the dying professor could only make “a funny sort of bubbling, whistling noise” through his cut throat and weakly pulled fragments of broken teeth out of his mouth.
 (Even the most horrific murders often are leavened with darkly comic touches. The same hatchet that dealt death to the professor had been used only a week before as a paddle with which upperclassmen spanked freshmen during initiation rites.)
 Robbery was not the motive: eleven dollars were in Turner’s pocket and his gold watch had not been stolen. He was taken to Our Lady of the Lake Sanitarium, where he died two hours later. The Baton Rouge State Times interviewed dozens of students and reported that “not an unkind word was said of him.”
    Detectives tried to learn as much as they could about the victim. This proved difficult, for despite his popularity with students the known facts of Turner’s life were sparse. He was the least likely murder victim that one could imagine. He was fifty-six years old and from Plymouth, Illinois. He had been a successful farmer in his home state but decided to move south for the warmer climate. He had come to LSU in order to get a master’s degree in agronomy and joined the faculty in 1923. Quiet and personable, he was a famously thrifty bachelor who saved money by rooming at 714 College Avenue (now North Fifth Street) with Norman Allen, an entomologist and LSU graduate who worked at the university’s experiment station. Despite his parsimony, Turner was no miser. During the Great War, he had given the Army a pig every day and a cow every week; in the academic sphere, he had been known to finance students’ education with his own money.
    As far as anyone knew, Professor Turner’s personal life was squeaky clean: he did not drink, did not attend parties, did not consort with women, and was a member of the First Baptist church. Despite his sociability, he had no close friends who could offer insight into the mystery. Two of his three brothers came to Baton Rouge and told the press that Turner had no known enemies; after an elaborate funeral with student cadets forming a military guard of honor, they took his body home to Plymouth for burial. Turner’s funeral in Illinois was held in a stucco chapel he had built himself at an estimated cost of $50,000.
    A student named W. H. Stracener reported that he saw a man enter the Arsenal via its south door around six a.m. on the last morning of Turner’s life. The victim’s roommate, Norman Allen, told the police that Professor Turner had left the apartment at seven a.m. Within an hour, he would be attacked in the Arsenal; within three, he would be dead. Based on bloodstains in the agronomy building, police deduced that Turner had initially been struck with a fist or the hatchet on the stairway, possibly as he walked away from his assailant. He fell to the bottom of the stairs and then was hacked where he lay, the same fate of the hapless detective in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. The attack was as silent as it was brutal. Only fifty yards from the Arsenal stood the home of LSU’s president, Thomas D. Boyd; his wife had been sitting in a rocking chair on the porch at the time of the murder and had heard nothing out of the ordinary.
    Blood drippings in the building indicated that the killer had left the gory hatchet on a dusty shelf and fled by running through a chemistry classroom laboratory, where he paused to wash his hands in a sink. He exited through the Arsenal’s east door. Investigator Maurice O’Neill found a seemingly first rate clue left by the professor’s murderer: a bloody fingerprint on the east door facing. Prints were found on the hatchet’s handle but they were too smeared to photograph. Nevertheless, the mere presence of fingerprints at the crime scene was a valuable clue in itself, for they suggested the murder had not been premeditated. Only a novice killer would have failed to wear gloves.
    Another intriguing clue was discovered when police searched the chemistry lab. O’Neill looked into an electric oven and found a package containing some of Professor Turner’s papers and two of his textbooks, including one with the enthralling title The Nature and Properties of the Soil. If the books and papers were incriminating, why did the murderer not simply take them with him? If they were not incriminating, why did he stop in his flight to conceal them? The items were examined by O’Neill, a fingerprint expert from New Orleans Police Department, but to no avail. Detectives eventually learned that Turner sometimes used the oven as a temporary repository for his books, so the placement of the items may have had no significance.
    Citizens of Baton Rouge panicked at hearing about Turner’s grisly death, thinking a homicidal maniac was in their midst. Given their fresh memories of the New Orleans Axman’s dark deeds, the alarm can be understood—especially since, like the Axman, the professor’s murderer had left the bloody hatchet behind at the crime scene. But as no one else was harmed in the ensuing days, Turner’s murderer clearly had been interested in killing only him. The citizens’ terror was replaced with curiosity and several popular conjectures were launched, some of which sound as if they came from people who had been spending too much time taking in melodramas at the silent movie palaces. Some thought Turner had been murdered by an envious rival teacher. For adherents to this theory, the number one suspect was Norman Allen, Turner’s roommate, for a handkerchief bearing Allen’s laundry mark was found near the dying professor. Allen was able to prove he had been elsewhere at the time of the murder. Most likely, Turner had accidentally carried away one of Allen’s handkerchiefs. Idle folk, and not a few detectives, wondered whether Raymon Markham, Turner’s graduate assistant, had murdered him to get his job. Markham explained to the press that he had already received offers to teach at colleges in Huntsville, Texas, and in South Carolina: “I had never had the least idea of staying here at LSU after I got my master’s degree.” The belief that the murderer envied Turner’s job lost traction when the press revealed that it paid only $125 a month, a shabby salary for a college professor even by 1925 standards. (The equivalent in modern currency would be a little over $1,500 per month.)
    Others thought there had been a financial motive after it came out that the frugal instructor had been worth as much as $100,000 at the time of his death. Turner had sometimes lent money to people and kept copies of their outstanding notes in a black briefcase, which disappeared and never was found. Perhaps a debtor had killed Turner and stolen the briefcase, erroneously believing that it contained the original notes?
    Since a hatchet was the murder weapon, those inclined to put stock in racial stereotypes believed the killer must have been a “Chinaman” bent on revenge. A quick check of the professor’s class roster revealed that he had three Asian students, two from China and one from the Philippines. The exultation some felt in this discovery was short lived, for the three Asian students made some of the highest grades in the class and had no discernible motive for butchering their teacher. Detectives also questioned George Porter, a custodian with a cut hand, but released him when he provided an alibi. Porter told the investigators that he thought Professor Turner was a fine fellow and poignantly recalled the time Turner gave him a dime so he could buy a cup of coffee.
    Another red herring swam to the surface of the case when detectives checking out a professional laundry uncovered a pair of pants with bloodstains in the pockets. When they found that the pants belonged to one of Turner’s agronomy students, they tracked him down and apprehended him while he was taking a final. He claimed that the gory pants were the result of a nosebleed, but not his own. A friend of his had punched a woman in the nose. The unlucky student had helped her clean up, then absentmindedly stuck his bloody hands in his pockets. The unlikely story was confirmed when police ascertained that the fight had in fact occurred and interviewed the doctor who had treated the poor woman’s nosebleed. The student was dismissed as a suspect and generously allowed to retake the final.
    There was talk of a mystery woman, an inevitable feature of any self-respecting unsolved homicide. But the victim’s brother claimed that there had been only one true love in Professor Turner’s life, and she had been living as a missionary in India since around 1895. Rumor held that the professor had advanced a large sum of money to a woman in Baton Rouge, who decided to play the Mohawk rather than pay back the loan. Detectives investigated the story and found it groundless.
    The mystery car is another staple element of baffling murders; the Turner case yielded a bounty of three. On the afternoon before the murder, a woman who worked in the school cafeteria had seen Turner riding in the back seat of a dusty touring car with three other men. The three men stepped forward and identified themselves as Turner’s students. The professor had gone on a ride with them that day, but only to inspect the site of LSU’s new campus then being constructed.
    A student saw mystery car number two at one a.m. on June 7, six hours before Turner was murdered. He noticed that the open car was full of men, two of whom climbed out of the vehicle and skulked away in the darkness. The car then reversed its direction and drove away. The student thought the behavior of the car’s occupants was so suspicious that he wrote down its license plate number in case they were up to no good. The auto was traced to a Mississippi man who had simply dropped off friends after a dance.
    While these less than rousing events transpired, LSU President Thomas Boyd decided he would spare no expense to find the professor’s slayer. Boyd hired an undercover agent from the Pendleton Detective Agency of New Orleans to investigate; his identity was so successfully kept secret that the sleuth is known to the ages only as Agent Number 405. He arrived at LSU on June 9 and soon uncovered the third mystery car. The auto was spotted on campus the morning of the murder and it had a license from Turner’s home state, Illinois. Agent 405 traveled 700 miles to the Land of Lincoln and found to his excitement that the driver of the third mystery car shared the surname Turner and lived only forty-five miles from the victim’s family. A new theory formed: the professor may have been killed by a relative. But the detective found that it was all an amazing coincidence. The two Turners were not related. Agent 405 reported back to LSU’s president with Napoleonic understatement: “I was a little disappointed.”
    In early July, President Boyd hired a second detective from the New Orleans firm, a man called Agent 303, who posed as a door-to-door magazine salesman. At night, he blended in with LSU students at a favorite haunt, the Square and Compass club. He observed students shooting craps and partaking of alcohol—these were the days of Prohibition—but heard nothing of any use in solving the murder of Professor Turner. When he asked one underclassman whether he had heard any rumors about police discoveries, the student sneered that the police couldn’t track an elephant in the snow. Agent 303 dutifully noted the unwitting student’s insult in his daily report.
    The whole affair took on a ludicrous tone at the end of the month, when Agent 303 realized that he himself was being shadowed as he pretended to sell magazine subscriptions. His follower was a woman selling corsets, and Agent 303 suspected she had been hired by someone interested in thwarting the course of justice. According to his daily reports, whenever he skipped a street, she did the same; if he paused anywhere, she was sure to pause nearby. At one point, she boldly asked 303 how his business was doing. The undercover man investigated the corset seller and discovered only two facts: she lived in the Palms Hotel and had a fondness for yellow hats. Soon, Agents 303 and 405 threw in the towel and went home to New Orleans, probably after presenting President Boyd with an itemized list of their expenses.
    Meanwhile, the head of LSU’s psychology department, Prof. C. H. Bean, expressed the opinion that the murderer was a “moron, an imbecile or a pervert.” He thought he knew who the culprit was, too: a grubby-looking “man of low mentality” who had been lurking around the campus for the past two months. The man spent most of his time in the campus library. He would wash in the public restroom, a fact suggesting that he was homeless, and often could be seen smoking cigarette stubs he found on the sidewalk. Dr. Bean was informed that the sinister hobo “did not work, and no one could get him to work,” and had been on campus as recently as two days after the murder. The man was not named by the press and apparently was cleared by the authorities.
    An LSU agriculture professor, whom the police declined to name, stated that he had “had trouble with persons not connected with the university,” and believed that he had been the murderer’s intended victim. Professor Turner worked in the same building as Professor X and had been attacked in a dimly lit hallway. Had it been a case of mistaken identity? The theory was not as farfetched as others, but when the dust of the investigation settled, the best and most logical theory was that the professor’s killer was one of his own students. The reader will recall that the murder occurred during finals week. Raymon Markham, Turner’s graduate assistant, told police that on Saturday, June 6, the professor had written the questions for the agronomy final, which was to be held on Monday. Turner had left the exam in his desk in the Arsenal and went to supper with the intention of mimeographing the final after his meal, but when he returned the first four pages of the five-page test were missing. Markham and Turner spent the evening searching the office for the missing questions; in fact, the desire to resume the search was the reason why the graduate student had been at the Arsenal so early on Sunday morning, and it is probably why Professor Turner also had been there. The day after the professor’s murder, Markham unlocked Turner’s desk and found that the four missing pages mysteriously had been returned.
    The police believed that when Turner arrived at the agronomy building on the morning of June 7, he had surprised one of his students in the act of returning the test questions. After Turner had locked the papers in his desk, the student followed him to the stairs, begging not to be reported, expelled, and disgraced. When Turner refused, the student found a handy weapon on a shelf—the hatchet used to chop kindling wood for the building—and murdered the professor in a fit of anger. The student then returned the hatchet to its usual place and ran from the building, generously coated with spattered blood and lucky that he managed to avoid being seen. If this theory is correct, the mysterious man that W. H. Stracener saw entering the building at six a.m. on the morning of the murder was not the killer, for it is improbable that he would return the missing test pages and then loiter in the building for over an hour until Professor Turner showed up.
    On the other hand, Markham admitted that the professor had been very absent-minded, and perhaps had locked the test questions in the drawer to begin with and then forgotten about it. But if Turner thought on Saturday night that the exam was missing, his desk drawer is surely the first place he would have looked. It is safe to assume that the exam was indeed temporarily stolen, and its disappearance the day before the murder and its reappearance the day after was not a coincidence. Almost certainly, the missing test played a critical role in the murder.
    It would seem a simple matter to find the guilty party among such a narrow list of suspects. There were only twenty-seven students in Professor Turner’s Agronomy 33 section and the killer left a bloody fingerprint. Students were fingerprinted as well as Raymon Markham and Emile Raffo, who had tried to comfort the dying man. But the badly smudged fingerprint could not be matched to anyone. Perhaps the blurry print was left by a student who to his secret relief was dropped as a suspect when his fingerprints did not appear to match it. According to the State Times, as of June 12, 1925, five members of the Agronomy 33 class had not been fingerprinted: “Two of them have gone to their homes and will return for commencement. One more will probably not return, while two others are in Baton Rouge…. [Police Captain] Woolfley said some of the boys in that class had left before he had obtained definite instructions when to have them fingerprinted.” Did a guilty student slip through the investigators’ dragnet?
    An inspection of the professor’s grade book did not shed much light, for none of his students was in danger of failing. The student doing most poorly in the class had an average of 77, a passing grade. The members of the Agronomy 33 class were given Professor Turner’s final on Monday, June 8, as scheduled. Their answers were scrutinized by the coroner, who no doubt looked for a student who answered questions a little too flawlessly.
    “Surely someone saw the murderer leave the building after the attack,” pleaded the Baton Rouge State Times. “Surely, if a student is guilty, someone missed him from his room or place of work at the time of the crime. Surely, someone saw someone on the campus around the hours mentioned.” But nobody stepped forward with information that would solve the case. As time passed, it became evident that the murder of Professor Turner was destined to be an unsolved mystery. It remains so to this day unless some very elderly LSU alumnus chooses to unburden his conscience with a deathbed confession.
    Progress has little respect for sites stained by the blood of the murdered. The year after the Turner slaying, LSU moved to a new location three miles south of the old campus. In 1931, the Arsenal was torn down; in 1932, Louisiana’s State Capitol Building was constructed near the location where the old agronomy building once stood. Three years later, Senator Huey Long would be shot to death within a stone’s throw of the spot where Professor Turner met his untimely end.


