CLEWS Your Home for Historic True Crime

On Hiatus

I've got a big ol' pile of true crime books begging to be enjoyed, so I think I'll take a pause in posting to do just that and probably won't have anything new for you 'til next week.

In the meantime, I'll tell you about some really cool websites and stories that some Clews visitors have shared with me:

The unsolved murders that took place in Villisca, Iowa, in 1912 still fascinate Iowans today. A movie has come out about the case, and the supporting website offers facts, photos, and theories. Fascinating case.

The folks at Cliopatra have compiled a history blogroll that has been published on The History News Network with blogs organized by category. "Clews" is under "other" -- thanks!

Baltimore now has its own website devoted to matters criminal -- Baltimore Crime.

The "Original Night Stalker" case has attracted the attention of many people; there is a comprehensive website devoted to the case and an active discussion on the A&E Network's Viewer Forum.

Todd Matthews was one of the first people to break open a cold case -- a very cold case -- using the internet. His website tells the story of the discovery of a girl's body in Kentucky in 1968. Nobody had any idea who she was for 30 years, and she was dubbed "the Tent Girl." Matthews, who was the son-in-law of the man who found the girl's body, became obsessed with the case, poring over newspaper accounts for years, traveling, studying, and dreaming about the case, before his dogged search finally led him to missing persons websites on the internet -- where after years of hunting he finally came across a family looking for a young woman whose description met the Tent Girl's body. DNA testing confirmed the indentification. It's a fascinating story, and I expect to see it take another form -- book, radio, movie? -- some time soon.

Have a great weekend, and I'll see you in October.

Miss Hartley's Defense

In 1894, the Bank of Nevada Building in Reno was a three-story affair. On the first floor presided the wealthy president of the bank, M.D. Foley, 44, a former state senator and one of Reno's leading citizens. The second floor held medical and law offices. On the third, where the rent was cheapest, resided one Alice Maud Hartley, a beautiful portrait painter.

But on a late afternoon in July of that year, Reno's businessmen found the normal bustle of commerce interrupted by a pair of gunshots from inside the bank building.

A lawyer and a doctor tentatively stuck their heads outside their office doors and were stunned to see the banker, M.D. Foley, staggering down the stairs from the top floor with a gunshot wound in his chest. The medical man led the wounded banker into his office as the latter stated the obvious: "Doctor, I am shot and am a dead man." This became true almost immediately.

In the meantime, the lawyer looked to the staircase, and he saw Miss Hartley, the small, brown-haired, grey-eyed, 30-year-old artist, standing on the landing with a pistol in her hand. Advancing toward the lawyer, she demanded that he summon the police.

When the uniformed man appeared, Miss Hartley said, "I believe you are the sheriff," and she handed him her gun. "I surrender as your prisoner."

The sheriff obligated her, though the jail had no cells for women; Miss Hartley was locked up in the courthouse and put under guard. At her arraignment, she was represented by the same lawyer who met her on the stairs. She confidently pleaded not guilty, declining to explain why she killed the banker, but it was apparent soon enough that she was to be a mother in the near future, and this was the first clew to the motive behind the fatal shooting.

Alice Hartley was put on trial for murder in September of that year in the Washoe County Court. The women of Reno were particularly interested in the story and packed the courtroom; many had already come to the conclusion that the married banker and the beautiful painter were secret sweethearts, her life had been wrecked by pending maternity, and it was the banker's fault.

Their assumptions found proof when Miss Hartley took the witness stand. She described an affair with the banker that made him appear to be a coercive ogre. He frequently called on me, she said, staying long past a reasonable hour... he demanded that I drink brandy with him... his expressions grew warm, causing me to grow fearful... he stayed until daybreak... and so her story continued, herky-jerky.

Three hours later, the fact of their relationship was finally established as the spectators blushed and tittered and made other noises. This scene was repeated for another five hours the following day until she finally reached the point of conception. At that time, she testified, she asked the banker to acknowledge the child to come. He stopped visiting. A quarrel followed on the fatal day, during which the banker struck her, she said, and denied the child; he said he would "buy some men with a few twenty-dollar pieces to testify to anything."

That's when she grabbed the pistol, and the rest was well known. But when it came time to describe the shooting, the heavily pregnant defendant descended into hysterics, repeatedly fleeing the courtroom to be corralled in the hallway and returned to the stand.

The reaction to this pitiful tale was mixed in Reno. Many prominent women of the town took the lady's side in the matter, but others considered her a fallen woman, best convicted of her crime. One woman minister who visited and consoled her, Mila Tupper Maynard, was ostracized and had to leave Nevada.

The all-male jury was sympathetic, but the facts and the law were clear. They convicted Miss Hartley of second-degree murder.

For a moment, the defendant sat still. Then she stood and turned to the jury, saying, "Gentlemen, I thank you. I had hoped that you would exonerate me."

