November 24, 1924 was Louise Zimmerman’s nineteenth birthday, but rather than celebrate it with her friends, she spent the day on the witness stand, testifying against a Prohibition agent from the Seven Mile Mayor’s court.

The trial had very little to do with Prohibition. Miss Zimmerman was on the stand to testify that Dry Officer Harold Shugg attempted to rape her on the night of October 20 that year.

She was “slow in answering questions” and on the verge of sobbing, the Hamilton Daily News reported, and Judge Clarence Murphy had to keep prompting her to answer, urging her to “cast aside her modesty and answer the questions of the state without hesitancy.”

Bit by bit, her story emerged: Miss Zimmerman lived with her mother and two sisters at 140 Francis Avenue and had been working at a local factory for six months. Around 8 p.m. the evening of Sunday, July 20, 1924, she received a suitor at her home. Joseph Gardner was the part owner of a garage on Darrtown Pike, a mile out of Hamilton city limits. He was well-known in the area as a baseball player. They had known each other for about two years.

They stood and talked in the front yard for a while, then Gardner invited her to go on a ride in his Ford coupe. They drove out Darrtown Pike and took a right onto one of the country roads out there. Gardner parked his car. They talked for about half an hour when a man came up from behind them, saying that he was patrolling the area and they weren’t allowed to park there.

The man, Miss Zimmerman said, was there in the courtroom, the defendant Harold Shugg. Because of the charges against him, he had been fired from his post as a constable for Mayor Morris Shuler’s court in Seven Mile. Shugg was 28 years old and the father of two children, one of them by a former wife. He served honorably in the U.S. Navy on convoy ships and submarines.

The young couple both readily answered Shugg’s questions and gave their names. Shugg, Miss Zimmerman told the court, told her to get out of Gardner’s car, that he was taking her to the girls training school on B Street and that Gardner could follow. She refused, saying Gardner could take her. Shugg took her by the arm and forcefully dragged her out of her suitor’s machine and led her to another one about 100 feet to the rear. He put her in the back seat and closed the door. Another man was driving, Robert Havens, also an agent for the Seven Mile court.

Miss Zimmerman said that after Shugg spoke with Gardner for a moment, he got into the back seat with her and told the driver to follow the coupe.

After about a half a mile, however, the driver lost sight of Gardner’s car. Then Shugg “tried to put his arm around me, but I said, ‘Get away.’ I then pulled the driver by the coat and asked him to stop, but he said nothing and drove on.”

She told the court that when another car passed in the opposite direction, she shouted for help. Shugg told her to keep her mouth shut and told the driver to step on it. A short time later, the driver took another side road and stopped in the middle of a creek. Shugg told her that if she didn’t shut up, he would toss her into the creek. “Shugg then grabbed me and pushed me down in the back seat. He tried to raise my dress and I tried to push him away.” He persisted and tore her bloomers as she struggled to sit up. Shugg managed to pin her arms behind her, and she fainted. When she had partially recovered her senses, she saw Shugg climbing over into the front seat. She was still dazed and could not move for quite some time.

Still parked in the middle of the creek, she heard Shugg tell Havens to get into the back seat with her. Havens declined at first, but Shugg demanded that he do it, so he finally climbed over the back of the seat and sat beside her, according to her testimony.

“Don’t you touch me,” she said to him as he settled in.

“Don’t worry,” Havens replied. “I won’t.” As Shugg drove the car at a leisurely pace, Havens asked quietly, “Did he hurt you in any way?”

She said Shuggs took a roundabout route, but finally ended up at the YMCA in Hamilton, where he and Havens got out and had a whispered conversation. Havens then offered to drive Miss Zimmerman home, and they got out of that car and into another one parked nearby.

As they drove north on Second Street, she testified, Havens told her that Shugg was a married man and that he would personally make him pay for it if Shugg had hurt her in any way. She said she began to wonder if he had hurt her in some way. On the way, they encountered Gardner, who was with city detective Al Mueller, and they all went to the police station. Gardner gave his statement and left, then Coroner Edward Cook took Miss Zimmerman to Mercy Hospital, where she was examined. They found no serious injuries and she went home.

In cross examination by Allen Andrews, Miss Zimmerman said she cried out several times for help during the ordeal.

She sobbed openly as she stepped down from the stand when the court called for a noon recess.

Havens took the stand that afternoon and said he didn’t hear anything from the back seat except for Shugg calling out directions, until they got stalled in the creek after crossing the iron bridge. He did not feel Miss Zimmerman tug at his sleeve. He heard no unusual noises while he worked to get the car started again, and when he did, Shuggs said that he wanted to drive. He saw Miss Zimmerman crying, and Shugg told him to get in the back seat and keep her quiet, so he did, but he didn’t want to.

Shugg took the stand in his own defense the following morning, entering a general denial of the charges against him. He said that he had met up with several Seven Mile officers at the Hamilton YMCA earlier that evening. Havens went out to lunch around 9 p.m., and Shuggs said he got an anonymous call to investigate a Ford coupe that had been parking every night on a side road between Darrtown Pike and Eaton road. When Havens returned, Shugg told him he had some dope on a case and asked him to drive Shugg’s car out that way.

Shugg testified that they did indeed find a Ford coupe parked on the side of the road just as the anonymous caller suggested. Haven slowed the car and Shugg leaped from the auto and went up on the coupe, shining his light on the occupants: Louise Zimmerman and Joe Gardner. “The girl’s clothes were above her knees,” he said.

“I told Gardner I would have to search his car for liquor,” he said. He found none. Then he searched Gardner. Still nothing. “I asked the girl how old she was. She replied, ‘About 16.’ Gardner interrupted, ‘No, you are 18.’”

Shugg said he told them it was a case for juvenile court and ordered the girl to come with him. He said he told Gardner that he could go along and arrange for bond, that he could ride with them if he wanted, but Gardner preferred to drive his own car.

Shugg said they followed Gardner’s car but lost sight of it before they got to the top of the big hill on Eaton Road. Havens was driving and he was in the back with the girl. While he and Havens debated what to do next, the girl cried to be taken home. They decided to take the girl home, but she gave a different address than she had earlier, saying she lived on the Darrtown Pike. Shugg said he confronted her about changing her story and she replied, “No girl ever gives her correct address.”

Shugg said as they were making their way back to Darrtown Pike on the side roads, they crossed a bridge and the girl suddenly said to turn right. He wasn’t sure Havens heard the girl, so he repeated it. Havens turned right and “before they knew it” the engine stalled on the car and they were parked in the middle of a creek. Shuggs said he could hear the water swirling around the car.

Shuggs, according to his testimony, got out of the car and took to wiping off the coil with a rag. Havens kept trying to turn the motor over and they finally got it running again. He said they tried to get the girl to point out a house, but she would not. By this time, it was getting late and he wanted to get back to his wife and kids in Seven Mile, so he asked Havens if he could take the girl home. He took the wheel and they proceeded back to the YMCA to switch cars.

Allen Andrews asked him: “Did you attack the girl while the auto was in the creek?”

Shugg said they were not there long enough, and on cross-examination said they were in the creek for fifteen or twenty minutes.

There were a few character witnesses, but Allen Andrews did not present any evidence to support the conspiracy theory that he was about to unwind in his closing statement to the jury, which began with the pronouncement: “Truth is on the gallows and crime is on the throne! When they [bootleggers] find a Prohibition officer of weak moral fiber, they bribe him. When they cannot bribe him, they frame him, and when that fails, they kill him. More than 100 have been killed! They set up an entrapment and I might be able to call attention to those who are engaged in this one.”

It began, he charged, with the anonymous phone call on the night of July 20 that led him to the country road where he found the young couple, and that the young woman would lead the officers around the country to give Gardner enough time to get back into town to set a trap using the city police.

“Havens would like to tell more about this case, but if he said he heard the girl’s cries and refused to stop the auto and allow her to get out, he would make himself guilty. He came up to our office voluntarily and told John Andrews that he thought it was a frameup.

Prosecutor P.P. Boli ridiculed the proposition: “The claim that this is a conspiracy theory is a surprise coming at this stage of the game. I never dreamed that was a defense until I heard Mr. Andrews say so... Does it appear from the evidence that this kind of a lady would be used as the perpetrator of a frameup? Of the hundreds of ways to frame an officer, why would they choose this woman?”

The jury received the case at 4:35 p.m. on the second day of the trial. Officers of the court cleared the mass of spectators so that the jury could deliberate in the courtroom. It was reported that the vote was deadlocked at 10-2 in favor of conviction on the assault with intent to rape charge, but after five hours of deliberation, they agreed on a verdict of guilty of assault and battery. Judge Clarence Murphy gave Shugg the maximum sentence of six months in jail and a $200 fine. He served his term at the Dayton workhouse and never returned to Hamilton. His second wife was granted a divorce in 1926.

Seven Mile Mayor Morris Y. Shuler, whose Prohibition raiders were the scourge of bootleggers and moonshiners anywhere and everywhere in Butler County, was nearly driven to retirement from the stress of finding himself on the other side of the judge’s bench.

Around 2 p.m. Friday, January 9, 1925, four officers went to Shuler’s private residence with four warrants, charging him with possessing and giving away liquor. The agents removed four full quarts and a pint of bonded whiskey (bottled before Prohibition), one quart of “balsam whiskey” (European-style herbal schnapps), and a half-quart of moonshine. The search was conducted by Robert Havens and George Hall, two state dry agents that had formerly worked for Shuler’s court, assisted by Hamilton city detectives Herman Dulle and Albert Miller. The raid was coordinated by Charles Walker, a special state investigator who had been working undercover. The affidavit mentioned four occasions in which Shuler gave liquor to Butler County Luther Epperson and two other former Shuler operatives, Dolphus Bell and Lewis Bolser.

The Hamilton Evening Journal reported that Mrs. Shuler suffered a heart attack at the appearance of the officers at her front door. She had been in ill health for several months, ever since the Shuler home was bombed by (allegedly) unknown bootleggers. When Dr. Marsh arrived at the house to attend to her, the four officers were still in the midst of their search. After giving attention to his patient, Dr. Marsh ordered the four officers from the house. “A short time after their departure, her condition improved to such an extent that the physician could leave for a few minutes at a time.

Although all was quiet in the village of Seven Mile at two o’clock on a winter’s weekday afternoon, commotion at the Shuler home drew out the entire village and the people were reportedly “up in arms.” They reminisce about the bomb that had been placed in the Shulers’ basement window, and about the night shots rang out when Shuler’s officers foiled a robbery of confiscated liquor from the little barn behind the house. Many of the lingerers had also been present at the raid of the Hilz dry cleaning plant in Hamilton and when Shuler’s men dumped nine barrels of moonshine into the village sewers.

The village council held an impromptu meeting and demanded the resignation of one of their own, Havens, also one of the officers conducting the raid. Villagers pointed to the many things that the mayor had done for Seven Mile and expressed the general option that if any liquor was found in the home, then it was certainly the remains of samples from various raids. “They pointed with pride to the more than 200 liquor cases tried in the Sevenmile court last year [1924], in which more than $40,000 in fines had actually been collected and added also that Mayor Shuler was doing a wonderful thing for the village and for Hamilton in the arrest of liquor law violators.”

Shuler was not at home at the time, but was in Hamilton when he received a call informing him of his arrest. With an attorney in tow, Shuler immediately surrendered himself to Police Chief Frank Clements, decrying the charges as “frame-ups.” He paid a $1,500 in bonds and then hastily sped home to check on the condition of his wife.

Responding to charges that the affair was a frame-up by Havens and Hall in retribution for being fired from Shuler’s raiding squad, Hall said: “The records will show that Havens and I resigned voluntarily.” Hall said the investigation by Walker had been going on for months, but was reluctant to reveal any details, saying that when the evidence is presented in court, all will be revealed.

Epperson, Bolser, and Bell, the three men mentioned in the affidavit, all refused to confirm the charges when approached by reporters.

Sheriff Epperson: “You can emphatically deny that I am involved in the charge in any way, and I know nothing about the case.”

Bell said that he quit the raiding squad when he had a disagreement with Shuler, but he didn’t know anything about any affidavit. He did recall a time when the mayor had given him a drink of Old Taylor: “He asked me if I could tell good whiskey and I said I could. He then poured me a glass full from a quart bottle and I drank it.”

While Shuler waited for the scandal to wend its way through the courts, Ohio Senator George Bender of Cuyahoga County introduced a bill that would modify Prohibition laws that would confine mayors, justices of the peace, and others to their own jurisdictions.

“Such a bill would put an end to the activities in Hamilton of the Sevenmile and Monroe Mayor’s court officers,” the Journal-News reported. “In fact, it is thought that these village courts would be entirely eliminated if the powers were limited to the district in which the mayors were elected.”

When Shuler made his first court appearance at an arraignment on Monday, January 20, “a mass of humanity--men, women and youths--tangled together, struggled and jammed into the box-like court room one hour before the hearing. The crowd came to feast their eyes--and many to delight--at the unusual spectacle of one of the state's most renowned liquor trial judges standing before a court accused of liquor law violations... The crowd came to get the ‘low-down’ on the liquor case which has aroused interest in all parts of the city and county.”

The witnesses included Hamilton Mayor Howard E. Kelly, Safety Director Joseph Meyers, the city auditor, chief of police and clerk of council, all subpoenaed by the defense, calling into question the legitimacy of the raiders Hall and Havens, that they had no authority to enforce the warrants. The defense moved to quash the charges against Shuler and to have the confiscated liquor returned. Detective Dulle was called to the stand, but in the face of the objections from the defense, he was not able to testify as to the details of the raid. After thirty more minutes of arguing, Municipal Judge Kautz and attorneys on both sides agreed to continue the case until Thursday.

When court reconvened, the jam-packed audience enjoyed three hours of “flowery oratory and brilliant technical arguments.”

Judge Kautz declared: “Havens was not an officer. He represented himself [as] a special officer in obtaining a search warrant. Mayor Shuler had the right to shoot Havens when the latter entered his home with an improper search warrant the same as every homeowner has a right to protect his home from invasion where a proper search warrant has not been issued.”

The crowd, “composed of many whose homes had been raided by dry agents and many who had been convicted of liquor law violations,” stirred at the pronouncement.

In regard to a defense motion that the liquor be returned to Shuler because it had been legally obtained, detectives Dulle and Mueller took the stand to identify the bottles confiscated. Mueller tasted from the bottles and “termed the fluids red whiskey and moonshine.” They said the bottles, three without labels, were found in closets on the second floor of the Shuler home.

Even though the warrants were deemed invalid by Judge Kautz and the charges of giving away liquor were dropped, Shuler had a further arraignment on February 18 on the charge of possession of liquor. Interest in the case--or perhaps faith that justice would be meted out against the mayor, well-beloved by his constituency buy hated by the underground--seemed to wane and only a handful of spectators were in the courtroom.

Shuler’s defense was that the liquor was legally held, seized in raids by Shuler’s officers and placed in Shuler’s home, which had already been approved as a state depository, for safekeeping. The prosecution argued that the liquor should have been destroyed.

On the witness stand, Shuler testified that he believed the four quarts of red whiskey were part of a confiscation of sixty-eight bottles from cafe owner Lyman Williams. Williams took the stand and showed a receipt indicating that everything from that raid had been returned to him. Prosecutors gave him a bottle that was in evidence. “I am positive this bottle was not part of my stuff,” Williams said. “My bottles were not labeled.” 

Recalled to the stand, Shuler maintained that the bottles had been found after Williams had been given back his whiskey and was not in that inventory list.

Koehler for the defense: “Did you ever tell anyone of this?”

Shuler: “Yes. I told you about it.”

Judge Kautz declared: “The court believes the liquor was legally possessed. Mayor Shuler may have been negligent in destroying or ordering destroyed the liquor... Negligence is not a crime.”

Kautz again dismissed the charges against him and ordered the liquor returned.

Although he was exonerated, the ordeal took its toll on Shuler.

“Rumor has it you are going to resign,” a reporter asked, “is it true?”

Pale and haggard and apparently nervous, Mayor Shuler smiled faintly and replied “This is the third time I have been into a thing like this. It is a heartless job. I have never taken a dishonest penny.”

He wouldn’t say more. But the rumors included that Mrs. Shuler was suffering from serious illnesses that had been exacerbated by the “constant worry and suspense” related to the mayor’s predicament.

He had the support of the people of Seven Mile.

“We will not let him quit because of a thing like this,” one resident told the Evening Journal. “Everyone in Sevenmile always was solidly behind Shuler in this case.”

No wonder. In addition to being lauded statewide for his work as a Prohibition enforcer, “Through his work as a liquor trial judge Sevemile has ‘flourished’ financially,’” the Journal wrote.

Shuler’s days of authority over the entire county were numbered, due to the emerging Bender bill, but he did not resign and would still have a year to crusade for the powers of Prohibition.

The Hotel Lee, a café at the corner of Wood Street and Monument Avenue, was one of the hottest spots in the part of Hamilton known as “the Jungles.” 

The nickname was largely a racial epithet, but people of all races frequented the speakeasies, “soft drink parlors” and “sporting houses” that lined Wood Street, now Pershing Avenue, the heart of the Ohio city’s thriving Prohibition era nightlife. It was run by Lee Richardson, an African-American attorney from Nashville who moved to Hamilton in 1903.

Edward Schief, proprietor of a “cafe” at 328 Court Street, and his right-hand man Andrew “Skimmer” Kuhlman were making the rounds of the clubs on April 30, 1925. They, along with Philip Einsfeld and his wife, went to a restaurant to get some food but found it closed, and decided to go to Peter Farley’s café on Wood Street, between the Hotel Lee and Madame Hawley’s house, to get some sandwiches. Einsfeld and his wife waited in the car. Ten minutes later, when Schief and Kuhlman did not return, they walked to their house. 

They did not hear about the murder until the next morning.

Reports of what happened were incoherent and contradictory, but by all accounts a party of about eight men and one woman swooped down upon the Hotel Lee about 1 a.m. The café was supposed to have closed by midnight by city ordinance. Owner Lee Richardson said he had closed it, but that “the boys” broke in. 

The brawl started in the cabaret room.

According to one of the patrons, a black man who “took the air” as soon as the fuss started, said that Kuhlman and Schief were squared off against John “Todd” Messner and four other men. Metal knuckles and broken bottles made for a bloody fifteen minutes. A door window was knocked out and the tables and chairs were overturned.

Patrolmen Henry Keiser and Frank Mayer were a few blocks away when the red signal lights began to flash. When they got to the Hotel Lee, they saw Eddie Schief trying to kick in the door to the hotel, blood running down his face.

They saw several other men beaten and bleeding but no one would give them any information and no one wanted to get treated for their wounds. The patrolmen had heard shots fired, but they could not find a gun.

Schief and Kuhlman retreated to the Farley Café, a few doors east on Wood Street, to clean up. They stayed inside there for about thirty-five minutes. Kuhlman was the first to come out. Several men from the brawl jumped him, knocking him to the sidewalk.

“I felt a blow on the head, but it did not quite knock me out,” Kuhlman said later. “I fell to the sidewalk and tried to get up.”

One of the men was kicking Kuhlman in the face when Schief came out of Farley’s place.

“What are you doing to Skimmer?” he shouted.

Two shots fired. 

Kuhlman said, “I heard a shot and saw Schief fall. The gang then jumped on me and that is the last I knew until I woke up in the hospital.”

Schief collapsed on top of him. He was shot twice, once in the neck and once about six inches above his left knee. He was killed instantly by the throat wound.

The gang jumped in a Hudson and fled.

The police arrived shortly, detectives Joe Koons and Charles McCormick, found Schief and Kuhlman in a pile on the sidewalk, one on top of the other, and took both to the hospital.

Word on the street was that Messner and Schief had a falling out over a shipment of beer from Canada, that Messner somehow “double-crossed” his partner.

When the coroner examined Schief at the hospital, he had no personal effects except for a single key and a fountain pen.

Jack Schief, the victim’s brother: “When I examined Eddie, I found that he had cuts and gashes in his head which had been sustained in the brawl which preceded the killing.”

The police officers had passed the Hotel Lee Café a short time prior to the fracas.

Philip Einsfeld, 129 Chestnut Street, a former policeman: “I know nothing about the affair. I rode down to the place with Schief and Kuhlman and they went into the café and I walked to my home a short distance away. I don’t know what’s the matter with Messner. He’s crazy if he says I slugged him. I don’t think that he knows me.”

Eisfeld said that he was not on Wood Street when the brawl or the murder took place.

Police got an answer to the mystery when they spoke to taxi cab driver Edward “Red” Weber, who said that he met Ray Nugent, a local thug named he knew as Crane drive off in the Hudson.

“I had two customers in the cab when the fight in the hotel took place. I don’t know much about the scrap. After the row in the café some of the boys left in a Hudson coach. As I was parked in front of butcher shop to await a milkman whom I see regularly, I saw this same coach drive north on Front Street and turn into Wood Street. This was some time after the fight. I followed the coach and parked my car on Monument Avenue, north of the Hotel Lee. Pretty soon, I heard two shots fired. I drove to Wood Street.

“I was sitting in my machine on Front Street when I noticed a large automobile being driven toward Wood Street. I recognized Nugent and Messner as occupants. I did not see anyone else. Knowing of the fight in Richardson’s place, I followed the car for a while. It was driven back to Richardson’s place and parked in front. I kept on going over Wood Street. Suddenly two shots rang out. I turned my machine and hastened back. Just as I came upon Nugent running toward his machine, Messner had already boarded the automobile. Nugent saw me and aimed his revolver at me. It was a nickel plated gun.”

“Don’t shoot,” he cried. “I’m just a taxi driver.”

“What are you doing here?” Nugent asked, still pointing the gun.

“Then a little fellow who is in the Hudson calls, ‘Come on, Crane, come on!’

“Then Messner began to call for him to hurry. He appeared to become excited at this point. I think I owe my life to the fact that Messner called him. Otherwise I believe that he would have shot me.”

Taxi driver William O’Hara also had a story to tell about the case. He said picked up Todd Messner the morning of the murder at the corner of East Avenue and Hanover Street.

“I told Messner about the murder, and he asked me to drive him around to Farley’s place to see about it,” O’Hara said. After riding him past the scene, he drove to Ninth Street and dropped Messner off in an alley near Heaton Street, not far from where Ray Nugent lived.

Farley said that immediately after the shooting her heard the sound of an automobile being driven away rapidly but was unable to see the machine.

On Thursday afternoon around three o’clock, less than 24 hours after the killing, police arrested Raymond Nugent in his home at 331 North Ninth Street, where he lived with his wife and two children, two and four years old.

He had been going by the name Roy Browning since getting to Hamilton as he was wanted in Cincinnati in connection with the murder of insurance agent Ashur L. Pickens during a brawl in the Little Sunshine fishing camp in Turkey Bottoms in Cincinnati’s East End the previous October. Police had also charged a man Edward Naegle with the crime. At that time, Nugent had been going by the name Richard Crane. 

He was arrested by Detective Charles Nugent, no relation. While detective Charles Morton guarded the front door, Nugent told the man’s wife that he was a friend of “Crane Neck,” Nugent’s gangster name.

She pointed him to the room where he found Nugent lying in his bed. His face was cut and bruised, but the detective recognized him as the partner of George “Fat” Wrassman, a convicted bootlegger and burglar that he had recently arrested by Middletown police. During the arrest, this man Nugent -- alias Browning alias Crane -- jumped on the running board of Wrassman’s car and escaped.

Now, the gangster didn’t recognize him or seem alarmed, so Detective Nugent continued to act as if they were pals. “How are you feeling?” he asked.

“Oh, all right,” the gangster replied.

“Had pretty much of a scrap last night,” the detective said. “Get hurt much?”

“Yes, had a row at Lee’s but didn’t get hurt much,” Nugent said. “Got socked several times.”

“Well,” the detective said. “You’re wanted at police headquarters, so come with me.”

“What’s the charge?”

“Assault and battery.”

As Detective Nugent walked the thug Nugent into the station, Weber took one look at him and said, “That’s the man who pointed the gun at men.”

Nugent said nothing.

Messner’s mother and sister identified him as the man who had come to their home earlier in the day asking for Tod. They told him Tod had been arrested for Schief’s murder and the man left abruptly.

Questioned by Police Chief Frank Clements, Nugent denied any knowledge of the Cincinnati murder nor Schief’s murder, but he did talk about the brawl that took place in the Hotel Lee’s cabaret room.

“I was standing in Lee Richardson’s place on Wood Street when Schief entered. He was accompanied by Kuhlman and two other men whom I took to be bootleggers. Schief came over to me and without a word, struck me. I became angry and picking up a chair, swung it above my head and brought it down on his head. In the meantime other men in the place began to struggle. Messner was among the lot. I seized the first opportunity and made my escape. They were all still fighting when I left. I went to my home and did not leave it until the police arrived and arrested me.  I was positively not on the scene when the shooting occurred.”

They asked him about his association with Fat Wrassman. Nugent “shut up like a clam,” detectives said. That evening, Cincinnati detective Joe Schaefer and William Duning, superintendent of the Bertillon Bureau of the Cincinnati police department, identified Nugent on sight.

“We want him badly,” Schaefer said, “for murder.” He told the Hamilton police that Nugent was “a gangster, a hi-jacker, a thug and a safe-cracker.” He was well-known at a joint called the Hole in the Wall, a notorious West End resort and the hangout of Cincinnati yeggs. But since Hamilton had possession of the man, the Cincinnati police conceded, they could have first crack at bringing him to trial.

Coroner Hugh Gadd: “My version of it is that the brawl and the killing was a result of a bootleggers’ brawl. They had been drinking. I understand that Messner and Schief had been partners and that they had split up. My evidence in the case is very meager as neither side seems to want to give information. The fact that no one talks makes me cling to the theory of a bootleggers’ war.”

From the jail, Messner said, “Why should I kill Eddie? He was my pal and my friend. God knows that I am innocent of this charge. Why I was not there when any of the shooting they talk about took place. The police arrested me at my home. They said I had killed Eddie--God, I didn’t even have a gun. You want to know all that I know about it. I don’t know much about any of it. When Eddie was shot, I wasn’t there. I was walking along the street when Philip Einsfeld, who was with Eddie and Skimmer, jumped out of an automobile and slugged me. Eddie told Phil, ‘That’s Toddie’ didn’t hit him [sic]. We were in Lee’s place when the fight started. I don’t know what it started over. Then someone took me home and it was there that I was arrested.”

He said he did not know who took him home. He said he danced with the girl who was with one of them but he did not know her name.

Messner: “I had just stepped out of Richardson’s place when Schief, Phil Einfeld (Insfeldt), Kuhlman and several women drove up in a machine and stopped. Schief got out of the machine first. I had no more than said, ‘Hello, Eddie,’ when Einfeld, who was drunk, lunged at me and struck me in the mouth, busting my lip. Then Eddie shouted, ‘Stop it Einfeld. Todd’s all right. Todd’s our friend.’ Even that did not stop Einfeld. He knocked me down and into the street. I got up, dazed, and ran into Richardson’s place again. Einsfeld followed me into the place and again started to beat me. In the meantime Schief and Kuhlman also entered and were fighting with two other men whom I did not know. The next thing I knew I was being walked up and down the street by two men. I didn’t know them. They finally put me into an automobile and took me home. Arriving there, they took my key from my pocket, opened the door for me and I went upstairs. My mother and sister had just finished bathing my wounds when the police arrived and put me under arrest. I want to stay that I was not there when Schief and Kuhlman were shot. I was home and in bed.”