Sources

“Ax Victim’s Books New Murder Clue.” Houston Post-Dispatch, June 10, 1925, 1.
“Brothers Say Dead Man Did Not Have Enemy.” Baton Rouge State Times, June 8, 1925.
“Coroner’s Query in Murder Likely to Close Tonight.” Baton Rouge State Times, June 16, 1925.
“Crime Horrifies City.” Baton Rouge State Times, June 8, 1925.
East, Charles. “Murder at LSU!” Baton Rouge Morning Advocate Magazine, March 19, 1950, 3+.
“Expert Says Printing of Fingers Was Very Successful.” Baton Rouge State Times, June 10, 1925.
“Faculty and Students Pay Their Final Tribute to Prof. Turner.” Baton Rouge State Times, June 9, 1925.
“Fifth Day Ends With Murder Mystery Little Nearer Final Solution.” Baton Rouge State Times, June 11, 1925.
“Fingerprint Expert Busy as Axe Murder Mystery Grows Deeper.” Baton Rouge State Times, June 8, 1925.
“Fingerprints May Furnish New Clues in Turner Murder.” Baton Rouge State Times, June 9, 1925.
“Lone Fingerprint of Blood May Prove Solution of Murder.” Baton Rouge State Times, June 10, 1925.
“Louisiana University Teacher Murdered.” Houston Post-Dispatch, June 8, 1925, 1.
“Members O. B. Turner’s Agronomy Class Are Questioned.” Baton Rouge State Times, June 8, 1925.
“Mistaken Identity Latest Ax Theory.” Houston Post-Dispatch, June 12, 1925, 8.
“Negro Janitor Questioned but Later is Released.” Baton Rouge State Times, June 9, 1925.
“Officers Have Reached End in Mystery.” Baton Rouge State Times, June 12, 1925.
“Renew Effort Solve Turner Murder Riddle.” Baton Rouge State Times, June 15, 1925.
“Solving the Mystery.” Baton Rouge State Times, June 10, 1925.
 “University Murder is Still Unsolved.” Houston Post-Dispatch, June 9, 1925, 20.


, 1998.

Dunlap, David W. “In Search of History: When Today’s Agenda is a Prism for the Past.” New York Times, 1 Oct. 1995.

Loewen, James W. Lies Across America. New York: New Press, 1999.

Moore, John Bassett, ed. The Works of James Buchanan. New York: Antiquarian Press, 1960. (Reprint of 1908 edition.)

“The Presidents.” The History Channel. 2005.

Webster, Noah. A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language. New York: Bounty Books, 1970. (Reprint of 1806 edition.)

“Woo.” Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford University Press. 2010.



STORY FOR SEPTEMBER 2012: “Not in Cleveland: Possible Earlier Victims of the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run”
Genre: Historical true crime

Not in Cleveland: Possible Earlier Victims of the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run

    As the author of a number of books on history, historical true crime, and biography, most of my preliminary research is done by looking through old newspapers. For the past decade, I have been perusing every microfilmed issue of the Louisville Courier-Journal starting with the year 1877, recording the dates and page numbers of issues which include incidents that might develop into interesting stories for my books. Naturally, I pay especially close attention to historical homicides.
    One of the most fascinating series of unsolved murders in American history is the string of gruesome crimes committed in Cleveland during the Great Depression by an unidentified criminal whom the press variously called the Torso Murderer, the Cleveland Headhunter, and the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run. The Butcher is famous now as an early example of a serial killer, as well as for having escaped detection despite the best efforts of such legendary lawmen at Eliot Ness and Peter Merylo.
    I was familiar with the killer’s history, having read excellent books on the subject by James Jessen Badal and Steven Nickel; as I looked through old papers in search of material, I was surprised to find evidence—not solid proof, but compelling evidence—that the same killer who terrorized Cleveland from 1934 to 1938 (and perhaps later) may have claimed earlier victims in Pittsburgh in 1923 and in New York City in 1927-28 and in 1930-31.
    Before looking at the earlier cases, it will be instructive to review basic facts in the dozen or so Cleveland murders attributed to the Butcher:
    0. Unidentified white woman, probably murdered in March 1934. In mid-August 1934, vertebrae and ribs from a human body washed ashore at North Perry; the lower half of the female victim’s legless torso washed ashore on the beach at Bratenahl on September 5. Part of an arm was found later. (Investigators referred to the victim as “number zero” because it is not certain that she fell prey to the Butcher.)
    1. Edward Andrassy, white. Found September 23, 1935, at the foot of Jackass Hill in Kingsbury Run. The body was headless and emasculated but not otherwise dismembered. The killer partially buried Andrassy’s head near his corpse, leaving hair visible on the surface so it would be found. An autopsy revealed that Andrassy had been alive when beheaded.
    2. Unidentified white man, also found on September 23, 1935, thirty feet from Andrassy. His remains were slightly burned. Like Andrassy, victim no. 2 was headless and emasculated, and his head also was perfunctorily buried at the scene. Bloody clothing which fit the victim was found nearby, as well as lengths of rope, a railroad torch, and a bucket containing, oil, blood, and hair. The coroner estimated that he had been murdered two or three weeks before Andrassy—meaning that the killer must have kept victim no. 2’s body in storage and chose to dispose of it and Andrassy’s remains at the same time. The cause of death, as with Andrassy, was decapitation.
    3. Flo Polillo, white. Found January 26, 1936, behind the Hart Manufacturing building. Her killer displayed a bleak sense of humor by placing the lower half of her torso, both thighs, and her right arm and hand in two half-bushel produce baskets. The pieces were wrapped in newspapers and the baskets were covered with burlap sacks. Underwear wrapped in a newspaper was placed nearby. On February 7, the upper half of Polillo’s torso, her legs, and left arm were discovered behind an abandoned house on Orange Avenue. These pieces were simply dumped and not elaborately wrapped. Her head was never found. Official cause of death: decapitation.
    4. Unidentified white man, notable for his sailor-like tattoos. Found June 5, 1936, in Kingsbury Run. Shorts, shoes, socks, a cap, and two bloody shirts were left at the scene; the victim’s head was found wrapped inside a pair of pants. The rest of the body was found June 6 near the East 55th Street Bridge, a few hundred feet from the spot where Andrassy and victim no. 2 were found. The body had been neither dismembered nor emasculated. Cause of death: decapitation.
    5. Unidentified white man, found in the woods in the suburb of Brooklyn on July 22, 1936. He was naked and headless, but neither dismembered nor emasculated. The head was found partially hidden on a pile of bloodstained clothing. He had been dead about two months and cause of death was impossible to determine. Victims no. 4 and no. 5 had been murdered on site unlike the earlier victims, who were killed elsewhere and then transported to their dump sites.
    6. Unidentified white man, found in a creek in Kingsbury Run on September 10, 1936. His bisected torso was missing the head, arms, and legs. The victim had been emasculated. Searchers found the lower parts of both legs and both thighs in the water. Clothing was found at the scene, including a bloody shirt wrapped in a newspaper. Probable cause of death: decapitation.  
        7. Unidentified white woman; the upper half of her bisected torso, lacking head and arms, was found on the shore of Lake Erie on February 23, 1937. Cause of death was unknown, but the coroner determined that she had died before decapitation. The lower half of the torso was found in the lake on May 5, but the head was never recovered. 
    8. Unidentified black woman, possibly Rose Wallace. Her skull was found partially buried under the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge on June 6, 1937. When police dug under the skull, they found a burlap sack containing skeletal remains (minus the arms and legs) and also a piece of newspaper. She had been dead nearly a year. Cause of death: unknown, but cut marks on the bones indicated that she was intentionally decapitated.
    9. Unidentified white man. On July 6, 1937, the Cuyahoga River yielded the free-floating lower half of his legless torso and a burlap bag containing the armless, headless upper half (wrapped in a newspaper) and a woman’s silk stocking. A search of the river turned up his left thigh, both lower legs, and both upper arms with hands. The man had not been emasculated; his head was never found. Cause of death: undetermined.
    10. Unidentified white woman. Her left leg was caught in a storm drain on April 8, 1938. Her headless torso, a thigh, and left foot were found in a burlap sack recovered from the Cuyahoga on May 2. The other thigh surfaced later. Probable cause of death: decapitation.
    11. Unidentified white woman, found in a garbage dump on August 16, 1938. The torso was buried under a small pile of rocks and concrete chunks and wrapped in brown paper (like butcher paper, as author Badal has noted), a man’s coat, and a homemade quilt. Under the torso were thighs wrapped in the brown paper and secured with a rubber band. Five feet away, searchers found the head wrapped in brown paper. A cardboard box held the arms and lower legs; nearby were two empty burlap sacks and a page torn from a magazine. Cause of death: unknown, but cut marks proved beheading. She had been dead several months before her discovery, and the Butcher presumably had stored her body a long time before disposing of it.
    12. Unidentified white man, found in the dump near victim no. 11 on August 16, 1938. Part of his skeleton was found in a shallow hole; other bones—the pelvis, ribs, and some vertebrae—were visible on the surface nearby. The skull was found scarcely hidden in a large plum butter tin can. Several pieces of newspaper were with the body. Cause of death: unknown, but as with victim 11, cut marks indicated decapitation.
     In addition to these twelve (or thirteen) victims, there is evidence that after 1938 the Butcher got in his work elsewhere and then returned to Cleveland for a final macabre swan song.
    On May 3, 1940, three murdered men—two forever unknown, one identified as James Nicholson—were found in abandoned railroad boxcars at McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania. Two of the men were dismembered and headless, their removed sections wrapped in burlap sacks; the third was beheaded but otherwise intact. Newspapers were with the bodies, but it was thought that they had been brought by the victims themselves. The murders were so similar to the Butcher’s atrocities that they attracted the immediate interest of Cleveland detectives. Peter Merylo, the lead investigator on the Butcher case for years, felt certain the three had been murdered by the same hand that had claimed so many lives in Cleveland.
    The Butcher may have taken his last Cleveland victim in the summer of 1950. On July 22 the body of Robert Robertson was found under loosely piled steel girders at the Norris Brothers’ lot on Davenport Avenue. He was naked, dismembered, and headless. Robertson’s clothing was nearby and newspaper pages were under the body. His head was found in a lumber pile twenty feet from the girders.
    A few further points are worth noting. In every case, with the exceptions of victims 7 and 10, investigators were impressed by the Butcher’s obvious skill at dissecting bodies. They repeatedly noted his “anatomical knowledge” and doctors became favorite suspects among the police, the press, and the public. In addition, the Butcher was unique in that he murdered both men and women without regard to age, race, or body type. Most serial killers target people of a certain gender, age, and appearance.
    Now that we are familiar with the Cleveland Butcher’s crimes and the strange calling cards he left at his dump sites, let’s examine earlier unsolved murders in Pittsburgh and New York in which he may have been involved. The possibility that the Butcher murdered in locations other than Cleveland is not a new idea; in his book In the Wake of the Butcher, James Jessen Badal notes that murders similar to the Butcher’s took place at New Castle, Pennsylvania, between 1921 and 1934, and then after a respite, continued between 1939 and 1942.

