AS THE MUDDY trading pit of Milwaukee tottered to its feet as a major American metropolis, its residents—both those bred here and those just passing through—were occasionally driven to acts of violence as heartbreaking and horrifying as they were mesmerizing. These are stories of blood spilt: one’s own or that of another, the warm blood of love or the chilled gore of retribution, blood let in fits of rage and blood whose sticky sheen seemed the only path to peace.
What drove these people to the darkest corners of their own capability is what drives people there still. The commonplace occurrences of sorrow, rejection, fear, and lust—distorted through lenses of shame, hatred, and madness—are what consume many of this chapter’s actors.
These doomed actors lived here, died here, and killed here. The commonplace madness that displaced them from the gentle confines of reason still exists in this place. We breathe the air of their final breaths, sleep in the homes they shattered, and travel the roads they stalked. Their Milwaukee has become ours, its earth still in possession of the blood of these unfortunates.
They are our neighbors still.
November 1874
MARIA WAGNER was dying. She had taken ill shortly after being abandoned by her husband, left to fend for herself and her young son, Carl. An emergency hysterectomy was needed to save her life, after which she was taken in by her sister and brother-in-law, Mary and Edward Aschermann. Edward was the proprietor of a downtown cigar factory and had once been a business partner of Maria’s estranged husband. The couple nursed her during her recovery and provided support for young Carl, allowing them both to stay at their large home at 203 Thirteenth Street. Maria was preparing to remarry when a routine visit to her doctor revealed that her illness had returned. Her death would be a painful one. It could come in as little as two weeks.
In the week after her diagnosis, Maria wrote three letters: one to her mother, one to Edward, and one to the man she had planned to marry. Each letter was an explanation and an apology. To her thirteen-year-old son Carl, “all she had in the world,” she wrote nothing. The boy had recently returned from a grand European vacation paid for by his uncle Edward. He toured a boarding school in Germany that he was to attend with a son of the Aschermanns. Maria had evidently signed off on her son’s future plans, but now, facing the last days of her life, she was unable to leave him behind.
The Sunday after her diagnosis, Maria was the last in the house to bed. Sometime past midnight, her sister heard her descending the stairs. Into the darkness, she asked who was there. “It is I,” Maria replied. She said she was going out to the yard but would return shortly. Mary listened as her sister walked through the house and into the inky blackness of the fall evening. Mary knew about the return of Maria’s illness. Although her sister had seemed composed and tranquil over the past days, Mary was worried about her mental state. As five, ten, then twenty minutes passed with no rustling downstairs, Mary grew worried. Finally, she roused Edward and asked him to go out and check on Maria.
Edward lit a lantern and went into the yard. He scanned the grounds but could find nothing. Finally, in the stoic chill of the November air, the glow of his lamp caught something out of place. He slowly approached the mouth of the brick cistern that was buried in the rear of the lot. The lid had been removed from the circular opening that led to its underground belly, which was filled about four feet deep. In the grass just beside the mouth sat a pair of women’s night slippers.
A brick cistern similar to the one in which Maria Wagner ended her life
Library of Congress HABS FLA, 17-PENSA, 65-3
As Edward approached the cistern, Mary got up to check on her young daughter, who shared a bedroom with Carl. She found the girl frantically shaking her cousin, trying to wake him. Mary turned her own lantern to the boy’s bed and found him foaming at the mouth, his bedclothes covered in blood. Back in the yard, Edward shone a light into the cistern and found Maria floating in a frigid pink pool. Determined that she could not leave her boy, Maria had poisoned the child, secreting him the contents of the empty opiate bottle later found in her bedroom. After putting Carl to bed, she tried feebly to slit her wrists. She drew blood but could not bring herself to cut deeply enough. Blood dripping from her hands, she checked on her boy one last time, went to the yard, and found the cistern.
September 1897
GEORGE BUNDAY’S parents did not approve of the attention their young son was paying to Blanche Warren. George and Blanche first met as children in Bay City, Michigan. The Bundays were a family of vast means, socially established and protective of their boy. Blanche Warren’s family had once been similarly endowed. Her father had been the president of the First National Bank of Bay City, but when the bank collapsed, so did their wealth and standing. The Bundays discouraged George from spending time with the girl, but he had already fallen in the dumb kind of love into which kids often fall.
Eventually, the Bundays moved from Bay City. But George and Blanche kept in touch with an endless series of letters. Her family’s limited means forced young Blanche into the working world. She trained as a nurse as George went off to law school at the University of Michigan. After they graduated, fate conspired to reunite the couple. Each accepted a job offer in Chicago and, for the first time in years, George and Blanche could enjoy each other’s company. In Chicago, George lived with his parents, who had also relocated to the city. He managed to keep his romance with Blanche secret for a time, but eventually his parents found out, and they encouraged him to end the affair and find a girl more suited to his station. He assured his mother and father that he would. Days later, a nondescript telegram arrived at the Bunday home. “Am called to Milwaukee on business. Will return tomorrow. George.”
His business in Milwaukee was marriage. The couple arrived on a Monday afternoon, took a room at the luxurious downtown Plankinton House hotel, and set out to find a preacher. Milwaukee had long been a destination for Chicagoans in a rush to the altar. Unlike in Illinois, Wisconsin had no marriage license requirement. A Milwaukee wedding took no more effort than to find a willing clergyman. George and Blanche were in such a hurry and were married that day by Reverend E. A. Brown of the Christ Episcopal Church at Eighteenth and Wright Streets. That night, the newlyweds took a few grams of morphine and enjoyed their first evening in their marital bed.