Lee Richardson updated his story, now saying that Nugent, Messner and several others pursued Schief and Kuhlman into his place and into a dance hall where a free for all struggle ensued during which chairs were hurled, tables knocked over and fixtures broken. Several shots were fired, but no one was struck by any of the bullets. After the struggle, Messner, Nugent and the others drove away in an automobile.

Peter Farley: “I was sitting in my place when I heard the sounds of a terrific struggle which I learned later had taken place in Richardson’s café. I went to the street and came upon Schief and Skimmer Kuhlman. Bother were cut and bruised and their clothes was splattered with blood. Knowing them, I invited them into the rear of my place where I have a gymnasium and I dressed their wounds. I helped them clean up and we talked for a while. I urged Schief not to go out. He had not been gone more than two minutes when suddenly two shots rang out. Thinking that the fight had recommenced, I went out the side door of my place and walked into the street. There is a high fence about my side yard and when I stepped through the gateway I nearly stepped upon Schief and Kuhlman. Skimmer was lying on top of Schief, who was dead. When the police arrived, I helped put them into an ambulance and went with them to the hospital.”

Farley said that immediately after the shooting her heard the sound of an automobile being driven away rapidly but was unable to see the machine.

Messner said he believed the two men who took him home were the two men who started the fight with Schief and Kuhlman. He said he did not know them and was unable to explain their solicitude for his welfare.

Indignation over the affair prompted Mayor Howard E. Kelly to announce that he would shut down the cabaret at the Hotel Lee as a result of his own investigation into the place. He said he found the cabaret “obnoxious” and “a public nuisance.”

“My investigations have shown that that the cabaret at Lee Richardson’s place was the source of a great deal of the trouble in the Jungles.” Richardson would still be allowed to run his soft drink parlor, but the mayor said he would continue to investigate other cafes in the city.

After two days of searching for the third man in the Hudson, Detective Schaefer and Cincinnati police did Hamilton police a favor by arresting Edward Scott, twenty-three years old, a black man who lived on Cutter Street. Scott was a known associate of Nugent.

“We have them all now, and the stage is set for a preliminary hearing on the Schief murder,” Chief Clements said, noting that this was one of the hardest cases he ever had to unravel. “Everyone we questioned gave us facts very reluctantly, as if they were afraid something would happen to them if they told when they knew.”

Detective Morton concurred, saying, “It was ten hours after the murder before we were able to get anything but the bare fact that there was a murder.”

Clements added, “Everything has been well-handled in spite of the fact ad we expect to have the murderers’ confessions or conviction very soon.”

Nugent, Messner and Scott were all held on charges of first degree murder. Only Nugent was held without bond.

Coroner Hugh Gadd held an inquest on the death of Schief on May 15, and there were still surprises coming forth when the long-rumored “woman in the case” made her first public appearance, but it proved anticlimatic. Twenty-two year old Ella Mae French, 969 Main Street, said that she was at the Hotel Lee with Elmer Woodruff about one o’clock in the morning. They had come from the Woodlawn Inn. She knew Messner and saw him there. “Toddy was rather rough,” she said, meaning he was pretty drunk, but she danced with him. He got a little fresh and she slapped him, then he slugged her, so she left the joint. She said she was there for 20 minutes but did not see a fight or hear any shots fired.

The coroner had a warrant issued for Lee Richardson, who failed to answer a subpoena to appear at the inquest, and postponed a verdict until he could interview the man. The next day, Richardson was arrested at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Kentucky, for violating liquor laws. At the Kentucky Derby, he was at the same table as Hamilton police chief Frank W. Clements and chief of detectives C.W. Herrmann when a fourth fellow, a sheriff’s deputy from Illinois, produced a bottle of liquor and sat it on the table. Clements said that just at that moment, a federal agent seized the bottle and arrested everyone at the table.  

On May 27, when Richardson finally appeared before the coroner, the scene had the atmosphere of a showdown. Richardson tried to explain why he missed the earlier subpoena and got his dates mangled so badly that he had himself both in Windsor, Canada, and Louisville, Kentucky, on the same day. “The testimony was passed over for his signature,” the Evening Journal reported, but realizing the contradiction in dates, he refused to sign the paper until he was given the opportunity to study a calendar and see where he made his mistake. Looking at a calendar, he said he was in Windsor on May 9, Detroit on May 12 and Louisville May 16. “Say, everybody knows I was at the Derby on the sixteenth. It was in the papers.”

That straightened out, Richardson said he knew practically nothing about the Schief murder, that he had passed operations of the establishment to his son, Max. He was upstairs on the night of April 30 and heard fighting in the dining room. Several men were in a brawl, but he didn’t know any of them, and he was the one who called the police. When police got there, he said, Skimmer was lying beneath a table unconscious and Schief was on the sidewalk looking into the hotel. When the hotel was cleared, he and Max were at the bar talking when they heard two or three shots and someone told them that two men were lying on the sidewalk.

On June 28, Todd Messner was badly beaten and bruised about the head and body, his skull fractured with the butt of a revolver, in a brawl at a fishing camp somewhere on the Little Miami River, the result of a liquor deal gone bad.

On August 22, Warren Gard, Nugent’s attorney, managed to get Judge Clarence Murphy and Prosecuting Attorney P.P. Boli to agree to a $5,000 bond for his client, with the property of William J. Barry, former proprietor of the Stockton Club as surety. Because Nugent was wanted by Cincinnati authorities, Sheriff Luther Epperson refused to release the prisoner until probate court Judge Gideon Palmer intervened and ordered Nugent’s freedom on a writ of habeus corpus. Nugent managed to slip out of the jail and into the wind just moments before Detective Schaefer arrived to collect him. Sheriff Epperson joined Cincinnati detectives that afternoon in visiting Nugent’s known haunts, but he could not be located. The bond required his presence before the grand jury.

When the grand jury convened in October, it charged Nugent with second degree murder, Edward Scott and Todd Messner as accessories. 

***

The trio would be tried together, and a date set for December 9, 1925. Two days before the trial began, Judge Walter Harlan gave Sheriff Epperson subpoenas to deliver to potential jurors and witnesses. On the list was Red Webber, the taxi driver and the only person who puts a smoking gun in the hands of a killer. Epperson turned to the Hamilton police for help, but the man was nowhere to be found.

On the day of the trial, Judge Harlan waited until 10 a.m. for Webber to show up, then called the trial to order. Prosecutor Boli asked for a continuance: “The witness has not been found and without him, the state cannot proceed.”

After Harlan granted an indefinite continuance, the sheriff took Todd Messner into custody again. Lottie Hawley, operator of a known brothel on Wood Street and the woman who put up surety for his $5,000 bond, had two weeks earlier asked to be released from the commitment. Epperson was unable to locate him in advance, so when he showed up for trial, the sheriff assigned Deputy Ernest Legg to shadow the suspect. In order to avoid any legal tangles, Legg waited until Messner had stepped out of the court room before taking him in custody and straight back into the courtroom to appear before the judge, who ordered the sheriff to take the man to jail. He did not stay long as that afternoon, C.M. Parker stepped forward to sign the bond.

Word got back to Sheriff Epperson that Red Webber was in Dillsboro, Indiana. Because he had not been served with the subpoena, the sheriff could not go after him, but he was confident that Webber would come back to Hamilton, and Judge Harlan promised that when he did, he would place the witness under a bond. Webber showed up at Boli’s office on December 29 with a certificate showing he had gone to Dillsboro for his health and arranged for a $300 bond to assure his presence when the trial could be rescheduled. It would make him the second witness under bond as Ella Mae Thompson nee French had to post $1,000.

***

Finally, on January 11, 1926, while the city dug its way out from under a weekend snowstorm, the trial of Nugent, Messner and Scott got underway. The morning was devoted to seating a jury, and the afternoon was spent in as the long-awaited “star witness” Red Weber, began the state’s case by repudiating his previous statements, even though he told his story under oath to three different courts during preliminaries.

“That’s typewritten stuff,” he said when confronted with transcripts, “and some of it is not true. My memory isn’t very good. I’ve been sick for five or six years and I drank a good deal until recently.”

Over the objections of defense attorney Warren Gard, a clearly exasperated Boli read passages from the grand jury, mayor’s court and coroner’s inquest transcripts, but Weber held fast that he didn’t know what he was talking about then, and that he’s not feeling much better now.

“I was in no condition to appear at those hearings,” he said.

“Were you drunk?” Boli asked.

“I was pretty well mixed up,” he said. “I don’t know much about this case.”

“You remember more now than you ever did?” Boli asked.

“Yes, sir. My memory’s been bad.”

“How long has your memory been bad?”

“One day it’s all right, and the next day it is all wrong.”

“Did you get well today?”

“No, sir. I am not right yet.”

“If you told the grand jury it was Crane that came toward you, that wasn’t right?”

“If I did say it then, it wasn’t right,” he said.

The defense did not need to call a single witness. For all the delays, the trial which was expected to last a week was done in only two days. After the state rested its case Tuesday afternoon, still agitated over Red Webber’s change of story, Gard moved for a directed verdict. 

Boli said, “The state believes that there has been some pressure brought to bear on the testimony of one witness in an attempt to bring about a miscarriage of justice. We believe this case should be given to the jury.”

“Undoubtedly, there has been a cover-up process, suppression of the truth and intimidation,” Harlan said. “I guess there’s nothing to do but direct a verdict. I don’t like to do it.”

When the jury came back, Harlan explained the action he was about to take, tracing the testimony and explaining that there was no evidence to directly connect the two defendants to the killing.

“Therefore,” he said, “the court is bound to direct you to render a verdict in favor of these defendants. I sustained these motions with great reluctance. Somebody killed that man. It seems to me, and no doubt to you also, that somebody should come forward and tell the truth. It is a sad condition of affairs in this city that this isn’t done.”

Later that month, Red Weber was indicted for perjury, but the trial was postponed indefinitely. 

The papers never said why police didn’t hold Nugent on the Cincinnati charges, but he man went on to enjoy a notable career in the gangster world as one of the top machine gunners around. He would never be put on trial again, but would be credited with at least a dozen other murders, moving on to bigger and more notorious gangs. He went to Kansas City and renewed his acquaintance with a war buddy, his sergeant on a motorcycle machine gun crew who was now leading a gang there. His name was Fred “Killer” Burke, and the notorious Chicago gangster Al Capone called the Burke gang his “American boys,” and it was this gang that he called upon for the infamous St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Ray “Crane Neck” Nugent was one of the machine gunners with Burke that day.

After that fiasco of a trial, Boli got back to the business of padlocking the cafés from Skinner’s list and targeted 12 cafés, but by that time so many had changed ownership or closed down completely that only four cases made it to hearings.

Ohio prohibition commissioner McDonald continued to offer his support, but the tone of his comments revealed his impatience. He was, the Evening Journal said, “straining at the leash.”

“If the authorities at Hamilton want me to give them legal assistance in their liquor padlocking cases, I will make arrangements to have someone from the attorney general’s office go down to help in the prosecution,” McDonald said. “We have a number of men who are familiar with that kind of litigation and could render valuable aid… If it is impossible for the attorney general to furnish a lawyer from his department I will secure one of the attorneys in the employ of the Anti-Saloon League and one of the best. I want the cases pushed to the limit and I want the state to give all possible assistance as it is duty bound to do.”

When the first four cases were brought to court on January 25, only Casey’s Place at 41 Chestnut Street was ordered padlocked because the other locations had been vacated and the café equipment removed, although Boli said he would keep the suits alive should anyone attempt to re-open the locations as cafés. John Casey lost a $1,000 bond on the deal, which he had posted a year earlier after being threatened with a padlock and promising that he would use the building as a barbershop. Casey tried to get another bond, but the effort proved unsuccessful and he relocated to Florida to take a job as a chef. “The café business in Hamilton is too tough,” he said.

It would be the end of March before another joint would be padlocked, Wrassman’s Dunlap Café on Court Street, and then only after another raid. The raiding party of 11 men from the city police, sheriff department and Seven Mile court failed to turn up any liquor

On May 2, 1925, The Saturday following the murder, people of the Congregational Church at Seventh and High Streets passed out handbills advertising the next evening’s sermon by its pastor, the Reverend William S. McBirnie. The headlines read “What I Charge Mayor Kelly With” and “Schief Should Not Have Been Murdered.”

Because of the publicity, nearly 2,000 people crammed into the sanctuary, filling every available seat and standing room in the back. 

The service began innocuously enough with the regular prayers and hymns, up until McBirnie read a passage from Lamentations, according to the Evening Journal, “the story of how Jerusalem, once the pride of the world, became decadent, the walls crumbled and fell, and how the passersby sneered and hurled stones at the city, and how then Jeremiah, the weeping prophet called to them ‘Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?’”

“Is it nothing to you,” McBirnie addressed the audience, driving his point home, undoubtedly in the dramatic fashion for which he was known and loved, “that Hamilton is corrupt?”

McBirnie had barely been in Hamilton a year. Born in Ireland in 1890, he said he early on developed a taste for travel. It’s not clear when he first came to North America, but he joined the Canadian Army in 1914, fought in France during World War I, and relocated to the United States in 1917. He became affiliated with the Salvation Army and went on a lecture circuit as a fundraiser, talking about his experiences in the trenches at Ypres. As he traveled the country, mostly in the Midwest and South, he said he became more interested in evangelism than lecturing, and began studies at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago and the Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati.

When he first came to Hamilton in December, 1923, for an interim position with the First Congregational church, he said he was planning to embark on a three year world tour. The Evening Journal described “a young man of intense convictions” who “preached in the power and demonstration of the Holy Spirit.” He was such a compelling preacher and so won the hearts of the First Congregational that by April 1924 he had accepted the pastorate there, to begin that August after a trip to Ireland to see his mother. 

The sanctuary at the Congregational church was packed “pit to dome” on the evening of May 3, 1925, with Mayor Howard E. Kelly and his stenographer in attendance, along with municipal court Judge E.J. Kautz and other city officials.

McBirnie revealed that three months previous, he was part of a self-appointed committee that launched an investigation into the “moral affairs” of the city. He did not name the other seven members of the committee, but said he was authorized to impart the results of his investigation, which he conducted in disguise--“a cap and an unlighted cigar”--with two hired detectives as his bodyguards.

The first place he visited was Bob Schief’s Place at 338 Court Street.

“The man who was with me gave the ‘high-sign,’” McBirnie said. “The door was unlocked and we were admitted. We asked for two ginger ales and got two glasses of ‘white mule’ with ginger ale on the side. I couldn’t drink mine. The detective who was with me drank his. In a moment, the sweat began to stand out on his head. He complained of intense head and stomach aches. Such was the effect of the stuff we found there.”

McBirnie also went to the Hotel Lee that night, where all the trouble would start the night of Schief’s murder.

“We entered the cabaret,” he said. “We asked the colored waitresses and later the house man if we could get any good whiskey. He said he would find out. A little later we received the high-sign and were led through a door into a small room. Lee Richardson was there and poured out three drinks in one glass. Three of the colored waitresses crowded in. They asked us for cigarettes.”

The reverend had the audience enraptured and outraged. They laughed at his comic stories about his experiences in the bars and brothels of Hamilton. He charged Mayor Kelly with incompetence, relating several occasions when Kelly had knowledge of gambling and illegal liquor operations and refused to act, saying he didn’t have enough police force to do much about it. 

“There are more houses of ill-fame in Hamilton than churches,” he preached. “It is easier to buy moonshine than milk... I went to Mayor Kelly with three others and told him of the conditions I found. I offered my evidence. He promised to find out what action could be taken... Nothing has been done.”

After the sermon, a reporter heard the mayor quip, “Well, I feel better about it now that I know what it was all about.”

The next day’s Evening Journal published a six-paragraph statement from the mayor saying that if McBirnie would swear affidavits as to the findings of his investigation, the mayor would personally sign them to bring charges against the sporting houses.

The last two paragraphs took a different tone, threatening court action against the crusading reverend: “I personally believe that [certain statements] were sufficient to slander my character, and I will institute a suit against him as soon as my attorneys have gone over the contents of his sermon.”

That Tuesday, Mayor Kelly reported that McBirnie was to come to his office at 1 p.m. and deliver the evidence he had gathered, but he did not show, instead leaving a note for him at the YMCA saying that he was going to “confer first with members of the citizens’ committee.” 

As it turned out, the Rev. McBirnie and the delegation of citizens had actually gone to Columbus that day to deliver his evidence to Governor Vic Donahey: 58 affidavits and a typewritten sheet outlining his charges against Mayor Kelly and demanding that he be removed from office. The governor then handed the affidavits over to state prohibition Commissioner A.F. McDonald, who said he would send a pair of investigators to Hamilton straightaway to investigate the allegations contained in the affidavits.

McBirnie continued his own investigation, hiring “secret service men,” including some former, disgraced Hamilton police officers, at a cost of $1,700 (he wouldn’t say whose money it was, only that it wasn’t his) to begin issuing affidavits locally to shut down the cafes and resorts of Hamilton. By the end of the week, police had arrested Florence Freese for keeping a house at 319 Market street and five other women for keeping or working in houses on Wood Street on charges sworn to by McBirnie and his committee. 

In a municipal courtroom packed with men and boys that Friday, four of the Wood Street women were fined $50 and costs, with charges dropped against one. Madame Freese’s case was continued until Monday. “Rev. McBirnie was constantly in whispering conversations with Millikin Shotts, city solicitor,” the Evening Journal reported. “The whispers were taken to mean that the minister was leading the cross-examination.”

The defense attorneys called McBirnie to the stand for three minutes of testimony that didn’t seem to amount to much.

“Are you an American citizen?” was the first question. His attorney’s objection was sustained and McBirnie didn’t answer.

“Have you been deputized?”

“No.”

“Did you finance this investigation yourself?”

He did not answer the question, and the judge did not compel him to.

The following Sunday, May 10, McBirnie took to the pulpit again with the sermon “Behold a City Left Desolate By Sin,” furthering his clean-up effort and challenged the congregation to end dancing and card-playing in their own homes. He charged that “moneyed interests behind vice” were working to thwart his effort, but he declared his relentlessness.

“They say I am running away,” he said. “I assure you that I have never fled from anything and that I will not run away.”

He related his experience on the witness stand in municipal court and the implication that since he is not an American citizen he has no standing as a crusader.

“I knew they would say this,” he said, “so I made my application for my first papers. This shows that my heart is right, does it not? I’d sooner be Irish with God in my heart than like some people in Hamilton without God in my heart.”

McBirnie claimed that three-fourths of the spectators in the courtroom were in sympathy with the women: “I got dirty looks and was called dirty names but it didn’t stop me one bit.”

He closed his sermon with a denunciation of conditions in Hamilton so fervent and a call to action so passionate--“In the name of Hamilton go over to the right side! Do something for God’s sake! For Hamilton’s sake, do something!”--that he momentarily collapsed into a chair next to the rostrum, his head buried in his hands.

A hush fell over the congregation and Mrs. McBirnie jumped to her feet and led a rousing rendition of “Onward Christian Soldiers.” It was enough of a pause for the preacher to compose himself enough to offer the benediction. The packed sanctuary rang with cheers and the minister was surrounded by parishioners with their pledges of support for his clean-up drive.

The next morning, McBirnie spent a half-hour in front of the Butler County grand jury, but he would not speak about it afterward, and the jury’s next report did not mention and did not include any indictments coming from McBirnie’s crusade. 

That evening, McBirnie was back in court, standing the entire time as he directed the prosecution of Florence Freese. She was represented by Warren Gard, former Congressman and county prosecutor, who spent a full 15 minutes at the start of the trial objecting the introduction of water works billing records that would prove that Mrs. Freese was the tenant of 319 Market Street. Nevertheless, the document was accepted. After a three hour session Monday and another session of at least an hour Wednesday evening occupied by Gard’s motion to dismiss, the court fined Mrs. Freese $50 and costs.

“Thugs and denizens of the underworld,” as the Evening Journal called them, or “some slinking reprobate” as McBirney would say from the pulpit, struck back at 10:45 p.m. Saturday, May 16, with an attempt to burn down the preacher’s house at 815 Campbell Avenue.

The minister, his wife, his two sons Bobby and Billy, and his mother-in-law were all asleep when Mrs. McBirnie heard the sound of footsteps and voices outside the house. Peeking out a window, she saw flames leaping from the rear porch. She awakened her husband and he called the police and fire departments, who responded quickly and extinguished the fire before much damage could be done. Investigation showed that the rear porch and weather boarding had been soaked with benzine and ignited with a match. A quart bottle smelling of benzine was left on the back porch.

Word of the arson further inflamed both public indignation and the pastor’s fury as more than 1,500 packed into the High Street church Sunday evening.

“They can’t come out in the open and take off their coats and fight like men,” he began his sermon. “They had to wait until my babies were asleep before carrying out their infamous plot.”

Meanwhile, rumors were flying in from Columbus that Commissioner McDonald had finished his investigation and would release the results at any moment. Those rumors halted when Governor Donahey called Mayor Kelly in for a private conference, which he did on Tuesday, May 26. The following day, McDonald and Donahey released a recommendation that seemed to take much of the city by surprise, although McBirney publicly expressed satisfaction at their findings.

McDonald concluded that it wasn’t the mayor, but Chief of Police Frank Clements who was to blame for the lax law enforcement, and he and the governor recommended Clements’s immediate removal. Clements refused to resign and Kelly seemed to balk at the idea of firing him, but did the following day. The chief immediately appealed to the Civil Service Commission. Twenty-five of the 58 affidavits that McBirney gave to the governor concerned Clements, who argued that the real problem was that the police department was severely understaffed, to the point that he was personally acting as desk sergeant in addition to his duties as chief so that he could have an additional man in the streets.

Before the Civil Service Commission began its hearings on the case, Kelly officially filed a $10,000 slander suit against McBirney, and the Council of Congregational Churches met at the High Street church the very next day and voted to dissolve their relationship with the crusading pastor, saying that he did not consult the council about his investigation and did not have its approval. McBirnie delivered a “farewell sermon” the following Sunday, June 8, and vowed to remain in Hamilton until all the matters that required his attention were taken care of.

Even though he was without a job, McBirney and a cadre of his supporters--now known as “the Committee of 12”--attended the Civil Service Commission hearings. McBirney himself testified, occupying most of the first day. He had his say, but the proceedings did not go well for the crusader after that. During the second day, while the city safety director was testifying that while Clements was suspended he continued to work as desk sergeant while drawing the salary of a chief, McBirnie interrupted the hearing and accused Mayor Kelly of hand signalling answers to the witness. “Instantly there was a hubbub in the courtroom,” the Evening Journal reported. “Attorneys were on their feet, all talking at once... The mayor merely laughed and shook his head.” Even before things began to settle down, McBirnie apologized to the members of the commission, grabbed his hat and began to push his way through the crowd and into the corridor.

“It’s all a frame-up!” he cried to a reporter on the way to the elevator, and waving his arms dramatically shouted, “I’m through! I’m through.”

“Will you come back?” the reporter asked.

“Never!” he shouted as he got on the elevator.

Twenty minutes later, the hearing adjourned and the three-man Civil Service Commission unanimously sided with Clements and ordered that he be returned to duty, which he did on July 6. He sent out a memo to the department explaining the situation and asking for their cooperation--and took a shot at McBirney as he denounced “non-citizens, cheap investigators and their backers.”

That weekend, the Rev. William S. McBirnie, citing health concerns, packed up the family car and said they would be staying for a month in St. Louis, eventually making their way to Dallas, to rekindle his work with the evangelist Gypsy Smith and the Salvation Army. He said they would camp along the way, in the hope of further benefiting his health.

At around 10:30 p.m., Saturday night, June 20, 1925, Squire Morris Y. Shuler and five members of his liquor squad parked their cars on the Seven Mile Pike in Coke Otto, the village that would later be incorporated as New Miami.

Shuler remained in his car while Wayne township constable Wilbur Jacobs, 43, led a team that included State Prohibition officer and Middletown resident Arnold Skinner, Coke Otto magistrate Louis Bolser and Seven Mile deputy marshal Robert Tewart. They walked the 200 yards to the house on Augspurger Road. Sanford Lakes rented the house and lived in part of it with his wife and daughter, but the Prohibition squad was interested in the two rooms in front, one up and one down, that Lakes sublet to Ethel Grathwohl and her boarder Milton Henson. Jacobs carried a warrant to search those rooms for liquor.

Jacobs had been a deputy in Shuler’s court for about three and one-half years, and had been on nearly 800 raids of the cafes, barns, sheds, garages, and homes of Butler County.

Milton Henson was a 32-year-old veteran of the Great War and claimed to have been gassed three times. Two years earlier, he came to live with Ethel Grathwohl, 30, and her husband William, who operated a boarding house at 335 Market Street in Hamilton. A year later, when Mr. Grathwohl moved out of the house and separated from his wife, Henson stayed on, and he and Ethel lived together since. They also bought a Ford coupe together, but both Henson and Grathwohl insisted they were not living “as man and wife.” 

Jacobs knocked on the screen door. A man answered, asked them what they wanted. When Jacobs said that he “represented the law,” the man hastily closed and latched the screen door in their faces and walked rapidly away.

The officers then broke through the door. Tewart, Bolser, and Skinner went immediately up the stairs, where at least nine men were shooting dice and playing poker.  One of them shouted, “If you’ve got a gun, get rid of it!”

In the corner was a tub full of ice and bottles of home brew, a small group of men drinking beer next to it, and two women fast approaching him. Jacobs stepped into the front room at the left of the hallway. Jacobs suddenly stood face to face with Ethel Grathwohl. Standing defiantly behind her was Mattie Foster, a friend who still lived in the boarding house on Market Street, although Mattie would later swear she went out into the yard as soon as the liquor agents arrived.

Ethel confronted the officer and shoved him toward the door, telling him that if he represented the law to “get out and enter the house in a manner becoming ‘the law’," she said later.

“I have a warrant,” Jacobs said.

“Where’s the warrant?” she inquired and Jacobs held it out to her.

“Read it,” he said.

“You read it. Is it for me or for him?” evidently referring to Henson, but he wasn’t in the room at the time.

The room was dimly lit by a lone lamp on a table in the center of the room. Jacobs brushed Grathwohl aside and took steps toward lamp to get better light, and started to read the warrant.

The men who were drinking home brew from the tub would later say that Jacobs “was reading the warrant when I chanced to look past him and saw the slayer, alone, creeping stealthily into the room from the hallway. His eyes glittered and half crouched, he kept his right hand and arm hidden behind him.”

“It was while she and Jacobs and the Foster woman were standing near the table in the middle of the room that a man entered from the hallway. Henson entered the room bare-headed and in his shirt sleeves.” 

One witness said he felt a “little funny when Henson entered the room in a crouched position. Walking in a stooped position to a place near the center of the room, the man suddenly straightened, extended his right arm... with a revolver not far from the officer’s head.”

“That man was Milton Henson. I believe that just before he fired the shot he shouted, ‘Read it, damn you.’”

“Suddenly, the crouched figure straightened, the hidden arm was brought forth, clutching a revolver and the bullet fired into Jacobs’s head.” 

The bullet entered Jacobs’s left temple and took an upward course through his skull, and exited from the right side of his head. The bullet was never located. 

Jacobs “just groaned, then slid to the floor, dead. The slayer ran from the room and out the front door, still holding the revolver in his hand. That was the last that I saw of him.”