* * * * *

    At 10:00 a.m. on October 3, 1923, Stephen Kass was walking by Pittsburgh’s Number 11 swimming pool at the foot of South Nineteenth Street. He had not been feeling well and thought a walk might improve his health. As he passed by a doorless, windowless shed where women changed into their bathing suits, he glanced in. Instead of the bathing beauty in a state of undress that Kass probably hoped to glimpse, he saw a headless white man in a dark blue suit lying on the floor. 

[The murder shack. From the Pittsburgh Chronicle Telegraph, Oct. 3, 1923.]

    (The corpse had been beheaded but not otherwise mutilated, which may seem at first to disqualify him as a possible Butcher victim. However, as Mr. Badal has observed, while the Butcher always decapitated and sometimes emasculated men, he did not often cut their remains to pieces. Among his male dead in Cleveland, he dissected only victims nos. 6 and 9. He reserved most of his dismembering fury for women.)
    The man was unclean and his clothing was cheap, suggesting that he was a tramp. He was small, at an estimated height of 5’7” and a weight of 125 pounds. He appeared to have been murdered in the dressing room. Bloody fingerprints were on a banister leading to the shed. There was a difference of professional opinion as to whether he had been dead for only a few hours or as long as an entire day.
    Dr. DeWayne Richey performed the autopsy. According to a newspaper report, “He said that an attempt apparently had been made to sever the head from the front and later it had been hacked off from the back.” The head had been removed with “an unusually large knife,” according to a separate press account. An abrasion on the body’s left shoulder suggested it had been dragged.
    There were plenty of leads for police to follow to determine the victim’s identity. A laundry mark on the dead man’s shirt read “P. Mc.” He had a dagger tattooed on his right arm, and his left arm bore tattoos of a dagger, a woman’s head, and some phrase in Arabic that a Syrian policeman interpreted to be “Howsan Hezer” (according to another account, “Hassan Mahmod”).  Police theorized that if this were the man’s name, he possibly was Turkish. His coat pocket held two photographs, one depicting three young women wearing what appeared to be student nurse’s uniforms. An inscription on the front read, “Marion—Me—Bella B.” On the back was written: “To Chick from Inda—my chums and I. Aren’t they sweet looking?” The other photo showed one of the women alone. It was captioned “Thinking of you.” A search of local hospitals failed to turn up any nurses named Inda. Some investigators thought the three women may be waitresses or factory workers.

[Photo found in the victim’s pocket. From the Pittsburgh Chronicle Telegraph, Oct. 3, 1923.]

    One of the most mystifying aspects of the case was the absence of the victim’s head. Detectives thought at first that the killer had tossed it into the Monongahela River but several hours after Kass found the body, three boys found the discarded head while playing on the river bank between South Eighteenth and Nineteenth Streets, close to the crime scene. The boys found it buried in the sand with three small rocks on top—but the killer left noticeable wisps of hair on the surface, exactly as the Cleveland Butcher did years later with Edward Andrassy and victim no. 2. (In fact, the Butcher also made lackadaisical, almost comical attempts to partially “hide” the heads of victims 4, 5, 8, 11, 12, and Robert Robertson.) The Associated Press wrote: “That no apparent effort was made to hide the head…was shown by the fact that a blood-soaked undergarment was found nearby and that a few wisps of hair appearing above the sand first attracted a group of boys to the scene.” (In the future, the Cleveland Butcher would customarily leave articles of clothing behind at his crime scenes.)
    Once they saw the victim’s face, police opined that he was “exceptionally good looking” and had an air of refinement despite his slovenly clothes. Thousands of people came to the morgue to see the body, but despite the victim’s distinctive tattoos and his reattached head no one could identify him, leading police to believe that he was not from Pittsburgh.
    October 5 saw the emergence of the mysterious “Inda” who had inscribed the photographs in the victim’s coat. Inda West was, in fact, a nurse at Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia. She told authorities that she had given the photos to Charles Munroe McGregor from Kittanning. Five additional persons who saw the body in the morgue declared that it was McGregor. Others thought the victim might be William Boland, an orderly at Pittsburgh’s South Side Hospital who had been fired on September 30 “because he did not do his work properly.” Intriguingly, Boland’s fellow orderlies believed his home was in Cleveland and stated that his “habits…were always shrouded in mystery.”
    The matter was settled on October 7, when James H. McGregor of Homestead, Pennsylvania, saw the body and stated unequivocally that it was his son Charles, age 21, who had lived on Jefferson Street in Kittanning but had not contacted his parents for the past year. Charles was a baker by trade, but he had a “roving disposition,” according to his father. Just recently, for example, McGregor had taken a trip to Detroit and back on a whim.

 

[Charles McGregor. From the Pittsburgh Chronicle Telegraph, Oct. 5, 1923.]

    Pittsburgh detectives may have felt that the solution to the mystery was at hand once they positively identified the body—but at that juncture the investigation stalled forever, although some of the more imaginative detectives thought the murder was the result of “oriental vengeance” because the victim had been decapitated and his head buried in the sand, and also because he had an Arabic tattoo. Charles McGregor’s killer was never found.

* * * * *
   
    A woman’s torso was fished out of New York City’s Hudson River off West 200th Street on the night of July 21, 1927. News articles don’t mention whether the head was attached. The New York Times described the torso, which had been in the river for several weeks, as having the legs “cut off above the knees, the left arm below the shoulder and the right arm at the shoulder joint.” A couple of days later, a barge captain saw human body parts floating in the Hudson near the Jersey shore opposite Weehawken. A woman’s left arm was recovered, as well as a floating trunk bearing the initials “J. C.” It was thought the woman’s body may originally have been stored in the trunk but its inside was clean.

* * * * *

    On August 26, 1927, a man in Whitestone, Long Island, in the borough of Queens, went into an isolated thicket “in the sandy flatlands north of Flushing” to pick cherries. There he discovered a nude man with his head cut off close to the shoulders in a shallow gully a few feet from the corner of 24th Road and 157th Street.  The body was hidden in sumac bushes. Bloody sand near tire tracks indicated that the man had been murdered elsewhere and transported to the gully by car. Two or three separate sets of shoeprints were at the site—some apparently made by a woman’s high heels, but it was impossible to say when they had been made. No clothing was found; a number of burlap sacks were, but police acknowledged that they possibly were trash thrown into the gully by someone other than the murderer.
     Investigators found an object that appeared to be a human tongue in a tree stump about fifty feet from the body. This promising clue suggested a revenge murder or a Mafia-related slaying until Dr. Thomas A. Gonzalez, Acting Chief Medical Examiner, determined that it was only a fungus. A stolen car had been abandoned three blocks from the scene and a muddy coat was found a block from the site, but their connection to the murder, if any, was not uncovered.
    An autopsy showed traces of neither poison nor alcohol in the man’s system. He had been beheaded with a heavy knife. He was well built and “in remarkably fine physical trim.” His soft hands indicated that he had been well-to-do and not a physical laborer. 
    Another dead man was found in Glendale, Queens, on the night of August 27, but his murder did not seem related to the earlier killing. The second man had been shot twice, was lying openly in a gutter, and was not mutilated in any way—but his death led police to theorize briefly that both men were victims of a gang war. The Glendale victim had opium in his pockets and was quickly identified as Michael Felco, an ex-convict and narcotics dealer, and likely target of a drug hit. No connection was ever found between the murders of Felco and the headless man—who was never identified, despite the police having scoured the vicinity for clues and placed the body on public display at the Bellevue morgue.

* * * * *

    On May 1, 1928, police recovered the nude torso of a woman floating at the southwest end of Governors Island. The head, arms, and one leg had been neatly severed, but the other leg appeared to have been violently ripped off the body. Dr. Gonzalez’s autopsy revealed that she had been in the water several weeks and bore no knife or bullet wounds, and the dismemberments apparently had been done with a cleaver. The murder was never solved nor was the woman identified.