After her conviction, bail was granted, since nobody wanted to see the baby born in the courthouse. The convicted murderess had a baby boy, Vernon Harrison Hartley, and a few weeks later she received a sentence of eleven years in prison. After losing her appeal, she entered a women's penitentiary the next summer with her baby.

Almost immediately, an effort began to obtain her release, and the Pardon Board found itself ankle-deep in petitions for clemency. When one of these documents arrived containing the signatures of the very jurors who convicted her, the Parole Board relented, and after serving 1 1/2 years in prison, Miss Hartley and her little boy were released.

Miss Hartley promptly moved back to Reno and brought suit on behalf of her son against the Foley estate. The case dragged on in the courts, and at every hearing, the lively little baby was a prominent figure. But Miss Hartley's life again took a tragic twist when the baby died at the age of two from scarlet fever. She eventually lost the claim on the Foley estate and left Nevada for good.

Miss Hartley appeared in the newspapers on two more occasions before falling into obscurity. In 1897, she created a drama inside San Francisco's Emanuel Church. At the time, the city was rocked by a dramatic murder case involving one Durrant; the minister of the church preached about the case. Durrant had been convicted and sentenced to hang for the rape and murder of women inside the church (see the Court TV Crime Library essay on the Durrant case). At the end of the sermon, Miss Hartley stood, and before the entire assembly, she declared that she had a message from God that Durrant was innocent, his life should be saved, and the congregation should make it a duty to see to this. Her speech was successful only in putting her on the front page again.

Her name appeared in the newspapers only one more time in 1899, when she married a San Francisco lawyer named William S. Bonnifield (who so happened to be nephew of one of the Supreme Court justices who sat on the Pardon Board in Nevada and voted to grant her release). One has to wonder whether the wedding guests confined their congratulations to the bride.

Sources:

"Mrs. [sic] Hartley's Case. Application for Pardon Denied - Interesting Proceedings - Will She Get A Rehearing of Her Case or Go to State Prison with Her Baby Boy?" Daily Nevada State Journal, June 4, 1895.

"The Hartley-Foley Case Continued Until After Thanksgiving - Its Consideration To-Day," Daily Nevada State Journal, Nov. 26, 1896.

"Dust to Dust. Death of Little Vernon Harrison Hartley," Reno Weekly Gazette and Stockman, Feb. 25, 1897.

"The Foley Estate. A Jury Procured and the Trial Commenced," Reno Weekly Gazette, June 10, 1897.

"Foley Estate Case. The Hartley Interest and the Dead Man's Property," Reno Weekly Gazette and Stockman, June 24, 1897.

"In Emanuel Church. Alice Hartley Creates a Scene Over the Durrant Murder," Fort Wayne Sentinel, Dec. 13, 1897.

"Fatal Shooting in 1894 Rocked Reno to its Roots; Trial Had Drama and Histrionics; Two Shots One July Afternoon Launched Strange Sequence of Events," by Peggy Trego, Reno State Journal, April 8, 1951.

San Francisco Genealogy

So… what brings you here?

As a Typepad blogger, I have access to a report that details the “referring site,” so I know with specificity what search someone has typed into Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL Search, or the fancy new Google Blogsearch to reach my site. Some of the searches have made me laugh out loud. Here’s a sampling of the strange queries I’ve seen – what do you suppose they were looking for?

cruel + punishment +matron

historical adulterers

crime trend sin Jamaica

gagged priestess

ex-wives

true stories of corpse abuse

"she enjoyed torturing"

And someone out there has desperately sought photos of Court TV correspondent Amanda Grove for months now.

If you are looking for something specific and don't see it here, and there's nothing else on the internet about it, and it falls within the realm of historical true crime (i.e. before 1985, preferably long before 1985), let me know, I might be able to dig something up for you. Leave a note under Comments or send me an email (just be sure to put Clews or something in the reference line, because I'm very likely to delete anything remotely looking like junk mail). But if you're looking for a "gagged priestess" or anything else listed above, I can't help you there, pal.

Next up -- I'm studying a case from Reno, Nevada, in the 1890s -- the stunning true story of a wronged woman who... well, you'll have to wait for the rest.

Two Women and a Razor, or the Trials of Jessie Morrison

In El Dorado, Kansas, at the turn of the last century, a love triangle assumed its ancient form, but this one had a wickedly sharp edge to it and would give the people of Kansas fresh sensations for many years and one of the most remarkable criminal cases in its history.

The apex of this triangle was Olin Castle, son of an undertaker, a handsome man of 24 who worked as a variety store clerk. Alongside him worked a clerk by the name of Jessie Morrison, the daughter of a former probate judge, who at 27 was staring down the barrel of spinsterhood. Jessie was desperately in love with Mr. Castle, and he reciprocated her affections. But his head was turned by a neighbor, Claire Wiley, who was younger and prettier.