“What became of him after I do not know. I ran from the house, together with other occupants.” 

While he was trying to find the light, Milton Henson entered the room from the hallway. He was in a crouching position, his right hand behind his back. He slipped in beside Ethel, then suddenly stood up straight and shouted, “Read it, damn you!”

He then extended his right arm, clutching a .38 calibre revolver with a pearl handle, the barrel within two feet of Wilbur Jacobs’s head.

The bullet entered the officer’s left temple at an upward angle and exited on the right side of his head. Jacobs, a witness said, “just groaned, then slid to the floor, dead.”

Ethel Grathwohl said that she was “too bewildered” to know who fired the shot. “I only heard one shot fired. As soon as the shot was fired, someone went to the window while another person opened a locked read door in the room or jumped out a window.” Other witnesses said that she grabbed Henson and started crying, “O Milt! You’ve killed him!”

At the sound of the shot, the entire house erupted in chaos as the officers barreled down the stairs followed by those gamblers who didn’t climb out of a second floor window. Arnold Skinner, who was the last officer to go up the stairs, was the first officer to reach Jacobs. He said that about two minutes had passed since they had broken down the screen door. As he reached the bottom of the stairs, a man rushed from the room with a smoking revolver in his hand, the pungent odor of burnt powder still permeating the room. the other men in the house escaped by various means of windows and doors and ran down the street toward Seven Mile Pike with Tewart and Bolser in pursuit.

“I was waiting in a car parked on the Seven Mile Pike when I heard something that sounded like a shot,” Squire Shuler said. “The next minute I heard a large group of men running down the street. I recognized Bolser’s voice calling them to stop. Then I jumped from the car and pulling out my revolver, headed the men off. We searched them and found no weapons. The sheriff and police were called at once and the men taken to Hamilton.”

He said they found a half-pint bottle of liquor in the house. Beneath a trunk on the second floor, the flooring had been sawed out, evidently as a cache for liquor. None was found.

Shuler broke down when they told him that Jacobs had been slain. “Jacobs was one of the best officers I ever saw. He was not in the raiding business for the money that was in it but because he wanted to clean up this moonshine and illegal liquor traffic. He was a fine officer and a square one.” 

Still, he held the prisoners under guard until the Sheriff and his deputies arrived, along with a contingent of Hamilton officers and detectives. Sheriff Epperson was the first called and he in turn called deputies Wesley Wulzen and Ernest Legg, and they all hurried to the scene along with a contingent of Hamilton police officers and detectives.

***

The search for Milton Henson lasted ten days. On more than six different occasions, police had responded to calls to places where Henson was believed to be hiding, but always arrived too late. 

Finally, on June 30, deputy sheriff Wesley Wulzen took a tip from an informant and assembled a team to go to Brookville, Indiana, where Milton Henson was said to be hiding out on the farm of Joseph Roark, a distant cousin. Wulzen and 17 other officers left Hamilton about 8 p.m. When they arrived, the men spread out and completely surrounded the house and barn, which were about 75 yards apart. They were prepared to wait until dawn, believing that if they waited until daylight, the fugitive would have less chance to escape. For hours the officers lay in hiding behind outhouses, trees, and bushes.

At first light, Sheriff Joliff of Brookville knocked on the door to the house. Joe Roark answered.

“I don’t harbor that kind of breed,” Roark said. “He was here but he has left. You can search the house if you want to.”

Patrolman Joe Evans of the Hamilton Police and Patrick Hanna, officer of the Oxford magistrate’s court, had already gone inside the barn, Police Inspector Holden of Hamilton covering the loft while they searched. In the meantime, Patrolman Joe Evans of the Hamilton Police and Patrick Hanna, officer of the Oxford magistrate’s court, went inside the barn to search. Police Inspector Holden of Hamilton stationed himself to view the loft to preclude an ambush. Finding no sign of him he had seen no sign of the fugitive in the loft, Inspector Holden joined the other two officers and aided in the search. The trio split up.

Outside the barn, Detective Charles Nugent and a dozen other officers were lying flat on the ground so they could not be seen should the fugitive try to bolt for the woods. The morning pastoral stillness was interrupted by the clatter of hoofs. Someone climbing onto a straw pile had chased a bull out of the barn and into the field. Nugent saw the bull. It was coming his direction. Nugent knew there was a fence between him and the bull but didn’t know the gate was open. The bull came through. Then Nugent ran. He later said, “But I was not the only one who ran.”

Detective Evans was the first to see Henson lying in the haymow, tucked into a hole dug in the hay, covered with a blanket. He was muttering incoherently in his sleep. Evans, drawing his revolver, reached over, shook Henson and warned him to keep his hands from beneath the blanket where he believed a pistol might have been hidden.

“Don’t shoot, Joe,” he said. “I’ll give myself up.”

“Have you a gun?” Evans asked.

“No. I threw it in a creek between here and Brookville.”

With three revolvers aimed at him, the fugitive became a prisoner as he climbed down from the mow without the least show of resistance. Deputy Wulzen and other Hamilton officers joined them in the barn and began questioning him.

Deputy Wulzen asked him, “Did you shoot Jacobs with a .38 or a .45 calibre revolver.”

Henson answered, “I didn’t shoot him.”

No one would own up to it--Henson wasn’t sure but thought it was Hamilton detective Charles Nugent--but somehow or other, someone struck Henson in the back of the head with a revolver before he came out of the barn, leaving a bleeding wound.

Henson was perceptibly nervous on the return as he rode handcuffed to Detective Evans. He volunteered no information but readily answered questions.

Holden asked him, “How are you feeling?”

“Not very good. I am nervous. I cannot sleep and cannot eat.”

“Why did you shoot Jacobs?”

“I don’t know,” Henson said, and added he was sorry he did it. He said no more until his arrival at the police station.

In the chief of police’s office in Hamilton, Henson made a full confession to safety director Joseph B. Meyers before his attorney arrived.

After preliminary questions concerning his name and so forth, Henson was asked if he knew Jacobs. He answered that he knew his face but did not know him personally.

Henson seemed nervous when asked to tell the story of the shooting. His hands were twitching and he tugged at his clothing. Before beginning his story, he asked for a cigarette. After a few puffs, he laid it aside on a table near where he was sitting, and burned itself out as Henson told of the murder and his flight from justice.

He recalled in detail the police coming to the door and Jacobs reading the warrant, but the moment that he pulled the trigger was hazy in his memory. “But after I had pulled the trigger, I ran out of the room and out the front door.”

"I came to the house at Coke Otto where I had been staying with Ethel Grathwohl about 10 o'clock on the night of the shooting,” he said. “At 10:15 I took a boy to work at Hamilton, leaving him at Fifth and Vine streets. On the way back, I stopped my car on B street and got some cigarettes, then I returned to Coke Otto.” 

He drove right into the yard when he got back to the house, the first time he had ever done that. The lights flashed on Mattie Foster, who was sitting in the yard. 

“I know it’s you!” Henson said the woman yelled.

“When I got there, some of the boys wanted a little game of cards, so I went to look for a blanket. Someone said, just about this time, that there was somebody at the door. I looked, but didn't see anybody. Then I went into the front room downstairs.”

There was a rap at the door and he answered it. There were some men there. One of them said, “Open the door.” Henson asked them who they were but they did not answer. Then he turned to walk in and reached up on the cupboard for his pistol.

"Just then the door was broken down. A lot of men rushed upstairs. Another one started into the room. Mrs. Grathwohl tried to stop him. I believe the man was [Jacobs]. He pushed her aside, threw back his coat and showed his badge, then said, 'I'm an officer and I have a warrant.'”

At the start, Jacobs pushed Mrs. Grathwohl aside when she tried to get him to go out and read the warrant.

“I was standing in the door. Someone threw a flashlight on me and I put my head down. Jacobs was standing at the table. Two men who were sitting in the corner of the room got up and went out.

“I ain’t going to read it!” Henson said Jacobs remarked.

“I said go ahead and read it, if you have a warrant for her and one for me.”

Henson remarked that he could neither read nor write.

“I said 'Read it.' Jacobs answered 'Read it yourself, damn it,' and threw it on the table.

"I guess that was when I shot him. I threw the gun on him and pulled the trigger. I don’t know how I came to do it. There was scuffling in the house. Some of the men who had gone upstairs came down and some of those who were in the house went out through the windows. I said for someone to call the doctor or the police and get them quick.

“I don't remember just how it was, but after I had pulled the trigger, I ran out of the room and out the front door.”

Ethel Grathwohl was out there trying to get someone to call the police. Several other men tried to get out, but the officer knocked them back with the remark, “Get back there or I’ll kill you.”

He went to the barn behind the house, he said, and sat there until everything at the house quieted down. Henson said he went back to the barn and sat there 20 minutes, then he got up and went back to the house. There was no one there. He tried to open both the front and back doors, and finally tried to get in through the cellar but that door was also locked. He called to the Lakes family, “Are you asleep?” but no one answered.

He saw several automobiles parked in front of the place but he did not know the persons in them, so he went back to the house, rapped on the door again and said, “Open the door.”

“Lord have mercy don’t come in here,” Mrs. Mary Lakes replied without opening the door. “There’s been a man killed.”

“What did they do? Where did they go?”

She said the police took everyone to town.

“I want to come in,” Henson insisted. The he turned and walked back to the barn again with the gun still in his hand. Some automobiles came and threw their lights onto the field. He finally recognized one of the boys with whom he formerly worked and asked him to take him to down.

“I’m afraid to do that,” the boy replied.

Henson said he’d get the boy some whiskey if he did, but he still refused. Henson went to the barn again and remained there for a short time, then walked to the coke plant and found a telephone. He called Mattie Foster and asked her to take him to town.

“I can’t do that,” Foster said. “They’re watching me. There’s someone here now.”

After that, Henson went down the road to the traction line. 

“I ran along the road and down into the creek, where I hid under the bridge which crosses Four Mile creek,” a few hundred yards from the house. "I stayed under the bridge for a long time."

Then a traction car came along and he could see where it was going, he climbed the bank and followed the tracks.

Henson followed the railroad track to Hamilton, arriving there at 3:30 a.m., cutting over to about Third Street at Vine. Policemen were within a city block of Henson at that time.

“I went back on Third Street to Little Italy where I stayed with a family named Barger all the rest of Sunday night and until dark on Monday.”

Two of the boys there had sat up with him all night. They told Henson they did not know what to advise him to do. 

“I believe I’ll go and give myself up,” Henson said he remarked at the Barger house.

After that, he went over to the family home of William Rogers on North Fourth Street but did not go in. He talked to someone there and asked them to tell his brother. Henson was told his brother had been seen but they did not get to talk to him. He got a drink of water there, he said, but was then turned away, so he went down East Avenue to the home of Roy Roark, a cousin. He remained there Monday night and left there Tuesday after dark. One of the boys who had married into the Roark family, whom he did not know except by the name of Casey Jones, drove him over to the Joe Roark farm near Brookville. 

At the Roark house on East Avenue, the officers arrived only about twenty minutes after Henson had gone to Brookville that first time. Myers asked, “Where did you get your grub?”

“I didn’t eat. I drank a glass of milk. They asked me to eat but I was not hungry.”

Henson came back to Hamilton Tuesday afternoon, saying he planned to turn himself in. He paid a farmer boy $4 to bring him in from Brookville. The boy took him to the National garage on Main Street where he used to keep his automobile and used a telephone to call Mattie Foster.

“You aren’t in town?” she asked.

He replied, “Yes, I came back. Get word to Ethel. Tell her I’m coming over.”

He then called on his brother, Bev Henson.

“Come over and take me to the police station,” he said he told his brother.

“All right. I’ll come and take you or you can call them where you are so they can come and get you,” he said his brother replied.

After talking it over, he changed his mind about giving himself up at that time, so he called the Ohio Taxi Company. It was then after 1 p.m.

Eddie Fiehrer, the cab driver, would later tell the Evening Journal the story of the ride to Brookville: “I was called to the National garage to get a passenger and when I got there a man asked me what the charge would be to take him to Reily. I told him twelve dollars. While we were on the way to Reily, my passenger said to me, ‘You don’t know who I am, do you?’ and I replied, ‘No. Your face seems familiar, but I don’t know your name.’ ‘It’s all right,’ the fellow answered and nothing more was said about identity. 

“When we got near Reily the fellow asked me what the charge would be to take him on to Brookville and I told him fifteen dollars and he asked if I could not take  him there for less. I told that when I got to Reily I would call up the head office and ask about it. I did so and was told to take him on to Brookville for twelve dollars, which I did, taking him up among the hills about two miles beyond Brookville. 

“I had absolutely no idea who my passenger was and I had no reason to ask his name so long as he paid and knew where he wanted to go. If I had known who he was, I would without doubt called the sheriff as I had every opportunity to do so at Reily where he sat in the cab while I went into a place to call the office. He would not have known what I was talking about and if I had known it was Henson I could easily have called the sheriff and they could have gotten him right away as I could have held him there on some pretext until the officers arrived. I did not know until after his arrest and confession that I had hauled Henson that day. I did not in any way tip him off to the officers because I did not know who he was and consequently I have not received, nor do I in any way feel entitled to any reward in connection with the case.”

“I had the gun with me all the time,” Henson said in his confession. It was a .38 calibre Smith and Wesson Special, he said, which he had bought about a month ago at a store at Main and B streets. “After the taxi had left, I walked back along the road to a bridge near Brookville and threw the gun in the river.”

Meyers asked, “Why did you buy the gun?”

He replied, “A fellow had been threatening me. You know you never can tell what they’ll do.”

Henson had been considering giving himself up ever since the shooting.

“I couldn’t sleep. This thing was on my mind. I couldn’t get it off. I have eaten practically nothing. I drank a little milk. When I would sleep I would dream. I was dreaming about this woman (Ethel) when officers arrested me. She seemed to be saying, ‘I’ll see you.’ I thought she was crying.”

“Then I went back to the farm and into the barn. I guess I went to sleep about dark and I didn’t hear anything until this morning when Joe Evans woke me up in the barn. I was dreaming then about a girl. It seemed that she was crying, trying to tell me to beware of something that was going to happen. That was when the officers awakened me. That’s about all, I guess.”

Meyers asked him to get it into the record: “We didn’t use any force to get this confession, did we?”

Henson replied, “No, no, no. I wanted to tell the straight story and get it off my mind.”

He paid a farm boy $4 to bring him back to Hamilton on Thursday, again planning to turn himself in. On a phone at a Main Street garage, he spoke to Mattie Foster and told her to tell Ethel he was coming to see her, then called his brother and decided to not give himself in and took an Ohio Taxi back to Brookville.

“Then I went back to the farm and into the barn. I went to sleep about dark and I didn’t hear anything until this morning when Joe Evans woke me up in the barn. I was dreaming then about a girl. It seemed that she was crying, trying to tell me to beware of something that was going to happen. That was when the officers awakened me.”

***

The day after Henson’s capture, Mayor Shuler levied a fine against Ethel Grathwohl to the tune of $1,000 for the home brew and moonshine found in her apartment the night of Jacobs’s murder.

He raised his right hand above his head and said, “Mrs. Grathwohl, I hope the spirit of Wilbur Jacobs will harass you during all the time you are if it so happens that  you cannot pay this fine. I hope, too, that the widow of this man and his children, as they go sorrowfully about their daily tasks will cause you to regret more and more that this evil deed was done at your house.”

When he had finished, he dropped his hand to his side and bowed his head, tears coursing down his cheeks. Jacobs had been a lifelong friend of Mayor Shuler.

Henson mounted a defense that he was too drunk to be totally responsible for the murder. Prosecutor Peter P. Boli asked the jury for the death penalty, while Henson’s lawyer asked for second degree murder, which would give him a chance for parole. It took the jury five hours to reach a guilty verdict for first degree murder, but recommended mercy, and Judge Walter Harlan sentenced him to life in prison. He made no appeal.

Ethel Grathwohl did not appear as a witness at Henson’s trial and did not pay the fine, so she spent some time in the Marysville reformatory until a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in March 1927 ended Shuler’s liquor court and rendered all its decisions null.

Milton Henson died in the Ohio Penitentiary hospital, June 1, 1966, at the age of 72.

At about 6 p.m. on the evening of Saturday, November 21, 1925, Butler County Coronor Hugh Gadd, moonlighting as an officer of Seven Mile Mayor Morris Y. Shuler’s liquor court, met up with brothers Bob and Fred Gary at the YMCA to discuss their plans for the evening. Shuler had told Gadd earlier that the Donkey Club, 328 Court St., had installed a steel door and was selling liquor in the back room. So the three men first went to that café and stood near the rear door listening. They heard voices quoting prices for drinks and half-pints.

They went around front and saw three young men coming out the door and stopped them at the corner of Court and Third. One man had a bottle of liquor in his pocket, so the agents took the trio to Sheriff Luther Epperson’s office. The young men would not say where they bought the liquor, but because the prohibition officers had seen them exit the Donkey Club, they were able to get a warrant to search the place.

Upon reaching the Donkey Club at 7:45 p.m. Fred Gary circled down a passageway to the east of the cafe building to a rear door. He looked in the peep hole and saw three men in putting white liquid into bottles. When he rapped on the door and demanded admittance, a voice on the inside shouted: “You come in here and I will pour some hot lead into you.” He stood back and kept an eye on the door.

In the meantime, Gadd and Bob Gary went in through the front door. Alabama Wells, co-owner of the cafe, was behind the bar. There were ten or twelve men in the room. Gadd saw two men he did not know go through a steel plated door behind the bar into a back room. 

Gadd said, “I asked Wells if he was in charge and he said he was.”

The Donkey Club had formerly been owned by Bob Schief, who was murdered outside the Hotel Lee on Woods Street, but had been purchased by Olney Wells, known around Hamilton as “Alabama,” his home state. Orphaned as a toddler, he was reared by relatives, and when he turned 15, took up the trade of a molder at in Ensley, Jefferson County, Alabama. He came to Hamilton to work in the foundries here before he joined the army, and returned at the start of Prohibition, but began working in the cafes instead of the foundries. The Donkey Club was not his first venture, and he had paid fines in the Mayor’s courts of Seven Mile and Morning Sun in Preble County.

On March 5, 1925, Wells and his employer, John Welsh, who owned a café at Fifth and Sycamore streets, as the result of a visit by federal prohibition officers on February 23. “On their first visit to the place, officers were under the impression that a signal was sent to the second floor and that some liquid was poured into other containers. Samples were taken and these tested 5.55 percent alcohol. It also contained acetic acid, supposedly to kill the odor. Nothing was found during a second search when the warrants were delivered, but Wells and Welsh were charged for Volstead violations, including “maintaining a common nuisance,” a charge that would get their café padlocked. The episode cost them $175 in fines from the federal court in Cincinnati. 

A few days later, Hamilton Police seized an abandoned automobile on the corner of Sixth and Sycamore that contained 46 gallons of moonshine. The car belonged to Olney Wells and Officer Ed Tuley signed out a warrant against him for transporting liquor. In January, 1925, Wells and another Hamilton man were fined $150 in Preble County by Squire Pastor of Morning Sun. They were sent to jail in Eaton and released “after a satisfactory arrangement had been made.”

The Coroner noticed as he read his search warrant to Wells, the men in the café, getting the drift of what was about to go down, began exiting the front door, but no one came out of the back room. Soon, Gadd reported, it was just the two officers and Wells.

“I gave him the search warrant to read,” Gadd said. “Wells said to me, ‘There is a word in this warrant I can’t make out,’ and I told Wells that the word was ‘structure’.”

About that time the telephone rang, and Wells set the warrant on the bar while he answered it. “Graham’s not here,” he said, then hung up and the cab driver Tincher came in for a pack of smokes. Wells gave him change for his quarter while Gadd explained the meaning of “structure.” Then the phone rang again and Alabama took the call while Bob Gary and Gadd waited.

Wells stayed behind the bar, Gadd walking up and down in front of it, chewing gum rapidly and seeming to be nervous, according to one of the men who peered in through the front window, his hands ducking in and out of his pants pockets.

Finally, Wells said, “If you are looking for whiskey, then go ahead and search.” 

“I was waiting for you to finish your phone call so you could open up the steel door,” Gadd said.

“Why don’t you just search behind the bar?” Alabama asked.

“Because the whiskey’s in the back room.”

Then chaos erupted. 

Gadd said that Gary walked toward the steel door behind the bar and in line with the peep hole when he saw Wells reach for his gun.

"Gary's back was to Wells," the coroner said. “When Wells pulled out, his revolver and started to shoot. Gary walked behind the bar and within about eight feet of Wells and the way it looked to me that Robert Gary turned his head and about that time a shot was fired by Wells... and Gary fell back on the bar.

“I tried to get my gun out about the same time Wells was getting his out,” Gadd said, “but I didn’t get it out until after Gary had been shot. Wells reeled and shot twice at me and the second shot hit me in the left hand, entered at the second joint of the index finger and about two inches back of the knuckle joint.

“Every time Wells shot he would duck under the bar and would bob up and down to fire again. He shot about five times.”

Gadd said that he was only able to get off one shot, then his Colt .45 revolver jammed.

“Then there were two or three more fellows ran in the front door with guns. I hit Wells on the head with my gun and as I did he fell on the bar. I took Wells’s gun off the bar and put it in my pocket and I then stepped around to where Gary was lying on the floor.

“I noticed that Gary did not have a gun in his hand. I reached under his coat and removed the gun from his holster.”

While Gadd and the cafeman were clinching, police officers, deputies, and detectives swarmed into the cafe. 

Around back, Fred Gary tried to force the door, but found it heavily barred and impossible to move, but was working on it when he heard the shots, seven in all: Three quick ones, then a pause, then two more, then two more. The last shot, he would say, was louder than the others. He went running down the alley, around the corner and to the Donkey Club’s front door. He knocked and detectives let him in. 

“Where’s Bob?” he asked the coroner.

“Bob’s been killed,” Gadd said and pointed to the spot behind the bar where he lay.

He went around the corner and saw his brother. “That is my brother, men,” he said bitterly. “Who shot him?” 

“That man there,” Gadd said, pointing at Wells who was sitting in a chair, bleeding.

“Why did you shoot my brother?” Fred Gary asked.

Gary would later that Wells answered, “I don’t know,” but the detectives on the scene said that the only thing Wells would say after the shooting was that he wanted an attorney, former prosecutor and ex-Congressman Homer Gard, who earlier in the year helped get a directed not guilty verdict for Todd Messner and Raymond “Crane Neck” Nugent, alleged killers of Bob Scheif, former owner of the Donkey Club.

Gary put handcuffs on Wells as Butler County Sheriff Luther Epperson came to the scene. By this time, the café was crowded with dry agents, police officers and detectives, then the police ambulance arrived.

Gadd handed a .38 Colt revolver to the sheriff, saying it was the one used by Wells. The barrel was still warm. There were six empty shells in its chambers. Epperson picked up a loaded .32 automatic that was laying on the counter. 

Sheriff Epperson led a search of the premises. No alcohol was found, neither in the front nor the rear room behind the steel door, but there was a loose floorboard, and under the floorboard was a funnel attached to a hose leading to a drain into the sewer system.

1926 0408

At Alabama Wells’s trial, Warren Gard laid out the defense: Gadd fired the fatal shot, not Wells. 

After Gadd served the warrant and they talked about it for a few minutes, Gard said in his opening statement, “Robert Gary came behind the bar and advanced toward Wells, who was about in the middle of the bar.

“Wells, seeing Gary coming toward him, his hand outstretched, retreated. Robert Gary continued to pursue him, comeing nearly to him with his hands outstretched, armed with a revolver. As Gary advanced to the telephone at the south end of the bar, Wells turned to the sideboard, securing a revolver from a drawer. 

“A shot was fired across the room by Hugh Gadd from a .45 caliber automatic Colt revolver, undoubtedly at Wells, but the shot struck Gary. Gary fell and Gad remained with his revolver drawn.”

Gadd then advanced toward Wells, who had a gun but did not shoot. When Gadd got to where Wells stood, the coroner hit him on the head and Wells fell over a gas stove, unconscious. While he was on the floor, Gadd shot the revolver at Wells’s head, but struck only a glancing blow, but Gadd continued to wave the revolver around threatening to shoot Wells.

At that time, someone came into the door, saying, “Don’t do that! Don’t do that!” to which Gadd replied, “If you come in here, I’ll kill you.”

The defendant took the stand himself and told his side of the story publicly for the first time. 

At the trial, Wells told his side of the story publicly for the first time. He said that prior to November 21, he was being treated at the Veterans Hospital in Dayton for broken blood vessel in his nose, and when he got to the café around four o’clock on November 21, it was his first time there in three weeks. He was tending bar when Gadd and Robert Gary came into the café.

“Gadd was standing across the bar from me and Gary at the north end of the bar. Gadd explained the warrant and I read part of it. The telephone rang and a party asked for a man named Graham. Graham was not there. Again, I picked up the warrant and read it and then someone asked for cigarettes. There was another call on the phone.”

He said he was friendly with the officers and there was no hard feelings on his part. “I told the officers to help themselves and search. And Gary came around the end of the bar and came toward me. Gadd was a little north and east of the bar where I was standing. Gary Came toward me. He was rather tall, with a menacing looking face and he came with his arms outstretched. He got close to me and I retreated. I did not have a gun in my hip pocket. My gun was in a drawer. After Gary came close he said, ‘Come on! I’ll get you!’ Gadd fired point blank and struck Gary. Gadd has his gun in his left hand and he seemed to point it at me. Gary was very close to me.”

“Did you see Gadd shoot?” Gard asked.

“I did,” he said. “Then Gary seemed to leap into the air and fall backward. I reached in a drawer and got my gun and started firing at Gadd. I was fearful of Gadd. We exchanged shots. I don’t know how many I fired or how many Gadd fired, but we both kept going north and we met at the end of the bar. Gadd grabbed me and started beating me over the head. I was knocked out and fell into a corner, but before I lost consciousness Gadd fired at me, the bullet striking me in the back of the head.”

During cross examination, Boli asked him if he was selling whiskey the night of the shooting.

“No.”

“You never sold any?”

“Oh, yes, I have sold whiskey.”

“Did you sell it in the back room?”

“No. I was selling whiskey out in front and had it under the bar.”

He told the court that he had stopped selling whiskey after his arrest on August 22 by Seven Mile officers, including Fred Gary. He was fined $500 for the incident and still owed $100 to Squire Shuler. He denied that he told Fred Gary that he would get even with him.

The star witness for the defense was a 33-year-old horse trader named Joe Jacobs. Around Hamilton, Jacobs was known as “Turkey Joe,” a nickname he picked up after an incident in which he led the hijacking of what he thought was a load of moonshine, but ended up just being a load of turkeys on the way to market.

Despite Gadd’s claim that everyone had fled the bar when he produced the warrant, Jacobs testified that he was standing at the bar talking to Wells when the officers came in, and that Gadd was standing behind him and to the north of him. He didn’t see Gadd fire the shot, but the shot came from his direction and he saw Gary fall to the floor. When he turned around, he saw the gun in Gadd’s hand.

“I was about the middle of the bar. One fellow, supposed to be Gary, was walking behind the bar and Gadd backed away from the bar. Gary walked up toward Wells with his hands out. I heard a pistol fired behind me. I could feel it. It almost shot me. Gary threw up his hands and fell back. I became frightened and thought I had better get out or I might get shot. Gadd walked up towards the bar, toward the end of the bar. As I was going out I heard four or five more shots. I walked to the front door and stood in the door. There was a tussle between Gadd and someone else whom I could not see and Gadd was hitting someone on the head with a gun. Gadd said, ‘Ill kill you.’ I don’t know who he was talking to. Gadd backed away and shot, saying ‘I’ll kill you.’”