For the next two days, the couple enjoyed the sights of the city, the parks and theaters, appearing to the hotel staff as happy and contented. During this time, George was in touch with his family in Chicago. The tone and content of their exchanges, however, is disputed. His parents later claimed that he had asked them to see him in Milwaukee but would not say why. Fearing he might be ill, they pried and he finally confessed to marrying Blanche. They said that upon learning of the marriage, they asked him to return home and not to bring his new bride until they had a chance to talk. Blanche later told of a much more terse exchange. She said they objected vigorously and told their son she was not welcome in their home. She said they told him to take a long vacation and forget about his bride.
What was not disputed was that by late Wednesday, George felt he could not return home with Blanche. The beaming future he had seen as recently as Monday evening—his own practice, homestead, and loving wife—now seemed perilously out of reach. On Wednesday, after taking in a show at Second Street’s Bijou Theatre, he found a lawyer who kept late hours. He asked the man to prepare paperwork to transfer all of his real estate holdings to his father. The young man trembled so badly in the lawyer’s office, he had difficulty signing the documents. “[He was] the most nervous person I ever saw,” the lawyer later recalled.
That evening, the couple wrote letters home explaining their decision. As George found a mailbox, Blanche, familiar with the process from her medical training, prepared two syringes with a toxic morphine cocktail. Sometime before midnight, the young lovers took their dose and drifted off to sleep. Blanche eventually woke up. George never did.
The next morning, weak and disoriented, Blanche managed to ring for a bellboy. A doctor was summoned, but she was barely able to explain what had happened. George was already dead. By the next day, the Chicago papers were reporting sensational claims about the suicide of young Bunday. The stories depicted the young man’s parents as unwilling to accept his bride, owing to her profession and social rank. After hurrying to Milwaukee, the Bundays sought out a Milwaukee Journal reporter to correct these claims. “Oh, it is an awful thing,” George’s mother told the reporter. “He was such a noble boy. So good and true and noble and honest. If it had been some young girl we would have blamed him and not her.” She went on to say that it was her age, not her class, that most upset the family. George was twenty-five years old. No explicit mention of Blanche’s age was ever printed, but a letter to the editor in the Chicago Tribune from Blanche’s brother claimed she was just two years older than her departed groom.
The Bundays collected their son’s body and returned to Chicago with his widow still recovering in their honeymoon suite. She was strong enough to travel after a few days but found herself without the funds to pay the hotel bill. She finally managed to wire friends for the cash and set off to return home. As Blanche gathered the sad mementos of her tragic honeymoon, the family of George Bunday laid the young man to rest. No one bothered to tell Blanche about the service. She was still not welcome in the Bunday home.
“OUR COFFINS WILL ARRIVE AT YOUR HOUSE TODAY . . .”
January 1905
IN THE summer of 1904, a man took a room at the Groves Boarding House in Chicago. He presented himself as Mr. E. S. Terry, a wealthy and refined Englishman. He was, in reality, Arthur Milligan, an English-born Brooklynite, wanted by police for passing bad checks in Manhattan and for thieving the payroll at the Boston Journal while working there as a clerk. E. S. Terry was but one of the half-dozen or more aliases possessed by this man who had empty pockets, spellbinding charm, and suicidal tendencies.
In Chicago, Milligan took an interest in Florence Groves, the nineteen-year-old daughter of his landlords. Groves worked during the day as a telephone switchboard operator, but her evenings quickly became occupied by the man she knew as Mr. Terry. She enjoyed singing as he played the house’s parlor piano. Her friends said she was “mesmerized” by him and had fallen into a kind of awestruck love. Despite her boundless affections, Milligan’s insecurities ate at him. He was convinced that he had a rival for her affections. At least once, he threatened to kill himself if she ever left him.
On Friday, January 13, 1905, after several months of courtship, Milligan and Groves rode the passenger steamer Indiana north to Milwaukee. Groves was under the impression the trip was a pleasure excursion, but Milligan had far different plans. They would be wed in Milwaukee, he told Groves during the trip north. In Milwaukee, the couple took a room at the downtown Blatz Hotel at Water and Oneida1 Streets, registering as Mr. S. F. Berry and wife. But sometime during their first nights in the city, Milligan had a fateful change of heart. The idea of possessing his dear Florence via the bounds of matrimony was no longer enough. The only way to truly make her his own would be to cross with her into the great hereafter. Groves accepted this plan, according to Milligan, willingly—even eagerly—and they made plans to end their lives after nightfall. But when nightfall came, they lost their nerve. The next day, they made the same vow but, again, could not bring themselves to comply. Finally, they agreed to pool their cash and live in high spirits until poverty forced their hand.
After ten days in the city, their money finally ran out. Milligan said that on that day, a Sunday, Groves made three attempts to poison herself. He said that she “begged” him to allow her to go first, saying that she could not bear to live, even for just a few minutes, in a world without him. She swallowed glasses of iodine and wood alcohol but could not keep either down. Early the next morning, Milligan made fifty cents begging and went to a local druggist where he talked the clerk into selling him a bottle of carbolic acid. After mailing a letter to the Groves family, he went up to their room at the Blatz and prepared Florence’s dose. He served it to her in a wine glass, helping her in her weakened state to raise it to her mouth.
The young woman’s death was a horrifying one. She twisted in pain and writhed grotesquely as the liquid slowly burned away at her viscera. The girl died just past 6:00 a.m. Milligan later said he was reading the newspaper as Groves passed on but also claimed to have been so distressed by her awful demise that he lost the nerve to end his own life. For the next three hours, Milligan remained in the room, trying to work up the nerve to follow her into the excruciating hereafter. “After I saw Florence die in such great agony in my presence,” he said, “I could not bear the thought of being found dead with my eyes and mouth open, looking so ghastly.” So he fled. He cleaned Groves up and kissed her good-bye. After checking for mail at the front desk, he took a drink in the hotel bar and caught a train out of town.