Castle decided on the younger lady, and they were wed on June 13, 1900, defying superstition as to the date.

Jessie did not take the news well. Eight days after the Wiley-Castle nuptials, Jessie Morrison paid a call on her former rival in the bride’s new home.

Then the neighbors heard the new Mrs. Castle screaming.

When the women who lived nearby rushed into the Castle home, they found Claire Castle lying on the dining room floor, bleeding heavily from her throat. Jessie Morrison was standing over her with a straight razor in her hand. They pulled Jessie away and took her to the authorities, who spirited her to jail.

Claire Castle was terribly wounded, suffering from numerous severe cuts. She gave a written statement explaining that Jessie Morrison had called on her uninvited, started an argument, and attacked her. Mrs. Castle died eighteen days later (probably of a massive infection), but not before expressing her forgiveness for what Jessie had done.

Jessie Morrison was put on trial for murder in the Butler County Courthouse in November, 1900. The evidence against her was damning. The key witness for the prosecution was Mrs. Spangler, the first neighbor to enter the Castle home. She told the jurymen that she saw Claire Castle lying on the floor, her torn dress saturated with blood; Claire was screaming, “Get off me, Jessie Morrison! You are killing me!” Mrs. Spangler grabbed Jessie. “I said: ‘Woman, what have you done?’” Mrs. Spangler testified. “She said she had killed Mrs. Castle and would kill me. ‘I cut her all to pieces with a razor,’ she said.” Seven other neighbors who witnessed the immediate aftermath of the attack corroborated Mrs. Spangler’s testimony.

Things looked dark indeed for Jessie Morrison, and the newspapers reported that she looked dejected as the trial began. The penalty for murder was death by hanging. When her victim’s dying declaration was read into evidence, Jessie’s chest heaved and she gulped continually.

But then it was the defense’s turn. The lead defense attorney suggested that the whole affair was Mr. Castle’s fault, that he stimulated jealousy between the two women, and “Mrs. Castle is better off in her grave than living with such a man as he had shown himself to be.” The defense claimed that Jessie Morrison was acting in self-defense.

Miss Morrison testified at the trial and was quiet and self-possessed. She claimed that on the day of the tragedy, she so happened to be passing the Castle home when Claire called her into the house, accused her of trying to end the new marriage, and when Jessie denied it, called her a liar. Per Jessie’s testimony, Claire Castle began the fight, grabbing her husband’s razor, and compelled Jessie to attack her to save herself.

The prosecution matched this testimony with evidence from numerous witnesses that the razor in question actually came from a display in the store where Jessie Morrison and Mr. Castle worked.

And thus the case was presented to the jury, but the men who heard this evidence were unable to reach the same conclusion, and the case ended in a mistrial. Jessie Morrison had to be tried a second time in the spring of 1901. On the next go-round, the jury again had a great deal of difficulty and wrangled for nearly 30 hours. All but one juror saw through her wretched excuses and fought to convict her of murder in the first degree. The lone holdout for an acquittal finally agreed to a compromise, and the jury announced its decision: a conviction for second-degree manslaughter. The penalty was three to five years in prison.

Miss Morrison should have accepted this stroke of luck and served her brief stretch. But her attorneys appealed to the Kansas Supreme Court, which granted her a new trial. The third time Jessie tried her luck in 1903, the jury convicted her of second-degree murder, and she was sentenced to 25 years in prison.

As Jessie began serving her sentence, an hysterical agitation gripped Kansas, and public sympathy for the prisoner reached the highest political levels. The Kansas Supreme Court, citing bias in the trial judge, ordered a fourth trial. But before yet another proceeding could be held, Governor Stubbs ordered her parole in 1910 (on condition that she go to church). The governor declared that Jessie Morrison’s first trial “more nearly gave justice than the two following.” But the forgiving voters of Kansas were not thoroughly satisfied with her release, and following the public opinion, the succeeding Governor Hodges gave Jessie Morrison a full and unconditional pardon in 1913.

After her parole and pardon, Jessie Morrison moved to West Virginia and took up a quiet life. Olin Castle married again – the second time to a woman reporter who fell in love with him while covering the Morrison trials for the El Dorado Republican.

And the rest of us are left with a mystery to ponder. In the face of devastating evidence that Jessie Morrison was a cold-blooded murderess, a jealous monster who cut down her rival for spite, how did she manage to secure such outcomes? Her gender had everything to do with it. The death penalty also may well have been a key factor; she certainly wasn’t the first woman (nor would she be the last) to escape a first-degree murder conviction in a death penalty state in the face of overwhelming evidence. One is forced to conclude that some of the jurors, the Supreme Court, two governors, and a majority of the people of Kansas were more horrified by the prospect of seeing the body of a woman swinging from a stout rope than by the body of a young bride lying on the floor in a pool of her own blood.