Jacobs said there was a voice from outside saying, “Don’t you dare! Don’t you dare!’ and Gadd said, “I’ll kill anyone who comes in.” 

“The witness said he became frightened and left the café, looking back to see Gadd striking someone behind the bar. Gadd also… made the remark “I’ll kill you,” and stepped back from the man he was beating and fired another shot.

“Did you see him fire the shot?” Boli asked.

“Not exactly,” Jacobs said, “but his gun was smoking. After the shot was fired, Gadd stood there trembling.” 

He did not see Wells with a gun and saw no gun in Gary’s hand.

Jacobs admitted to having pleaded guilty to larceny in Greenville in 1918 to get a suspended sentence, and that he had been arrest by Monroe officer for having whiskey in his home. He said he trained horses in the summer and did not work in the winter, and has been doing that for 10 years.

“Do you operated a place on Wood Street?” Boli asked.

“No.”

“You’re running Lottie Hawley’s place, aren’t you?” Boli asked.

“No, sir.”

“Have you been living there? Why do you spend most of your time down there?”

“I’ve been trying to rent the place. I tried to rent Farley’s place several times.”

John Evans, thirty-one years old, testified that he was standing outside the Donkey Club and looking in the window when Robert Gary walked behind the café bar toward Wells. He said he was not drinking whiskey but had come there looking for his brother, Charles.

“Looking through the window, I saw Gadd step back a little and go down with both hands into his clothing. He came up with an automatic pistol. There was a report. I saw a flash from the gun. It looked like he pointed it in Wells’ direction. Then I left the place and walked east on Court Street, North on Fourth and West on High Street to a restaurant.

“They seemed to be having an argument,” he said. “Gadd reached down and there was a report. It looked like the gun was pointed in the direction of Wells.”

Evans said it looked as if Gadd was going to get two guns and had trouble getting his gun out.

During cross examination, Boli asked him if he was known as “Happy Evans”.

“You were in trouble in 1918 and served time in the penitentiary for burglary and larceny, didn’t you?”

“Yes, sir,” he said, also admitting that he had been arrested for disorderly conduct and was a regular patron of the Donkey Club when Schief owned it, but not since.

Evans said he left at that and did not see Gary fall.

The defense’s only witnesses who say they saw the actual shot were Joe Jacobs and John Evans, whose testimony was suspect because of their dubious characters.

Assistant prosecutor H.H. Haines said, “It seemed strange that of all the men around here, the defense could only get the two criminals to come in and say they saw the shot. Why would Gadd want to shoot? There was no indication of danger. They said he was nervous. Who said it? Those sweet-scented cherubs Joe Jacobs and John Evans. They didn’t get them from the sidewalk. They came from the gutter.

“Wells is a criminal in a criminal business and was pursued by officers of the law, like all men of his type. Ten minutes before the murder he had sold this vile liquor to three boys.

Boli also attacked Joe Jacobs: “If you believe a man like Joe Jacobs, there is no need for further argument. I venture to stay that for $50 I can get the like of Joe Jacobs to swear that I was in St. Louis yesterday. A man who did a day’s work ten years ago and who does not have to work during the winter--I’m surprised there weren’t more Joe Jacobs in this trial.”

The prosecutor then closed his argument with a statement that would resound in Hamilton for the next century and beyond: “Let your verdict show that law and order must prevail in this community. Don’t tell the world that Hamilton is a Little Chicago, a breeding place for murder, robbery, pillage and the stick-up man.”

Warren Gard--former prosecutor, judge and Congressman--reminded the jury that the burden of proof was on the state, not the defense. He said, “We are not compelled to show that Gadd fired the shot that killed Gary. It is the duty of the state to show Wells guilty.”

Gard claimed that the .45 caliber bullet found under the floor was part of the defense evidence in that it proved the testimony that Gadd had shot at Wells while he was on the floor in the northwest corner of the room.

“There is only one man who said that Wells fired the shot that killed Gary,” Gard said. “And that was Hugh Gadd.”

Gard demonstrated what he termed the impossibility for Wells to fire the shot from the position he was in and inflict the wounds which caused Gary’s death. “You cannot shoot a bullet around a corner.”

“It is not the contention of the defense that Gadd shot Gary for the purpose of killing him, but it is our contention that he fired at Wells and the bullet struck Gary.”

xxx

On April 1, 1926, a jury of eight women and four men took seven hours to acquit Wells of the charge of murder.

At 9:50 o’clock, nearly three hours after the jury had returned from supper, George Oberfell, the court bailiff, was notified that a verdict had been reached. Wells was brought from the county jail and attorneys for the state and the defense were called to the courtroom.

When the doors of the room were opened, more than 30 people who had kept watch in the corridors of the courthouse filed into the spectator’s section of the room. Jurors were asked by deputy clerk William Hunter if a verdict had been reached and the roll of jurors called.

Before the verdict was read by Hunter, Judge Walter Harlan warned Spectators that there would be no demonstration of any kind when the verdict was read. The signed verdict was received from Walter Houck, foreman of the jury, and read by Deputy Hunter. Not a sound was heard in the courtroom other than the voice of the Deputy Clerk and for a moment after the reading of the jury's finding and after the jurors had answered “it is” to the question of whether or not it was their verdict, not a person moved. 

Jurors were told by Judge Harlan that they had been called to sit in this case only and that their services would no longer be required. 

It was then that the jurors stepped from the jury box to where Wells was seated nearby, and in turn practically every member of the jury shook hands with the man who had been acquitted. 

A few of the jurors lingered about Wells, speaking of their confidence in him and advising him to give up his former Associates and live a life beyond reproach. Wells in turn thanked the jurors and went from the courtroom to the office of Sheriff Epperson where arrangements were made for him to leave the courthouse a free man. 

When asked if he had anything to say, Wells answered only that he desired to speak appreciation for the interest people have taken in his case and for the things that have been done for him.

When the verdict was received in the courtroom Wells’s attorneys, Warren Gard and JB Connaughton, were with them and H.H. Haynes, assistant prosecuting attorney, represented the state. 

It was rumored at the close of the trial that the first ballot taken by the jurors after they retired to deliberate stood seven to five acquittal. Other ballots followed and the vote is said to have changed to eight to four, nine to three, ten to two and and finally twelve for acquittal. 

The slaying of Prohibition agent Robert Gary quickly caught the attention of state officials who swept into the city 24 hours later to begin a series of raids that left many of the Hamilton’s cafes in wreckage.

“There are more barred and steel doors in cafes in Hamilton than in any city of its size in the state,” said Samuel A. Probst, deputy state prohibition commissioner when he arrived in Hamilton to launch a drive to have such doors taken from cafes, either by persuasion or force.

As Probst and his men gathered with Morris Shuler’s Seven Mile agents to begin the raids, he said if anyone initiated gun play, they had orders to shoot to kill.

State officers found their first steel door at the Crystal Café at Central Avenue and Walnut Street. State agent Arnold Skinner said that when officers arrived at the Crystal they saw several men leaving, locking the front door behind them. Police broke down the front and used a heavy iron bar to force open a steel-lined door at the back. There was no liquor, but Skinner said he believed there had been liquor there.

At the Dunlap Café, 338 Court Street, a few doors from where Gary was shot to death, state men are said to have been resisted by George “Fat” Wrassman, proprietor. Wrassman, standing over six feet, four inches and over three hundred pounds, was a known tough. He’d been acquitted on a robbery charge in Middletown and held there on an Indiana indictment of unlawful possession of dynamite, but released when no Hoosier officers came to pick him up.

There were eleven men in the raid, and Skinner was the first to go in the front door, only to find himself looking down the foot-long muzzle of the revolver in the equally large hands of George “Fat” Wrassman.

Skinner kept his head and did not pull his revolver, but ordered Wrassman to put his down. Surprisingly, the big man did.

Skinner picked up the heavy gun.

“I’ll have to handcuff you,” Skinner said.

“There aren’t enough men here to do that,” Wrassman said. 

That started a free-for-all fight, Wrassman tossing dry agents like flies, his giant fists protected by brass knuckles when they tried to handcuff him. With Wrassman shouting curses in every direction, the prohibition men finally wrestled him to the ground after several sharp blows to the head softened his resolve, but Fat continued to curse the officials even as he lay flat on his huge stomach with the handcuffs behind his back.

The back door in the Dunlap Café, lined with one-half-inch steel, proved to be was tougher to break down than the Crytal’s. Police eventually gave up on battering it down to get into the back room and went through the partition wall instead. The room was empty, but there was evidence that liquor had been dumped and an unknown number of men made a get-away. Wrassman continued to curse the whole time they trashed the place.

Police arrested Wrassman on four charges--carrying a gun, currying metal knucks, pointing a firearm and assault--and placed him in the county jail.

He was fined $40 for that melee.

No liquor was found in any of the cafes they raided. 

Probst assured Butler County Sheriff Epperson and Hamilton Chief of Police Frank Clements that he realized what they were up against and promised all possible aid by state officers. “You have some tough characters to deal with here,” he said. 

For all of his glad-handing while he was in town, Deputy Prohibition Commission Probst had a quite harsher tone when he got back to Columbus on Monday, laying the blame for Gary’s murder on the door of Hamilton police, saying the inefficiency of the department “has resulted in a reign of terror in Hamilton with bootleggers holding sway.” 

“Bootleggers in Hamilton are in open rebellion against the law and will resort to murder to carry out their trade,” he scolded, then promised “There will be no let-up until Hamilton has been cleaned-up.”

Mayor Howard Kelly said he was all in favor of shutting down the liquor trade in Hamilton, but he couldn’t do it on the resources he had available.

“When the prohibition law became effective, it added 75 percent more duties on the police department,” he said. “With the present force we have been unable to meet the situation. At times I have had to be satisfied with a house crew of nine men and until the time that revenue from taxes will permit an increase in the force, we shall continue to have a force inadequate to cope with the situation. I have revoked licenses without effect. I have closed places without effect. I have asked for state aid without effect and now I am asking for padlock proceedings.”

He pointed out Fat Wrassman’s Dunlap Café as a prime example. The man had never been issued a license, but opened up his shop with its iron doors anyway.

Wrassman was linked to Cincinnati bootlegger George Remus and was suspected in a litany of crimes all over Southwest Ohio. Before his story would end, he would have two murder acquittals on his record and never convicted of anything other than liquor violations. 

“Out of all his escapades ‘Fat’ emerged unhurt physically and with a whole skin as far as conviction was concerned,” wrote the Evening Journal.

Other than Skinner, Wrassman’s chief nemesis was Joe “Dutch” Schaefer, a detective working for the Hamilton County prosecutor’s office, who was constantly on his trail. Wrassman was frequently heard to boat, “I’ll wipe out that dirty Dutch bastard.” When Schaefer heard of this, he said he accepted the challenge.

Wrassman had been a railroad man like his father, who used to take him on runs from Hamilton to Indianapolis. He had “a smile as expansive as his mountainous bulk,” the Evening Journal said, “with a smile, a joke and a back-slap for all he met.” He moved to Hamilton in 1918, when there were still local option laws. Indianapolis was dry; Hamilton wet. When he’d go from Hamilton to Indianapolis, he started carrying quarts of whiskey with him to sell to his friends.

When prohibition hit, Fat quit the greasy, back-bending railroad job and went all in with the liquor racket. It didn’t take long for the law to catch on. Wrassman and his wife lived in a modest bungalow on Hudson Avenue, where she kept a neat house and he kept a 100-gallon still in the basement. When police raided the house in March 1923, it took trucks to haul it and 75 gallons of high-quality moonshine away. “Biggest and best seized to date,” police bragged as they hauled Fat off to jail. Wrassman moved his family to Ross Avenue, and when police raided that house later in the same year, they commented that his new still was even bigger than the first.

His craft included the transporting of good “red liquor” as well as making his own moonshine and at some point he added the art of the yegg (safecracker) to his repertoire. He was found not guilty of robbing the H.A. Glenn store in Middletown in March, 1925, and was suspected in a Connorsville, Indiana, heist that June, but had an alibi. Wrassman was also the primary suspect in the robbery of the Butler County Courthouse in January, 1926. 

After the showdown with Skinner, Wrassman moved further south to Cincinnati. Though he steered clear of Hamilton for much of 1926 and 1927, he was occasionally seen at the Hotel Lee and at a café on South Fifth Street, and always had three men with him as bodyguards. His merrymaking trips to Hamilton often ended up in brawls and sluggings. 

Wrassman was credited with the June, 1927 shooting of Glenn Hiatt, alias Harrington, and Jack Parker at the Superior Fishing Camp, and was linked up with the slaying of Thomas Concannon, July 6, 1927, at the Five Mile House, Rapid Run Pike, a “good beer” joint on Race Street. 

Toward the end of May, 1929, Wrassman and one of his men came to Hamilton to party at the Hotel Lee, but the soiree broke up when a Dayton man took a bullet in the shoulder and his pal ended up in Hamilton police headquarters. Wrassman and his entourage slipped away, but the heat was great, so he turned himself in a few days later. The Dayton men would not talk, forfeiting $100 bonds by failing to appear at a hearing and Wrassman walked out of municipal court a free man.

***

Schaefer wanted Wrassman for several shootings at fishing camps and had been trailing him closely. The detective was returning to Cincinnati at 12:30 a.m. Tuesday, June 11, 1929, after a late-night trip to a Newport fishing camp along the Licking River when he spotted Wrassman’s automobile, a brown sedan, parked on Opera Place between Race and Elm, now the site of Cincinnati’s convention center.

Dutch called police headquarters for back-up, Captain of Detectives Walter Fricke, and they searched the car but did not find anything except a few steel saw blades and other tools of the yegg--but no guns, so they knew the big man would be armed.

Then Schaefer saw two men on the south side of the street, leaving the Canton Chop Suey House, about 100 feet away. Wrassman was carrying food in his left hand. Schaefer stood in the shadows with his hat pulled down on his forehead, but Wrassman recognized him anyway and shouted, “I’m going to kill you, you dirty bastard!”

Wrassman walked toward Schaefer and Schaefer walked toward Wrassman in a classic showdown stance, Fricke standing nearby, watching closely should Wrassman pull his gun. But he did not draw his weapon. He was already holding it in his right hand. When they were about 35 feet apart, Wrassman began shooting. He fired twice before Schafer sprang into action, and his revolver barked five times as Fat continued to hurl lead. The men walked boldly toward each other as they shot. Fricke called it “the most remarkable show of courage I ever hope to witness.” When they were but 10 feet apart, Wrassman crumbled to the sidewalk, falling on his gigantic stomach. All five bullets hit the prodigious mark, but all six of Wrassman’s shots missed.

“You got me at last, Dutch,” he murmured as he turned his head toward Schaefer.

“I’m sorry, Fat,” Schaefer said as he holstered his revolver and took Wrassman’s, noting that they both carried the same type of pistol. “It was you or me.”

There was a tense moment as a half-dozen or more men, thought to be members of Wrassman’s gang, gathered anxiously around the scene of the shooting, trigger fingers itching. Fricke worried that there might be more trouble if these fellows decided to take out their revenge right away, but they began to disperse as more police arrived.

His death marked the end of a bitter rivalry between the gangster and the detective. 

Schaefer accompanied Wrassman’s body to General Hospital, and an hour later got a phone call there. “You,” said a mysterious voice. “You’re marked.”

Undertakers created a specially-made, extra-large casket to accommodate Wrassman’s enormous frame. It took eleven pall bearers to get the huge casket in and out of his modest home on Evanston Avenue, where more than 250 people mingled in the yard while the family of George Wrassman held private funeral services inside. 

Even though they weren’t officially posted as guards, there were several Cincinnati police detectives in the crowd. Hamilton Chief of Police John C. Calhoun forbade any Hamilton police to go there. The police presence caused a fair amount of tension, and reporters on the scene said there was an expectation that “anything could happen,” though nothing did.

Lyman Williams’s heroics in the Yerigan rampage, however, did not give him free reign to continue his liquor interests.

In the fall of 1927, Judge Clarence Murphy ordered the Lyman Williams café Place to be padlocked. It was one of ten cafes named in the suit filed by Butler County Prosecutor P.P. Boli as “nuisances”, stating that more than two liquor law convictions were reported against each.

Williams, apparently undeterred, posted a $1,500 bond on the promise that it would not be used for the illegal possession, sale or use of liquor for one year, then pursued other interests. He purchased an interest in the Grand Hotel from the estate of former Butler County Sheriff Rudy Laubach and was allegedly a silent partner in a café at 117 Court Street, an operation that would soon cause his downfall, and was implicated in the operation of a 200-gallon still.

The latter incident came about in April, 1927, when Lyman Williams and Miss Zanna Case, 775 Fairview Avenue, were arrested for having 23 gallons of moonshine in the car. Zanna Case, formerly known as Ruth Johnson, was 33 years old, a widow and a beautician by trade.

At a preliminary hearing, both entered pleas of not guilty and Case told the Federal Liquor Commissioner in Cincinnati that Lyman Williams did not know the liquor was in the car and knew nothing about it. The Commissioner dismissed Williams and held the woman to the federal grand jury. She was eventually found guilty and fined $300.

The arrest and conviction apparently alerted Prohibition officials to bigger doings at work in the bootlegging underground.

At either 10 a.m. or noon January 12, 1929, Hamilton police Chief of Detectives Otto Kolodzik and two other officers knocked on the door of a house at 2004 Dixie Highway, conducting an investigation into by-passes around gas and water meters. Zanna Case answered. 

“They asked how big a plant was in operation there,” according to the Journal, “and she invited them to the second floor.”

The operation took up three rooms. Police confiscated 34 barrels of mash, several hundred pounds of sugar, and other supplies, a 200-gallon or a 250-gallon still, either twenty-five and fifty gallons of finished moonshine “ready for flavoring”, and an unstated quantity of Canadian beer. 

“Raiders said the liquor is the same that has been found in bottles bearing fancy labels, Scotch and bourbon, and peddled for $5 a pint,” one paper reported. Another said that it had been passed off as “good Canadian liquor.”

“The still was one of the most complete outfits to be seized by police in the annals of police history,” the Daily News said. “The still was going full blast” when the officers arrived. They believed it was owned by “a prominent Hamilton bootlegger.”

Three officers dismantled the still, took it outside and put an axe to it.

Mrs. Case would neither deny nor affirm ownership of the property and as a result, charges were placed against her for possession and manufacturing of alcohol, possession of implements designed for the manufacture of alcohol, possession of by-passes through the gas and water meters, and disorderly conduct.

Late that night, Hamilton’s Chief of Detectives Otto Kolodzik received seven telephone calls between 1:30 and 4 a.m., arousing him from his sleep. He thought he recognized the voice of Lyman Williams.

“Each time, he was made the butt of insulting remarks and each time he was warned that the gang would get him,” the papers said, that he would be “taken for a ride.” 

Kolodzik had his wife answer a call while he listened in.

“No, Mr. Williams, my husband has gone to headquarters,” she said.

“How do you know this is Williams?” the caller asked.

She hung up the phone and the calls ceased.

The next day, a Saturday, Kolodzik and three officers raided the café at 117 Court Street and arrested John Dinwiddie, 28. They seized a slot machine and punchboards and a cash register containing $700. In the register, they found a list of names, supposedly customers who had charge accounts. “Small amounts” of whiskey and beer were seized. Dunwoodie said they were his.

The following Tuesday, Kolodzik and two officers returned to the café. They knocked at the locked rear door and someone peered from the peep hole and said he was going to get a key. Believing this to be a stall, police kicked in the door. 

Mel Auraden, owner of a café on Heaton Street, and Lyman Williams were in the place when it was raided. It was believed that Auraden and Williams were partners in the Court Street establishment.

They found nothing on the first floor, but six dozen bottles of beer on the second floor. Police asked Auraden and Williams if the beer was theirs. They said no, that Dinwiddie would again take the rap. 

Zana Case pleaded guilty to four of the five charges, one charge dropped, and fined $1,200. Police believed that she, too, was taking the rap for Lyman Williams.

***

A few months later, on Monday, April 8, Hamilton police raided four different cafes, arrested three men and seized a small amount of moonshine, but the raid on the Court Street café operated by Lyman Williams turned out to be “a water haul.”

After raiding the Court Street establishment, still looking for liquor, police seized what appeared to be an abandoned automobile without license plates in a parking lot near the café and towed it to police headquarters.

Dry squad officers Rudolph Kolodzik and Oscar Decker rode in the confiscated car four square through a bumpy alley and over car rails, not wise to the fact that 24 caps and 100 feet of fuse were playing a tattoo upon the motor.

When they got the car back to headquarters, they began their searching for a “liquor Plant,” police lifted the hood of the dilapidated sedan, found a safe blower’s “arsenal” in a gunnysack resting on top of a cold motor.

The caps, each of which explodes with a 60 pound pressure, and the fuse were discovered by patrolman Urban Leugers who made a minute inspection of the car. A small tin box which contained the caps, carried the warning—explosive—danger, do not jar—handle carefully—keep away from heat—keep in dry place.”

Ownership of the sedan, a wreck and entirely out of running order, was traced to Lyman Williams.

“Our opinion,” said Chief of Police John C. Calhoun, “is that the caps and fuse belong to a gang of yeggs, probably from Cincinnati. It is sort of a mystery how they came to be placed in the sedan. I do not believe the owner of the car knew the caps and fuse were there.”

The license plates of the car were found a month later on the stolen green Nash sedan in which Turkey Joe Jacobs was machine gunned along River Road near Symmes Corner. Jacobs, police allege, was a doorman for Williams and Auraden at the Court Street café.

Late in the evening of May 3, 1927, two men, one from Canada and one from Michigan, came to the Hamilton Police Chief Otto Kolodzik with an unusual request: They wanted help in tracking down some bandits they believed were in Hamilton. Earlier that day, the two men had left Toledo with $400 in cash, a Ford truck filled with 166 cases of Canadian beer, and a Ford roadster loaded down with 60 cases of Canadian whiskey. They were headed south to Cincinnati.

When they were just past Greenville, four men in a Hudson brougham forced the truck off the road. Shots were fired, but the driver escaped unharmed. One of the men from the Hudson got in the driver’s seat and took off with the truck, the beer, and the $400. The driver of the roadster, seeing this activity in his rearview mirror, at first pulled over, but once he figured out what was going on, he tried to speed away. The Hudson soon caught up with him and amid a hail of gunfire, the driver pulled over into the yard of a farm and hit the ground running, the bullets spattering the lawn around him as he sought safety in the farmhouse.

The Hudson, the load of beer, and the whiskey continued the journey south. The two drivers met up on the road and hoofed it back to Greenville. They had managed to get the license plate number of the car, and the Greenville police told them that it was registered to Robert Kolker of Hamilton. The drivers fully admitted that they were rum runners, but they wanted the Hamilton police to help them recover their vehicles and cash.

Chief Kolodzik had a tip, so with a posse of a half-dozen detectives, deputies, and liquor agents, he set up an ambush in Coke Otto and waited until 5 a.m. Wednesday morning. It turned out to be a wasted effort. The posse spread out to search for the three vehicles, and a few hours later, they found the roadster and truck, shed of the cargo, parked on Maple Avenue. At 4 p.m. that afternoon, Sheriff Bert Wagner of Darke County showed up with an arrest warrant for three Hamilton men: Kolker, 29, Jack Parker, 28, and Glenn Harrington, 25, whose real name was Hiatt, but he was trying to avoid being located by an ex-wife in Michigan. Police knew Kolker and Parker to be close, both with prior records not only of bootlegging but also armed robbery, safe cracking, and gambling. Parker owned the cafe operated by Olney Wells on Court Street where Bob Gary had been killed in a raid. Again acting on a tip, Kolodzik and two detectives drove around town and spotted the Hudson brougham with five men inside, including the three named in the warrant. Kolker, Parker, and Harrington (Hiatt) were arrested and turned over to the Greene County authorities.

Although the trio didn’t speak, police in Hamilton and Cincinnati believed that the hijacking was in retaliation for an earlier hijacking, and that some kind of rift had opened among the Hamilton bootleggers, that a war between rival factions was beginning to heat up.

And heat up it did.

Kolker, Parker, and Hiatt made bond in Greenville and returned to Hamilton. A couple of weeks later, Parker and Hiatt took their wives to the Superior Fishing Club along the Little Miami River for a day of relaxation, but it may have been something of a gangster’s picnic. These “fishing clubs” were quite popular along area rivers during Prohibition. Tucked away deep in the woods far from the prying eyes of city police, many of them had bars where they could legally serve “near beer” as a front for whatever other activities might go on. Kolker had a previous engagement that Sunday, June 5, or else he and his wife would have been there, too.

There were about 25 other people there that afternoon, and copious amounts of near beer and who knows what else consumed. Jack Parker was reportedly very drunk, and after the two couples had dinner on their own, his wife came down with a headache and went to the car to lie down. Parker and Kolker were at the bar, and witnesses later said that Parker went around asking for a $10 loan. Exiled Hamilton bootlegger and moonshiner George “Fat” Wrassman, then making Evanston his home, reportedly said to him, “I don’t have $10, but if I did, I wouldn’t give it to you.”

Parker turned on him. “If you think you’re a better man, let’s step outside,” he slurred.

Wrassman did not step outside. He calmly pulled a revolver from his jacket and shot Parker in the knee, breaking his kneecap in two and shattering the bone behind. Enraged, Hiatt either pulled his own weapon or took one from Parker (accounts vary) and shouted, “Who did that?” and waved his gun around the crowd in a circle. “I’m going to get the guy who shot my pal!” At the coroner’s inquest, twenty-three people who had been in the bar testified, but no one could say for certain who fired the shot that killed Glenn Hiatt. Parker didn’t remember, but somehow, a struggle ensued and more shots were fired. Hiatt took a bullet in his right side and the crowd dispersed immediately.

The Hiatts and the Parkers hopped into the Parkers’ car with plans to go back to Hamilton to Mercy Hospital to have their wounds tended to. It’s not clear who was driving the car, but it ended up in a ditch. Some men stopped to help extricate it, but having no luck, a nephew of the man who ran the camp took Kolker in his car, and dumped him at a doctor’s office in Montgomery, where he died shortly after.

Jack Parker and the two women went to Mercy Hospital, thinking that was where the nephew had taken Hiatt, but he wasn’t there, so the two women left Jack at the hospital to be treated for a shattered kneecap and went to a Cincinnati General Hospital. They asked around, and found that Hiatt was at rest in the Hamilton County morgue.

Police expected Fat Wrassman to turn himself in, believing that he would believe he would be safer in police custody than on the streets, but he did not. Hamilton County Prosecutor Robert Taft said he believed fear of Wrassman was responsible for the rampant lapse of memory among the witnesses and was convinced of connections between this case and the murder of bootlegger Harry Sollick in Cincinnati two months previous, which resulted in a warrant for Raymond “Crane Neck” Nugent, who was known to be one of Wrassman’s trigger men.

Without an indictment, it seemed the case would blow over until someone would come forward. But three weeks later, Wrassman was wanted again, implicated in a shooting at a speakeasy on Race Street in Cincinnati when a bootlegger named Ed Concannon was killed. Wrassman played a bit of cat and mouse with the prosecutor, but when his $3,500 bond was forfeited, he gave himself up and stood trial. It only took the jury ninety minutes to vote for acquittal, even though Taft’s star eyewitness was a bank director and former state senator. Wrassman’s attorney, Charles H. Elston, would soon help Cincinnati’s bootleg kingpin George Remus cop a temporary insanity plea in the murder of his wife.