That afternoon, his letter arrived in Chicago. “We are too divinely happy to live,” it read in Milligan’s hand. “When you receive this, we will be on our way to heaven. Our coffins will arrive at your house today. . . . We will die smiling. Bury us side by side.” Groves’s brother was enraged. He was certain that Milligan—Terry to him—had murdered his sister. He went at once to Milwaukee and arrived at the Blatz as police were clearing out the room. Two more notes were found, both written by Milligan, requesting the bodies be returned to Chicago. By now, the police had discovered Milligan’s true identity and a statewide manhunt was launched for his arrest on the charge of murder.
The next day, after a bartender who recognized his photo from the newspaper called police, Milligan was arrested in a Racine flophouse. As the cops broke through his door, Milligan tried in vain to take his dose of poison, but an officer knocked the bottle from his grasp. Saved from death by his own hand, he settled into an odd calm. At the central station in Milwaukee, he asked for—and was given—a swallow of whiskey before laying out his confession. He had planned to escape back to Boston, he told police. There, he would surrender on the standing embezzlement charges against him—under another alias—and hopefully make Arthur Milligan vanish. That June, he was convicted of manslaughter and given ten years at Waupun State Prison. “It is believed,” the Racine Daily Journal reported, “that he will commit suicide at the first opportunity offered in the prison.”
June 1851
JAMES JOHNSTON, a tall, auburn-haired man of about thirty years, stood in a dank holding cell of Milwaukee’s little stone jailhouse, waiting for his turn with the straight razor. It was Sunday morning, the day that the prisoners were permitted to shave. Johnston and his accomplice, a man named Peter King, had been arrested the week before on a burglary charge. The pair had been working together for several years but had till then avoided the censure of the law. Johnston had been known to proclaim that he would sooner take his own life than serve a jail sentence. As the razor was passed from man to man, Johnston waited patiently. Passed the blade, he opened it and proceeded to gently shave his face. His wife, whom he had written of his arrest, was on her way to him and was to arrive later that day. Finishing the job, he kept the blade open, extended his arm, and drove it violently across his throat. The force of the blow tore open his windpipe and sent blood burping from the wound. His fellow prisoners screamed for the jailer, who quickly arrived and looked upon the scene in horror. Johnston stood erect, throat opened and drenched in blood. The jailer rushed into the cell and tried to close the wound with his hand. Johnston fought him back and, for a moment, the two grappled in the deathly red puddle. While a doctor was summoned, Johnston was restless. He lay down, stood, and paced until weakened, then lay again before getting up to pace some more. Within an hour, he was dead. His wife arrived in time to claim the corpse.
June 1899
“TODAY, I learned what kind of woman [my wife] is. She misused me and acted wrongly. I have seen it. What kind of man would take such a punishment if he had a certainty as to the facts? She shall die with me.” These were the lines written on a single-page letter, folded and kept in the pocket of Fred Gmelin as he sat in the saloon at 623 West Walnut Street that he owned with his wife. The night before, the Gmelins had one of the many rows that punctuated their brief marriage. Fred stomped off in anger after the fight but had returned that morning to settle the matter. He found that his wife was out, so he sat and waited.
Fred and Victoria Gmelin were an atypical couple. They met when he hired her as a housekeeper after his first wife died. As he sat in wait with the letter in his pocket, he was sixty-two, she just twenty-eight. Despite the age gap and the regular domestic squabbles, the marriage had produced two sons, two and four years old. The present situation had peaked about three months earlier. Fred, fraught with jealousies over the attention that younger men paid his pretty, young wife, left the home and moved in with an adult son from his first marriage, leaving Victoria to care for the children and run their saloon. In March, she had Fred arrested on charges of spousal abandonment. In turn, he brought a suit of divorce against her.
When Victoria returned home, Fred said nothing. She set up an ironing table and began work on the chores. He sat, watching her work, while his young children played at her feet. Without a word, he rose, drew a .32-caliber revolver from his jacket, and fired two shots into her midsection. As his wife fell into a heap, he turned the pistol into his mouth and fired once. The gun barrel was still clamped between his teeth as he fell dead to the floor. Victoria, wounded and bleeding, gathered herself and ran into the street, her two boys close behind. From two sharp holes in the steel corset cinched about her waist, crimson streams of blood soaked her dress. Outside, she collapsed into the arms of a passerby.
Victoria was rushed to a doctor, who quickly determined she would survive the attack. Had the slugs not been slowed by her heavy corset, she might not have been so fortunate. That afternoon, as the bullets were being plucked from Victoria’s ribs and Fred was hauled off to the morgue, their divorce case was to be heard by the judge. The pending case was closed, the Milwaukee Journal noted, “when the great judge, Death, granted the divorce.”
May 1931
“GET ALL togged out like I am. . . . Keep well-shaved and kid the women along. You’ll be surprised how quickly they will fall. . . . Then a little moonlight, sweet words whispered in their ears, and you’ve got ’em on their way to get a marriage license. A couple of weeks more to find out how much dough they’ve got and you’ll have it. Then you can always leave ’em.”