* * * * *

    Portions of a disarticulated, recently deceased muscular young man turned up several miles apart in Manhattan on the morning on November 24, 1930. The legs were wrapped in sheets, stuffed in a suitcase, and placed on a sidewalk close to the East River. (It will be remembered that the Cleveland Butcher occasionally “packaged” pieces of his victims by wrapping them in butcher paper, newspapers, quilts, or burlap bags—also, that his two favorite means of disposing of his victims were leaving them out in the open where they would shortly be found or tossing them into bodies of water.) A trunk retrieved from the Hudson River contained the man’s torso and arms wrapped in oilcloth. A pair of pants was neatly folded atop the torso. Dr. Charles Norris, chief medical examiner who performed the autopsy, found that the victim had been drinking heavily before death. Noting the skillful dismemberments, Dr. Norris remarked that the slayer was “a man who knew how to use a knife.”  One news account states: “The body had been severed so cleanly that authorities were inclined to suspect the slayer of some surgical knowledge.”    
    Both the trunk and the suitcase contained articles of seedy clothing. (A few years later, the Butcher would enigmatically leave clothing with five Cleveland victims; clothes were also left at the New Castle, PA, and Robert Robertson murder sites, which many criminologists consider the Butcher’s handiwork.) Although his uncalloused, well-manicured hands bore no traces of having performed manual labor, the victim evidently was a hobo since a claim check for the Mills Hotel—a notorious flophouse—was found in one of his pants pockets. Investigators went to the hotel and claimed the satchel, which contained an alarm clock, a gray suit, a gray cap, three work shirts, and the Bridgeport, CT, Post of September 2. (The reader will recall the Butcher’s curious habit of leaving pages from newspapers or magazines at crime scenes, which he did in six of the Cleveland cases; this idiosyncrasy was also represented at the Robertson and New Castle murders.) The New York Times described the clothing as “apparently belonging to a laborer,” but whether it belonged to the victim, the murderer—or neither—could not be ascertained.
    On December 3, Mrs. James Collins of Jamaica, Queens, tentatively claimed the body as that of her husband. But the victim appears never to have been positively identified despite the best efforts of fifteen detectives who dredged the river in search of the head, tried to find the store where the oilcloth had been purchased, and attempted to track the laundry marks on every scrap of clothing found with the body.
   
* * * * *

    John Diaz, a Queens salesman, was driving on the Williamsburg Bridge from Manhattan to Brooklyn on the night of March 27, 1931, when he saw a left thigh lying in the roadway. Deputy Medical Examiner Emanuel Marten declared that the thigh came from a woman in her early twenties who had been dead fewer than 48 hours. “The dissection, he said, showed the work of a professional hand,” according to the Times.
    On March 30, workmen in a lumber yard in the vicinity of the Williamsburg Bridge found a portion of a torso—only, the medical examiner thought this portion came from the right side of a “powerfully-built man” who had died more recently than the woman from whom the thigh had been removed. Was a maniac killing and butchering both men and women? This would be a rare circumstance among serial killers who, as has been noted, generally select victims of a particular appearance and gender—though the Butcher who terrorized Cleveland a few years later had no such inhibitions.
     On March 31, the upper left and right arms, a left thigh, and a lower left leg minus the foot were found in the water at the foot of Grand Street in Brooklyn. (The news account does not mention if these parts came from a man or a woman.)
     On April 12, a “mutilated pelvic section,” wrapped in a towel and a Brooklyn newspaper dated March 27, was found in Glendale, Queens. It was left near a cemetery by someone who appears to have shared the Butcher’s Stygian sense of humor. Medical examiners could not determine the gender of the victim, but the portion was taken to the Kings County Morgue and placed with all the other recently discovered human fragments.
    On May 31, a Brooklyn patrolman spotted three suspicious packages in a vacant lot near Ten Eyck Street and Morgan Avenue. One contained the head, forearms, feet, and hands of a man about 35 years old with manicured fingernails and curly brown hair, who seemed to have been “fastidious in personal appearance.” Another package held several garments with faded laundry marks. Because he had been dead two months, detectives thought he was the man whose scraps had been turning up all over the city since March 30. (On the other hand, the corpse might have been female—the medical examiner couldn’t be certain because of its less-than-mint condition. But he believed it to be male.)
    The press gingerly described the corpse’s injuries, but if we read between the lines it appears that it had been emasculated (assuming the body was male). The Louisville Courier-Journal of June 1 states: “Extreme brutality of the butcher was apparent, police said, ‘from the manner in which certain parts of the body were cut and hacked, as though with a meat cleaver or ax, leading to the conclusion the killing was a sex murder of the most vicious type.’” 
    Other aspects of the dump site were Butcheresque. One package was wrapped in the April 16 edition of the New York Daily News, and another in the March 26 Brooklyn Daily Eagle. The third package contained a silk shirt, several pieces of men’s silk underwear, and a pair of women’s panties.
    The bodies whose parts had littered the city for the past two months were never identified, but the four-year string of unsolved murder cases involving disembodied humans ceased in New York after this final onslaught against social decorum and good taste. Three years later, pieces of people started turning up in Cleveland’s vacant lots, gullies, and waterways.

* * * * *

    In the course of my research, I have found many accounts of headless bodies. Decapitation in murder cases is not all that rare: removing the victim’s head is a way of ensuring that identifying him will be difficult. If the bodies found in Pittsburgh in 1923 and in NYC between 1927 and 1931 were merely headless, there would be little reason to suspect they were early victims of the Cleveland Butcher. However, one must consider the prospect because these cases share several elements—some of them very ritualistic and unique—with the Cleveland murders. None of the earlier murders has all of these bizarre elements, but they all have some of them: decapitation; dismemberment; the head puckishly hidden in such a manner that it must be found; clothing and/or newspapers left at the murder scene; severed body parts carefully wrapped or packaged; victims either displayed openly and brazenly or disposed of in water.
    While we will probably never know the Butcher’s true identity, there are plenty of intriguing suppositions. One of the Cleveland detectives’ leading theories was that the Butcher was a hobo or a railroad employee; either circumstance would have kept him constantly on the move. Perhaps the Butcher performed his dismemberments in one location, went elsewhere to kill again, then returned to old haunts when the heat was off, coming back to the same locations over and over like a murderous circuit rider. As a tramp or a trainman always on the go, he could have committed murder almost anywhere in the nation with little chance of getting caught. This might explain why so many victims in Cleveland—numbers 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6—were found near railroad tracks.
    As a final note: other pet theories of Clevelanders in the 1930s held that the murderer was a doctor, a medical student, a hunter, a mortician, a mad scientist, or a professional butcher. After all, the killer’s anatomical knowledge and skill with a knife had to be explained somehow. However, if the same man killed in New Castle, Pittsburgh, and NYC between 1921 and 1931—and if that man happened to be the Butcher—it raises the possibility that investigators who pursued these theories were wasting their time. It may be that the Butcher had had no medical training whatsoever, but rather had dismembered so many people over the years that by the time he got to Cleveland it only seemed as if he had surgical skills.

SOURCES:

Badal, James Jessen. In the Wake of the Butcher. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press,    2001.
- - - . Though Murder Has No Tongue: The Lost Victim of Cleveland’s Mad Butcher. Kent, OH: Kent State    University Press, 2010.
Louisville Courier-Journal.  “Another Slain Man is Found in Queens.” 28 Aug. 1927. I: 26.
- - - .“East River Dragged in Search for Head.” 26 Nov. 1930: 1.
- - - . “Head and Legs Cut Off Woman’s Body.” 2 May 1928: 1.
- - - . “Head Found for Mutilated Body of Murdered Man.” 4 Oct. 1923: 8.
- - - . “Headless Body Is Proving a Mystery.” 8 Oct. 1923: 2.
- - - . “Part of Second Torso Found in New York.” 31 Mar. 1931: 1.
- - - . “Pelvic Section Added to Grim Collection.” 13 Apr. 1931: 12.
- - -. “Sex Slayer is Sought by Gotham Cops.” 1 June 1931: 1.
- - - . “Tongue Clew to Slaying of Man.” 28 Aug. 1927. I:1.
- - - . “Torso of Man Found in River.” 25 Nov. 1930: 1.
- - -. “Torso Partly Identified.” 4 Dec. 1930: 2.
- - - . “Turk Vengeance Seen in Murder.” 7 Oct. 1923. I: 8.
- - - . “Workman Finds Headless Body.” 27 Aug. 1927: 3.
New York Times.  “Autopsy Held on Torso.” 3 May 1928: 9.
- - - .“Body of Man Found Headless in Queens.” 27 Aug. 1927: 15.
- - - . “Bronx Laundry Marks Torso Murder Clues.” 26 Nov. 1930: 2.
- - - . “Clues Fail in Identity of Headless Body.” 30 Aug. 1927: 4.
- - - . “Dismembered Body of Man is Found.” 25 Nov. 1930: 56.
- - - . “Find Parts of Body and Clue to Murder.” 1 June 1931: 36.
- - - . “Identify Slain Man as Former Convict.” 29 Aug. 1927: 4.
- - - . “Parts of Body in River.” 24 July 1927: 22.
- - - . “Torso of Woman Found in the Bay.” 2 May 1928: 27.
- - - . “Visit Scene of Murder.” 31 Aug. 1927: 23.
- - - . “Woman Murdered: Crime a Mystery.” 28 Mar. 1931: 3.
- - - . “Woman’s Torso in River.” 22 July 1927: 40.
Nickel, Steven. Torso. Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair, 1989.
Pittsburgh Chronicle Telegraph.  “Headless Body Found in Dressing Room at Pool.” 3 Oct. 1923: 1+.
- - - .“Headless Body Is Not Identified.”   4 Oct. 1923: 1+.
- - - .“Nurse Says She Gave Picture to Charles McGregor.” 5 Oct. 1923: 1+.
- - - .“‘That’s My Son,’ Parent Exclaims on Seeing Body.”  7 Oct. 1923: 1+.

STORY FOR AUGUST 2012: “Death Comes for the Evangelista Family”
Genre: Historical true crime