***

On Sunday evening, June 5th 1927, an unidentified man brought a body to the office of Dr. J. O. Blackerby, Montgomery. The man said he picked the body up in Miamiville. No other details were given by the man, who left doctor Blackerby's office immediately after placing the injured man in the Physicians Care .

Two man laid the body on the floor of the office. It was shot through the long. He died a few minutes after being left there. 

One of the men was later identified as Charles Mitts of Connorsville, Indiana.

Mitts is a brother-in-law of Taylor, the man who ran the camp, and was working that day. He was about 300 feet away from the bar when the shots were fired, he said, and ran back to learn what it happened. Taylor at once decided he better go home,  only to come upon Parker's auto, stalled in a ditch. 

He was in his machine trying to pull it out with both Parker and Hyatt were in it. Someone suggested that he take Hyatt to a doctor, and the man was placed in his machine and he drove to Montgomery and to the office of Dr. Blackerby. The doctor had his patient in his office at the time,  he was alone Mets declared, a man came out of the office and help them take Hyatt in And lay him on the floor. He said he left at once, as he thought the other machine was following him, and he did not know who hired or anything about the shooting. Betts said that no one at the camp was drunk.

Mitts's story a was contradicted by that of Doctor Blackerby and by Henry Weisel, 1638 Western Avenue, who was in the doctor's office at the time. They declare that Mitts told them that the injured man had been hurt in an automobile accident, and when he started to leave the office and was asked where he was going he said he wanted to get his hat. 

But he jumped into his machine and speed away, Weisel declared. 

The only identification marks on the slain man we're tattoo inscriptions on the right arm what's the initials G. C. H.- Helen Nolan - true love.

An automobile key, a truck key, and the door key were the only things found in his clothing. The victim was about 5 ft 11 in tall, weighed about 185 lb, had dark hair, had dark brown hair and mustache. It was wearing a light gray suit and was of neat appearance Curry

Glenn Hiatt had been going by the name of Harrington to avoid being found by his ex-wife.

On Sunday, June 5, 1927, many of the key figures in the local bootlegging and hijacking game were together at a cook-out at the Superior Fishing Camp along the Little Miami River.

Bernice Hiatt: “Sunday my husband and I and Jack Parker and his wife Mary went to the camp in Parker’s machine. The men played ball with the others there in the afternoon and then we had dinner. There were about 25 others there, but I did not know any of them. Just before the shooting, Mrs. Parker was asleep in the automobile, she having felt ill, and I was standing at the end of the bar with the others when Glenns aid he was going to the other end of the bar to get some cigarettes.

“There was no argument; I didn’t hear a word before the shot was fired. WHen the shot was fired I ran to the machine and woke up Mary Parker and they brought my husband and Parker to the machine. Parker said he was stooping down over my husband when someone shot him, the bullet passing through his right leg at the knee.

“We started to leave in Parker’s machine, but it went into a ditch, and then some men in another machine came along and they said they would take my husband with them. They put him in that machine and started off.

“We supposed they were going to take him to the hospital at Hamilton. Another couple offered to take me there in their car and I went with them. We went to the hospital but they did not show up there, and then we came to Cincinnati and went to the General Hospital. We saw a policeman there and told him what we were looking for and asked if any wounded man  had been brought in. He advised me to go back home and wait until I heard something of where they had taken my husband. I then called up the police department and was told there was no report of anyone being brought into the city wounded. They did not ask my name.

“I did not see who shot my husband, and I do not know who did. There was a big man and a small man standing beside the end of the bar when he went there. The big man weighed more than 250 pounds, I would think, and the other man probably weighed 170 pounds. The big man was dressed in a dark suit and a straw hat. He also wore shellrimmed glasses. I would know him again if I saw him, as he was playing ball with the others during the afternoon. The other man wore a light suit. I did not see much of what happened for I was not looking at my husband at the time, and I ran to the machine as soon as the shot was fired. I did not see anyone with a gun.”

When taken to the morgue to identify her husband's body she broke down completely, and had to be assisted back to the coroner's office. She expressed great concern for the blow her husband's death will be to his parents, who, she stated, Zanesville, Ohio. 

Mrs. Hyatt was permitted to return to Hamilton what's mrs. kolker, after she had promised that she would come here to testify at the inquest. Mrs. Coulter said that she and her husband had not gone to the camp with the other couples on Sunday for the reason that they had arranged to visit relatives at Middletown instead.

Long before Mrs. Hyatt had sent the word which identified the dead man as her husband, deputy sheriff's August Beckman and Herman Klein have discovered the place where the murder was committed. This resulted through a telephone number found in the effects on hiatt's body, which proved to be the number of the Superior fishing club, and with County detective Shafer, they had started an investigation which is expected to lead to the arrest of the man who killed Hyatt and shot Parker.

They also learn that the story told by mrs. Hyatt, that she and her husband and Parker and his wife went to the camp alone, was true. The two couples kept to themselves at the camp except that the man played ball with the others for a while. Babe dinner by the house and drink home brew beer at the bar, but made no attempt to mix in with any of the other crowd. These facts, coupled with the further information that the party which had picnicked at the place during the afternoon at all left for home before the shooting occurred, please officers to the theory that the killing was a Bootleggers Feud entirely.

What's a murder of Hyatt the murders of Harold h Fitch and Harry solic, both known Bootleggers. We're recalled. Such, it is charged, was riddled with bullets at a garage in Reading Ohio, and his body then taken to a lonely spot on Cooper Avenue where it was left by the roadside early on the morning of March 19th. For this murder Harold Nason, Alias Nate Blum, Detroit Michigan, were indicted on a first-degree charge, but both were released on five $5,000 Bond each, and nothing has been done with their case yet.

Sollick was shot and killed bedroom on West 2nd Street and his body taken in an automobile to front and Harriet streets, where was dumped in the gutter on February 2nd. A sealed indictment was returned in this case, but no one has been arrested. This also was declared to have been a fight between Bootleggers who had fallen out. Which was alleged to have been a hijacker.

Detective Schaefer and deputy sheriff Klein return from Hamilton empty-handed, as Parker, whom they sought to have a beer before Corner swing, was too badly wounded to be moved. This is the second time that he received a bullet in his name the former bullet tearing away part of the kneecap. 

In spite of the fact that mrs. Hyatt said that she was standing at one end of the bar drinking near beer with Parker when her husband went to the other end to get some cigarettes and was shot, and despite the fact that she had declared Parker inform her he was leaning over Hyatt when he receive the bullet in his bag, Parker denied to the officers that he was close enough to see anything he declared that he did not know anything was wrong until he heard the two shots and received a bullet in his leg.

However the officers have information proving that there was an altercation before the shooting and that's more than the two shots were fired.

The bullet entered on the left side, pass through the left lung, then through the spinal column after which just went through the right long and passed out the right side of the body. 

Search for a fat man weighing close to 300 lb, and a companion, was estimated to weigh approximately 175 pounds, was because yesterday my deputy sheriff's Herman Decline and August Jo Beckman and County detective Shafer the question them regarding the murder of Glenn Hyatt 216 South 3rd Street oh, at the Superior fishing club camp. It was learned that the fat man left Hamilton Monday and has not been seen since, while the whereabouts of his smaller companion also has not been learned.

The suspect is said by police to have been ordered out of Hamilton two years ago. He is said to have made a hasty Retreat from the camp after the shooting and has not been seen by detectives are friends of the police department sense.

Joe Schaefer, Hamilton County detective, predicted the man will be arrested as soon as any disguise he may assume will not be difficult to penetrate. Real paragraph Schaefer also believes Fat may surrender as he has been told he’s first on the list to be bumped off in the liquor fight said to be waging.

Parents of Hyatt were to arrive and Cincinnati Wednesday afternoon to take charge of the body no funeral arrangements have been made but it is believed the body will be taken to Saginaw Michigan the home of mrs. Hyatt. The body has been in the Hamilton County Morgue since its removal there Sunday night from The Office of Dr. Blackerby. 

***

The next casualty in the Little Chicago gang war came March 5, 1928 at the Garden of Allah, a roadhouse on Springfield Pike just outside of Butler County. Jack Parker, whose entrepreneurship included gambling, was having dinner there with John “Buddy” Ryan, a well-known and promising young boxer from Covington who was also known to consort with the gambling fraternity. Parker, again very drunk, and Ryan got into a persistent argument, apparently over a woman, and three times they took it to the parking lot. The third time, Ryan came back alone, bleeding from a wound in the stomach from a heavy calibre automatic. Parker was seen to hop into a big car with the woman in question and drive off.

Parker was indicted on the lam March 13, and three weeks later was involved in another notable caper. Though not directly related to the gangster wars, the incident at the Pelican Club proved to be a pivotal event in the Little Chicago narrative.

The Pelican Club Cafe was a pool hall, restaurant, and ice cream parlor on Hamilton Avenue in College Hill. Although there is no record of it being a speakeasy, no reported liquor violations, owner William “Peanuts” Warnken did have prior arrests for allowing gambling on premises, and he was present during the early morning hours of Sunday, April 8, 1928, when a gang of six gunman burst in on a hot dice game that was taking place on one of the pool tables. They all wore masks of some sort, a bandana covering their mouth and nose or a small black mask covering their eyes. One wore large, dark sunglasses, who seemed to be the leader of the crew. One man carried two sawed-off shotguns, another man one. The rest brandished pistols.

It was apparently the dice game that had attracted the bandits, but they first went for the safe. One of them put a gun to the cook’s head and demanded he open it. He pleaded that he did not know the combination. Fearing they would open fire, Warnken stepped forward and said he could open it. The safe yielded but five dollars in pennies, so the bandits turned to the twenty men in the cafe, many of whom were crouched and hiding under the tables. The bandits cursed and yelled, poking the men with their shotguns and pistols, getting them to line up along the walls. One man didn’t move fast enough and was paid with a shotgun muzzle to the face, knocking out several teeth.

In the meantime, the village marshal, 53-year-old Hungarian immigrant Peter Dumele, had been on a robbery call in the neighborhood, and seeing the lights on in the Pelican Club, decided to stop in and shoot the breeze, as he sometimes did. Dumele saw all the commotion in the place as the bandits were about half-way through their shake-down, but found the glass front door locked. He tapped on it.

One of the bandits noticed Warnken trying to give Dumele a sign to move on and opened the door, ushering the marshal inside. Dumele laughed, as if he thought it were a put-on when they ordered him to put up his hands. Warnken begged him to obey, but his pleas were cut short. Suddenly realizing the seriousness of the situation, Dumele made a move toward the pistol in his back holster. 

The bandit in the dark glasses shouted, “Give him what’s coming to him, boys!” 

The bandits opened fire. One load of shot tore away Dumele’s right hand and shattered his arm, another hit him square in the chest. A revolver bullet went through his belly sideways. Dumele fell to the ground. The men panicked and the room erupted into chaos. One of them crashed through a large window and dragged the sash behind him down Hamilton Avenue.

The bandits hastily collected their loot. As they filed out the door, one of the victims shouted, “Hey! I know you fellows! You’re from Hamilton!”

“Let him have it!” dark glasses shouted. The last bandit out the door turned around and fired a shotgun into the room. The blast passed within inches of Warnken’s head and then peppered the back of a man huddled in a corner, causing superficial flesh wounds.

Dumele survived a few hours. On his deathbed, he told his wife, “I would not be a coward. If it had to be, I would rather die for the village.”

Detective Joseph “Dutch” Schaefer was put on the case, and soon began making arrests. Although they wore masks, they were easily identified. Witnesses pegged the leader of the gang, the man in the dark glasses who gave the order to fire on Dumele, as Todd Messner, who a few years earlier had been acquitted along with Crane Neck Nugent of the murder of Hamilton Cafe owner Robert Schief. The gang included Breck Lutes of Middletown, Rodney Ford of Cincinnati, and Bob “The Fox” Zwick, of Newport but closely associated with Nugent and Wrassman. The “sixth man” was not indicted for lack of identification, but was only referred to as “a Hamilton man,” suggesting that it may have been Turkey Joe Jacobs.

Jack Parker was part of that gang, too, but he was not indicted, because he was killed before Schaefer could catch up with him. A posse almost had him in Preble County on April 13, but missed him by a few hours, though they did capture a 150-gallon still on the raid and arrested Parker’s pal Kolker for it.

Parker’s bullet-riddled body was found by a man out picking greens on the afternoon of May 16, 1928, in a pool of water at the foot of an embankment 20 feet off a Warren County road near Lebanon. He had been hiding out in a camp near there. Bloodstains in the road suggesting he was shot there and thrown into the ditch. He was shot three times, once in the face and twice in the back. At first it was thought that some of his old pals had taken him “for a ride in the country.” No one was ever arrested or indicted for his murder, but Schaefer would later express the belief that it was the work of Crane Neck Nugent, who was reported to be a special pal to Buddy Ryan, the boxer for whose murder Parker was under indictment.

The body count continued to rise in the Little Chicago gang war, and it was far from over. Soon the violence would return to Hamilton’s neighborhoods with a series of bold assassinations.

Two weeks after Jack Parker’s body was found beside a Lebanon highway and just less than a month after the murder of Marshal Dumele at the Pelican Cafe, Hamilton County detective Joe Schaefer receive a break in the latter case when he took into custody Breck Lutes, a 28-year-old Middletown electrician, from “a disorderly house” in Newport, Kentucky. Three women were arrested at the same time, including one who gave her name as “Mary Hamilton” and turned out to be Jack Parker’s widow.

Schaefer had tracked him to Newport following an incident on May 30, 1928, in which two Cincinnati motorcycle police chased a speeding car containing two men and a woman across the bridge into Covington. One of the men in the car began firing with a revolver over his shoulder at the motorcycle cops, hitting one of them three times in the shoulder and the other once in the foot. They gave up the chase, but one of the officers said he recognized the driver of the car as “Crane Neck” Nugent, who had been acquitted of the murder of Bob Schief in Hamilton. He was reasonably confused, as it was actually Todd Messner, Nugent’s co-defendant in the Schief murder, also acquitted. Investigators traced the car to a rental agency in Covington. Lutes admitted being in the car when it was rented, but said he was not in the car when the motorcycle cops were shot. He wasn’t, but three people identified him as one of the Pelican Cafe bandits. Schaefer let Lutes go, however, hoping that he would lead detectives to the other bandits in the case.

Nearly five months would pass before the first solid arrests in the case, all three tinged with serendipity.

On the afternoon of Sunday, September 30, Hamilton police responded to a disturbance at a fishing camp along the Great Miami River north of town near Woodsdale. Several people had been drinking at the camp, and when some of the party decided to leave, a very drunk and belligerent Toddy Messner shot the tires of their car full of holes. “I’m staying and now so are you,” he told them.

Somehow, the departing partiers managed to call a cab and took the tire into town for repairs. The garage owner tipped off Hamilton police, and a posse of seventeen officers from Hamilton and Middletown set up a stake-out at the entrance to the narrow lane that led to the fishing camp. When Messner, another man, and two women left the camp, police surrounded the car and took them all into custody. The man, a bus driver from Bond Hill, broke down under questioning and gave police the address of the Newport apartment where Messner had been living. There, they found a stash of yegg’s tools and the clothes that would place Messner at the Pelican Cafe the night of Dumele’s murder. Hamilton police turned him over to Hamilton County authorities, and the owner of the Pelican Club identified Messner as the man who directed the other bandits during the raid.

The very next weekend, Detective Schaefer and his partner found Rodney Ford, a 30-year-old Cincinnati man, parked in a car a couple of blocks from his home in the West End. They saw him drop a revolver over the back seat. They took him into custody and witnesses identified him as one of the bandits from the Pelican Club. During his trial, he revealed that he had just dropped off the fugitve Robert Zwick, also known as “The Fox” and “Foxy Bob,” who was also wanted for Dumele’s murder and other crimes, and was on his way to buy some whiskey. It was the first of many narrow escapes for Foxy Bob.

The same day Ford was arrested, Breck Lutes showed up at Mercy Hospital in Hamilton after having been shot in the hip at a fishing camp near Venice. Charles Fiehrer, a Hamilton man who owned the camp, said he was cleaning his gun when it went off and shot his friend. Schaefer and Hamilton police arrested Lutes when he left the hospital three weeks later, and a Hamilton County grand jury indicted Messner, Ford, Lutes, and the absent Zwick on first degree murder charges.

The three prisoners appeared at a preliminary hearing together on November 15 and were granted separate trials. Ford was to be the first to face the jury, but with Zwick on the loose the gangster war raged on even while these three were in custody.

On the night of December 12, the day the Hamilton County court began questioning potential jurors in Ford’s trial, Martin Lewis, who lived on West Miami River Road, just north of Venice but across the river in Hamilton County, saw his barbecue stand about 250 feet from his hillside home consumed in flames. He rushed to the scene and with some of his neighbors watched the small frame building quickly burn to the ground. The stand had been closed for the season and there was nothing flammable inside, but it burned so quickly that Lewis presumed it was arson. Still, he  was shocked when the falling flaming timbers revealed a body lying on the floor.

The coroner discovered a bullet wound in the chest, three knife wounds, and a broken left arm on the charred remains. The body was lying face down. The coroner asserted he had been killed elsewhere and the barbecue stand, just a few yards where the body of another gangster had been discovered a year earlier. A belt buckle and the remaining teeth helped identify the body as that of Robert Andres, a 28-year-old railroad worker who was present at the Pelican Club the night of Dumele’s murder. He was one of the few men present willing to go on the stand to identify the bandits and had testified at Ford’s arraignment. There was no doubt in Schaefer’s mind that this was the reason for his murder, and he laid the crime on Foxy Bob Zwick and Crane Neck Nugent, by now a gangster all-star having been in on the notorious St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. 

Three days later, Nugent and Zwick struck again, by Schaefer’s reckoning. Bob Kolker, who was close to the late Jack Parker, had been drinking at his Parrish Avenue home with a fellow named Kenneth Richardson. At about 4:30 in the morning they both got into Kolker’s car, Richardson driving, to take the latter home on Dixie Highway. In front of Richardson’s house, Kolker got out of the car and was about to take the driver’s seat when the glare of bright headlights blinded him from the rear. A sedan slowly passed near and a man leaned out of a window, firing five shots. Four shots missed, but one caught Kolker in the chest, just below his heart, and lodged in his left lung. He had been picked up several times by the police in connection with Parker’s death, and Schaefer insisted Kolker never talked and said he believed that the gangsters believed that Kolker had been giving “tips.” 

Kolker managed to survive the attack and appeared as a defense witness at Lutes’s trial, offering an alibi, then went into the wind. All three of the captured bandits were convicted in the Dumele murder, Messner and Lutes both receiving life sentences in the Ohio Penitentiary, and Rodney Ford executed July 1929. Foxy Bob Zwick was still on the move, but still spent a good deal of time in Hamilton, and was there on May 19, 1929, when the gangster war began its boldest string of skirmishes.

A Lindenwald street car passed Seventh and Heaton streets about 10:45 p.m. that evening, and in spite of the rattle, several in the neighborhood heard what sounded like gunfire or a car backfiring. But they minded their own business. Several alleys in the neighborhood contained garages filled with all sorts of contraband, and most residents fearfully parked their cars on the street to avoid stumbling onto something.

But shortly after 11 p. m. Walter Finfrock drove into the alley off the 300 block of North Sixth Street and in the beam of his headlights saw a man lying on the ground, sort of wedged up against a garage door. “Just a drunk,” Finfrock’s passenger, his father, said. Then they noticed the pool of blood. Finfrock abandoned his car there and notified police. 

The dead man was George Murphy, known around town as a night clerk at the Grand Hotel when it was run by former Butler County Sheriff Rudy Laubach. He was originally from St. Louis and was known to have run liquor to Hamilton from Detroit, Kansas City, Louisville, and St. Louis. Other than talking about his war experience in the Canadian army, he revealed very little of himself to people in Hamilton, who noted that he was often out of town for months at a time. Even his family was in the dark about his occupation and didn’t know any of his friends, but they knew he always had money, dressed in the finest clothes, and always drove a new car. 

The law enforcement system knew Murphy better than the underworld or his family. In addition to being well-known as a liquor runner, Murphy was the chief suspect in a recent attempt to blow up a safe at the Rollman department store in downtown Cincinnati on May 5 along with Hamilton’s own Fat Wrassman and Harry Truesdale, one of George Remus’s lieutenants. He had a long criminal record and had made a daring escape from the Atlanta federal prison. He was such a brazen and reckless operator that no gang would work with him full-time, so he was known as a lone wolf. Nevertheless, he had a reputation as a straight-shooter for the most part, although he had been known to participate in several hijackings of fellow bootleggers. 

Murphy, 40, elegantly dressed in a fine gray suit with monogrammed handkerchiefs, bad been dead twenty minutes when the first police arrived. The location of machine gun shells indicated a gunman had lain in wait behind a board fence across the alley. Twenty-eight shots had been fired: ten into the garage door, eighteen into George Murphy. Six bullets went into his back, six more shots nearly tore off his left wrist and arm, and six of the bullets, apparently shot after an initial attack, traced a perfect circle eight inches in diameter around his heart. Murphy had a .38 revolver tucked in his belt. His inside coat pocket was a gold watch that contained a picture of a pretty girl. Detectives presumed it was his sweetheart, the titian-haired beauty Pauline Wilson, 25, but she was nowhere to be found. Murphy and Wilson had moved from last known address, an apartment on Atlantic Ave. in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Cincinnati, in February. They told neighbors they were moving to Florida. Neighbors knew her as “Pearl Murphy” and suspected he was a professional gambler. They paid their rent in advance, in cash, and were mostly quiet but received frequent visitors, including “a big fat man.”

The next morning, in what police believed as evidence of a related incident, travelers discovered a pool of blood on the bridge at Venice, not far from the burned-out barbecue shack that contained Robert Andres’s remains. The river was running high, making it impossible to search for a body. 

Although there were many men in and around Hamilton who served in World War I and could wield a machine gun with the precision and panache as Murphy’s hit, but no two were as expert as Crane Neck Nugent and Foxy Bob Zwick. It would later turn out that the bullets in the Andres murder and the Murphy assassination were from the same gun, the kind that Zwick was known to use.

Police were also concerned because the tactic used in the attempt on Kolker’s life and the Murphy assassination--hiding in ambush and taking the victim by surprise--was almost unheard of in Southwest Ohio. A more common method among local thugs was taking the man for a ride outside the city limits. “Victims were often lined up before a battery of weapons and told of the cause for death before his life was snuffed out with led,” the Daily News reported. “Not so with Murphy. No killing quite so well-planned and covered up has come before authorities here in many years.”

As it would turn out, the hit on George Murphy was just a warm-up.

After the assassination of George Murphy and other escalations in the Little Chicago gangster wars, police were on the lookout for Bob Zwick, one of the top machine gunners in the underworld and indicted in the murder of College Hill Marshal Peter Dumele.

Zwick hailed from Cincinnati and was early on associated with the bootleggers in Newport, Kentucky, but he also had a friend in “Turkey Joe” Jacobs, one of Hamilton’s most well-known gangsters. Jacobs, a horse trainer and race by trade or cover, was a defense witness at the trial of Alabama Wells, testifying that Coroner Hugh Gadd fired the shot that killed Bob Gary. It was reported that he hated his nickname, earned early in his bootlegging and hijacking career when he stole a turkey truck that he believed was hiding a load of liquor, but it turned out to only be turkeys. Another story says he got the name because he grew up on a turkey farm in a neighborhood right outside of Hamilton known as Gobbler’s Nob. He was closely connected to an interstate auto theft ring and implicated in a variety of gangland activities, from running moonshine to blowing safes. 

“To all but those who knew Jacobs well,” the Evening Journal reported, “he might have been considered a yokel. His manner of dress, his easy-going way and his disarming appearance characterized him as such, but he was anything but a yokel in the racket.”

The Daily News said that Jacobs was not fond of guns but was well-armed with his fists. He and Zwick were the best of friends, and many believed a not-so-innocent bystander when the assassins came after Zwick, that Turkey Joe just got caught in the crossfire. He was planning to take one of his horses to a race in Columbus the day after his death.

At 6:15 p.m., May 27, exactly one week after the Murphy killing, Turkey Joe Jacobs and Bob Zwick were in the Milders Inn at Symmes Corner south of Hamilton, a favorite regional eatery. 

Jake Milders had been a sports promoter before the 1913 flood picked up his Hamilton Coliseum and floated it two miles downstream before crashing it into the Columbia Bridge. Symmes Corner was a stop on the traction line to Cincinnati, and their restaurant was popular with Reds players and a destination spot for people who would come in from as far away as Indianapolis, sometimes waiting three hours on a busy weekend night for a steaming plate of “Mom” Milders’s fried chicken and mashed potatoes with creamy gravy.

They were keeping a close eye on the traffic on the Mt. Pleasant Pike, on the lookout for a liquor truck that was supposed to be heading down that way around 8 p.m. They were planning to hijack it.

Jacobs’s head turned toward the Pike when a brown sedan passing by. The two men quickly paid their tab, left their meal unfinished, and got in Jacobs’s brand new Nash sedan that parked on the Symmes Road (now Nilles Road).

Anna Smith, 22, was walking west along the crossroad to meet a friend when the Nash passed her by. She saw a second sedan behind it traveling at high speed, and caught up with the first car containing Jacobs and Zwick about 50 feet from the brick schoolhouse. The first car came to a stop and as the brown sedan pulled alongside and someone leaned out of the window and launched a machine gun assault, pumping round after round into the green Nash. 

The brown car took off heading west, passing the Miss Huffman, who was driving her uncle’s car, heading east. She slowed down, horrified at the sight of the bullet riddled car just as Bob Zwick managed to roll out of the Nash’s door and in front of her car. She slowed further to keep from striking him and he jumped on her running board.

“Get off!” Huffman screamed hysterically.

“They’re after me,” the man said, a revolver dangling from his right hand and blood pouring from his left where three fingers has been ripped to shreds and dangling. She stopped the car and screamed hysterically until Zwick pointed the gun in her face. “Take me up the road,” he demanded, and she complied, driving right past her friend, who stood paralyzed by the side of the road having witnessed the assault. As Huffman approached the Milders Inn and the intersection, he jumped from the car and stumbled inside.

The brown sedan had driven about 100 feet down the road and turned around just as Zwick jumped onto Huffman’s car. It slowed down again and pumped another blast of machine gun fire into the Nash.

“Hide me!” he pleaded to Mom Milders. She took him through the kitchen and out the back door to the privy. He locked himself in and Mom Milders went back inside and saw the brown sedan speed past the restaurant. Jake and Mom Milders and their daughter Helen saw four heads bob up in the air like jumping jacks as the car bumped over the CH&D Railroad tracks. It then disappeared around a curve.

After the car passed, Zwick left the outhouse and walked north toward Hamilton and stopped at Phillip Beiser’s grocery store, pushing his blood spattered face against the glass of the front door, scaring the wits out of Mrs. Beiser, who was luckily locking up for the day. He continued out to the Mt. Pleasant Pike and flagged down a Studebaker that was headed north toward Hamilton, a high school boy from Mt. Healthy on his way to a church festival in Hamilton. Zwick got in the back seat.