This was the advice of George “Jiggs” Perry, to a pal, on how to win big with women. The quote was relayed to the Milwaukee Sentinel in October 1930 as a nationwide dragnet had just been launched for Perry, who had wooed, won, and left as many as ten women across the Midwest over the preceding year. At least four of these women claimed that Perry had married them. Another, Cora Belle Hackett, a twice-widowed Milwaukeean who had married Perry in Canton, Ohio, was found dead on the Lac du Flambeau Indian Reservation with a single bullet in her head. She was last seen trudging into the woods with Perry, who was armed with a borrowed rifle, later returned to its owner with a single empty shell in its chamber.
Jiggs Perry was an unlikely Romeo. Thirty-seven years old when he started his marrying spree, Perry was stout and moonfaced. His hair was so badly thinning that he would dunk his head in well water as often as a dozen times a day and walk outside hatless in an attempt to stimulate its growth. Newspapers made references to his having a glass eye. And he worked, when he worked, as a simple railroad brakeman.
Perry’s first—and only legal—marriage was to Miss Mary Nickels, whom he wed in 1912 at age nineteen. Together, they had three children and kept a modest home at 1117 Pierce Street in Milwaukee. Even to Mary, Jiggs was known as a flirt who adored the attention of women. He possessed a charm and engaging nature that belied his unimpressive appearance. He was also well read and was said to be able to “talk on anything.” With a particular interest in the macabre, he made a habit of saving newspaper clippings of murders and was quick to spout off to friends about the mistakes the killer had made. According to Mary, sometime in the late 1920s he suffered an accident that fractured his skull. “Since that time,” she later said, “he has been doing some thoughtless things that others criticized, and I excused.”
In 1928, Perry left his wife and family. He first went south, spending time in New Orleans before working his way up to New York City. But by early 1929, Perry had come up with a new means of making a living. For the next year, he traveled through Illinois, Ohio, and Wisconsin, finding well-to-do middle-aged women, winning their affections, and “marrying” them, feigning his way through the required paperwork and ceremonial trimmings. He posed as a man of means, often showing the women phony letters to himself from prominent Milwaukee citizens, congratulating him on his nonexistent business successes and making vague plans to get together soon on his equally imaginary yacht. After a quick wedding—Perry claimed later it was always the women, never he, who proposed—Perry would leach money and favors from the women, speaking of large sums soon due to him that would make true everything he had promised during their courtship. He would then laze about until the woman got wise or the cash ran out. Then he was on to the next, and the next, and the next. . . .
Katherine Gebhardt was the first, marrying Perry in January 1930 in Chicago and setting up a home with him in Cleveland. During a trip away from Gebhardt to visit an “aunt,” Perry met and married Cora Hackett. The couple took their fateful honeymoon that summer at a country resort near the Lac du Flambeau Indian reservation in Eagle River. It was there that Perry borrowed the rifle and marched into the woods with Hackett. Later that day, Perry returned to their cabin alone, packed both his clothes and hers, and quickly left. When he got back to Cleveland, Gebhardt was convinced that he had been seeing another woman during his time in Wisconsin. To help win back her trust, Perry gave her a trunk of fine, new clothes—those that once belonged to the departed Cora Hackett.
The marriage to Gebhardt ended when another woman called her and asked if she was married to Perry. Gebhardt replied that she was, causing the other woman to exclaim, “Why, that can’t be! He proposed to me and promised me eighteen thousand dollars after we were married in Chicago!” After parting with Gebhardt, Perry added two more wives to the roster, marrying Lida Downey and Elizabeth Morrison just weeks apart in Camari and Albion, Illinois, respectively. With a deserted wife in Milwaukee, one demanding a divorce in Cleveland, two newlyweds just forty miles apart in Illinois, and the body of Cora Hackett rotting in the Wisconsin North Woods, Perry met and became engaged to Harriet Milligan, a St. Louis widow. They were married shortly before Hackett’s body, which had been found a few weeks earlier, was finally identified. When the police made their suspect known, Perry fled to the south, leaving behind three active marriages and at least two pending engagements.
Perry’s whereabouts remained unknown until May 1931 when, after reading an article on the case in a true-crime pulp magazine, a San Francisco police officer recognized the grainy image of Perry. In San Francisco, he was known as Frank Moran, husband of thirty-nine-year-old Anna Gutierrez, a former beauty queen and the heiress to a Salvadorian coffee empire. The officer was familiar with Moran, having recently investigated a theft at an apartment building owned by Gutierrez. The couple had been wed in January 1931, which would have been Perry’s sixth marriage in twelve months.
After conferring with authorities in Wisconsin, San Francisco police arrested the man known as Moran, who denied knowing anything about anyone named Perry or Hackett. The suspect was held while a Wisconsin detective rushed westward. With the detective was William Parker, the man who owned the resort where Hackett was killed and a personal friend of Jiggs Perry. After arriving in San Francisco, the two men met with the suspect, who continued to insist he was none other than Frank Moran. Parker immediately recognized the man as Perry and recounted numerous stories of their time together. “You’re Perry and you know you’re Perry,” Parker scolded him. “You were with me in 1929 and you were with me in 1930. I and my wife treated you like a brother. We liked you, Perry, and we know you.”
But as the suspect refused to relent, a minor slip of the tongue revealed his true identity. At some point during the interview, the suspect referred to Parker as “Bill.” The suspect did not catch the gaffe, but the detective did. He stopped the suspect and told him that no one had yet mentioned Mr. Parker’s first name. How would Frank Moran know the first name of a man he had never met? The suspect slumped. He admitted nothing but stopped claiming to be Frank Moran. Days later, he was on a train bound east to be charged with the murder of Cora Belle Hackett. The suspect was decidedly dispirited, but perhaps most so because his dear Anna had refused to come see him at the jail. “Take him away. Take him to Wisconsin,” Gutierrez told reporters. “I loved him. I think I love him now, but I do not want to see him.”