Death Comes for the Evangelista Family

    Some of the most interesting murders seem like the events in a horror film come to life. This thought probably did not occur to the detectives called in to inspect the house at 3587 St. Aubin Avenue in Detroit, for in their day horror films contained little more terrifying than Lon Chaney’s latest astonishing makeup job. No vision on celluloid could equal what the police found in the house that morning.
    Around 10 o’clock one summer morning, real estate dealer Vincent Elias, an associate of the homeowner, dropped by to make a business call. Could you go back in time to witness this moment, you would see Mr. Elias knocking on the unlocked front door and waiting a little while after receiving no answer, then cautiously entering. All would be silence for a few moments; perhaps you would hear faint footsteps. Then you would see Elias running back outside and screaming for help.
    Detectives were there within a half hour. Unfortunately, so were squads of reporters who had received a tip that some nameless horror was waiting for them in the house. Inside, investigators found Mrs. Santina Evangelista, age thirty-eight, in bed. She had been nearly decapitated and her attacker had made an effort to amputate her arms. Her eighteen-month-old son Mario lay dead beside her. In another bedroom lay the mutilated bodies of three other children: Angelina, age seven; Matthew, age five (this victim may actually have been a girl named Margaret; accounts differ as to name and gender); and Eugenis, also known as Jean, age four. Ax blows to the head had killed them all; one child’s limbs had been severed. Angelina’s body was found on the floor near the bedroom door. Apparently she had woken up during the carnage and tried to escape.
    The greatest horror of all was discovered when the police opened the door to a first-floor room, used by the master of the house, Benjamino Evangelista, as an office. Among the clutter were two swords—neither was used in the commission of the family’s massacre—plus a wig and false beard, the purpose of which was never discovered; on the floor, three large photos of a child lying in a coffin. Mr. Evangelista was almost fully dressed and sitting at his desk, but his head was missing. The police found it on the floor, eyes looking heavenward. On the wall, overlooking the grotesque tableau, were a crucifix, a wooden cross and a print of da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.”
    Benny Evangelista had had some singular notions about interior decorating. His house was filled with religious icons, pictures and other objects representing the Christian faith. Yet, in the basement the police found a séance room containing a homemade altar over which hung papier-mâché and wax effigies, “hideous and grotesque in the extreme,” in the words of the local press. The figures symbolized the ten celestial planets (including the sun and the moon; charlatans seldom have use for astronomical accuracy). They were “painted revolting colors and covered with hair clipped from dogs.” The centerpiece was a large object resembling an eye that was electrically lit from the inside. It was theorized that the eye was supposed to represent the sun. (I do not know how the sun could be both an effigy and an illuminated eyeball at the same time.) A reporter noted that the walls and ceiling of this room were lined with puffy light green cloth, making it resemble a padded cell in an insane asylum.
    The police may not have been familiar with the forty-four-year-old Benny Evangelista, but he was well-known to Italian immigrants living in Detroit in the days just before the Great Depression—for the date of the gruesome find was July 3, 1929. He was born in Naples around 1885; his surname was prophetic, given his line of work when he reached adulthood. Benny joined his older brother Anthony in Philadelphia in 1903. They lived together for six years, but had a falling out concerning Benny’s increasingly unorthodox religious beliefs. Although a Catholic, Evangelista started his own religious cult in 1906. The brothers and their families moved to Detroit in the early 1920s, but Benny and Anthony remained estranged and rarely spoke.
    Benny Evangelista became a real estate broker and landlord. He attended a local Roman Catholic church, the Church of San Francisco. Although his devoutness was such that some called him a fanatic, he re-established his cult in Detroit. This secondary source of income led to prosperity and, possibly, to the murder of his family. He became, as crime writer Jay Robert Nash stated, a kind of Henry Ford of the supernatural. The cult bore the grand title “Union Federation of America,” which seems a name more appropriate for an organization of truck drivers. After the cultist’s death his priest, Father Francis Beccherini, told the Detroit Free Press: “Evangelista, no doubt, was insane. Of that I am sure, although he was shrewd and seemed to have quite a lot of intelligence in other matters…. I do not believe Evangelista was sincere in practicing the creed he had established. Rather, I believe he founded the mysterious cult with all of its weird props and practices, with the sole idea of making money.” Mr. and Mrs. Evangelista had bothered the priest so often with reports of their mystical visions and claims that they could conjure up devils that he finally had to order his assistant to stay away from them “for fear of a scandal.”
    Evangelista ambitiously wrote (or rather dictated, since his command of English was poor) and copyrighted his own bible in 1926, The Oldest History of the World, Discovered by Occult Science in Detroit, Mich., a book that allegedly took exactly twenty years to write. At the time of his death Evangelista was scheming to create a movie depicting the history of mankind as related in this weird little volume. It is safe to say that everyone who peruses the unreadable book comes away convinced that Evangelista needed a nice, long rest at the nearest mental institution. I own a rare first edition of this crackpot classic, and reproduce a couple of lines from the preface to provide an example of Evangelista’s matchless style: “By the willingness of God, my respect to this nation, I shall do my best to tell you of the Old World. I shall tell about the world before God was created up until this last generation, and I shall explain to you your descendants.” It is a violent tome populated by Adam and Eve, witches, a male warrior named Rowena and a prophet called Miel of the Ape, among many other characters. The book ends with a promise of three more volumes which the author did not survive to write. The upshot of Evangelista’s book seems to be that he is a prophet who possesses the power of God, and that he has nightly visions between 12 a.m. and 3 a.m. (Since he and his family were murdered late at night, perhaps Evangelista was having visions in his office when he met his gruesome fate.)
    Evangelista told his fellow immigrants’ fortunes at ten dollars per session. He sold hexes and charms and performed faith healing. He sold a love potion and according to the local Department of Health, “he had a permit to practice medicine so long as he did not use drugs or prescribe medicine.” These restrictions did not prohibit him from the lucrative business of selling herbs. Evangelista even poked pins in a voodoo doll when necessity called for it. His friends had long been embarrassed by his habit of giving “frequent religious demonstrations on the street,” staring upwards and waving his arms at the sky. Having exploited the superstitions of others for several years, by 1929 Benny Evangelista was rich enough to afford a two-story frame house for his family. The Fates smiled upon the enterprising con artist until the night of July 2.
     A crime scene must be kept in pristine condition; this was as true in 1929 as it is today. Unfortunately, by the time detectives arrived at the Evangelista household, policemen, coroner’s deputies, reporters and citizens afflicted with morbid curiosity had already ransacked the place. The only viable clues left for detectives were footprints left about the house and the killer’s bloody fingerprints on the front door’s latch. However, poor Vincent Elias might accidentally have left the bloody footprints as he ran through the house in panic, since they matched his shoe size.
    Investigators wrestled with the problem of figuring out how the murderer, who had probably been drenched with blood, managed to escape from the house and into a suburban neighborhood without attracting attention. They also were stumped as to motive, since the killer appeared not to have robbed the family. Eventually sixty officers were assigned to the case. They painstakingly searched through numerous boxes from the Evangelista home. Hundreds of papers, trinkets and pieces of clothing were examined, all to no avail. One peculiar but initially promising find was a box full of women’s underwear, each bearing the name of its former wearer. Police theorized that a jealous husband had remonstrated with Benny via an ax, but they discovered that the underwear had been used in a voodoo ritual intended to find missing persons.
    The difficulty of the case led the frustrated police to try some unconventional, not to say absurd, methods. Within a few days of the murders they heard from a local astrologer who claimed the stars had revealed that the murderer would surrender soon. The stars were honestly mistaken. Officers arrested a harmless curiosity seeker who had attended the Evangelistas’ funerals and questioned a local company Evangelista had commissioned to create the ghastly effigies he kept hanging from the ceiling in his basement séance room. Police Lieutenant Royal Baker theorized that the killer “was a degenerate or a mentally deficient person scared into killing the Evangelistas through fear of his basement idols.”
    The police’s thirst to catch the killer resulted in a surreal incident. A month after Benny Evangelista was buried, it occurred to some detectives that he might have murdered his own family and then committed suicide. They theorized that Evangelista had “managed to chop up his family, behead himself, and then hide the murder weapons,” in the words of crime writer Jay Robert Nash. They went to Mt. Olivet Cemetery in the middle of the night, exhumed Evangelista’s body and took fingerprints. They did not match the ones on the door latch. (This darkly entertaining account may be a garbled version of an event that occurred in March 1930—see below.)
     Over the years the police would interrogate more than 500 persons in an attempt to solve the mystery. As often happens in real-life murder mysteries, the Evangelista case yielded many intriguing suspects, some of whom were nearly as bizarre as Benny himself. On July 3, 1929, Detroit police arrested thirty-four-year-old Angelo Depoli and his four Italian roommates. Depoli lived near Evangelista, and in his barn detectives found a wicked looking curved knife “of the type commonly used in cutting bananas from the stalk” that appeared to be stained with blood, a short ax and a pair of recently washed shoes. (Later tests indicated that the stains on the ax and knife were not blood.) Depoli admitted that he knew the Evangelistas but denied killing them. Three of his fellow Italians were released after a thorough grilling by the police. Depoli, an illegal immigrant, refused to talk to the police about his remaining roommate, and in retaliation the authorities had Depoli deported to Italy so quickly he didn’t even have time to return to his rooming house.
    Despite his denials, Depoli might have had some connection to the crime. His fourth roommate’s name is given as Umberto Pecchio, age forty-two, in the Detroit Free Press of July 5. This was a typo; one of the major emerging suspects in the slaying was Umberto Tecchio, a tenant of Evangelista’s who had taken his wife to Evangelista for medical treatment several times. None of the other roommates questioned along with Tecchio could swear that he had been in his room all night, and in addition, he had a documented violent streak and allegedly was an extortionist for the Black Hand. On April 19, 1929, three months before the Evangelista murders, Tecchio had stabbed to death Bartolomeo Maffio, brother of his wife Theresa, over an unpaid debt. It was ruled self-defense and the killer was not even tried. Theresa divorced him three weeks later. Tecchio had gone to his landlord Benny Evangelista’s house on the night of July 2, 1929, in order to make the final payment on his house. Police lost interest in the suspect when his friend Camillo Treas insisted that he had accompanied Tecchio on his errand, and that when they left the Evangelista residence around 8 p.m., Benny and his head had not yet parted company. He admitted that Tecchio talked to Evangelista “in a loud voice,” but this was not significant since he “always spoke in a high, excited voice and even in normal conversation seemed to be angry and quarrelsome.” The alibi seemed airtight, and Tecchio was turned loose. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage on November 26, 1934, following a drinking binge.
    Several months after his death, in August 1935 police again became interested in Tecchio. Witnesses came forward who had been afraid to speak while he was alive. As we have seen, Camillio Treas had provided Tecchio’s alibi by claiming to have accompanied him to the Evangelistas’ house on a mundane errand on the night of July 2, 1929. But now Treas added that Tecchio entered their rooming house by the back door early on the morning of July 4, carrying a canvas mason’s tool bag three feet long—just the right size for concealing a machete or two. No one had seen the canvas bag since.
By 1935, Tecchio’s ex-wife—now known as Mrs. Maicucci—had married twice more. She told police that after the divorce from Tecchio, she had married Louis Peruzzi. To add domestic insult to matrimonial injury, the Peruzzis lived at 2675 Scott Street in the house Tecchio had bought from Benny Evangelista on the last night of Evangelista’s life. The loss of his residence did not sit well with Tecchio, and according to his ex-wife in early 1932 he threatened to blow up the house. This he did not do, but on November 9, 1932, someone shot Louis Peruzzi through the heart as he enjoyed a smoke on his porch. The police ruled it a suicide, even though (presumably) no gun was found at the scene.
     Mrs. Maicucci claimed Tecchio had murdered the Evangelistas with a couple of Spanish machetes that Benny himself had used to behead chickens during his cult rituals. Benny had kept them mounted to the wall over his desk, and they were the only items known to have been missing from the house after the murders. (Early reports insist an ax had been the murder weapon, but detectives later claimed the wounds were “too long and too deep” to have been made by an ax. Possibly the killer brought an ax to the crime scene and inflicted some wounds with it, and then, seeing the machetes, decided to use those as well.) Mrs. Maicucci insisted that she had seen the machetes in a bag owned by Tecchio. Police searched the dead man’s personal effects but never found them. Perhaps he had disposed of the weapons some time during the five years between the commission of the murders and his death.
    Twenty-year-old Frank Costanza was another witness. In 1929 he had been a paperboy, and he claimed that around 5 a.m. on the morning in question, as he delivered papers on his bicycle, he had seen Tecchio standing on the Evangelistas’ front porch. Costanza recognized Tecchio and shouted a greeting. In return he received nothing but a grunt. When later in the day the boy heard about the butchery at the Evangelista house, he realized Tecchio might have done it. Eventually word of what he had seen got back to the police, but the promising lead came to an end when a detective received erroneous information that Costanza was dead.
    In light of all this new information, the late Umberto Tecchio was again briefly considered the major suspect. But there were problems. The police assumed the killer of the Evangelistas must have been coated in blood, but former newsboy Costanza admitted that the man he took to be Tecchio did not appear to be bloodstained. Just as the police never found Tecchio’s alleged machetes, they never found his bloody clothes, though he could hardly be expected to have kept them for very long if he had committed the murders. Most importantly, Tecchio’s fingerprints did not match the ones left by the killer.
    The police entertained other theories. At the time of his picturesque demise Evangelista had been involved in lawsuits concerning his real estate business. Perhaps a disgruntled client had taken revenge? Some detectives thought that the killer was the same unknown individual who had murdered Mrs. Henry Cipinski and her three children at River Rouge, MI, in June 1929, only two weeks before the Evangelista massacre. In both cases the dead had undergone similar mutilations. Rumor held that Benny had acted as a “go-between” for the Black Hand, leading to the possibility that a crime lord had ordered his execution. Perhaps a lunatic brought to Benny for treatment had killed the family. This theory received support, albeit secondhand, from George Pricco, a Lansing tailor, who told police of a woman he knew in Detroit who had gone to Evangelista for medical advice. Evangelista had told her that he “feared death from some person who had come to him as a patient.” The woman was questioned but the identity of the mysterious patient was never discovered.
     Or maybe the Evangelistas had been wiped out by a rival cult. This theory was being explored as late as November 1932, when police interrogated Robert Harris, a mentally unbalanced Tennesseean who led a hundred-member Detroit voodoo cult called “The Order of Islam.” Harris had been arrested for sacrificing forty-year-old James J. Smith on an altar. Specifically, this meant that Harris had crushed Smith’s skull with a car axle and then stabbed him in the heart with an eight-inch knife. Harris readily admitted killing Smith, who was “some stranger—the first person I met after leaving my home,” but insisted that he knew nothing of the Evangelista murders, having moved to Detroit a few months after they occurred.  Authorities took Harris’s palm print, but as that was the last the papers mentioned of it, presumably his prints did not match the ones left behind by the family’s killer.
    According to one version of the story—which, as we shall see, may be untrue—perhaps the best suspect was Aurelius Angelino, an old friend of Evangelista’s who shared his interest in mysticism. They had met as immigrants in Philadelphia, where both worked as railroad repairmen. In 1919 Angelino supposedly performed a crime in Lancaster, PA, similar to the Evangelista butchery ten years later: he was said to have taken an ax and killed two of his four children. Angelino was sent to the asylum but escaped three times. The third time, in 1923, was permanent. He was never recaptured and his fate remains a mystery.
    According to this version of events, detectives wondered if the newsboy Costanza had actually seen Angelino on the Evangelistas’ porch that fatal morning and mistaken him for Tecchio, since Angelino and Tecchio resembled each other. Furthermore, while Angelino’s fingerprints were not on file, he was known to have been left-handed. A left-handed man had made the bloody prints on the Evangelistas’ door latch. Had Angelino, an escapee from an asylum, tracked his old friend to Detroit and then butchered the entire family due to some ancient, unknown grudge?
    Or perhaps it was for some reason related to the occult. Police thought that the killer might have gotten a few twisted ideas from Evangelista’s “bible,” The Oldest History of the World. As a local paper noted, “Evangelista pictured one character in his bible wrenching the head of an antagonist from his shoulders and hurling it at his feet, a fate such as the author, himself, suffered. Several other characters in Evangelista’s writing suffered dismembered arms, just as Mrs. Evangelista and one of the children were mutilated.” Perhaps the fate of Benny Evangelista points a moral to aspiring crackpots and cult leaders: the money is good and the power is gratifying, but beware the follower who takes his lessons a little too seriously.
    On the other hand, an alternative theory denies that Aurelius Angelino ax-murdered his own children and went on to kill the Evangelistas, holding instead that Benny Evangelista murdered Angelino’s children.  It is a fact that in March 1930, the police exhumed Evangelista’s body and found that his fingerprints resembled bloody fingerprints left at the Angelino crime scene. Maybe the insane and missing Angelino came out of hiding long enough to exact some painful tit-for-tat revenge upon the faith healer and his family.