“He said he’d been in an accident, that he was with another woman and his car had hit a pole and they were both hurt,” the young man said. “He said he didn’t want his wife to know about it. I asked him where the other woman was and he said he left her at Milders’s... There was a wound over his right eye and his face was covered with blood. One finger on his left hand was almost cut off and was hanging by the skin.”

“We drove to Central Avenue, then to Fifth Street, to East Avenue, to Maple Avenue and then crossed the canal to Hancock Avenue, turned into an alley and went about a block and came to a small, one-story frame house. As we crossed Walnut Street, he ducked his head as though he didn’t want to be seen.

“When we stopped at the house, he got out and a woman, a big woman with bobbed hair came out and said, ‘My God, man, what have you been doing?’ She seemed to be mad.’

The boy would later identify the woman as Anna Jacobs, Turkey Joe’s wife, but she denied ever seeing him or Zwick that night. When showed a picture of the fugitive Bob Zwick, the boy said, “That’s the man.”

When he arrived at the scene, Coroner Edward Cook estimated that 35 to 40 bullets in the automobile. Jacobs, slumped over the driver’s seat, was shot in the left eye, in the left ear and in the left jaw, several more in his head, his left arm and wrist, a total of 18 wounds.

Two hats, one felt and one straw, were lying on the front seat. Jacobs had worn the felt hat. Jacobs had a .38 caliber revolver in his belt, unfired. Fifteen .45 caliber automatic bullets, loosely wrapped in a sheet of paper, lay on the back seat. Rear seat pockets contained 25 more .45 shells, a loaded .45 revolver hidden, tucked beneath an adjustable armrest, its numbers filed away. Police found bullets that had passed through Jacobs’ skull embedded in a shed 75 feet back from the road.

Hamilton police were already certain that the assassination was in reprisal for the murder of George Murphy, so Chief Calhoun took charge of the investigation even though the incident was four miles outside city limits. He personally led squads of detectives and officers on five raiding expeditions trying to find the wounded Bob Zwick, with little effort directed toward finding the assassins.

The Milderses, the Studebaker driver, Blanche Huffman, and others identified Jacobs’s companion as the man wanted in the murder of Marshal Peter Dumele in North College Hill, the murder of Hamilton gang chief Jack Parker, the murder of George Murphy and numerous hijackings of liquor trucks in Southwest Ohio.

From witness accounts, police surmised that Zwick had been shot four times, a graze on his forehead, one in the hip, one in the arm, and a devastating shot to the left hand that took his little finger and damaged several others. The wounds may have been fatal, so they alerted all area hospitals and physicians.

Police would later discover that a Hamilton taxi picked Zwick up at the Evans house and at around 9:30 p.m. delivered him to Dr. J.M. Digby a Newport, Kentucky, physician, who sewed his finger back on, gave him three stitches in his scalp wound and removed a bullet from his hip. The wounded man told the doctor he had been wounded at a beer camp. Dr. Digby would tell the newspapers that such occurrences are not unusual in Newport.

The search for Zwick turned to the north, toward Dayton, Detroit and Canada based on a tip saying that the fugitive had moved to Middletown, where someone else took him through Dayton to Columbus, but the trail soon grew cold.

Officials allowed Turkey Joe’s brother, George Jacobs, a furlough from prison, where he was serving time for burglary, to attend the funeral Friday afternoon. Although Turkey Joe was deeply embedded in the local gang culture, the event was strictly a family affair. Most of the 50 people in attendance who were not police or press were women, there to console his mother, his wife, and his five children. The pallbearers were mostly cousins, though one man was the son of Jack Parker, the local gang leader who met a similar fate a year earlier in Lebanon.

By the weekend, the waters of the Great Miami River had receded some and Hamilton County officials resumed dragging the river in search of Pauline Wilson, George Murphy’s missing girlfriend, whom they believed had been shot and thrown off the Venice bridge. The search was for naught as the body turned up on the farm of Theodore Baughman of East River Road near New Baltimore, five miles below the bridge. The body was fully clothed, wearing a fur coat, a sorority pin, a ring with a black oblong stone, and a wrist watch--stopped at 12:45.

When word of the discovery reached Hamilton, officials rushed the Hamilton County morgue with Murphy’s gold watch with the photo of the girl, but found it difficult to make a positive identification as the body had been badly decomposed from its two weeks in the swell. The eyes had been eaten from the body, the flesh discolored. Nothing indicated that the body had been weighted. The corpse bore one bullet wound that entered just below the left eye and exited the back of the skull on the right side. The only other wounds were scratches and scrapes caused by its five-mile odyssey in the Great Miami River.

Her watch proved to be the positive identification, and police traced her to Atlantic Avenue apartments in Cincinnati where neighbors identified the woman they knew as “Mrs. Murphy.” Dr. A.L. Huston said that the Murphys lived in the building for several months but left in February, saying they were headed to Florida and would return in the spring.

“We did not know what Murphy did for a living,” Dr. Huston said, “but they appeared very quiet and lovable. Never, as long as I was there, did I hear a loud voice or see them that they were not smiling and happy.”

On Wednesday morning, June 5, police discovered an apartment at 831 Carthage Pike where “Mr. and Mrs. George Wilson” lived after they vacated the Atlantic Avenue apartment. The kitchen was spotlessly clean, the living room neatly, tastefully and expensively furnished.

Then they opened a chifferobe. It was a “yegg kit,” with two ounces of nitroglycerin carefully wrapped in cotton, a dozen dynamite detonating caps, and other tools used to blow open safes. They also found a high-powered automatic rifle with a silencer in the apartment and a set of silverware in the process of having a monogram removed. 

Raymond “Crane Neck” Nugent, acquitted of the murder of Hamilton cafe operator Bob Schief in 1925 and who went on to become one of the most notorious machine gunners in the Midwest, left the area for good following the Symmes Corner incident and moved around between Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit, and Miami, Florida, where he had his last run-in with the law when he was arrested March 1930 at a speakeasy under the name of Morris. He was reported staying in a mansion owned by Al Capone.

Even though there were warrants against Nugent for murder in both Cincinnati and Toledo, there was a mix-up in communication and before the policed arrived from Ohio to collect him, a judge accepted a $10,000 cash bond and released Nugent so that he could make an appearance in extradition court. Nugent pulled the $10,000 from his wallet. He never made that promised appearance, nor was he ever seen again. There are several theories as to what happened to him, one favorite being that Al Capone had regarded him as a risk after the Miami affair and some of his pals walked him into the Everglades to feed the gators. A less romantic speculation is that he was one of several gangster bodies found floating in the Detroit River and never identified.

Nugent was not declared officially dead until 1952 after a court action by his widow trying to claim his $1,500 World War I veteran’s death benefit. Mrs. Nugent said when she applied for the benefit that on April 11, 1930, she was living in Chicago and visiting Cincinnati when she received an anonymous telephone call saying, “He’s dead. You better pack up and go home.”

It was “market night” in downtown Cincinnati. Around 8:30 p.m., July 23, 1881, Sophia McHugh was standing on the southwest corner of Sixth and Plum streets when a man emerged from the crowd, roughly pushing several women aside. He put one hand on the woman’s shoulder, spun her around and plunged a large butcher knife between her second and third ribs, three and a half inches deep. 

The woman shrieked, and as the commotion commenced, the man disappeared into the crowd as quickly as he came. “I am stabbed,” she said faintly, then fell. 

A group of bystanders picked the woman up and carried her to a nearby drug store at Longworth and Plum. Someone summoned a doctor, but by the time he arrived, Sophie was dead, lying in a pool of blood, with more streaming from her mouth. She was “a remarkably handsome woman,” the newspaper said, with a fair complexion. Her long, thick mane of blonde hair was matted with gore. The knife had sliced through the pulmonary artery. 

When police arrived, several witnesses identified the assailant as the woman’s husband, William “Red” McHugh. Officers fanned out to search and around 9 p.m., found McHugh -- extremely drunk or pretending to be --staggering along Central Avenue. As they escorted him to the jail, McHugh berated the onlookers, asking them if they thought they were looking at a puppet show. When they placed him in a cell, McHugh went directly to a cot, threw a blanket up over his head, and went to sleep, or pretended to. When the coroner came in to talk to him around midnight, McHugh pretended to be in a drunken sleep, but the coroner began asking questions anyway. One of the inquiries got his attention, and he sat up to respond, soberly and clearly, proving that his drunken behavior was a ruse.  

The tragic marriage was either doomed from the beginning or had squanderedthe opportunity for a fairy tale narrative. Two years earlier, the couple had been among the more than 5,000 single people who paid 25 cents each to attend Colonel Robert M. Moore’s “marriage picnic” at Cincinnati’s Inwood Park on behalf of the National Association for the Promotion of Marriage (NAPM). 

Colonel Moore, a Civil War hero and a popular Cincinnati mayor, was an upright and generous philanthropist. On behalf of the N.A.P.M. he offered a bounty of $25, some furniture and solid gold rings to any man and woman who met at the picnic and decided to get married at a ceremony at the end of the night. 

There was much eating and the beer flowed “liberally but not profusely,” the Cincinnati Enquirer reported. Some said the 5,000 people were mostly there to drink and jeer. At the end of the evening, only three couples took the Colonel up on the offer, including McHugh and Sophia Sorella. 

Red McHugh was a tall, thin, rough-looking man of 26, and as the nickname might suggest, sported a wild shock of bright red hair and a florid complexion. Sophia was around 30 years old, and about the same height as McHugh, but the bride, the paper reported, would have been “capable of turning the scales at a higher figure than he.” 

Sophia was the daughter of a cooper who died when she was 13 years old, and she soon turned to life in the streets and the brothels. She first met Red McHugh in 1871 and took a fancy to him although he was several years younger than she. She told him she would leave the brothel if he would be with her. He balked at the responsibility, but eventually relented and they took an apartment together on McFarland Street. 

She soon fell back into her old ways, however, and they separated when she gave him syphilis. He moved in with his mother and Sophia went back to the brothel at the corner of George Street and Central Avenue. At the Marriage Picnic, both were well in their cups and needed little coaxing to renew their romance. McHugh would later say that they told him the marriage was not binding, but just for fun. 

***

It was not, as one might imagine, a marriage made in heaven. Although he gave his profession as a painter, “Red” McHugh was a seasoned career criminal and well-known to the police, having done several stints in the Cincinnati Workhouse. Sophia was a well-known courtesan who plied her trade under the professional name Belle Walker.  

The couple moved to Fifteenth and Race streets in the German section of Cincinnati known as Over the Rhine but spent most of their time in the saloons on Sixth Street. Neighbors reported that the McHughs were constantly battling. Mrs. Aidleman, who lived on the floor below them, said that on July 5 she heard screams coming from above. When she went to investigate, she saw Sophia bounding down the stairs with a hail of plates and dishes raining down from above, hurled by an irate and probably drunk Red. Sophia ran all the way to the police station for protection. She did not file charges or even send an officer to see her husband. Sophia’s mother, Mrs. Zueller, was living with them at the time. She said that earlier the same day, July 5, she had offered to make Red some lunch, which she did, but he was quarrelsome and knocked her down. She moved to Anderson Ferry the week before the murder. 

About two weeks before the fatal event, Officer Young was sent to their house for a domestic disturbance and arrived in time to find Sophia running out of the house. She said that her husband had been abusing her, but she did not want him arrested. Young went inside the house, found broken dishes strewn about and Red McHugh lying in his bed. “If you want me,” he told the officer, “you can have me.” 

McHugh would testify that he and Sophia got along better than people made out, that their rows were just a matter of having some fun, that they were constant companions except when was working. On the 19th of July, a few days before the murder, he came home from looking for work and found the door locked and his clothes in a bundle with a note from Sophia saying: “William, these are your clothes. Leave.” 

That was OK by him, he said. Just the day before, he had given her the money he earned for a job and she went on a spree without him. He was tired of “this kind of business,” so he picked up the bundle and headed out. As he was leaving, she came in and they talked in the stairwell. 

“I think we can get along better if we separate,” she told him. 

He said that he agreed with her, telling her, “We met in friendship, let us part in friendship.” They kissed each other goodbye. He said he went on a bender after that and did not remember the next few days, nor the horrible event at the corner of Sixth and Plum. He was pretty sure he was in Gilligan’s saloon at Central Avenue and Fifth Street at the time. 

The day before the assault, Sophia had complained to a Sixth Street barkeeper that her husband was abusing her and that they could not get along. She told other patrons that she had filed for a divorce. McHugh had been abusing her because she had returned to her own line of work. And why shouldn’t she, she asked her fellow drinkers, since he never gave her anything. 

McHugh spent most of the day of the murder drinking with his brother John and another fellow. They had a few drinks in a bar at 10 a.m., then went out on a job laying bricks, where they drank several more pitchers of beer. John testified that Red was quite drunk when they quit working at 3:30 p.m. They then went to another bar after they picked up their pay. Yet another bar later, around 6 p.m., John went to the bathroom. When he came back, his brother was gone. 

McHugh went into a dry goods store on Central Avenue and purchased a butcher knife with a six-inch blade. The clerk started to wrap it up, but McHugh stopped him. “I shall want to use it before long,” he said. 

The prosecutor called the crime “devilish in its conception and brutal in its execution.” 

McHugh’s defense would be that he was drunk and not in control of his faculties because he was suffering from the mental effects of syphilis. 

Apart from the defendant’s own testimony, the most poignant moment of the trial came when his widowed mother took the stand. Mother McHugh said she came to Cincinnati 35 years ago, and her youngest son William was born three months after his father died. William had always lived with her except when he was living with Sophia, whom she called “Belle,” and he always supported her ever since he got out of school, even if it meant shoveling coal. He also worked as a bootblack and was taken in as a painter’s apprentice at 15. She was under the impression that William and Belle had an affectionate relationship, and said she and her daughter-in-law got along quite well. Just a week before her death, Belle had come to visit her, and they parted friends. 

On the night of the murder, Mother McHugh was taking a clean shirt to her 

son John. She was to meet him on the corner of Sixth and Plum, but he did not show, so she went inside Harding’s saloon to leave the shirt for him there. She was in the saloon when she heard the ruckus and a cry that a woman had been killed. 

“I ran to where the killing was done because everybody else was,” she said. “I did not know who it was that was murdered. I crowded between a man’s legs and got near enough to see.” 

When she saw that it was her daughter-in-law, she cried out, “Oh! It is my Belle.” 

“I put my face down to her face and fainted,” she said.  

Red McHugh was three times found guilty of murder and sentenced to hang, with three different teams of lawyers. The first two verdicts were overturned by the Ohio Supreme court for procedural errors, but the third one stood. 

The night before his execution, Red McHugh gave an impassioned speech to his fellow prisoners: 

“Three years ago I was a light-hearted boy without a care, only to have enough to eat and have a good time. I was cursed with a desire for drink, and to that I owe my present position. I am doomed to die in the morning, and I am ready to meet my fate... Please take this advice from a dying man and when you get out, try and live an honest life. Keep away from bad women, for they will lead to many worse things.” 

At the gallows, when asked for his last words, he gave the crowd of 200 a nice, long gaze and said in a sorrowful voice, “Goodbye, friends.” When they replied with a chorus of “Goodbye, Red,” and “Goodbye, Billy,” he smiled for an instant before the deputy put the black hood over his head. 

The fall did not break his neck, and William McHugh died of strangulation, May 2, 1884. 

-30 -

Sources: Cincinnati Enquirer: Marriage Picnic: Five Thousand People at Inwood Park Yesterday, August 11, 1879; A Horrible Crime: James McHugh Stabs His Wife to the Heart, July 21, 1881; “Red” M’Hugh, the Man Accused of Wife-murder, July 25, 1881; M’Hugh Inquest, July 26, 1881; His Lease on Life, December 17, 1881; Black Friday: William McHughs Last Day on Earth, May 2, 1884; Strangled: McHugh Drops into Eternity, May 3, 1884. 

[NOTE: This crime did not take place in Hamilton, but it is one of the murders that Alfred Knapp confessed to after he was arrested for the murder of his wife.]

At about 2:30 on the afternoon of June 23, 1894, two 15-year-old boys, Samuel Cole and Charles Barr, went to their hiding spot in the lumber yard of J.B. Dopps on Gest Street in Cincinnati to change clothes.

They had hidden their swimming trunks under a stack of lumber that was held up a foot and a half off the ground by large logs. It was a remote and convenient spot for them to change their clothes, halfway between their home and the duck pond they went to swim in. It was about 10 minutes before 4–they had to be home at that hour so were keeping close track of time–when they went past again to hide their trunks and change back into their street clothes.

When they reached the huge pile of lumber, Barr stooped down to stash his trunks, then sprang to his feet. There was a girl covered with blood under there, he screamed to his companions. Cole took a peek, too, then they ran off to spread the alarm.

Neighbors identified her as 12-year-old Emma Littleman who lived nearby on Gest Street.

Her father, Herman Littleman, drove a wagon that delivered firewood to the city’s bakers and prepared his wares at one end of the Doppe lumber yard. Emma was his oldest child, not yet 13 but already a bright little woman, a pretty blond with big blue eyes. When other children played games in the street, she sat on the front porch with her baby sister. She was too much of a lady to play in the street.

Earlier that day, a Saturday, Emma had been helping her mother clean the house. Herman didn’t take the team out, but was working around the lumber yard. He came home for dinner around 2 p.m., and Emma fixed his meal. Afterward, he left to do some business while Emma washed the dishes and the rest of the housework was caught up, so Emma said she would go down to the lumber yard and get some wood chips for kindling.

Mrs. Littleman said that it was much too hot for that, the child would burn up in the sun.

“Oh, I’ll put on my sunbonnet and I’ll be all right,” Emma said as she put on her blue gingham bonnet. As she was leaving the house, her mother asked what time it was. She told her it was 3 o’clock and said she’d be back in a little while.

She was wearing her worst dress, a torn blue gingham thing she wore to do housework in, black stockings and black slippers, and a skirt of a different color yachting cloth.

The last anyone saw her alive was walking down the north side of Gest Street toward the lumber yard. It was barely three-quarters of an hour later that the two boys came around to hide their swimming trunks.

Police at first thought that she had fallen from the big pile of lumber and somehow caused an avalanche of boards that partly covered her body. Coroner L.A. Querner, however, did not accept that. There was no way by which she could have fallen, so that her body would have been half under the lumber pile and the other half exposed to the view of passersby. He ordered an autopsy, which revealed two distinct blows on the head and a third injury over her throat, and two scratches, possibly fingernail, on the left side of her neck. Her clothes had been torn, but she was not raped.

Mrs. Littleman told the coroner that she bathed her daughter every Saturday and that there were no marks or scratches on her body. She said the girl never played in the lumber yard, never climbed on the lumber piles, never had fainted, never been subject to dizzy spells.

The coroner’s report was inconclusive: “I am of the opinion that the child’s death was not the result of an accident, but the result of criminal violence. The evidence does not disclose the guilty party.”

Detectives visited the scene repeatedly, scouring for the slightest clue, interviewing and re-interviewing people in the neighborhood. This had not been the first attack on Emma Littleman. The girl suffered from frequent headaches, and the teachers at the First Intermediate School would allow her to sit in the yard when she felt ill. About six months prior, she went out into the yard and in a few moments came running in screaming because a man had chased her into an outhouse. School officials and police investigated but could find no traces of a man fitting the description she gave. Teachers believed that the girl, having a nervous disposition, overreacted “when seeing a colored man.” The girl stuck to her story, however.

Herman Littleman had seen Jacob Weinkamp, the son-in-law of the owner of the lumber yard, in the vicinity of the lumber yard around 3:30 p.m., though Weinkamp said he was not. The girl’s father put a lot of pressure on the police to arrest him, but there was no evidence connecting him to the crime.

Even so, when Weinkamp heard that he was to be arrested for the crime he fled to Kentucky, but no charges were ever filed, against him or anyone.

[NOTE: This crime did not take place in Hamilton, but it is one of the murders that Alfred Knapp confessed to after he was arrested for the murder of his wife.]

The man gave his card to Mrs. Crouth:

Robert Newcomb
Clifton Heights Broom Company

He was answering the sign in her window for a room to rent at 292 Walnut Street, across from the Cincinnati YMCA.

The room, Newcomb said, was not for himself, but for his cousin, and gestured toward a young lady who stood nervously on the sidewalk, a suitcase at her feet. She had come from Dayton, where she worked as a cigar maker, and was relocating to Cincinnati.

The unsolved murder of 12-year-old Emma Littleman was still Cincinnati’s most talked-about mystery on that Thursday, July 19, 1894, and the whole city was wary of strangers, but Mrs. Crouth saw no reason to be suspicious.

“I took kindly to her,” the elderly woman said, “because she appeared to be in trouble.”

Mrs. Crouth gave her a room for the girl at the front of the house, a door right off the front door, and Newcomb gave Mrs. Crouth $2 for the first week’s rent. Mrs. Crouth never saw him again until after the girl was murdered.

The girl said she was from Illinois, that her father beat her and she had to leave home. She had been in Dayton, but work was slack there, so she came to Cincinnati to work in a candy shop. She said she knew someone who said he would give her a job.

The young lady’s name was Mary Eckert. She was 23 years old. Mrs. Crouth called her “Miss Eckert.” She didn’t know the girl was married.

The girl had one visitor that neighbors saw during her short stay on Walnut Street, a small boy who was there briefly on the following Monday. Mrs. Crouth guessed he was a relative. On Tuesday, Miss Eckert got a letter from Dayton, and later that afternoon a different boy, but not a messenger boy, brought a note for her that the old woman slipped under the door.

“She went out Tuesday evening dressed in white,” Mrs. Crouth said. “She returned about 11 o’clock. A young man was walking with her. He left her at the gate. I was sitting on the steps. She passed me by, went into her room and locked the door. That was the last time I saw of her alive.”

Catherine Allen, a woman who lived on the third floor of the Crouth house, said that at around 6:45 Wednesday morning, she went downstairs to get some milk. She saw the milkman standing in Miss Eckert’s inside door with the top of his can in his hand, apparently selling the young woman some milk. Allen heard her say, “Yes, I am a little late getting up this morning.”

Mrs. Allen then went past the door and out to the street and saw the milk wagon before the front door. She waited there for the milkman to return.

A rather heavy-set man wearing a black shirt stopped and talked to the milk man, then went into the house. She did not see him come back out.

The milkman, William Woefle, 190 West Court St., said that he’d been selling Eckert milk on several of the mornings she’d been at the house.

“When she first got milk, she asked me if I could not get her something to do,” he said. “She said she was out of work and was willing to do anything to earn a living. She told me that she was a cigar maker by trade, but had failed to find work and was willing to do housework or anything else. I saw that the woman was in trouble, and my heart kind of went out toward her. I told her that certainly I would let her know if anyone wanted a girl and I would look around and see if I could not find some work for her.

“I called on the house about 7 o’clock Wednesday morning. I first went around the side of the house and delivered some milk to one of my customers in the rear. When I came back, I noticed that the blind on the side window of the woman’s room was open, and I peeped in. I saw her lying curled up in bed. I then went around in front. The front door was unlocked and open. It was always open mornings.

“I went into the hallway, rapped on the door and said, ‘Milk.’ I rapped again, and then she said, ‘Wait a minute.’ In a few minutes she came to the door. She had on a blue wrapper. It came open at the neck and I saw she had slipped it over a night gown.”

“I am a little late getting up,” she told the milkman. “I am not feeling well today.”

“Do you want some milk?”

“Yes, but I haven’t any money,” she said.

“Well, that’s all right,” the friendly milkman said. “You can pay me when you have money or you don’t have to pay me at all. It’s all right.”

“I will take five cents worth, then,” she said, and he delivered it up in a pail.

“As I stood by the door,” Woefle told the newspapers, “I saw a man standing near the iron fence in front of the house looking at the front of the house, first at the windows and then at me. There was something terrible in his countenance. He looked ugly and his teeth seemed to be set as he stood glaring at the house. I said to myself, ‘There’s something the matter with that man. There is trouble in his eye.’ He had an ugly face and he looked ugly, as if he was meditating some crime.

“He looked at me so fixedly that I spoke to the lady and said, ‘Do you know that man?’ She looked out and said, drawing back, ‘Wh-why no! Why do you ask?’ ‘Well, he stared at me so funny I didn’t know but he had some business here.’ You know, I thought he might be her husband and was mad because I was talking to the woman.

“She asked me if I had found her any work, and I told her I had not but would see what I could do. She asked me to try and find something for her as she was willing to scrub or do anything honest. There was no doubt in my mind that she was anything but an honest woman. The fellow kept staring at me and I got nervous and went down the steps just as he stepped inside the gate. He walked up the steps and as I got into my wagon, I saw him enter the front door. The door of Mrs. Eckert’s room was still ajar.

“The man was heavy-set and broad shouldered,” the milkman said. “He had a mustache and, I think, a slouch hat. His face was an ugly one. He wore dark clothes and a black shirt. I am positive he wore a black shirt. I thought when I read the Enquirer today that maybe he was Newcomb. He was a large man like Newcomb, but it was not he. I could identify him if I saw him again.”

About 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, Mrs. Crouth answered the knock of a heavy-set man who asked, “Is there a young woman named Mary Eckert living here?”

“I told him there was and asked him why he wanted to see her, and if he was a relative,” Mrs. Crouth said later. “He said, in a hesitating way, ‘I am not a relative but she visits us and I want to see her.’ I saw that he was nervous.

“I tried the door. It was locked. I rapped and then turning to him asked, ‘Is it particular?’

“‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it is very particular.’

“I unlocked the door and saw the woman lying on the floor. ‘Wait a moment,’ I said, ‘the lady appears to be sick.’ I stooped down and touched her hand and saw that she was dead.

“‘My God! She is dead!’ I cried, and as I said that, the man ran out of the house. He was heavy-set, not very tall and wore a soft hat. He disappeared so quickly I did not see which way he went. Mr. Crouth then went to Fifth and Walnut and found a policeman, and he told him to find the officer on the beat. My husband finally decided to go to the central police station.”

About 6:30 in the evening, E.L. Crouth, an old man with a straggling gray beard, walked slowly into Central Police Station and for a moment stood by the desk at which Sgt. Sam Corbin was busy writing.

“Well, what is it?” asked the sergeant.

“A woman has been found dead in a house on Walnut Street and I thought you would be the one to tell.”

“On Walnut Street?”

“Yes, on Walnut Street near Seventh. It is on the east side of the street, No. 292, just next to the saloon and nearly opposite the YMCA building. The house is brick and sits back in from the street.”

It wasn’t the right precinct, the sergeant told him, but he called the Hammond Street station and then called Coroner Lewis A. Querner, who was at home and went straight to the scene. Mrs. Crouth opened the door when he knocked, but then a woman with a towel around her head appeared and opened the door to a room on the south side of the house, a few steps from the front door.

When the side door was thrown open, Querner saw the body outstretched lying on her back on the floor. There was no doubt that the girl was murdered. Her head was toward the door and her feet were near the corner of a bureau. Her eyes were partially closed and glassy. She was wearing a nightgown and a figured wrapper, both ripped from the throat down.

About her neck was an old towel, tied very tightly. Her tongue protruded slightly from her mouth, her teeth biting into it.

Querner untied the towel. The throat was covered with indented red blotches where it had sunk into the flesh. It hid a stab wound, not quite a half inch wide, which could have been made by an ordinary pocket knife or possibly a stiletto. There wasn’t enough blood loss for the wound to be the cause of death. Strangulation, most likely.