A Milwaukee Sentinel reporter rode back with the suspect who, upon being loaded into the train, again began to insist he was Moran and denied ever having suggested otherwise. But the man whose gift of gab had earned him so much love and affection simply could not stop talking and, yet again, his ratchet jaw would run faster than his mind. Urged on by his cabin mates, the suspect talked at length about a number of topics. Somewhere in the Rocky Mountain region, the suspect began to tell a boastful fishing tale that caught Parker’s attention. “That happened at my place!” he interrupted.
The suspect sank in his chair. “Oh, what’s the use,” he sighed. “I’m Perry and you know it. . . . I’m guilty of bigamy, plenty guilty. But I’m no murderer.” On the rest of the long ride back home, Perry was unable to keep quiet about his exploits and romantic conquests. “The women love me. Every woman I ever married loved me. And everything these women gave me they gave of their own free will,” he said. He held a particular reverence for Anna and was still stung by her rejection of him. “I suppose that is what they call retribution. The one woman I really loved leaving me alone when I needed her the most.” When asked why he embarked on his marrying spree, he was glib but guarded. “Why buy a horse when you can ride for free?” he asked. “I never left any woman until I had to. I never left until I couldn’t get any more money from her. . . . A fine bunch of fools. They could have checked up on me in a hurry.”
After arriving in Chicago, he was put into a car and driven north. Just across the Wisconsin border, the car was stopped and Perry was formally charged with murder. Several hours later, he was taken to the Eagle River jail. He was upbeat, certain at least one of his old wives would come to his defense and provide him with the money he now desperately needed. But the only Mrs. Perry to come forward was the first. She made the long trek to Eagle River so his children could see their father. Her statements in support of Perry had been numerous, but she was near broke, frazzled, and paranoid from the attention the case had brought her. She claimed she could not go see her husband upon his arrival in Chicago because her “enemies” there sought to kill her. “Why did you marry all those women, George?” she asked him at the jailhouse. “Why did you do it?”
“Well . . .” was his only reply.
Perry’s trial began later that month. He promised an impenetrable alibi but could produce none. He said that he and Hackett had parted in the woods and someone else must have shot her after he left. He claimed to have been overtaken by tears when he heard that Hackett was dead. He said he regretted his spree and wanted badly to return to his first wife (whom he mistakenly referred to as Katherine—his first bigamous spouse). Perry collapsed when he was read the guilty verdict. A few weeks later, he was given a life sentence. Mary Perry maintained that her husband was innocent as he was carted off to the prison at Waupun. No comment was heard from Anna Gutierrez, whom Perry planned to return to after his exoneration. On the train back from California, brimming with confidence about his prospects, he had told a reporter with a grin, “She is waiting for me at the Golden Gate.”
April 1886
ISIDOR SEIDENBAUM was just fifteen when his parents boarded him onto a US-bound ocean liner and said good-bye. In his homeland of Austria, the boy was considered an incorrigible. His family hoped that fending for himself in a new land might straighten out the boy’s crooked ways. The plan seemed to work, for by 1886, he was in school in Milwaukee, tutoring children in Hebrew, and was soon to relocate to Cincinnati, where he would complete his degree and finish his rabbinical training. He was still just seventeen years old, with dark hair, deep-set eyes, and a slender build. He was “clean-cut and refined,” the newspapers would later say, with the looks of a boy “accustomed to refinement and culture.”
But Seidenbaum was also in a troublesome kind of love. He had evidently become infatuated with a student of his, a pretty, young girl, “well-rounded,” and “a picture of loveliness.” She was Annie Rosenstein, the fourteen-year-old daughter of a local tailor. Seidenbaum had been a frequent visitor to the Rosenstein home, a handsome two-story house at the corner of Vliet and Sixth, in the weeks before his scheduled departure. One night, after playing cards with some members of the Rosenstein family late into the evening, Seidenbaum was invited to stay the night. It is possible he lingered a bit longer than usual that night, hoping to be asked to stay. He carried with him that evening a peddler’s pack containing, among other things, a loaded pistol. He gladly accepted the invitation and readied for bed.
Seidenbaum slept with a cousin of the family on the first floor of the house. Annie slept with her four sisters in a room down the hall. At 1:30 a.m., Seidenbaum crept through the house, entered the room, and placed his pistol to the girl’s temple. A single shot ended her life. Isidor then turned the gun on himself, placing its barrel to his heart and firing. Awoken by the revolver’s report, Annie’s parents lit a lamp and quickly found the terrible scene. Their daughter dead, her killer splayed across her bed—blood gushing from his chest and feet dangling to the floor. The look on the dead girl’s face was serene. She had passed from life to death without waking. No firm motive was ever established for the crime. An inquest held in the following days could only assume that his love for her had driven him into a state of insanity.
February 1940
MILDRED BELL and Marie Rose walked along Downer Avenue toward the Walgreen’s drugstore. Bell and Rose were nursing students, both twenty-two years old and less than a month away from taking their state board exams. They were on a study break, enjoying the mild winter weather, and on their way to get a soda. Beside them, a sedan crept down the street. Behind the wheel was Harry Christiansen, a love-twisted and brooding twenty-two-year-old with a short temper and violent tendencies. Just two weeks earlier, Christiansen had asked Bell to marry him after nearly two years of dating. Bell refused. She told him that she wanted to focus on her career and was not ready to be married. It might have been true, but there were deeper reasons for her rejection.