SOURCES:

Detroit Free Press. “‘Divine Prophet,’ Wife, Four Children Hacked To Death.” 4 July 1929.
- - -. “Kin Estranged From Prophet.” Detroit Free Press 5 July 1929.
- - -. “Leader of Cult Admits Slaying at Home ‘Altar.’” Detroit Free Press 21 Nov. 1931.
- - -. “Letter Leads Police to Ax Slaying Clue.” Detroit Free Press 15 July 1929.
- - -. “Massacre of Six in Cult Family Baffles Police.” Detroit Free Press 5 July 1929.
- - -. “May Solve Six-Year-Old Massacre.” Detroit Free Press 18 Aug. 1935.
- - -. “Seek Second Shrine in Ax Deaths.” 7 July 1929.
- - -. “Solution of Killings Is Seen in the Stars.” 5 July 1929.
Detroit News.  “Evangelista Data Ordered.” 19 Aug. 1935.
Evangelista, Benny. The Oldest History of the World Discovered By Occult Science in Detroit, Mich. N.p.:    1926.
Louisville Courier-Journal.  “King Sacrifices Man on Altar of Cult.” 21 Nov. 1932: 1.
- - -. “Pennsylvania Hills Combed for Slayers.” 1 July 1930: 1.
Nash, Jay Robert. Open Files. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983.
New York Times. “Family of Six Slain by Detroit Maniac.” 4 July 1929: 32.
- - -.  “Man Held in Slaying Of Six in Detroit.” New York Times 5 July 1929: 2.
Sahs, Harry C. “Evangelista Clue Given by Woman.” Detroit News 18 Aug. 1935.


STORY FOR AUGUST 2013: “The Serial Killer in the Cemetery”

Genre: Historical true crime

The Serial Killer in the Cemetery

                Cincinnati’s Spring Grove Cemetery and Arboretum is considered one of the most beautiful burial spots in America. Founded in 1845, the cemetery is the final resting place of such notables as Union General Joe Hooker, abolitionist Levi Coffin and Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase.

                In the early twentieth century, Spring Grove housed not only the illustrious dead but also one of the infamous living. Nobody knew the name of the anonymous man who prowled among the gravestones, but there were many who desperately wished to know. He was a serial killer who existed seventy years before the term was invented and Spring Grove was where he watched and waited for his next victim. Since all self-respecting serial killers must have a nickname, I propose that this murderer be known henceforth as the Spring Grove Killer. This strikes me as being to-the-point yet vaguely poetic, as opposed to the vulgar, derivative name bestowed upon the killer by the contemporary press: “Jack the Brainer.”

                The first known victim was found at dawn on Monday, May 1, 1904, in Cumminsville, a suburb of Cincinnati. Mary McDonald, a slightly deaf thirty-two-year-old buttonhole maker, was found unconscious and dying between the parallel tracks of the Big Four Railroad near Dane Street, her left leg severed above the knee, her face mutilated, her skull fractured and her hair soaked with blood. An engineer noticed her and blew his locomotive’s whistle until he attracted the police’s attention. The unfortunate woman was taken to the hospital, where she lived long enough to give the police her name and mutter about “somebody on the tomb.” The police dismissed McDonald’s statement as a product of delirium. Due to her extensive injuries and the location where she was found, and because her breath smelled of whisky and the neck of her dress had been liberally splashed with the same, at first police believed she had gotten drunk and been hit by a train.

                But a closer inspection of the site shook their certainty. McDonald was found lying on the ground between two parallel tracks, but her blood was found in the inner rails of both tracks. She had sustained ghastly injuries to the head and was missing a leg, but presumably she would have been in even worse shape had she been hit by a train. Also, engineers were certain they had not run over anyone in the night. It began to look as though someone had hit her over the head, then arranged her body to look as though it had been run over. (Presumably her leg had been amputated by a passing train rather than her attacker.)

                Witnesses came forward who had had seen McDonald in her final hours. Around 10:30 p.m. on Saturday night, Mr. and Mrs. John Stagman saw her board a streetcar heading in the direction where she was later found. She appeared to be sober. A number of persons on another streetcar had seen Miss McDonald around midnight near the spot where her body was found, a lovers’ lane on Fergus Street next to Spring Grove Cemetery. She was in the company of a tall man wearing a slouch hat. Though they did not see the woman’s face, they were able to identify her by her dress. The two appeared to be drunk; the man had difficulty supporting McDonald, and at one point leaned her against a telegraph pole. When it was later realized that she had been murdered, police conjectured that the streetcar passengers might have seen the killer feigning intoxication.

                A railroad man who looked at the telegraph pole noticed that the man’s shoeprints were still there. He ran to inform the authorities of his potentially important discovery, but when he and a policeman came back to the pole two hours later the prints were gone. Someone had obliterated them with a large rock. Perhaps the killer had been watching the railroad man from a hiding place.

                Because there was no solid evidence of foul play, McDonald’s death was officially ruled an accident. About five months later, at 9:30 on the night of October 1, a nineteen-year-old shop girl named Louise (“Lulu”) Mueller walked down the lover’s lane on Fergus Street in order to meet her fiancé, Frank Eastman. The next morning a machinist named Patrick Shay found her body near the spot where Mary McDonald had met her fate. Her remains lay only near her parents’ home and two hundred feet from Spring Grove Avenue. Mueller had sustained injuries almost identical to McDonald’s except that neither of her legs had been severed. Although her body had been found in the weeds seventy-five feet from the railroad tracks, the police’s first instinct was to call Mueller’s death an accident. The theory was advanced that she had been hit by a train and then crawled to the spot where she died, but the coroner declared that she had died instantaneously. The inevitable crowd gathered to watch the police carry away the remains, and many later recalled the presence of a small bearded man who wrung his hands and cried “It was an accident!”

                An autopsy revealed that her skull had been crushed on the right upper side from the back of the head to the temple. In addition, her nose was broken and she was missing six front teeth. The killer had left a thumb-shaped bruise on the right side of her neck. Deputy Coroner O. C. Cameron found no evidence of rape; nor was the motive robbery, since Mueller’s purse contained money. Interestingly, a small box containing grains of cocaine was found a few feet from the spot where Mueller’s body lay, but it was never determined whether the find had anything to do with the murder, for the police foolishly allowed crowds estimated at thousands to wander the crime scene and play amateur detective, and undoubtedly much evidence was trampled on, carried away or destroyed.

                Inspecting the death scene, the police noticed that the sidewalk leading to the lover’s lane went past Spring Grove, and a high embankment in the cemetery rose up parallel to the sidewalk. A killer could hide among the tombstones on the embankment, peering down at passersby. Detectives theorized that the killer may have thrown rocks down on the heads of his victims, an idea that led to the papers dubbing him “Jack the Brainer.” (A few days later, on October 8, Mueller’s brothers found a bloody sharp-edged boulder hidden under a bush about forty feet from the murder site.) Near this high embankment the police found a pair of tennis shoes and a bare footprint in the mud, all size 7 ½. A bloody trail in the weeds and bushes near the embankment led to the spot where Mueller’s body was found. The authorities questioned Frank Eastman, who said that he had been detained in town and was late getting to the trysting place. When he did not see Lulu, he assumed she had given up waiting and gone home. His alibi was confirmed.