Querner guessed the woman to be about 24 years old, but she would turn out to be 19. Her features were regular and she might have been a beautiful girl, he thought, if her skin had not been marred by the scars of smallpox. She was “well-developed and well-nourished,” the autopsy would say, standing 5 foot, 3 inches and weighing 125 pounds. She had dark red hair and blue eyes.

She looked to be dead about eight to 10 hours. There was no disorder in the room, no sign of a struggle. The bed had been slept in or lain upon, but there was no telling when. The dresser held a pail of partly curdled milk and a glass that had some milk in it. The coroner could find no blood on the floor, the washbowl or anywhere except the towel around her neck. The lower sash of each window by the washstand had been raised.

In the drawer of the work-stand was wine, bread and crackers. But there was nothing to give the slightest indication of who else might have been in that room, and there was no weapon to be seen.

Querner found three letters among her effects. One was addressed to Jacob Eckert, 718 North Webster Street, Dayton. It was sealed, ready to be mailed, and dated July 22, the Saturday prior.

“Dear Husband: I will endeavor to write you a few lines to let you know that I reached Cincinnati safe. But I haven’t got my work yet. But I think I will get work tomorrow if nothing happens. I was at Newport this afternoon and I had a real nice time. I took in the museum last night. If I don’t get work tomorrow or the day after I am going to Denver, Colo. Perhaps I can get work there. I don’t have to work if I don’t want to. What would I have done to come here with $1? What can a person do with that? It’s a good thing that a person has got a friend. I will tell you one thing, Jake, a friend in need is a friend indeed. When I got in Cincinnati I was about to cry to think that I did not have a friend in this wide world. But then I thought again, Jake. If you don’t think anything, why should I think anything. But always remember me as your true, loving wife, and I will do the same by you. But Jake, not changing the subject, if you had the least bit of love for me you would not let me go away from you to go to a place like this by myself. Jake ain’t got a heart at all. If you thought anything of me you would give up your home for me. But, Jake, I see into it all. Your folks run me down to the lowest. Your father has got to know that I disgraced his family. Just come down to Court and Vine streets. People there know what he is. I suppose he wants you to be by me as he is by your mother. When they were in Cincinnati they were in sporting houses and every kind of places [sic] of that kind of amusement. I was eating my supper Saturday when a broommaker came in the restaurant, and he sat down at the same table that I was. He said to me: Hain’t you a stranger here, and I said, yes, sir. He say, where did you come from. I said from Dayton, and he say he knew some broom makers there. Then I ask him who did he know. He said he knowed your father. I told him I lived near by your shop. This fellow is a fine-looking man and he said your father was a lady’s man and that’s the way he blows so much money. He said he wants to be so refined in Dayton. But let him come down to the corner of Court and Vine streets in Cincinnati, where he generally rooms when in the city. I told him that I knew him by seeing him but wasn’t personally acquainted with him. If that is true he has got no room to talk. He had better keep his tongue off me, he might be brought to time; and for you, Jake, if you thought anything of me you would never let your folks run me down. But, Jake, I think we will never meet again. Think of me what you may, but for God’s sake don’t think I will go to destruction. Because I think too much of myself for that Jake you are the same principle as your father, and if you had any money there’s where it would go. Jake I am your wife, do you treat me as one, no you don’t. I am innocent like your poor mother is. Poor soul, if she only knew this, it would break her poor heart. She often said to me if I thought Adam would do anything like that she would choke the woman, that is if he ever caught her.”

The second letter was from her husband, dated July 23.

“Dear Wife: I received your kind and loving letter, and was glad to hear from you. Pet, don’t go away with that man. You don’t know what he may do when he gets you out there. I will tell you what to do if you want to stay there and work or if you want to come back and work till [sic] I get you out of the old man’s debt, and we will go housekeeping again. But whatever you do, don’t go away with that man. Pet, I will promise you today right when we go to housekeeping again. Don’t think I am fooling. I got down to hard work Monday and made $2. I think I can pay the old man what I owe him. You do what I tell you, and you won’t lose anything by it. Well, Pet, if you think I do not care for you just because I did not go to the depot with you you think wrong. He gave me hell for staying out all night. He didn’t know where I was. So, Pet, do your best down there or come back to Dayton and I will have steady work now and we get along all right. Pet, don’t think hard of me because I didn’t take you to the depot. Pet, you are always in my mind, I think of no one but you all day I don’t know where to go since my pet is gone. Pet, you said to get your tools and what else– I could not make out that other thing. From your darling husband. Good-by, Pet: one sweet kiss. Ancer [sic] at once. Pet, please don’t go with him. Good-by darling.”

That night, a Cincinnati Enquirer correspondent went to the home of saloon-keeper and broom maker Adam Eckert on North Webster Street in Dayton and awakened his son Jacob Eckert from his sleep to break the news of the death of his wife. His surprise and grief–“he cried like a child and acted like a mad man”–were enough to convince the reporter that he was guiltless. His alibi seemed strong enough as well: He’d been at work in his father’s broom factory all day in Dayton, over 50 miles away.

Eckert, 22, and Mary Wallace, 19, were married the previous December, but their union was not a happy one. Eckert tried to please her, his friends and family said, but Mary was inclined to run to saloon dances and court the acquaintance of other men. They had separated about six weeks before her death.

Eckert said that he saw his wife last Thursday when she was arranging to go to Cincinnati with the hope of getting a job in a candy kitchen there. He said that he had written her daily since her departure, and had intended to go to Cincinnati to see her on Sunday. He said that his father had promised to assist them and that he intended to live with her again. He said that in his letters he begged her not to see her former suitor again, a cook who lived in a hotel in Cincinnati last winter. Eckert did not know the man, and only knew him as “Vess.”

The correspondent went with Eckert to the home of the elderly Mr. and Mrs. John Wallace to tell them about the death of their daughter.

After the body had been removed to the morgue, Robert Newcomb called there saying that he might be able to identify the body.

He gave the face one glance and said, “Yes, that is Mary Eckert. Her husband is Jacob Eckert, a broom maker in Dayton.”

The policemen on duty took him to see Coroner Querner.

At first, the man acted contrary, but once the coroner got him talking, he could have gone all night.

He said that Mary Eckert came to his house on Friday and told him that she had left her husband and had come to the city to get work. He said he helped her to get a room and gave her some money.

He admitted telling Mrs. Crouth that she was his cousin although she wasn’t, but they were like family because he worked for her father.

Coroner Querner locked him up until he could investigate.

Querner went back to Mrs. Crouth, who said she had sent Newcomb to the morgue after he had come there. Because the Crouths were so feeble, Querner took Mary Pettibone, a woman who worked at the house, back to police headquarters to see if she could identify Newcomb as the man who had been there just before the murder was discovered. It was not him.

However, Police Sgt. Messerschmitt recognized Newcomb as a man who had gotten into considerable trouble about three years ago. Newcomb had gotten into a fight with a man and cut him almost to pieces, then fled to St. Louis. When Newcomb got back to town, he was arrested for the assault, but the victim had recovered and could not be found, so charges were dismissed. Messerschmitt also said that Newcomb and his brother mugged an employee of the Sohn Brewery and almost beat him to death.

Newcomb denied the sergeant’s claims, said it was a case of mistaken identity, but he did not deny being the same Robert Newcomb who had come by the nickname “The Terre Haute Mystery.” It seems he was on his way to work on Pearl Street and suddenly vanished. Friends got police interested and the rivers were dragged, sewers search and the countryside scoured, only to find no trace of him. One day soon after, a stranger in town was held up and murdered on the street. His picture was in the Cincinnati Enquirer. Newcomb’s brother saw it, and went to Terre Haute and identified the man as his brother Robert Newcomb. The body was interred in Terre Haute, everyone believing it was Bob Newcomb. But months later, he turned up in Cincinnati very much alive. [The newspaper accounts give no further details on either of these tales and I’ve yet to find any prior articles to support either.-roj]

At some point, Newcomb had gone to work for the Eckert’s broom factory in Dayton and became acquainted with Eckert’s son Jake and introduced him to a girl who lived in the same boarding house. Mary Wallace had just come from Illinois and worked at a cigar factory. She was just 18 at the time and Jake just over 21, so Adam Eckert did not approve of the marriage. They lived on their own for a while, until his father’s shop closed and he could no longer support the two of them. She went to a boarding house and he went back to his parents. They began to drift apart and would only see each other a couple times a week, if that. She met a man who said he would give her a job in a candy shop, so she came to Cincinnati on the train.

Further searches of the girl’s room turned up several drafts of the letter she had written and never mailed to Jake. Some of the letters were in sealed envelopes but ripped in two, as if she changed her mind at the last minute and re-wrote the letter, copying some things from her earlier drafts word-for-word.

But she omitted some things, such as how bad she had the blues on the train ride down, and how she got to Cincinnati without a plan and was wondering what to do when she spotted Vess in front of the depot. She said that Vess gave her the money for the room and that he took her to the museum. She may have changed her mind about evoking Vess because it was a lie. Newcomb continued to claim that he gave her the money and set her up at the Crouth’s.

The autopsy on Mary Eckert’s body confirmed the cause of death as strangulation, the knife wound not fatal, but also revealed a contusion near the right eye, probably caused by a blow from a fist. There were several fingernail scratches on her neck, probably made by the dead woman herself as she struggled to tear off the towel clutching her throat. There were other stray scratches, including one on her abdomen that may have happened when her clothing had been ripped.

They also discovered that Mary Eckert was two months pregnant.

The police set out to find this man Vess, whose name would turn out to be Sylvester Jennings.

According to her husband, who had come to Cincinnati on Thursday to claim the body, Vess used to keep company with Mary before she married Jake, but she rejected him. He kept turning up, however, at times when she would be out walking by herself.

“He offered her money and anything she wanted if she would go with him,” Jake said. “He wanted to take her to Denver.”

He did not think his wife had been intimate with him, however. Still, Jake swore that he see justice done if it took his whole life.

“I am going to take the first train for Dayton and run this man Vess down,” he said. “I will find out all about him and have him arrested if he is in Dayton. The murder of Mary shall be avenged!”

Mary’s mother said that Jennings was also a cook in Dayton for different hotels over the past eight years. When Mary was 17 years old, Jennings gave her a gold watch, which she later threw in his face when he insulted her. When she and Jennings were involved, he would sometimes walk her home in the evenings but never went in the house. Mrs. Wallace said that she frequently heard her daughter refer to Vess, even after she was married, joking with Jake that if he did not treat her right, Vess would take her back. She didn’t know much else about Vess, but guessed that he was married and came from Chicago. Mary did say once that Vess threatened to kill her if she married anyone else.

Mrs. Wallace said that her daughter didn’t know anyone in Cincinnati except that she got a letter from a man named Joseph Jessup whom she had met at the Woodsdale Island Park, where he had a candy stand, and struck up a flirtation. He wrote to tell her he could give her a job in his candy kitchen with good wages if she wanted to come to Cincinnati. She used that as her excuse to get out of town.

Vess Jenkins had been employed at the Beckel House as a cook the previous winter, and according to employees there, he matched the description of the stranger lurking in front of the Crouth house on Wednesday morning as described by the milkman and the description of the man who came to the house later that evening and ran away when the body was discovered: Tall, heavyset, dark mustache. People at the Beckel House knew him as Johnson, knew him to be “dark and taciturn.” When he left, he told the head cook that Johnson wasn’t really his name, but that he had been in some trouble and changed it.

Cooks at the Gibson House, another hotel where Jennings had worked two years prior, gave an almost opposite description, however. Jennings was not especially tall, they said, maybe about 5 foot 10. Although he was a medium heavy set, his shoulders were broad and stooped. And he was by no means dark and swarthy. In fact, he rather looked “like a consumptive,” with saffron colored skin as though he were jaundiced. He had thin brown hair and a light red mustache. He has a scar on one of his thumbs. In spite of his sickly appearance, the cooks said, Jennings was a dressy man and was not of a quarrelsome disposition. The cooks at the Beckel House, they said, were probably talking about someone else, someone actually named Johnson.

Police eliminated Vess Jennings quick enough. He wasn’t even in town. A telegraph from the hotel where he worked and a letter that his mother provided, postmarked from St. Louis on the day of Mary Eckert’s murder, was enough to clear Sylvester Jennings. So suspicion turned back onto Bob Newcomb, but by the end of the week, his alibi held up, too.

By Saturday, a desperate coroner and police squad began positing the theory that it might have been a woman who killed Mary Eckert. The thought was based on the fact that the wound in the neck was from a small knife that “suggests one of those little daggers, such as can be seen in almost any pawnshop window and such as many women carry,” the coroner said.

Since Mary Eckert told the milkman that she wasn’t feeling too well, the she was not likely in any position to struggle for her life, so it would have been easy for a woman to slip into the room.

Police had few other leads. Several people, after reading accounts of the murder and investigation in the newspaper called police reports of a couple they thought was Mary Eckert and Robert Newcomb begging for meals and shelter earlier that week, but it could not have been them.

Another theory, that the murder was the work of some itinerant doctor or tradesman, would emerge when a similar murder would take place in Denver, Colo., Jacksonville, Fla., or Norfolk, Va. Indeed, more than one subsequent report attributed the case to the “Denver Strangler,” who killed at least three women in that city beginning later in 1894.

The case would remain unsolved, the strange ugly man at the front gate never identified.

Note: In some reports, Robert Newcomb was spelled Robert Newcome. I settled on using the most common spelling. Likewise, the spelling of the victim’s name was variously Ekert, Ekhart, Eckhard, and several other ways. I chose “Eckert” partly because it was the most commonly used in the news reports, but is also a common Cincinnati name. -roj…

[In May 2019, I was invited to submit a short true crime story for an international anthology. The story was accepted, but subsequently edited to about 85 percent of its original length due to page limitations. The rights have expired, so here is the original, uncut version, free for you.]

Oramel Abraham Brigham had known Jane Toppan since she was a little girl, when she was adopted into the family that he had recently married into.

Captain Abner Toppan and his wife Ann founded a boarding house in Lowell, Massachusetts, an industrial town known as “Spindle City” for the proliferation of textile mills. Ann actually ran the boarding house as Captain Toppan was a seafaring man, away most of the time when he was alive, who died at the relatively young age of 45. Their only daughter Elizabeth married Oramel Brigham in 1862 while both were in their early 30s, they set up their home in the Widow Toppan’s stately Georgian house  on 3rd Street. 

Brigham was a well-respected member of the Lowell community. He worked for the railroad, first as a conductor and later in his career as the station master of the Middlesex Street Station of the Boston & Maine. But perhaps of more importance to his social standing, he was a deacon at the First Trinitarian Congregational Church and was so association with the position that the people of Lowell generally referred to him as “Deacon Brigham,” even at the time of his marriage. In the photos that would appear of him in the newspapers consequent of his relationship with Jane Toppan, he appeared portly and distinguished, with massive sideburns and a convivial expression that seemed to be the brink of a chuckle.

Two years after her daughter’s marriage and the addition of Deacon Brigham into the household, Ann Toppan took into their home young Nora Kelly, an indentured seven-year-old girl, who along with an older sister had been abandoned by her derelict father at the Boston Female Asylum. Although the child was never formally adopted, the widow re-named her Jane Toppan, but most people called her Jennie.

In spite of an impoverished early childhood, young Jane was bright and active, and “blessed with marked exuberance of spirits,” her childhood friends would later recall. She would make up vivid and impossible stories, and insist they were true. One of her favorite stories she frequently told the Brighams was a colorful tale about having discovered long-lost sisters and was in some way to inherit several thousands of dollars.

In 1874, Jane turned 18 and received $50 from the widow Toppan as stipulated by the indenture agreement. Though released from her obligation, she remained with the family for nearly a decade as a servant. When 25 years old, Jane expressed a wish to become a nurse. Deacon Brigham and other Lowell dignitaries gave her letters of recommendation to the the training school of the Massachusetts General Hospital. She was accepted, but told she would have to wait a year, during which time she worked at a hospital in Cambridge, where she returned for a time after finishing her studies. Eventually, she began to get enough work as a private nurse with much better pay inasmuch as she had recommendations from some of the best known physicians in Cambridge and Boston to care for some of the most prestigious families. 

Although many people were put off by her tall tales, she was quite well-liked and earned the nickname “Jolly Jane” around Cambridge, Boston, Somerville, and in Cataumet on Cape Cod, where she habitually took working vacations. Acquaintances would describe her as “agreeable,” “vivacious,” “generous and warm-hearted”--and “a prevaricator.” One schoolmate would say that if Jolly Jane were at a party, no other entertainment was necessary. No one suspected that she was in any way addicted to any kind of drug, though she did have a fondness for candy, and as the years passed, so did her girth.

By most accounts her “storytelling” was her greatest flaw as her murderous mania was yet to be revealed. Much of the time, she simply spun fanciful tales. At one time she declared that she was engaged to a Cambridge theological student, and a few weeks later said that she had broken the engagement in order to marry a millionaire resident of the Back Bay who had fallen in love with her. But she also aroused the ire of people whom she considered friends by making up stories and spreading them around like gossip.

Although she was vivacious and sociable, Jane “mingled little in the company of men,” Deacon Brigham said of her. “At one time she was engaged to a young man of this city. She was a young woman at that time. He lived in Lowell but went away to Holyoke where he married the daughter of a woman with whom he had boarded. The news of this unfaithfulness was a blow to Miss Toppan. The young man had given her a ring that had a bird engraved upon it. Miss Toppan always had a superstition on this account that we regarded as very peculiar. She always hated the sight of a bird after that, believing it to be a band omen for her.”

Jane left the Brigham/Toppan house on Third Street in 1885, but for the next 15 years, even as she moved to various parts of Massachusetts as her work took her, would return as a frequent visitor and welcomed guest. Even after the death of Mrs. Toppan in 1891, her foster sister Elizabeth promised her that she would always have a place in the Brigham home. When in Lowell, she would stay in her old room and never seemed to exhibit the animosity against Elizabeth smoldering inside her. Relations with her foster sister had always been cordial if not friendly, and there never seemed to be any serious conflict between them, but Jane later confessed that she harbored a long-seething hatred for Elizabeth, looking upon her as spoiled and privileged, feelings exacerbated by jealousy over Elizabeth possessing the one thing Jane wanted most in life: a husband.

So nothing seemed particularly out of order when Jane invited Elizabeth to Buzzards Bay in the summer of 1899 for a relaxing vacation at the little village of Cataumet in the city of Bourne. Jane had been vacationing there for several years in a cottage owned by the eccentric Alden P. Davis and his family. Although she was in excellent physical condition for a woman of 68, Elizabeth had been suffering from a mild but persistent case of “melancholia,” so Deacon Brigham encouraged her to go. She left Lowell on August 25 in fine fettle, but two days later, the Deacon received a telegram from Jane, saying that his wife was dangerously ill. He made straight for Cape Cod, but by the time he reached Elizabeth’s bedside, she was already in a coma. 

Jane told him that the day after Elizabeth arrived at Cataumet the two of them enjoyed a picnic of cold corned beef at Scotch House Cove. They had a wonderful time, but the exertion proved too much for Elizabeth, so she retired early. She failed to respond to a call to breakfast the following morning.

What Jane didn’t tell the Deacon, but would confess two years later when the scope of her murderous deeds would be revealed, is that Elizabeth was the first of her many murders up to that point that had been committed out of hatred and vindictiveness. She liked her previous victims and was sincere with her loving care, at least in her own mind. But when Jane brought her sister a tumbler of Hunyadi water, a bitter mineral water imported from Hungary renown for its digestive effects, it was laced with morphine and spite.

“I let her die slowly, with gripping torture,” Jane would say. “I held her in my arms and watched with delight as she gasped her life out.”

Even though Elizabeth had no history of heart disease, the unwitting physicians, based on Jane’s reports as opposed to any authentic post-mortem, gave the cause of death as cerebral apoplexy when Elizabeth died on the morning of August 29, 1899. 

Deacon Brigham would later recall that as he was gathering up his wife’s belongings to take them back to Lowell, he noticed that she had but $5 in her pocket book although--and he remembered distinctly their conversation on the matter of how much cash to take with her--she had left Lowell with more than $50. He questioned Jane, but could only dismiss his suspicions, if he had any, when she told him that was all the money she had seen her sister carrying. Then Jane told him that his wife’s dying wish, just before she slipped into the coma, was that Jane be given her gold watch and chain for a keepsake. That was so like Elizabeth, he thought, and gladly gave her the timepiece without a moment’s hesitation. He never saw Jane with the watch in the subsequent two years, but among Jane’s possessions at the time of her arrest was a stack of pawnshop tickets. Kleptomania was apparently another of her secret sins.

As he made the sad trip back to Lowell, Deacon Brigham was not aware that his wife’s death was preceded by at least 20 other deaths in the notorious career of his foster-sister-in-law, nor that it was the first step in the nurse’s devious matrimonial plan. Jane Toppan, now in her early 40s, was craving a husband, and she was determined that Deacon Brigham, though nearly 30 years older, would be that groom.

The second phase of her plan would be accomplished that winter when Jane came to Lowell for the holidays. Soon after her arrival, the housekeeper Florence Calkins fell ill. Jane, ever-helpful, gave Florence an abundance of loving care along with frequent tumblers of Hunyadi water, alternately laced with morphine and atropine. Florence died on January 15, 1900. Unaware of Jane’s practiced hand at murder, Dr. William Bass, one of the oldest physicians of Lowell, attributed her death as heart failure. Lowell people marveled at fortunate it was that a trained nurse should be visiting the Brigham home at the time Florence fell ill. Jane would later say that she poisoned Miss Calkins because she considered her a rival for the desired affections of Deacon Brigham.

In April, 1901, Jane asked Brigham for a loan of $600 so that she could make a final payment on a house at Cataumet that she wanted to buy and run a boarding house.

“Some months later she came to me in an excited condition and told me she had indorsed a note of $800 for a Boston merchant who lives in Cambridge, that he could not pay it and as indorser she had to meet it,” Brigham said. “I gave it to her and took her note. I found recently by talking with the Boston merchant that she never indorsed a note for him. I owed Jennie Toppan $200 on the bequest of my wife to her, but when she owed me $1,400 I thought of holding it until she made some payments.”

When a reported asked about Miss Toppan’s finances, he replied, “Well, if you can tell me what she has done with her money, I should like to have you do so. She has been earning $21 a week as a nurse for the last dozen years or more, but I don’t know what use she has made of it. She borrowed money of me, $1,400 in all, $600 to pay as she said on the Ferdinand cottage at Cataumet but on which she never paid a cent, and $800 to cover an indorsement on a note. Here was $1,400 that went somewhere, but only Miss Toppan seems to know. However, I never pressed her for payment. I haven't the slightest idea what she could have done with all of her money. She was pretty constantly engaged in nursing ever since she left the hospital yet when she came to the house, she was destitute.”

During her visits and with Elizabeth out of the way, Jane frequently approach the subject of marriage with the Deacon, but ever the gentleman, he would gently put her off. “It was generally understood that she did [want to be married to him], but I never proposed to her nor she to me. I suppose she wanted to get the money Mrs. Toppan left, and if she married me, and I was out of the way, of course it would be hers.”

At the same time, Deacon Brigham, a robust 70 years old, was showing some interest in another member of the congregation, the never-married Miss Martha Cook, a younger woman of 65. Murmurs of a union seemed to further inflame Janes frustrated passion (if that’s really what it was) for the Deacon, and they had more than one stormy scene over the matter.

To others in Lowell around this time, perhaps part of a misguided ploy to make the Deacon jealous, she frequently spoke of her intention to go to Australia, where she had heard that wives were scarce. She went around bidding friends goodbye, saying that her ticket was bought and all arrangements made for her departure.

Whether she really was in love with her dead foster sister’s husband, or whether she simply wanted the security of a home for her declining years, or whether the master plan included herself becoming a widow at some point to receive the property she felt due her, was known only by Jane herself, but Deacon Brigham was so overwhelmed by her expressions of desire to marry that he went to his pastor to confide that he felt he “lived a life of persecution.” Jane refused to allow her suit to be summarily dismissed. At one point, she insisted that he fire the housekeeper who replaced Miss Calkins and give her the job. Brigham refused.

Deacon Brigham would later tell reporters about “the champion of Miss Toppan’s many fables” that debuted during the April visit. She told several of her friends that she expected to go to Russia this fall she as a member of the Tsar's household and receive a fabulous salary. She said that the Tsar had heard much of the skill of American trained nurses and wished to secure one for attendance on the Tsarina.”

She went neither to Australia nor Russia, but to Cambridge, where she connived her way into a job as a housekeeper for her landlords, the Beedles, and then a short, fateful stay at the Davis cottages in Buzzards Bay before returning to Lowell for her last visit there in late August.

Jane was dismayed to find yet another female in the house, even though she was not in anyway a competitor to matrimony. Jane was consumed with jealousy nonetheless. Deacon Brigham’s 77-year-old sister, Edna Bannister of Turnbridge, Vermont, was combining a family visit with a journey to the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. She had arrived just a few days before Jane came on August 24. Although elderly, she was a strong and vigorous woman, but two days later, after lunch, she complained of dizziness and retired to her room. Jane immediately brought her a tumbler of Hunyadi water, and during her brief illness, citizens of Lowell once again marveled at how fortunate it was to have an experienced nurse on hand. The elderly woman slipped into a coma that evening, and although Dr. Bass came early the following morning, he could not revive her and she was dead before lunch.

Miss Toppan’s strange behavior at Mrs. Bannister’s funeral began to arouse the suspicions of The Rev. George F. Kenngott. She was extremely nervous and her mourning did not seem sincere. News of the deaths of the Davis family in Cataumet had started making the news, and Rev. Kenngott knew that she had attended the four members of the family as their nurse. The sudden death of Mrs. Bannister seemed to be part of that string, but he said nothing to Brigham.

It was just one day after Mrs. Bannister’s funeral that state detective General Jophanus H. Whitney visited Jane at the Brigham home with questions about the deaths in the family of Alden P. Davis of Cataumet. If the Deacon had yet to have any suspicions that his foster-sister-in-law had been a mass murderess, his presence at this first interview between Jane Toppan and the police would certainly have put him on his guard.

***

When she wasn’t trying to talk her widowed brother-in-law into marriage or vacationing in the Davis cabins in Cataumet, Nurse Toppan frequently returned to Cambridge to work. For the last several years, after she had poisoned her previous landlords, Israel and Lovey Dunham in 1895 and 1897, she went to board just down the block with Melvin and Eliza Beedle at 31 Wendell Street. Mr. Beedle was a former city councilman, and that winter she had fed him some of her laced Hunyadi water, but not enough to kill him. She never explained why she didn’t follow through with murdering the man. Perhaps she was poisoning him in order to bring him back to health and earn his trust, but the doctors put it down to ptomaine. She also dosed the Beedles’ housekeeper, but just enough to make it look as though she had been tippling so that the Beedles would fire her and give Jane the position. They did.

She was at the Beedle house at the beginning of the summer of 1901, an unusual brutally hot season in the Northeast, when Jane received an unexpected visitor, Mary “Mattie” Davis, the wife of Alden P. Davis who ran the resort on Buzzards Bay. In their waning years, Alden and Mattie Davis had mostly given up the tourist trade. Their large home that formerly served as an inn was now just for family, but they still had a few cottages they rented out, and one of their favorite tenants was Jolly Jane Toppan. Jane had been vacationing there for the past five summers, and even though the Davises gave her a discount because they enjoyed her company and it was handy to have a nurse around, she still owed them $500. 