Sources:

1900 Census, El Dorado, Kansas; 1910 Census, Kansas State Penitentiary

"Jessie Morrison's Story," Sandusky Daily Star, Dec. 8, 1900.

"Favors the Defendant. Judge's Instructions in the Morrison Case," Anaconda Standard, Dec. 9, 1900.

"State's Case is Finished," Anaconda Standard, June 20, 1901.

"Verdict Reached. Sensation [sic] Murder Trial Ends in Finding Miss Morrison Guilty," Davenport Daily Leader, June 28, 1901.

"Jessie Found Guilty. Jury Agreed on Manslaughter in the Second Degree. Received the Verdict Stoically," Delphos (Ohio) Daily Herald, June 28, 1901.

"Jessie Morrison Guilty of Manslaughter," Humeston (Iowa) New Era, July 3, 1901.

"Jessie Morrison Released," Lima Times Democrat, Oct. 9, 1902.

"Jessie Morrison Gets Full Pardon; Governor of Kansas Frees Convicted Slayer of Rival," Sheboygan (Wisconsin) Press, Feb. 26, 1913.

"Man Whose Wife Was Killed by Jessie Morrison Has Married Again," Newark Advocate, April 22, 1903.

More Cool Links

Feeling lazy today, your correspondent thought to share some fascinating links on true crime and other subjects not unrelated to same. So, with no further ado, let me introduce these interesting stories and sites I've stumbled across lately -- you might like these as much as I do:

The Gainesville (Fla.) Sun tells of an intriguing new effort to solve old crimes. Since cold case squads are short on manpower and long on unsolved murders (see Stacy Horn's excellent new book, The Restless Sleep, which gives the lowdown on why), some advanced criminal justice students at St. Leo University have decided to tackle an unanswered string of murders that took place in their corner of Florida in 1975-77. It's thrilling to see enthusiastic amateurs get access to the files and a chance to take on the cases that police officials lack the resources to tackle. If they manage to find some answers -- and they've already sent some evidence to a DNA lab -- that could herald something revolutionary on the cold-crime-fighting front. Go, St. Leo!

Mysterious People is a website that tells the stories of psychics, mediums, feral children, impostors, eccentrics, and other occult and curious figures in (primarily British) history.

The Serial Killer True Crime Library has a very long list of the worst of the worst, organized by name, country, and/or date (you choose). What sets this site apart from the many others devoted to serial killers is its sheer breadth and respectful approach to the subject matter.

Famous Trials, written by Professor Douglas Linder, relays the stories of dozens of the most well-known trials in legal history, with links to original materials.

Meanwhile, I'm digging into some then-famous-now-thoroughly-forgotten trials myself. I think I'll next tell the tale of a fascinating murder case from Kansas in 1901 with facts and an outcome that beg credulity. I'm also reading some pretty good books lately, so... more to come.

As always thanks for stopping by.

Profiling the Borgias

Poisoners are sneaky. Non-confrontational. Insidious, because the victim doesn’t stand a chance.

But what else do they have in common? What personality traits distinguish the poisoner from other types of murderers? A scientist from Michigan is about to find the answer, undertaking what is believed to be the first comprehensive study of the psychology of criminal poisoners. And the study that John H. Trestrail III, author, forensic toxicologist, and pharmacist, is about to begin will have a strong historical focus, while using the same methodologies that the FBI Behavioral Science Unit used to profile serial sexual killers—namely, interviews with living specimens.

Trestrail, managing director of a regional poisoning center in Grand Rapids, Michigan, has already authored a manual for the FBI on investigating criminal poisonings. (He’s also asked to consult with authors and TV show producers on poisons, but says he doesn’t feel comfortable broadcasting detailed knowledge on the subject of how it’s done; there are real poisoners out there, he says, who might think to themselves, “Hey, I have some of that in my garage….”)

His manual, Criminal Poisoning: An Investigational Guide for Law Enforcement, Toxicologists, Forensic Scientists, and Attorneys examines all that is known about the use of poison as a weapon in murder and reaches quite far back. Trestrail drew on his own collection of 1,000 books going back 300 years to review the various poisons that murderers have used over the generations.

With such a vast body of historical, scientific, and anecdotal knowledge, Trestrail will approach his study of the psychology of poisoners with some hypotheses. For one thing, he believes that love and money are the principal motivators for poisonings. Although most known poisoners are men, he thinks that most criminal poisoners are actually female – they’re just better at getting away with it. It is women who caretake the sick, make the meals, clean the house… and when they end lives with poisons, they are not as often caught. Trestrail also notes that almost half (!) of the poisoners who have been caught had more than one victim.

Trestrail’s earlier book explained how poisoners accomplish their foul deeds. This new work-in-progress will explain who. That ought to fascinate armchair criminal psychologists everywhere. I can’t wait to read that book.