Christiansen asked the women if they needed a ride. Bell said they did not and kept walking. The week before, she had tried to break it off completely with Christiansen. He reluctantly agreed to take some time apart from her, but he refused to end the relationship. At least once before, Christiansen had threatened to kill Bell. Her stepfather, Wauwatosa police officer Louis Johnson, had warned the girl that the young man was trouble and urged her to avoid him. Bell had no intention of trying to save the relationship but accepted Christiansen’s compromise. The truth was that she was afraid of what he might do if she made him too angry.
Christiansen was the son of Harry Christiansen Sr., president of the General Lumber Company and honorary colonel on the staff of Wisconsin Governor Julius P. Heil. He had briefly attended Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana, but proved himself a less than stellar academic. During his time in school he was arrested for carrying a .38-caliber revolver. He told police he had purchased the weapon for target shooting, and they returned it to him without filing charges. After failing out of school, he returned home to join the National Guard and work as a salesman for his father. His fascination with weapons had long been known. A friend recalled that he had once used a Thompson sub-machine gun to pepper a car his father had given him. He kept the car and drove it regularly even after the incident. He liked how the bullet holes looked. He was arrested again in 1939 at the Plankinton Arcade in downtown Milwaukee for carrying a handgun and a phony police badge. He begged out of charges once again, telling the officers that it was his dream to join the force and he was studying to take the entrance exam. The cops let him off with a scolding and returned his items. It was the same gun he had carried at Purdue. And it was the same gun he carried as he pulled away from Mildred Bell and Marie Rose as they entered the Downer Avenue Walgreen’s.
Inside, the women took a booth and finished off two sodas. At about 1:40 p.m., Bell ordered a malted milk. She was still waiting for her drink when Christiansen pushed through the entrance, half-jogging toward their table. He wore a light sweater and a gun belt. In his clenched hand was his prized .38.
“Don’t do that, Harry!” Bell screamed. An instant later he opened fire. Five of his six shots hit Bell. Christiansen executed his assault with chilling efficiency. Bell was struck in the chest, spine, kidney, and head—any of which injuries would have proven fatal on their own—and was dead within seconds. As her head dropped to the table and blood pooled beneath her chair, terrified patrons and staff fled the shop. Rose, briefly frozen with terror, watched as Christiansen emptied the pistol and pulled a single bullet from his belt. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t shoot you.” He calmly loaded the bullet into the gun, raised it to his temple, and fired.
As Rose fled, Christiansen fell to the floor in convulsions. The projectile had torn into his brain and lodged behind his right eye. He thrashed about violently on the floor as a waitress called police. Minutes later, the call went out over police radio about a female shot dead by an unknown male on Milwaukee’s east side. Bell’s stepfather was on patrol when the car radio brought the news. “Boy,” he told his partner, “I hope that isn’t Mildred.” Johnson knew that Mildred frequented the spot and knew her fear of Christiansen. He called the dispatch desk for more details of the shooting and, having confirmed his awful suspicions, went home to tell his wife the terrible news.
Back at the scene, it took several officers to hold Christiansen down as he was handcuffed. He was loaded into an ambulance and rushed to the hospital. Christiansen sat upward during the ride, covered in blood and with the bullet wound in his head still leaking. Asked why he shot Bell, he could only reply, “Leave me alone. I don’t know, I don’t know. . . .” He finally collapsed at the hospital and lingered near death for the next several days.
Although left sightless by his self-inflicted wound, Christiansen eventually recovered enough to stand trial for his crime. Five months after the shooting, unable to see the judge or jury who decided his fate, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.
February 1921
“WILL YOU please place these flowers on the coffin of Marian Davis for one who is ashamed to weep beside it?” read the note attached to a bundle of white sweet peas received in the coroner’s office. “I want them . . . to speak to [those] who would let the dying murmur of a broken-hearted girl be: ‘It is no use to tell my story—the man has too many friends among officials ever to be punished.’” Lying on the slab that afternoon was the body of a young woman who had finally succumbed to the handful of pills she had swallowed two weeks earlier. “I want them to speak for what I might have been and the joys of life I might have had, but for the vicious things that engulfed me like this girl has claimed.” Davis took her fatal dose after an all-night party that made a tour of known spots of sin and vice in the city. Police suspected a quarrel with a lover to be the cause. “I am sir, only, A Painted Girl.”
The gaudy circumstances of the suicide and the mysterious nature of its victim made the case a local sensation. No one in Milwaukee seemed to know much about Marian Davis. She was a gentle beauty, “flaxen-haired” and fair. She was rumored to be the daughter of a prominent Green Bay physician, but as she lingered meekly for two weeks at a Milwaukee hospital, no family came to call. Her most regular visitor was Barney Farrell, a well-known roadhouse operator and one of the men alleged to be out with her the evening of her suicide attempt. In the frontpage articles the morning after her death, Farrell’s lawyer told the press that his client would arrange for the girl’s burial.
Marian Davis’s real name was Esther Repstine. She was the youngest of ten children, born to a respected and well-off family in the little farm town of Atchison, Kansas. Repstine was described as “quiet and studious” by friends back home, but the simple happenings of the prairie were not enough for her. Repstine left home in her late teens—rumors flew that she was with child—and found work as a telephone operator in Kansas City. By 1919, she was working in Chicago, still plugging lines by day and moonlighting as a magazine salesgirl in a hotel. This was how she met Barney Farrell—the “prince of the Milwaukee nightlife,” as he was often called. She moved to Milwaukee in January 1920, becoming Farrell’s “kept woman” and taking residence at an apartment at 501 Cass Street on which he paid the rent. To her landlords, she was Mrs. O’Connor, wife to a considerably older husband who was often out of town and only spent a few nights each week at home. To everyone else, she became known as Marian Davis.