The matter of Jane’s finances remained a mystery to everyone, even to the conclusion of her story. As a private nurse, she had been earning $25 weekly for many years. Besides that, Mr. Davis was an exceedingly liberal man and had made Miss Toppan presents of money. Despite this she had drawn on the Davis family for loans. Near the end of the previous summer, Mattie Davis, always the businesswoman, asked Miss Toppan one day in a friendly way if she could pay the money owed. At the time, Miss Toppan told Mrs. Davis that as soon as she received the legacy do her from the estate of Mrs. Brigham in Lowell, she would pay the $500. However, Mrs. Davis was not satisfied and wrote to Mr. Murphy, Miss Toppan’s lawyer in Lowell to find out if it was really true that Miss Toppan had any money coming from the Brigham estate, and was told she did. The incident did not disturb the friendly relations between the two, but Mattie decided that before Jane came to Cataumet this summer, she would have to pay that debt. 

Even though at 60 years old and diabetic, she wasn’t in the best of health, she rushed to make the train to Cambridge on June 25, a scorcher of a day. On the way, she took a terrible fall and sprawled in the dust. Nevertheless, she persisted in her journey: a stop in Cambridge to collect money from Jane Toppan, then on to Somerville where her daughter Genevieve Gordon was visiting with her in-laws. The plan was for Mattie and Genevieve to then travel together back to Cataumet where Harry Gordon, Genevieve’s husband, would join them from Chicago for their summer vacation.

Mattie arrived at the Beedle home just as they were sitting down to dinner. She looked a fright and didn’t feel much better, but she accepted the Beedles’ invitation to dinner and Jane’s proffering of a tall glass of Hunyadi water to bolster her nerves. She finished both, and after dinner, Jane suggested they walk to the bank where she could withdraw the money she owed the Davises. As soon as they went outside, Mattie groaned and crumpled to the ground.

All hands jumped in to assist her up to an empty bedroom on the second floor. She was obviously in great distress, and Jane gave her an injection of morphine to quiet her.

Because of his wife’s ill health and the terrible fall she had taken on the way to the train station, Alden Davis wasn’t terribly surprised to receive a telegram that night from Nurse Toppan saying that his wife’s health was failing. Jane also telegraphed Genevieve, who hurried to Cambridge the following day and found her mother in what the doctors diagnosed as a diabetic coma.

In retrospect, it now appears that Jolly Jane Toppan was at the peak of her sadistic and murderous cunning, gaining a hubristic confidence in her skills as a poisoner that would be her downfall. For the past fifteen-plus years, from her days as a nursing student, she had poisoned dozens of patients, experimenting with varying doses of morphine and atropine, toying with her patients to make it look like the natural progression of an illness, finding a way to join them in their beds to stroke and fondle them as they died. When her game had ended, she would confess to her lawyers and the court alienists that she was sexually thrilled by these practices. After murdering her foster sister, however, it seems her crimes were otherwise motivated, sometimes by money and other times for the prospect of love. For whatever reason, Jolly Jane Toppan kept Mattie Davis alternating between coma and consciousness for a full week with doses of morphine and atropine, by Hunyadi water and by surreptitious injections, before finally giving her a fatal dose and climbing into bed with her to watch her die on July 2.

The body was, of course, taken back to Cataumet for the funeral, which Jane attended, and then stayed on, ostensibly to play nurse for the widower Alden P. Davis.

Mr. Davis had made national news earlier in his life when he voiced his support of the religious fanatic Charles Freeman of the nearby town of Pocasset. They belonged to the same Second Adventist millennialist sect. On April 30, 1879, believing himself to be a modern-day Abraham, Freeman felt called by The Lord to sacrifice his four-year-old daughter Edith so that she could rise from the dead again three days later. At her funeral three days later, Davis made an impassioned speech in Freeman’s defense, suggesting that since Edith was being buried before her resurrection could take place, that perhaps Freeman ought to sacrifice another child, perhaps one of his own. His statements mortified his daughter Minnie and Davis was shouted down with cries of “Murder!” Freeman was remanded to a lunatic asylum. Although a shadow still hung over Davis from this event even two decades later, he had become one of Cataumet’s leading citizens and helped turn the remote community into a popular tourist destination when the railroad came to town. He was even given the honorific title of Captain Davis, even though he was not a seafarer nor even owned a boat. The Davis family still came to be regarded as “peculiar,” that Alden appeared “off his balance,” suffering from headaches and known to be violent at times. 

Davis was prostrated with grief over the death of his wife, and his married daughters Minnie Gibbs and Genevieve Gordon both stayed on at the Alden home for the remainder of the summer. They wanted their friend and nurse to forstall her trip back to Cambridge and help take care of their aging father. Little realizing they were setting up their own doom, they practically had to twist Jane’s arm to get her to stay to help take care of their father and the large house. She did. 

The Davis sisters would not have a chance to live to regret this request, but they did not die right away. Before she resumed her career as a serial poisonist, Jane practiced another of her dark arts: arson. Two mysterious fires broke out in parts of the Davis home but were discovered and extinguished before serious damage could occur. In the meantime she also fomented dischord in the grieving household by planting insecticide containing arsenic in Genevieve’s belongings to be discovered by the her sister Minnie, the wife of a real sea captain who was away at the time. Jane was conniving to sow the belief that Genevieve was so despondent over her father’s death that she was contemplating suicide. So when Genevieve took ill and died during the early morning hours of July 27, the official cause of death was listed as “heart disease” by Dr. Leonard Latter, but everyone attributed her demise to grief and a broken heart over the loss of her father.

“Grief” struck again two weeks, August 9, later when Alden Davis, after returning home exhausted from a business trip to Boston and chugging down a big glass of Hunyadi water offered him by his nurse, went to his sick bed to die during the night. After consulting with the nurse, Dr. Latter put down “cerebral hemorrhage” as the cause of death.

On the morning of August 12, the surviving members of the Davis household--Minnie and her ten-year-old son Jesse, Genevieve’s husband Harry Gordon and his daughter, and cousin Beulah Jacobs of Somerville--now in deep grief after a trio of funerals in the midst of a blasting heat wave, planned the diversion of a carriage ride. Jane pulled Minnie aside and suggested a cup of cocoa wine to “brace up” for the trip. She took it, protesting that alcohol didn’t agree with her. Indeed, she only felt worse, and when the party returned from the carriage ride, Minnie fell upon the sofa in the parlor, lacking the strength to make it to her room. Jane was on the spot with an uplifting glass of Hunyadi water.

That evening, when the household had retired for the night, Jane tucked a blanket around Minnie and went upstairs. A few hours later, in the deep of the night, she sneaked back downstairs and gave Minnie one final injection of morphine. This time, rather than climb into bed with her victim, she went upstairs to Jesse’s room, roused the youngster from his sleep and took her into her own room, into her own bed, and snuggled with him while his mother lay dying. 

She did not die during the night, however. Beulah Jacobs woke early and went downstairs to check on her cousin, alarmed to find Minnie still fully clothed and barely breathing. She summoned Dr. Latter, who arrived around 5 a.m. Harry Gordon carried Minnie to her room and Dr. Latter prescribed absolute quiet and regular sips of cocoa wine, then left, promising to return shortly. 

Jane remained at Minnie’s side, and when the cocoa wine just dribbled from her lips, the nurse concocted a morphine enema and gave it to her, then stroked her hair and spoke soothingly to her until Dr. Latter (who would die of a heart attack before Jane’s arrest and would never know the truth of the Davis family’s demise) returned at 9 a.m. to find the patient unconscious and unresponsive. He reached out to a colleague, Dr. Hudnut, who was vacationing nearby, and he arrived at about 2 p.m., but to no avail. Her husband Irving at sea, her elderly father-in-law and retired seaman Captain Paul Gibbs hurried to her bedside. Minnie died at 4:10 p.m. that afternoon, just as her father-in-law arrived. Standing by the bed with Miss Toppan and Dr. Latter, Captain Gibbs said, “What's the matter with her, doctor?” Dr. Latter in answer said, “I don't know. This looks funny to me.” 

The local and Boston newspapers soon picked up on the strange coincidence of four members of a family dying of apparently natural causes in rapid succession, but the stories carried not the slightest hint of foul play, though some did mention that a trained nurse named Jane Toppan was on hand in all instances.

Captain Paul Gibbs did not think it was a coincidence. He made some visits, pulled some strings, police were informed and bodies exhumed. When Jane Toppan got on a train to Lowell in the last week of August, she was followed by state detective John Patterson, who took a room in a house with a view of the Brigham home.

***

When detective Whitney questioned Jane Toppan in Deacon Brigham’s parlor about the Cataumet deaths shortly after the demise of Mrs. Bannister, she repeated what the doctors had decided, that Mrs. Davis died of exhaustion--”all worked out,” she said--and that grief had taken her husband and daughters.

At Nurse Toppan’s trial, Whitney would testify that Deacon Brigham was present when he suggested the “propriety” of having autopsies done on the Davis family. “If these people died from natural causes it would be better for all parties concerned,” he said. “Don’t you think it would be better?”

Instead of directly answering him, she turned to the Deacon: “What do you think, Mr. Brigham?” Mr. Brigham replied that he thought it would be better to have the autopsy and then it would settle the matter. Jane replied, “I don’t know that it would.”

Jane was still under surveillance, detective Patterson following her every move about Lowell, and Whitney’s visit was meant to put Jane on guard in the hope that she would give up her murderous ways and no more lives would be lost before the test results were finished on the exhumed organs of the Davis family. Jane apparently did not get the hint. Although Mrs. Bannister would be the last person to die at the nurse’s hands, she wasn’t yet done poisoning.

“I returned from church one Sunday” [September 15], accompanied by Jane Toppan, Deacon Brigham later said, “and did not eat much dinner. I suffered extremely from headache during the afternoon.”

The next day, the Reverend George F. Kenngott, pastor of the First Trinitarian Congregational Church, was surprised to receive a letter from Nurse Toppan informing him that that Mr. Brigham had been taken suddenly and seriously ill. His previous discussion with the Deacon regarding Jane’s desire to be wed, and now the mysterious death of a family that was under her care, certainly on his mind, Kenngott went in haste to the house on 3rd Street and closely questioned the sick man and Miss Toppan.

On his return home, he sent a messenger with Miss Toppan’s note of warning to Dr. Lathrop: “Watch Jennie Toppan. She is trying to poison her patient.” The next morning, he clergyman called the physician over the telephone to make sure he got the message and would heed it. Together, they made sure that Miss Toppan was never alone with Brigham, and in a few days he had recovered enough to take a five-day trip into the White Mountains on doctor’s orders--without Nurse Tappan. It was just what he needed.

“I did not consider Mr. Brigham suffered from arsenical poisoning,” Dr. Lathrop said. “I was not aware Miss Toppan was unders suspicion at the time I attended her or I would have saved samples of spring water and aromatic mixtures of rhubarb I found in bottles. Detective Whitney expressed regret that I did not save any samples.”

“When I was prostrated by illness,” Brigham later reported, “I did not attribute it to any of Miss Toppan’s actions but... I have never known a day's sickness until that time. My housekeeper told me when I came home... that Miss Toppan had been acting very badly. She was so nervous that she could not stay still.”

Home from the mountain retreat, Deacon Brigham told Jane that she would have to leave the house. That was September 27. Two days later Miss Toppan made the first of two suicide attempts.

“I called Miss Toppan to dinner on Sunday,” Brigham said, “and she said she did not care for any. The housekeeper went up to see if anything was the matter. Miss Toppan told her that she had taken poison and requested that a lawyer be sent for as she wished to make her will. We soon had a physician and later got a nurse to care for her.”

Dr. Lathrop found Miss Toppan in an extremely drowsy state caused, he surmised, by some form of opium. He gave her an injection of aphomorphia and she rallied, but refused to tell him what she had taken. Given her experience in administering morphine, it seems certain that Jane never meant to kill herself, but to take just enough of a dose to be convincing. 

“Why didn’t you let me die?” she moaned. “I am tired of life. No one cares for me. People talk so about me that I am sick of living.”

Monday morning she appeared better and so the hired nurse went downstairs to get her some breakfast. When she returned, her patient was again in a stupor. Fortunately, Dr. Lathrop was just then coming to check on her. This time, she was much nearer death than the night before. He gave her another injection of aphomorphia and, he said, “she threw off the poison. But for prompt treatment she would have died. Upon regaining her senses she made the same replies to questions as the day before. I am of the opinion she was insane.”

Deacon Brigham told reporters while Jane was in the Barnstable jail prior to her trail, “I don’t know as I knew it then, but now I come back to look at the time Jennie was living with me, there were many queer things about her. I guess she’s insane fast enough.”

He was now convinced that she was a morphine addict on top of whatever other trouble she had gotten herself into, again told Jane that when she had partially recovered that she would have to leave the house. 

On September 1, she checked into the Lowell Hospital, where she stayed for most of the month, and then went to New Hampshire to visit an old friend, Sarah Nichols.

“It was probably to work on my sympathies,” said Deacon Brigham to the newspapers of the alleged suicide attempts, “and when she found that I did not even then come around to her way of thinking she made the second attempt, this time really desiring death. 

“While I suppose that I cannot deny that she wanted to marry me, you can be assured that I'm very glad that she didn't. If I had married her, I don't believe that I would be alive today. Jennie certainly did tell queer stories and many of them were undoubtedly done to injure me, although I always treated her like a sister.

The determined detective Patterson, who had been living quietly in a boarding house across the street from the Brigham house and followed her every move, reported, “Since then up to the night of the arrest I have kept her in sight, and in fact became acquainted with Miss Toppan and was quite intimate with her, accompanying her frequently on trips to the post office, etc. Her mail was examined and every effort made to find the evidence that was sought for.”

He went so far as to feign illness to get a room in the same part of the hospital so he could keep an eye on her there: “On leaving the hospital in Lowell, Miss Toppan proceeded to Amherst, New Hampshire, ostensibly to visit a sister of George L. Nichols of that town. I followed her to Amherst, both arriving there October 14.”

The newspapers described the Nichols homestead as “one of the most attractive in Amherst,” a yellow, story and a half house three quarters of a mile from the village on the main road leading from Nashua to Amherst. Across the street is the home of Frank Stearns, where detective Patterson lodged while spending the fifteen days in Amherst watching the suspected woman.

Nichols said that Jane appeared to be very nervous when she arrived, “and I soon discovered that she was addicted to the morphine habit. Still we had always known her as a woman of good character and I do not see how she can be guilty of the terrible crimes alleged against her, if she is guilty it must be because of her being addicted to the morphine habit.”

Miss Toppan was in the habit of going about the village a great deal and frequently visited the neighboring town of Milford, but she avoided cities like Nashua and Manchester. So quietly did she carry herself that few people knew she was in the town and the arrest came as a decided sensation when, on October 29th, General Whitney came to the Nichols home with a warrant and was shown into the room she was occupying.

“I explained to her that I had a warrant for her arrest,” Whitney said. “She asked me why she was arrested before she had an opportunity to give her evidence. I then informed her that autopsies had been held on all the parties in the Davis families who had died and that large quantities of morphine had been found in their persons.”

Jane would later tell the alienists that if Whitney hadn’t arrived as he did, she probably would have poisoned George and Sarah Nichols, too.

***

Jane seemed to take the arrest in stride, in her own jolly fashion. Reporters at the train station caught sight of her in a seat halfway up the car, the outside half of which was filled by detective Letteney, who had his worried, careworn face buried in the afternoon papers. By contrast, Jane was bright and cheery as she watched the passing crowd through the car window with a dynamic smile, her little half-shut eyes sparkling in amusement at the bustle of the station.

She was formally charged only with the murder of Minnie Gibbs, but as the story began to unfold through Whitney’s investigation and Jane’s confessions to her lawyers and the court alienists assigned to the case, the number quickly advanced to at least 31 at the time of her trial, but there is no official body count.

People who knew Jolly Jane and lived to tell about it were incredulous. A friend in Somerville, Miss Sarah Gordon, whom Jane had said was her dearest friend, heard the awful charges brought against Miss Toppan with astonishment that inflated to anger at this slander against her dear friend. She refused to believe one word of the reports. When she read that Deacon Brigham believed her to be guilty and insane and a morphine addict, Miss Gordon boarded the next possible train for Lowell. She at once went to Mr. Brigham and demanded an explanation of what she termed his “base desertion of his sister.” 

The Deacon calmly gave her a few inside facts about the case. “She went away convinced, I think,” said the Deacon.

At first, Jane denied all the charges and gossip against her. Her first public statement was delivered to the press two days after her arrest:

“I know nothing about the poisoning either of Mrs. Gibbs or any members of the Davis family. I suppose they all died from natural causes. I'm willing to tell all about these cases. I have nothing to conceal. I am sorry that doctor Latter is dead. Were he alive I would not have the slightest difficulty in clearing my skirts. The officers knew where I was all the time. I was not hiding and could have been found at an hours notice. Such talk as my hiding from arrest is absurd.”

He appended the statement with his own personal testimony: “I have known her for 20 years and I am positive that she has no such thing as a mania. She is a bright, intellectual woman, mentally and morally pure. The story about her wanting to get married is absolutely absurd. I never saw her in the company of a man or ever heard her speak of a man. I know she had nothing to do with them. Any friend of Miss Toppan will vouch for her very excellent moral character. I am convinced of Miss Toppan’s innocence. I've known her since her childhood and never has the finger of suspicion been lifted against her. We will admit nothing. Let the state go ahead and prove its case.” 

At her arraignment later that day, a little group of curiosity seekers in front of the jail watched her step out of the door arm and arm with the lawyer Murphy, in the journey to the courtroom. At the first sight of the prisoner a murmur of surprise came from those who saw her first appearance a week ago. Her face was pale. She walked with faltering steps eyes cast on the ground through the lane of spectators to the courthouse a few yards away once inside the courtroom. She sat down on the seat a near the door to await the perfunctory request for a continuance from lawyer Murphy with head bent forward Miss Toppan listen to the requests of Her counsel. She was attired in the usual black dress, but she looked unkempt, her black hair shaded with gray stuck straight out from beneath her black bonnet. A carelessly tied large white ribbon encircled a wide front collar her eyes with ever-shifting glances about the room were deep sunken underneath them dark circles deep-lined were showing. She appeared nervous, pale-cheeked and hollow-eyed, trembling with emotion, seemingly on the verge of collapse as she stood before the court and pleaded not guilty to the charge of murder against her. She looked like a hunted animal at bay, the newspapers said. She clasped her hands together to stop the trembling and little beads of perspiration began to glisten on her brow. Then her lips quivered and she bit them nervously until a tiny drop of blood turned them a brilliant crimson. 

She was in court only four minutes yet she seemed to go through a thousand emotions before she turned to leave. She then faltered as if in danger of falling and seized Murphy's arm for support. She never once opened her lips. She kept them tightly shut as though restraining herself by great effort. Her step was slow and she walked with seeming difficulty walking. She leaned forward, a pronounced stoop rounding her shoulders. The strain of confinement, the seriousness of the charges against her, and her name and picture all over the newspapers seemed to sap her strength. She was like a woman without hope.

Search of the Brigham home and her room in Cambridge revealed a cache of letters that Jane had written to various persons. If there had been doubt about her skills as a liar and storyteller, the letters put it to rest. In some instances Miss Toppan had written letters on two consecutive days to the same person exactly contradictory of each other. The stories she told bordered on the marvelous with an absolute disregard of the truth. Some told of the fabulous wealth left her, others of a marriage soon to take place with a prominent man, and yet another anticipated a trip around the world on a private yacht with some young man whom she had infatuated. There seemed to be no real benefit to spreading these fanciful stories, so the doctors opined they were purely the product of a disordered mind. 

Being captured and having to publicly face her crimes added an element of paranoia to her mental maladies. One physician said she was rapidly developing a suspicious nature that she did not possess when she was arrested. When asked about certain things she assumes an air of extraordinary cunning and returns evasive answers. He therefore predicted that there would never be a real confession. But he was wrong about that. She revealed to two of her attorneys and the three alienists appointed by the courts to examine her, details of her murders with a cool frankness and an “utter calmness” that equalled the deliberate and thoughtful way that she carried them out and shook all concerned to the core--perhaps even herself.

“No doubt,” one of the alienists told a reporter, “the ordinary citizen would unquestionably pronounce Miss Toppan insane when talking with her. She shows no evidence of her malady save to one who has made that branch a special study. She talked and even laughed with us and did not seem greatly concerned about her fate. But even this was abnormal. An ordinary woman placed in her position would have done her best to counterfeit insanity as soon as she became aware of the identity of her visitors, but Jane toppan did nothing of the sort. She seemed perfectly at her ease.” 

The confessions revealed a tale of cleverness and daring, glee over outwitting doctors, and the sexual lure of causing and witnessing the deaths of both men and women. She played with the lives which were entrusted to her with care as a cat with a mouse and it was rarely, she said, that those who once came under her charge arose from their bed of sickness when the patient lay helpless and insensible she exulted in her power and kissed and caressed them as they drew nearer and nearer to death. 

“You see,” she said to one of her attorneys, “I am not insane. I remember it all or at least most of the last few years. Those whom I killed in the hospitals, of course, I didn't know. I can't tell their names nor how many--perhaps ten, perhaps twenty, fifty-five.” 

She showed no remorse, and expressed her own concern over that. She told one alienist, “When I try to picture it, I say to myself, ‘I have poisoned Minnie Gibbs, my dear friend. I have poisoned Mrs. Gordon. I have poisoned Mr. Davis and Mrs. Davis.’ This does not convey anything to me, and when I try to sense the condition of the children and all the consequences, I cannot realize what a awful thing it is. Why don’t I feel sorry and grieve over it? I cannot make any sense of it at all.”

Corroboration of some of the sordid details of Jane’s modus operandi came from a former patient from her days at the Cambridge Hospital who came forward when the news broke to tell of her own experience. Mrs. Amelia Phinney had been in the hospital for an operation on her uterus. After surgery, Nurse Jolly Jane gave Amelia some bitter tasting medicine to help with her pain. As she slipped in and out of a morphine haze, the friendly nurse who had been caring for her got into the bed, kissed Amelia all over her face and stroked her hair cooing, then suddenly stopped and hurried out of the room. Groggily recalling the bizarre event the following morning, she talked herself into believing it was all just a dream. But when the news broke of Jolly Jane’s crimes, she realized how close she was to being another of the nurse’s unfortunate victims had the sensual poisoning not been interrupted.

  ***

It was warm and sunny in Barnstable, Massachusetts, on June 23, 1902, a beautiful day compared to the oppressive heat of the previous summer. Citizens wandered about the jail grounds as early as seven o'clock hoping for a glimpse of the prisoner Jane Toppan on her way to meet her fate in a court of law. The prisoners of the jail generally awakened at six o'clock, but on this day, the jail matron an exception. A long hard day was before the prisoner and the kind-hearted matron gave her an extra hour to sleep before gently waking her. Jane roused sporting a big, friendly smile, a bit of the old Jolly returning for a moment. After breakfast, Jane and the matron spent a half-hour deciding on her wardrobe for the day, even though the choices were limited to two dresses and three shirt waists. Every waist, every skirt was put on and taking off at least a dozen times and still she was not pleased. When her attorney called to accompany her to court, she was still confounded and seemed to make a hasty decision of a black dress, white waist, and a wide-brimmed black hat profusely trimmed with forget-me-nots.

While Jane was agonizing over her wardrobe, the crowd in front of the courthouse swelled until they were elbow-to-elbow. Promptly at nine o'clock, the little gallery at the rear of the courtroom was thrown open and in ten minutes was packed to the dome. At ten, Jane walked slowly in and took her place in the long prisoner's dock. She shot quick glances here and there at the crowd and the little gallery, at the reporters and at the tall sheriff and his assistants. The forget-me-nots in her hat bobbed up and down continuously. At first, she kept her heavy veil over her face, but when her interest in the proceedings increased, she pushed it impatiently away.

Jolly Jane Toppan’s fate was settled a mere six hours later. Impaneling the jury took only thirty-one minutes to begin the day and the jury required a mere twenty-seven minutes to agree on a verdict to end it. The reading of the indictment consumed twelve minutes, twelve minutes during which Jane Toppan was forced to hear four times those terrible words of “poison,” “kill,” and “murder.” Her emotion increased at each recital by the shaking voice of the aged clerk and at one time it seemed as if she was about to faint. With a quick gasp her head fell forward on the railing and for the rest of the time until the reading was finished, she kept her face buried upon her arm.

All of the witnesses were escorted from the courtroom with the exception of the the three alienists--Drs. Stedman, Jelly and Quinby, upon whose opinion Miss Toppan’s fate would be determined. They sat directly in front of her. 

The central testimony came from Dr. Henry R. Stedman, who said that Jane Toppan told him in the presence of other medical experts that she had caused the death of Mrs. Gibbs by giving her a poisonous dose of atropine and morphine; that she administered the drugs in the form of tablets or pellets; and that more than one dose was given. The two other physicians concurred that Jane Toppan was insane on August 13, the day of Mrs. Gibbs’s death, and was still suffering from “a form of degenerative insanity having defective control of an irresistible impulse.” In short, she was not responsible for the crime with which she was charged. 

There were no witnesses for her defense. Her attorneys relied entirely upon the insanity plea and the alienists who testified fully agreed that the woman was insane. Neither the counsel for the defendant nor the attorney general desired to address the jury. 

When the defense rested, the judge turned to Miss Toppan and said, “You have the privilege if you see fit to exercise it to address the jury in your own behalf. You are not obliged to do so, and may, if you choose leave your defense upon the basis where it had been placed by your counsel. No inference will be drawn against you from your omission to say anything to the jury in your own behalf. Do you desire to say anything?” 

The defendant said, “I do not.” 

The jury found her not guilty by reason of insanity. The district attorney suggested she be sent to the Taunton Hospital for the Insane and the defense agreed.

Back at the jail, a reporter asked her if she was feeling well, she said, “Oh, never better. I feel just grand.” 

“Do you dread your new life?” he asked. 

“Oh, no,” she replied. “I'll be alright again in a few years. They'll let me out the way they did Freeman,” the zealot who Alden Davis defended. He, too, was sent to Taunton, released after seven years. 

Even in jail and in the insane asylum, Jolly Jane never lost her propensity for exaggeration. By the time she arrived at the state mental hospital in Taunton, her confession had grown to a total of eighty-four victimes.

One newspaper wag asserted, “It is thought that unless her imagination be curbed she might claim or confess to the murder of half the inhabitants of the state.”

“There was just eighty-four,” she insisted to a reporter. “I was going to make it an even hundred and then stop.” 

In an update two years later, she was claiming 91 victims, and her paranoia had grown to extreme proportions. She stopped eating for fear of being poisoned, and her plump figure began to waste away. Her keepers went to “heroic measures,” the report said, to keep her nourished, including force feeding her through a tube.

“One look at this weak, incapable woman sitting in her cell in the hospital is sufficient to convince the visitor that some share of the vengeance, which delusions induced from horrible realities can inflict, has been meted out to her,” the Boston Post reported. 

By the time of her death in 1938 at the age of 81, she would claim to her keepers, “I killed at least 100 persons.”

PS: Oramel Brigham married Martha Cook in May, 1902, while Jane Toppan awaited trial in the Barnstable jail. He died in Lowell in 1920, 89 years old.