Source:

Michigan Public Radio interview with Trestrail on Sept. 16, 2005.

My Queer Books

The collector of criminology -- the genuine collector, who delights the dealers by purchasing with a lavish hand and never reading anything -- this gentleman fills his shelves with old books and pamphlets and all the stock stuff on the order of the Newgate Calendar. This famous collection, with its variations and successors, is the dealer's darling. It has all the requisites which make him love a book: moderate rarity, high price, and contents which are frequently so dull and stereotyped as to be nearly unreadable.

--"From Sudden Death," in Queer Books, Edmund L. Pearson (Kennikat Press, 1928)

As you might imagine, I have quite the crime library and have amassed an impressive collection of non-fiction crime books over the years. I often have to make a run to the home improvement store for yet another set of bookshelves to house the burgeoning mass of stuff I simply cannot bring myself to part with. Thank goodness this old farmhouse has enough rooms to shelter my library, my delightful hubby, and my cute little baby boy, because I'd hate to have to choose between them.

When Amazon started selling out-of-print titles a few years ago, I busted my budget every month, delighted to find some of the obscure historical titles that have been on my "Must Get" list for ages. Another wonderful source for the immoderate collector is a library book sale, and these are easily found via The Book Sale Finder, an online guide to used book sales at libraries and other places throughout North America (you can even sign up for an email alert to tell you of all the sales within X miles of your home). Two of the best used book dealers for the crime enthusiast are Powell's Books and Patterson Smith, both of whom have pleased me with a positive response to an obscure request.

But like anything else in the universe -- was it Harlan Ellison who said that 90% of everything in the universe is shit? -- there are some real turkeys in this genre, and some have found their way onto my shelves. I'll describe three of them for you here, but only if you promise to do the same, if you've had the misfortune to come across something really awful in this broad genre I call home (literally, haha).

The worst true crime account I've ever read sure sounded like a good read. The Holmes-Pitezel Case (or, to give the full title its due here, The Holmes-Pitezel Case, A History of the Greatest Crime of the Century and of the Search for the Missing Pitezel Children) by Detective Frank P. Geyer (Publishers' Union, 1896) is an account of the cross-continental manhunt for a serial killer who had kidnapped three little kids. The killer was H.H. Holmes, recently brought back from obscurity by The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson, generally known as the first serial killer (identified as such!) in the United States.

"It is not possible to find in the annals of criminal jurisprudence," Geyer begins, "a more deliberate and cold blooded villain than the central figure in this story...." Nor is it possible to find a more plodding, unemotional, and tedious account than the one that this detective unfortunately set down on paper. Sad to say, Geyer did not catch the killer before he took the lives of the children, but Geyer does describe his nausea at discovering their bodies -- not because of the crushing sadness of their horrifying murders or his own failure to save them (and there is nothing remotely touching these points to be found between the covers of this awful book), but because of their state of putrification, carefully described.

Even if Detective Geyer manages to bore your eyes closed with that tepid account, he holds no candle to a book I found at a garage sale and whose author I detest -- to the point that I refuse to stain my screen or yours by naming him. Suffice it to say that he's a turd that the Devil must've shit out after a particularly bad day in Hell, and may the SOB rot there forever. This convicted rapist-murderer decided to write a book which, again, I cannot bring myself to name, and in which he lovingly describes how he tortured and violated and killed children and young women, going on and on in detailed descriptions of their every minute reaction to this horror visited upon them. The Playboy Press actually printed this pile of shit in 1974, when raping and killing young women seemed to be the vogue, and there was an entire subgenre of "serial killer confessionals" finding their ways into American homes and minds. Thank God that the Son of Sam laws have more or less put an end to the publication of this sort of filth.

Boredom and horror aside, the queerest book in my collection is undoubtedly Euthanasia, The Aesthetics of Suicide (New York: The Truth Seeker Co., 1894) by "Baron Harden Hickey" (a/k/a James Aloysius Harden-Hickey). I'd seen many references to this book in others, couldn't find a copy anywhere, and paid an embarrassing amount of money to have Proquest xerox me a copy in its "Books on Demand" program.

Now this is one queer book. I learned the hard way that it is more talked about than actually read, and many of the things said to be said in this book, i.e. in The People's Almanac on Harden-Hickey, are not actually true. What Harden-Hickey did in this tome is promote suicide as a be all, end all. The first paragraph alone will give you the full flavor:

Among the numerous deceptions which bestrew the road of whomsoever searches his path amidst crumbling creeds, tottering philosophies and rickety scientific systems, there is a consolation in the thought which lights the way of the earnest seeker like a flaming beacon, casting afar its beneficient blaze, and this thought tells him that Truth must finally triumph, and that all the superstitions heaped up during the centuries by avaricious and knavish priests, all the false and trite theories emitted by vain philosophers, all the hoaxes elaborated by cranky scientists, must eventually disappear, swept away by Truth, as radiant sun drives away the dismal fog before its golden rays.