                Police arrested two men, painter William C. Wilson and one-legged expressman Theodore Salmon. The latter, who made his living by hauling freight in a wagon, owned a stable located near the crime scene. Wilson and Salmon admitted they were acquainted with Louisa Mueller and Frank Eastman; in fact, Salmon and Eastman were not on good terms. Wilson and Salmon further confessed that they had been drunk and in the vicinity on the night of the murder. Witnesses had seen Salmon talking to a woman at the Spring Grove entrance to the lovers’ lane about an hour before Mueller was murdered. The suspects told conflicting stories which failed to match statements made by two women, Stella Pierce and Lily Key, who had been with Wilson and Salmon earlier on the fatal evening. Salmon’s crutch and wagon appeared to be spattered with blood. (A microscopic examination revealed that it was actually red paint.)

                Things were looking very bad indeed for Wilson and Salmon. They were arrested on suspicion of murder on October 5 and formally charged on October 8. While they were in jail, their innocence was proved beyond doubt when the killer claimed his third victim on the night of Wednesday, November 2.

                The body of a young blonde woman was found on the morning of November 3 in a vacant lot in Winton Place, near Spring Grove’s entrance. Though they should have known better by then, some policemen believed she had been struck by a train or streetcar. She bore wounds and mutilations identical to those of Lulu Mueller; her jawbone had been crushed, several teeth had been knocked out, and brain matter seeped from a vicious head wound. Disturbingly, the dead woman’s eyes were wide open. It appeared the murderer had again attempted to make it look as though his victim had been killed in an accident. A streetcar transfer punched at 9:40 p.m. was found in her hand, and there was debate as to whether it had been planted. It seems unlikely that she would clutch the transfer while being beaten into unconsciousness. If the Spring Grove Killer placed the ticket in her hand, he may have been cleverly trying to give the impression that she had been hit by a streetcar, yet he placed the body 237 feet away from the tracks. The streetcar could have bounced her so far only if she had been made of India rubber. An autopsy later confirmed that she had been hit on the head with a club or hatchet and had died instantaneously. If we read between the lines of the press reports, the autopsy also confirmed that the woman was the only victim who conclusively had been sexually assaulted. This discovery had a chilling effect on the accident theory.

                A bloody trail in the grass and on the sidewalk made it clear she had been attacked at the elevated embankment by the sidewalk. The murderer had carried her to a thicket, and from there dragged her by the heels to the dumpsite. A large pool of blood showed where he had briefly stopped and rested before completing his gruesome chore. Mysteriously, the woman’s stockings were full of burrs of a type that did not grow on that side of the city. Some thought the Spring Grove Killer had collected them elsewhere and scattered them on her stockings to make it seem as if she had been killed in some other location. The burrs, and possibly the transfer, meant that the perpetrator had started planting false clues at his murder scenes in order to confuse detectives. Another possibly false clue was a pair of canvas shoes wrapped in a newspaper left near the victim’s hat, about 150 feet from the body. Among the accumulating gawkers was the same small bearded man who had made a memorable spectacle of himself at the discovery of Lulu Mueller’s corpse. He seemed as agitated as before, but by the time the police realized who he was, he had disappeared. His identity was never discovered.

                Also among the crowd was Mrs. Millie Bartlett, who had been walking down Winton Road when she heard that another murder victim had been found. Out of curiosity, she joined the throng and realized to her horror that she recognized the dead woman’s blue hat. Thus the victim was identified as Mrs. Bartlett’s eighteen-year-old sister, Alma Steinway (spelled Steingeweg in some accounts). She had been a member of the choir at Winton Place Episcopal Church and made her living as a “hello girl”—that is, a telephone operator for the Park Telephone Exchange in Cumminsville, a division of Cincinnati Bell, which offered a $1,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of its employee’s murderer. She worked the night shift, and was on her way home when the killer attacked. On November 5, her white casket was borne by six female telephone operators to her grave in the German Protestant Cemetery near Fairmount. Added to her battered remains were three of her teeth and part of her jawbone, all of which had been knocked out by the force of the fatal blow. The coroner presented these fragments of Alma to her brother Edward Steingeweg.

                Steinway’s many admirers were checked out by the police. They came to the conclusion that her murderer had been a stranger, and obviously the same man who had killed McDonald and Mueller. A streetcar conductor named Frank Limle told the police that on the night of Monday, October 31, Steinway had gotten on his car accompanied by a short, stout man roughly forty years old, wearing a slouch hat and sporting about a week’s worth of stubble. They had ridden together to Winton Road and gotten off together there along with other passengers. The short man did not ask for a transfer ticket, and Limle idly wondered why he had taken a streetcar for such a short distance. The same thing occurred on Tuesday night, then again on Wednesday night, November 2. But on that third night, Steinway and the little man were the only two passengers who got off at that stop. Limle suspected that the man was the killer, and that he had ridden three nights in a row just waiting for a chance to leave the streetcar alone with Steinway. Limle claimed that he could identify the man if he ever saw him again. Of course, the fact that the mysterious man had gotten on and off the streetcar at the same time as Steinway could have been only a coincidence. It strained credulity that even “Jack the Brainer” would have murdered a woman just moments after being seen with her in a public place. Within a few days the police had tracked down everyone who had been on the streetcar that night, and the mysterious man turned out to be “a prominent citizen of Winton Place,” despite his menacing appearance. The press withheld his name.

                Police confidently reported on November 4 that they expected to make an arrest that afternoon. But no arrests came then or ever, and the police had to concede defeat. One of Alma Steinway’s brothers vowed that he would spend the rest of life hunting down the murderer.

                For several weeks no strange-looking man could tread the sidewalk without being suspected of secretly being the Spring Grove Killer, as the pages of the Cincinnati Enquirer amply demonstrate. Within about six months of the attack on Mary McDonald, eleven women reported being accosted near the cemetery. Many sightings of the killer were the product of hysteria, while others were probably legitimate. On the night of November 10, a stranger grabbed nineteen-year-old Lillie Rodefield and tried to drag her into Spring Grove. She was so terrified that she was unable to fight back, but luckily her brother George had seen the attack from the window of a nearby streetcar station. He gave the stranger a comprehensive beating, and had the police not arrived in time, Lillie’s attacker might well have been lynched by the gathering mob. The man turned out to be Henry Swears, a florist’s employee. The police thought they had caught the Spring Grove Killer for sure this time, but records showed that Swears had been hospitalized during the attacks on Mueller and Steinway. The police reluctantly concluded that Swears was not their man.

                Even the daughter of Samuel Hannaford, former mayor of Winton Place, did not consider herself safe with the fiend lurking about. Dorothy Hannaford reported that as she waited for a streetcar on the cemetery side of Spring Grove Avenue on November 2, she suddenly had an uncomfortable feeling. Turning, she saw a shadowy man in dark clothes and a black hat sitting like a ghost on the picket fence surrounding the cemetery: “He startled me, and I wondered how he managed to keep perched up there. He was looking at me steadily and I began to feel uneasy as if something was wrong.” The man continued his bizarre balancing act but did nothing overtly menacing, probably because a young man across the street was waiting for a streetcar. Miss Hannaford was very grateful when her car arrived. Considering that Alma Steinway was murdered only a couple of hours later near the spot where Miss Hannaford had her disquieting experience, it is likely that she escaped a horrible death that night.

                Another woman who may have actually met the Spring Grove Killer was Josephine Hewitt of Cumminsville, who was attacked in late November by a man near the area where the first three victims were fatally injured. Hewitt was not prepared to submit meekly, however. When the man seized her throat she punched him in the left eye, then drew a revolver. The panicked attacker ran away into the darkness, Hewitt firing at his fleeing form until all chambers were empty. She ran home and called the police, but detectives could find no trace of the stranger. Hewitt did not get a good look at him and could say only that he was “rough looking” and appeared to have emerged from Spring Grove Cemetery. If her assailant was in fact the killer, it’s a safe bet he kept a low profile until his eye healed.

                In November 1904, the American Magazine offered some opinions about the series of crimes that seem curiously ahead of their time. The writer believed the Spring Grove killer was a sadist, “one whose natural love for the opposite sex is substituted by an uncontrollable desire to torture. Sadists usually begin by torturing animals and hurting a human being only when they think it won’t end in murder. This is as far as they usually get. It is only the sadist with brains and courage who becomes a murderer. The impulse comes on gradually and lasts several days, giving plenty of time to plan crimes…. Whoever the man is the police will probably not catch him by the ordinary methods. Some accident will reveal him if he is caught at all, it is thought, or he may accidentally be caught in the act of another crime….”

                 The writer had a good grasp of the mental workings of serial killers many decades before such monsters became common. FBI profilers such as John Douglas and Robert Ressler have noted that serial killers have an urge to tempt fate by placing themselves in the police’s investigation, perhaps by calling in tips or by joining neighborhood watch groups. The American Magazine’s writer noted a little over one hundred years ago: “Doubtless [the Cincinnati murderer] is one of the men who are contributing to the reward and is one of the men who now carry revolvers at night patrolling the town and looking for the murderer.”

                At this point the murderous attacks in Cumminsville came to a halt. Perhaps the Spring Grove Killer was scared off by the patrols; perhaps he had second thoughts after potential victim Josephine Hewitt fired a few shots at him. Perhaps he simply could no longer find victims near the cemetery, his favorite hiding place, for by November 1904 the area had such a bad reputation lone women refused to go there. (The American Magazine’s writer observed that “not a girl within miles would stir from her house after dark these days.”) Or perhaps the police unwittingly put the killer in jail for some other, less serious crime. Perhaps he temporarily moved away from the area when scrutiny became too intense. Whatever the reason for the cessation of his attacks, the citizens living near Spring Grove slowly relaxed, thinking the worst was over. A little over five years passed with no further Cumminsville atrocities.

                Then on New Year’s Eve, 1910, thirty-six-year-old Anna Lloyd, secretary for the Wiborg-Hanna Lumber Company, was found dead and mutilated in the snow. Like McDonald, Mueller and Steinway, she had been bludgeoned and was found near railroad tracks, which led panicked citizens to believe the Spring Grove Killer was back. But there were key differences: Lloyd had been gagged and, unlike previous victims, her throat had been slashed. The snow around her body was bloody and disturbed for several yards, indicating that she had struggled with her attacker. The gagging and the trampled snow suggested the assailant had spent some time with his victim, while the Spring Grove Killer had been notorious for his lightning-fast attacks. Another significant disparity was that her body was found in North Fairmount rather than in Cumminsville proper.

                On October 25, 1910, thirty-six-year-old Mary Hackney was found murdered in the sitting room of her Canal Ridge house near the railroad tracks at Dane Street. Like the Brainer’s three certain victims, she had been bludgeoned; unlike them, she had also been slashed. Her skull had been fractured in eleven places with a carpenter’s hatchet and her throat had been so deeply cut that she had been nearly decapitated. In a manner eerily reminiscent of the Axman who would commence terrorizing New Orleans only a year later, the killer left the bloody hatchet behind on the rear porch. Mrs. Hackney’s purse containing $8.75 was found nearby, so the motive appeared not to be robbery. The coroner found undigested coffee in her stomach. The Hackneys’ chickens had not been released from their coops, and she had not yet done her morning washing. These signs indicated that she had been murdered very early in the morning. Police had three prime suspects: the victim’s husband, Harley Hackney, an ex-soldier from Williamsburg, KY; a boarder who called himself Charles Eckert, but who was later revealed to be a runaway named Charles Nabor; and milkman Herman Schwering, who had called on the house early on the day of the murder.