Farrell spent freely on her, dressing her in furs—including a two-thousand-dollar mink that draped her shoulders as she was admitted to the hospital. But if Farrell was easy with his money, he was tighter with his affections. While Davis was still living as Esther Repstine, her mother died, leaving the girl so severely depressed she contemplated suicide. But then she met Barney. She wrote in a note found after her death that Farrell “took [my mother’s] place,” and that he was the only man she had ever loved. But his love was more elusive. He spent free hours with his friends and took to drinking every night. Davis became convinced his associates were trying to get Farrell to leave her. “I have given up all hope of the future,” she wrote, “but all the world knows I love that man.”
The end of her patience with the situation came on January 26, 1921. With Farrell and four others, Davis attended a boxing match at the city auditorium before touring some of Farrell’s nightspots in an evening of revelry. Witnesses reported that at some point during the evening, Farrell shoved Davis from a car and kicked her brutally. After a loud and visible fight at the LaSalle Hotel at 211 Fourth Street—another spot of ill-reputation controlled by Farrell—Davis went to a vacant room while Farrell went to the Cass Street apartment to sleep. Late that night, Davis swallowed seven bichloride of mercury tablets and collapsed. She was found by a pair of Farrell lackeys and dropped at the hospital. “The man in this case,” Davis murmured to the police that night, “has so many friends among the officials of this city and the County of Milwaukee that unless I speak, the story will never be known.”
But nothing else about the matter would leave her lips. Her condition gradually worsened and detectives, who had been waiting for her to improve, were never able to extract an official statement. Whispers about town suggested she had quarreled with someone named O’Connor, a man who was allegedly posing as her husband to carry on an illicit affair.
Back in Kansas, her family had only vague ideas of the big-city life she was living. She wrote of wearing diamonds about town and sent expensive gifts at Christmastime. But as she lay dying in Milwaukee, it had been several weeks since the family had heard from her. Fearing trouble, Edward Repstine, Esther’s older brother, arrived in the city in search of his sister, whom he suspected was living under an assumed name. But Davis had taken efforts to hide her new identity from her family and to portray herself as a young woman without any familial connections. A note found among her things said, “I haven’t any people, so don’t try to find them.” Edward managed to find his sister, but not in time. Davis’s body was about to be buried by Farrell when he arrived at the city morgue and identified Marian Davis as his sister.
As police filled the gaps in the sad story of Marian Davis, their interest in Farrell as a suspect was growing. They had already repelled attempts, believed to be made by his associates, to recover the mink coat Davis was wearing when taken to the hospital. Talking to police just days after she was admitted, Farrell said Marian was merely a friend and denied ever being intimate with her. He also denied giving her the bruises that covered her arms and legs—bruises that never healed. In the week after Davis’s death, he continued to claim no wrongdoing and denied that he and the mysterious Mr. O’Connor were one and the same. Apparently Farrell did his best to ensure no one else would say otherwise. District attorney Winfred Zabel, exasperated after hearing that a female witness was threatened with death if she spoke against Farrell, exploded in a closed-door interview. “You g[oddamn] dirty bum!” he screamed at Farrell. “What business have you got threatening a woman?”
Finally, after securing testimony from the janitor at the Cass Street apartment who positively identified Farrell as the mysterious Mr. O’Connor, police arrested Farrell at the LaSalle Hotel. The arrest occurred almost exactly one week after Repstine had died and roughly the same moment she was being laid to rest in Kansas. During the next week, more than a dozen raids were executed on various Milwaukee nightspots, a response to the public outcry against conditions that allowed young women like Marian Davis to be led so very far astray. Farrell was later convicted of giving a false statement and given three years in the house of corrections.
July 1893
SEAMAN AND Eva Hill were farm kids from the tiny burg of Oak Hill, Wisconsin. They had grown up together, fallen in love, and—just past their twentieth birthdays—stolen away south of the Illinois border to be secretly wed. They chose Milwaukee for their honeymoon destination.
They arrived in the city in time for the Independence Day festivities and enjoyed the plush settings of the newly built Schlitz Hotel and Palm Garden at Grand Avenue and Third Street. But Eva had been keeping a secret from her new husband, one that no woman could keep for long. Sometime after the holiday, she went into labor in their hotel room. Seaman was quite shocked by the development and most certainly watched with bewilderment as the house doctor delivered her baby in the bed of their honeymoon suite. It was not his child.
As stunned as the husband might have been, the trauma of the event and its preceding deceptions sent Eva into an outright panic. She insisted on leaving the hotel immediately, against the forceful objections of the doctor. She wrapped the newborn tightly in a blanket and set off for the lakefront Chicago and North Western depot. The couple lingered along the shoreline for hours. Eva was in fits over the baby. She was horrified at the thought of the shame that would be heaped upon her if she were to return home with a child. Eva told Seaman she needed to rid herself of the baby and said she would throw it in the lake. Seaman objected and tried to stop her, persisting until she said that if he would not allow her to toss away the child, she would jump into the lake herself with the baby firmly in her grip. Somewhere near the flushing station, at the foot of Kane Place, she dropped the newborn into the churning waters. From there, the couple walked back to the depot and boarded a train for Palmyra, Illinois, where they had been married just days earlier.
The Schlitz Hotel, birthplace of the baby Hill
WHi Image ID 54714
The babe’s body was found on the beach the next day. Bulletins on the gruesome discovery quickly reached the Schlitz Hotel and officials there alerted police about the Hills. Days later, they were arrested in Palmyra and each casually confessed to the crime. The Chicago Tribune reported that neither of them “seemed to realize the enormity of the offense.” Each was charged with murder. A postmortem examination of the child, however, revealed that it had already died by the time Eva threw it into the lake. The child had succumbed either to exposure or asphyxiation due to the hotel blanket being so tightly wrapped about its body. Eight months after their arrest, set free on bond and living back home in Oak Hill, the pair pled guilty to a charge of manslaughter. Eva was given one year in the house of corrections. Seaman was fined a hundred dollars.