Harden-Hickey did not actually suggest "88 poisons and 51 instruments that could be used for self-destruction," which, if I may defend myself, was the historical point that interested me. Rather, he goes on to fill the pages with quotes on the subject of suicide by "the greatest thinkers the world has produced: Zeno, Epictetus, Diogenes, Seneca, Cicero, Marcus Arelius, Montaigne, Rousseau, Donne, Hume, Gibbon, Montesquieu, etc.," but the quotes that follow are bare of attribution so the book is useless even as a reference for that purpose. After publishing this very strange book, Harden-Hickey ended his own life with morphine. Which might be a good thing, considering what other tomes he could've produced had he allowed himself to live beyond the age of 44.

Despite the duds, I unabashedly continue my collecting, and I promise to continue the book reports. Now, if you're reading my blog, and you've read this far, maybe you have some true crime turkeys of your own. Do share.

"I just go weed my onions"

In September of 1881, the typical peace and quiet of Davenport, Iowa, were shattered by news of murder. On a farm eleven miles north of the city, on the Happy Hollow Road, a young woman named Dora Heilwagner was shot and killed. Suspicion soon centered on the only other person known to have been at her farmhouse at the time: her elderly father-in-law, William Heilwagner, a Bavarian immigrant who hated her for her wild behavior.

A chain of circumstantial evidence wrapped itself around the old man, who made no real effort to explain or defend himself. Justice was swift. His trial a few months later lasted for a few days. The prosecution established that he had visited the home of his daughter-in-law on the evening of the murder, and that he had been in a rage over a dispute that had arisen between them concerning the loss of some milk. The evidence included the testimony of the defendant's 17-year-old daughter, who said that her father was drunk on the day of the murder and was railing against Dora, calling her "the low livedest thing around." Early the next morning after the murder, it was demonstrated that Heilwagner shared news of his daughter-in-law's death before anyone else knew she was dead. The exhibits included the defleshed skull of the victim, a not uncommon evidentiary practice at the time.

The defense attorney repeatedly pointed to the lack of direct evidence, the lack of witnesses to prove the state's theory, to no avail. The trial resulted in a conviction and death sentence. A higher court examined the proceedings for flaws, found none, and rendered its approval.

Enter Charles Edward Russell. At the time, he was a reporter for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and was well on his way to becoming one of the most famous reporters of his day. (Later in his life, Russell would put the "ism" in journalism, focusing his prodigious talents on muckraking and exposing the shameful class divisions in American society; among his many accomplishments, he earned a Pulitzer Prize and co-founded the NAACP.)

Russell, a native of Davenport, decided to dig into the case. He went to the jail where Heilwagner was being housed and tried to interview the old man, looking for an exclusive, some break in the case, something to explain some nagging doubts about the evidence. But all the reporter could elicit from the condemned was, "I just go weed my onions." Heilwagner refused to cooperate with any effort to save him. He refused to be visited by a minister. He was unrepentant, uncommunicative. Russell and all others associated with the case became convinced that the correct result was reached, and that Heilwagner was guilty.

The old man was hanged at Rock Island, Illinois, in March, 1882, before a group consisting largely of reporters. His last words: "Gentlemen, I am innocent of this crime." Nobody believed him.

Ten years passed.

Then, in a lodging house in Quincy, Illinois, another man, a wretched, tortured soul, sat down and wrote a long and detailed confession to the crime for which William Heilwagner had been hanged, a confession to the murder of Dora Heilwagner, an explanation that she was murdered because she was an adulteress. He left the note in his room, then took himself to a nearby bridge, threw himself into the water, and drowned.

The suicide was Otto Heilwagner--the old man's son--husband of the victim. The man that old William Heilwagner sacrificed himself to save.

Needless to say, Russell and many other people were horrified by this twist in the tale. Russell heaped blame upon himself for the execution of an innocent: "If I had been expert at my trade I might have saved that man." He came to firmly oppose the death penalty because of the risk of executing people who were not guilty. "The chance is too terrible," he wrote many years later. "We take it in one case in ten when we condemn men to death. Shall we keep taking it?"

Many good-hearted people came to agree with Russell's anti-death-penalty stance. And some very wicked people as well.

Sources:

"Rock Island. The Murder Trial. Wm. Heilwagner Tried for the Murder of Dora Heilweigner on the Night of the 6th of September Last--The Testimony of the Prisoner's Daughter," Davenport Weekly Gazette, Jan. 25, 1882.

"Once When the Wrong Man Was Hanged," The Davenport Democrat and Leader, Dec. 10, 1928.