                Eckert and Schwering were arrested, questioned and released for lack of evidence, but things looked mighty warm for Mr. Hackney for a time. He was suspected because his late wife had been in the habit of confiscating all of his pay except for one quarter per week which she generously let him keep for his own personal use. Also, Eckert claimed that a few days before the murder, Mr. Hackney had told him that wished he could be rid of his wife and rejoin the army. Investigators were puzzled by Hackney’s callous attitude concerning the murder of his wife. When a man expressed interest in buying his chickens, the less-than-bereaved widower joked: “We’ll kill them with the same hatchet [used to demolish Mrs. Hackney’s head]. No, we won’t. The coroner has that.” On the subject of his wife’s insurance money, Hackney told a Cincinnati Enquirer reporter: “It won’t take all that money to bury her, and you can bet I am going to be on hand and see that I get what is left over.” The coroner believed the murderer was left handed, and Mr. Hackney happened to be left handed.

                Despite these intriguing facts, and the fact that the Enquirer spent days reprinting for public consumption every rumor and innuendo obtainable from nosy neighbors, Mr. Hackney was able to prove that he had been at work when his wife met her killer. Bloody fingerprints had been found in the house on a portion of a rear door casing; the police cut it out and took it to headquarters. The prints did not match Mr. Hackney, Eckert or Schwering. Perhaps this piece of evidence still rests forgotten in a dust-covered box in the storage bins of the Cincinnati Police Department.

                The Enquirer stated on October 28: “The police are watching a man who is said to have acted suspiciously after the murders of Lulu Mueller and Alma Steingeweg some years ago. He is said to have disappeared immediately after the murders for some days, and it is said that he was working within a short distance of the Hackney home when the woman was killed.” The man was never identified in print and nothing came of the clue. In the end, the murder was never solved.

                A year after Mary Hackney’s murder, on October 11, 1911, a woman was found lying in a back yard on Agnes Street, Cumminsville. She was seventeen-year-old Edna Hogg, and she was bound, gagged and unconscious, but alive. The press stated that her injuries were believed to be fatal but appears not to have run any follow-up stories. A note written in a barely literate scrawl was found pinned to her dress: “Sorry we did not have acid to throw on her, too. From the one you did not like.” (Did “you” refer to the authorities or to Miss Hogg? If the latter, it suggests that the attacker and his victim were acquainted.) After this incident all was quiet in Cumminsville and the Spring Grove Killer terrified people only in local legend. Gradually he was forgotten. Perhaps his bones now nourish the worms in the same cemetery from whence he once spied on his victims.

                After so many years and so few clues, all we can do is speculate. It is clear that the same man killed McDonald, Mueller and Steinway in 1904, while the attacks after the six year respite have significant differences from the earlier slayings: Lloyd and Hogg had been gagged, Lloyd and Hackney had been slashed as well as beaten, Hackney had been murdered indoors rather than near Spring Grove Cemetery, Hogg was left with a written message from her assailant. The three later attacks cannot safely be attributed to the Spring Grove Killer. The same man (though not necessarily the Spring Grove Killer) may indeed have murdered Lloyd and Hackney, as the doctor who did an autopsy on Hackney reported that the two women suffered nearly identical injuries. On the other hand, there had been an attempted sexual assault upon Lloyd but not upon Hackney.

                Almost three years after the death of Alma Steinway, another man was apprehended on suspicion of being the killer: Christ Koehl, a painter by trade. Not long after the murders, Koehl had moved to Portsmouth. Allegedly he told his coworkers that he had traveled from Cincinnati; they noticed that he refused to discuss the murders, and that he wore white shoes and a brown coat, which they thought matched one description of the Spring Grove Killer. When this was pointed out to him, Koehl quickly disposed of the clothes. When his suspicious fellow painters asked him about his past he offered a vague reply, and then abruptly took off for Columbus on the excuse that he had received a telegram stating that his mother was dying. Allegedly, after Koehl fled Portsmouth a bloody hammer was found in his room.

                Koehl’s coworkers informed the Columbus police about him, and over the next year the authorities narrowly missed catching him once or twice. At last Koehl, age twenty-two, was arrested on West Broad Street on September 14, 1907. Koehl protested that he had lived at 3006 Bendville Avenue, New Orleans, all his life until June 8, when he went to Louisville, KY, for three weeks. Then he had moved to Columbus, where he had gotten a job as a mechanic. The only time he had ever been in Cincinnati was when he was en route from Louisville to Columbus.

                Whatever evidence there was against Koehl—and it seems pretty thin—was not enough to impress the authorities in Cincinnati, one of whom, Chief Millikin, sent a letter to Columbus noting that no good description of the murderer had ever been released. It was true that the police had been given a pair of white shoes that allegedly had belonged to the killer, but the Cincinnati detectives had “traced the ownership and proved conclusively that he was not the man.” The hapless painter’s coworkers were mistaken, in other words. Soon afterwards, Christ Koehl was set free due to lack of evidence.

                What information can we deduce about the Spring Grove Killer after all these years which may yet lead to his identification? The perpetrator of the 1904 killings probably lived very close to Spring Grove. It is hard to believe he stayed outside for long periods in the November cold just waiting for prey. Though the area near the cemetery was not well lit, it was full of activity: a streetcar stop was located nearby, people went to and came from work, and sweethearts strolled down the lovers’ lane. After the second or third murder, the killer must have known the area would be under constant scrutiny. Likely he lived in a house or apartment near the cemetery, from which he could comfortably watch for potential victims and to where he could escape quickly after committing a crime. Possibly he had a job that gave him an excuse to be out in the cemetery after hours, such as night watchman or gravedigger.

                The Spring Grove Cemetery Association kept a small shelter house in a corner of the cemetery, and it was theorized that the killer might have hidden there before and after his murders. Detectives found that the rear door of the house was blocked only with a light wooden bench, which meant the murderer could easily have traveled in and out of Spring Grove that way rather than by scaling the fence. One Mr. Emerson, who ran an automobile shop, stated that he had seen a man pacing inside the building around 8:00 on the night Alma Steinway was slain. Emerson did not get a good look at him but thought he was carrying a club and nervously snapping his fingers. A streetcar driver saw a man of the same general description at 8:40, leaning against the fence behind the cemetery’s shelter house. He was standing in the same position when the driver made the return trip at 9:02, only a few feet from the spot where Steinway was murdered around 9:30. The streetcar’s headlight illuminated the stranger for mere seconds, but the driver saw that he was a stoutly built man of medium size who wore dark clothes. His face was not visible, for his coat collar was turned up and his slouch hat was pulled down low. A few more details were added by a third witness, Frank Crotty, who saw the man up close and personal as he ventured past Crotty on the sidewalk around 7:50 p.m. Crotty claimed the man was about 5’8”, weighed about 150 pounds, was clean-shaven and in his mid-thirties. Crotty also noticed that the stranger wore new shoes. The heel prints of new shoes had been found at the Steinway crime scene, and an old pair of badly worn canvas shoes wrapped in a newspaper was left behind. (The shelter house was used in the daytime by a florist named K. Wolff. It will be remembered that suspect Henry Swears worked for a florist, though I have been unable to determine if Wolff was his employer. Perhaps the police, who often showed staggering incompetence when investigating the murders, dismissed Swears as a suspect too soon. As he does not turn up in the 1910 Ohio census, it could be inferred that he abandoned the state when the heat was on.)

                A viable alternate theory is that the murderer might have been a railroad man since the three canonical victims were found dead near railroad tracks. Or perhaps the killer was a hobo who regularly rode into Cumminsville on the train, went to his favored hiding spot, murdered his victims, then rode the rails out of town afterwards. Since trains run on fixed schedules, it might not be coincidence that the murders of McDonald, Mueller and Steinway each took place around the beginning of the month. Finally, assuming the later murders were the work of copycats, the researcher looking for the serial killer’s identity must seek someone who went to jail, died, fled town, or was otherwise incapacitated after November 1904.

The Serial Killer in the Cemetery

“Arrest is Expected This Afternoon.” Louisville Times 4 Nov. 1904: 1.

“Arrested for Cincinnati Strangling Mysteries.” Columbus Evening Dispatch 14 Sep. 1907: 1.

“Arrests Made in Murder Case.” Cincinnati Enquirer 6 Oct. 1904: 5.

“Bloody Bowlder [sic].” Cincinnati Enquirer 9 Oct. 1904: 9.

“Box Contained Cocaine.” Cincinnati Enquirer 7 Oct. 1904: 7.

“Bulletins.” Louisville Times 7 Nov. 1904: 1.

“Christ Koehl is to Soon Go Free.” Columbus Evening Dispatch 17 Sep. 1907: 3.

“Cincinnati Does Not Seem Anxious.” Columbus Evening Dispatch 16 Sep. 1907: 3.

“Cincinnati Mystery.” New Orleans Daily Picayune 12 Oct. 1911: 2.

“Cincinnati’s Murder Mystery Still Unsolved.” Louisville Times 5 Nov. 1904: 7.

“Clews Only Deepen Mystery.” Cincinnati Enquirer 5 Oct. 1904.

“Clubbed to Death.” Louisville Courier-Journal 4 Nov. 1904: 1.

“Find Girl Unconscious in ‘Murder District.’” Louisville Courier-Journal 12 Oct. 1911: 1.

“Fog Concealed Assassin…” Cincinnati Enquirer 4 Nov. 1904: 12, 4.

“Fourth Victim.” Louisville Courier-Journal 2 Jan. 1910, Section II: 10.

“Girl Repels the Ripper.” Iowa Recorder [Greene, IA] 23 Nov. 1904.

“Husband of Mary Hackney Closely Questioned…” Cincinnati Enquirer 27 Oct. 1910: 9.

“In the Cemetery.” Cincinnati Enquirer 8 Nov. 1904: 12.

“The Mueller Murder Mystery.” Cincinnati Enquirer 4 Oct. 1904: 3.

“Mutilated Body of Young Wife.” Cincinnati Enquirer 26 Oct. 1910: 8.

“Mysterious Murderer Who Hides Among the Grave Stones.” American Magazine supplement, San Francisco Examiner 27 Nov. 1904: 8.

“No Solution…” Louisville Times 4 Nov. 1904: 4.

“Not Blood on Crutch.” Cincinnati Enquirer 7 Oct. 1904: 7.

“Police Believe the Girl was Murdered.” Louisville Courier-Journal 2 Oct. 1904, Section    II: 4.

“Positive Proof of Foul Crime…” Cincinnati Enquirer 5 Nov. 1904: 9.

“Scene of Hackney Murder…” Cincinnati Enquirer 31 Oct. 1910: 12.

“Shoes May Furnish a Clew…” Cincinnati Enquirer 7 Nov. 1904: 10.

“Stoutly Built Man With Slouch Hat…” Cincinnati Enquirer 6 Nov. 1904: 9.

“Subpoena Served on Hackney.” Cincinnati Enquirer 30 Oct. 1910: 9.

“Suspected of Two Murders…” Columbus Evening Dispatch 15 Sep. 1907: 3.

“Suspects Let Go By Police.” Cincinnati Enquirer 28 Oct. 1910: 14.

Tesch, Jeffrey K. “ ‘Murder Zone’ Killer Paralyzed the Queen City in Ripper-like Fear.” Louisville.com. 4 Oct. 2004 <http://louisville.com/indexdisplay.html?article=9339>.

“Thousands of Morbidly Curious…” Cincinnati Enquirer 3 Oct. 1904: 10.

“Tragic Fate of Mary Hackney Seems Near Solution…” Cincinnati Enquirer 29 Oct. 1910: 18.