The Pen is Mightier: The Muckraking Life of Charles Edward Russell, by Robert Miraldi (Palgrave MacMillan, 2003) - an excellent biography of a fascinating man.

Le Muertre et Le Scandale, Or the Mystery of Cecile Combettes and the Prisoner of God

A man who worked as a gravedigger at the St. Aubin cemetery in Toulouse, France, unlocked the gate on an early April morning in 1847. The cemetery was wind-swept and wet, since it had rained the prior evening, and the place smelled of damp earth and flowers... geraniums. As he went about his chores that morning, he noticed a strange sight: a woman was in the cemetery. She was in a corner of the graveyard where two high walls met. On the opposite side of one wall was a religious institution; on the opposite side of the other wall was a public street.

The woman seemed to be kneeling in prayer, though in an awkward position. It looked as though she had been praying in the Islamic style, knees drawn beneath her, but her hands were supporting her head, and her elbows were pointed out at the sides, as though she had grown weary and rested her head. The gravedigger grew nearer, and the woman did not stir. He touched her--and saw that she was dead.

The gravedigger's discovery solved a mystery that had arisen the day before when a girl of about fifteen disappeared. She was last seen alive on the grounds next to the cemetery, which were owned by the Institute of Christian Bretheren, which housed 500 men of holy orders.

Cecile Combettes was an apprentice in the employ of a bookbinder named Bertrand Conte. Conte and Cecile, along with an older woman, had visited the Institute the morning before to deliver some baskets of books. Conte had dismissed the older woman, gave Ceclie orders to wait for him in the entrance hall, and had gone about his business with the Bretheren for forty or fifty minutes. When he returned to the hall, Cecile was nowhere to be found. Conte did not particularly concern himself and later said he assumed the girl had gone to visit her sick mother. He went about his business, and the only persons who seem to have taken notice of the girl's disappearance were members of her family.

The discovery of Cecile's body quickly became the focus of intense police scrutiny, and they made minute examination of the scene in the cemetery. It would later be said that there were no footprints in the soft earth around her body, and the ivy covering the wall between the cemetery and the street was undisturbed, so the only logical explanation for the position of the body was that she was thrown over the wall from the garden of the Bretheren. But this, too, proved a puzzle, for how could the body of a ninety-pound girl be thrown from a height of ten feet and land so? Had her body been gripped by rigor mortis before it was so thrown? Or had the police overlooked the footprints of the beast who may have posed her?

A police surgeon determined that poor Cecile had been violated and then killed with a heavy blow to her skull and died shortly after eating her breakfast. Trace evidence formed the bulk of the scientific proof [for trace evidence was well known at the time, contrary to the expectations and assertions of many shallow modern-day students of criminal law who assume that criminology was in the Dark Ages as late as the 19th century]. A thorough examination was made of the dirt and organic material found on the girl's body and clothing and in her hair, which included a single petal of a geranium (which grew in the Bretheren's garden); a few shreds of what appeared to be the fibers of a rope (identical with a rope found in the Bretheren's garden); some grains of fig (which were also found on a shirt numbered 562 in the Institute's laundry); and other shreds of purported proof that she had been in the Bretheren's garden.

At first, suspicion fell on the bookbinder, Conte. He was generally regarded as a man of ignoble character, having been overly involved with his sister-in-law a few years before. A witness came forward to say that Cecile complained of advances from Conte. His careless attitude toward her disappearance was also counted strongly against him. He was arrested. At first, he suggested that Cecile must have left the Institute of her own volition and encountered evil; on further reflection, he remembered that he left Cecile in the hallway of the Institute with two of the brothers, though no other witness saw anyone else there. Conte added that he knew a thing or two about one of the brothers' character, or lack thereof, though no other witness corroborated Conte's suspicions.

But it was enough to clear Conte and redirect the attention of the police, for anti-Church sentiment was very strong in France at the time, and the authorities seized on a man named Louis Bonafous, known in religion as Frere Leotade. The priest denied that he was the owner of shirt 562. He denied that he had been in the vestibule on the morning of Cecile's visit. He denied ever knowing of her existence until he was accused of her murder.

Since Conte was the sole witness against the holy father, the case was extraordinarily weak, but alas, the overzealous swept in to "help" Father Leotade. They perjured themselves in weak and obvious ways in what would ultimately prove a futile attempt to rescue him, for in the end, Father Leotade was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. He declared his innocence until the day he died, which perhaps rather fortunately came only two years later.

It was a few decades later that the sentiment of the age was forgotten and common sense applied to the case, and the Combettes-Leotade affair would come to be regarded as a double tragedy. Modern forensics and understanding of criminal behavior have shed no more light on the case, though the mysterious murder still engenders in France exercises in speculation, as fruitless now as they should have been in 1847.

Sources:

"The Mysterious Murder of Cecile Combettes," in Instigation of the Devil, by Edmund Lester Pearson, Scribner's, 1930.

There are a few very old and very rare books in French about the case, the best and most expensive being Le Forcat de Dieu: L'Affaire Cecile Combettes written by Jean-Pierre Fabre, an original of which can run you up to 300 Euros, but which was recently reissued in Paris. Pearson is the only person to my knowledge who has written in English about the case.

Mrs. LeBoeuf Breaks the Rules

"The wise murderess will take care to observe a few simple restrictions. She overrides these at her peril.... 1. If you decide to murder your husband you must never act in concert with a lover. In comment upon this rule it must be added that a lover should appear nowhere in the record; not a sign, not a suspicion, not even a shoelace of his."

--Edmund Lester Pearson, Rules for Murderesses

Mrs. Ada Bonner LeBoeuf of Morgan City, Louisiana, found her husband James annoying. Or perhaps it was the case that her paramour, the also-married Dr. Thomas E. Dreher, the country doctor who delivered her four children, simply outshone Mr. LeBoeuf in certain respects. Regardless, Mrs. LeBoeuf and Dr. Dreher found themselves madly in love but suffering from an impediment that a divorce attorney could have cleared up in a jiffy; alas, this simple answer apparently occurred to neither of them until it was far too late.

The doctor settled on an old-fashioned cure, hiring one James Beadle, described in the papers as a trapper, to put an end to Mr. LeBoeuf. A civil shot to the head would have sufficed to remove the offending husband from the face of the earth, but the trapper carried out his assignment on July 1, 1927, with grim vigor, electing to mutilate the poor man's corpse before throwing it in a lake. The trapper labored under the misimpression that a punctured body would more readily sink to the bottom.

Needless to say (or you would not be reading of it here and now), the scheme unraveled. The first-degree murder trial that followed a month after the murder of Mr. LeBoeuf was billed in the press as one of the Southland's most sensational legal battles, since, it was reported, the South hadn't convicted and hanged a white woman for murder since Reconstruction days, and Louisiana had never hanged a white woman for murder, not even in the days of French and Spanish rule.

The trial was a cross-country sensation. The state produced nearly a dozen witnesses who testified to the details of the scandal. Per these many witnesses, the light-o'-loves carried on their small-town affair in the "negro shacks" on the outskirts of the village. The evidence included love letters that were read aloud. The state also tried to establish that Mr. LeBoeuf caught wind of the dalliance in the days before his death.

It was reported that the doctor spent the proceedings mopping his brow furiously while the black widow watched the clock. The trapper, whose conflicting statements and recanted confession had brought them all down, chewed his wad of tobacco. The trapper escaped a death sentence. But the remaining two defendants were sentenced to perish at the hands of the executioner.

Following the trial, there was a considerable effort to obtain a reprieve from the sentence, for fickle public opinion was with the convicted murderers. Even most of the jurors who had handed down the convictions signed a petition requesting leniency. The lovers were imprisoned to await clemency from Governor Huey P. Long. But it never came.

Mrs. LeBoeuf and the doctor were allowed to see one another one last time. They held hands and sobbed together before they were hanged on Feb. 1, 1929. His parting words to her were, "Goodbye, I hope we will meet in the other world."

Mrs. LeBoeuf was hysterical as she was led blindfolded to the gallows, and she began to cry out, "My mother, my mother, oh my God. Isn't this a terrible thing! Don't let me stay there too long. Oh, isn't this a terrible thing! This is murder itself. That rope is too tight around my neck. Yes it is Mr. Martel. Oh, my God, God."

The doctor was able to keep his calm at the end. "Mr. Frost," he said to a reporter, "you know we didn't do it." When the rope descended around his neck, he said, "Oh, God, have mercy. Just don't let me choke to death."

Both died instantly, the newspapers reported.

And Louisiana, its spokesman said, brought an account opened on July 1, 1927, into balance.

Sources:

"Love Affair Behind Crime To Be Probed; Woman 'Go-Between' of Lovers to Be Quizzed; Trapper Still Denies Part," by International News Service, Danville (Va.) Bee, July 11, 1927.

"Woman is Calm; Principals in Louisiana Murder Trial Remain Unruffled As Case Progresses," by International News Service, Lima News, July 26, 1927.

"LeBoeuf Case Expected to Go to Jury Today; State Will Try to Show Love Affair Between Doctor and the Woman in the Case," Burlington (North Carolina) Times, Aug. 6, 1927.

"Doomed to Hang," Syracuse Herald, Dec. 9, 1928.

"Ada LeBoeuf And Dreher Hanged For Murder; Woman Dies First, Then Her Lover," by the Associated Press, Danville (Va.) Bee, Feb. 2, 1929.

Recommended reading: Ada and the Doc: An Account of the Ada LeBoeuf-Thomas Dreher Murder Case by Charles M. Hargroder