April 1889
JUST BEFORE eight in the morning, fifty-five-year-old Gustav Stenzel sat in the dirt of his backyard assembling a few pieces of cast iron into a makeshift cannon. The device consisted of a small tube, capped at one end with a touch-hole, and packed tightly with gunshot and ball bearings. The night before, Stenzel had arrived home heavily intoxicated. He had threatened his wife, saying he would kill her and then do away with himself. Fraught with terror, Mrs. Stenzel stayed up through the evening. The next morning, Gustav seemed to have regained his sobriety and rationality. Somewhat relaxed, Mrs. Stenzel left the house early in the morning to visit a neighbor. She was still there when Gustav mounted his device on an overturned washtub, knelt in front of it, put his chest to the muzzle, and lit the fuse.
The blast alerted Mrs. Stenzel, who rushed into the yard to find her husband, nearly torn in half by the shot, clinging to his final moments of life with a horrid expression on his face. He muttered something indecipherable before expiring. The cannon, “a novel weapon” in the words of the Milwaukee Journal, was found several yards from where he had touched it off.
May 1941
ALL THE operator at the Milwaukee telephone exchange could hear were the desperate screams of a violent struggle. The call was traced to room number 608 in a handsome apartment tower at 1104 North Marshall Street. Listening in on what seemed to be a horrible struggle on the other end of the line, the operator phoned the police and told them to send help immediately. Minutes later, officers arrived upon a terrible scene. Fifty-eight-year-old Carrie Seymer, a former music instructor and Sunday school teacher, was dead. Her badly beaten body, dressed in undergarments and a housecoat, lay in a thick puddle of blood, bruises and gashes covering her face. A pair of black gloves had been shoved into her mouth with an “inhuman fury.” Bloody splatters and specks covered a wall and continued into a bathroom. A seven-inch section of pipe, the assault weapon, was found on the floor. The receiver had been knocked off the telephone, allowing the operator to audibly witness the awful act. Near the phone, on Miss Seymer’s desk, was a receipt for fifty-five dollars’ rent paid on one of her many residential properties. No name filled the “received from” blank. It seemed the killer had caught her in the middle of some mundane paperwork.
Initially, the police sought an African American man in the slaying. Several complaints had recently been made in the area about a “heavy-set Negro panhandler.” Though nothing had been taken from the apartment, robbery seemed a likely motive. Phone records showed that a call was placed to Seymer from Alice Dornblaser, a tenant of Seymer’s who rented an apartment with her husband at 2530 North Fourth Street. Dornblaser said she had contacted her landlord about a receipt for her most recent rent payment. Hers was the name missing from the receipt. Dornblaser said she had also told Seymer of a leaking heating coil. A plumber used by Seymer for maintenance on her properties verified that he had, in the short period between Dornblaser’s call and Seymer’s murder, gotten a call from Seymer asking him to make the repair.
As police questioned Dornblaser at her home, her thirty-one-year-old daughter Eileen was in the next room. Dornblaser told police she was at home during the time of the killing. Eileen knew it was a lie. She had seen her mother ride off in a taxi shortly after the call to Seymer. She had also recognized the length of pipe found at the scene from a photo in that day’s newspaper. She had last seen it on her mother’s dresser. Now, it was gone. She said nothing to the police.
While their initial interview turned up no obvious red flags, the police decided to keep an eye on Dornblaser. Her husband and daughter were brought in for separate questioning, and a detective was stationed to observe her little Fourth Street home. Meanwhile, they made a canvass of all city cab companies, checking for any trips to or from the Seymer apartment the day of the murder. Records at the Checker Cab Company found a match. The driver said he had taken a woman from Fourth Street to the apartment just before the murder. The passenger, a very large middle-aged woman, had asked him to wait for her to return but never came back. The police took the driver on a stakeout of the Dornblaser home, where he positively identified the woman as the one he had delivered to the scene. She was arrested later that day and, after six hours of interrogation, confessed to the brutal killing.
The call she placed to Seymer just before the murder was not only about receipts and leaking coils. In recent weeks, Dornblaser had been adamant that Seymer pay to have her apartment redecorated. Seymer was adamant in refusing. The day of the murder she asked yet again, and Seymer again refused, telling her that if she did not like it, she could move. “I’m coming to see you,” Dornblaser spat before hanging up the phone. Fifteen minutes later, the argument continued in Seymer’s front room. “I just got mad,” Dornblaser told police. “I slapped her several times in the face. Then I took the pipe out of my purse and I hit her. I don’t remember how many times. I just kept hitting her.” Shown the gloves that were stuffed into Seymer’s throat, ultimately choking her to death, Dornblaser said she did not remember putting them into Seymer’s mouth but admitted they were hers.
She said after the murder, she washed the blood from her hands in the bathroom and left the building through a service elevator. Not wanting to be seen, she walked downtown and took a streetcar home. Police asked if any of Seymer’s blood ended up on her clothing. “Yes, there was,” she cried, tugging at the hem of the thin, blue dress she wore. “This is the dress I had on. I have washed it off.” After washing away Seymer’s blood, Dornblaser went out to the Futuristic Ballroom at North Second and Wisconsin to play bingo, a game to which she claimed to be addicted. She played a few cards the next day, while police built their case against her. Upon completing her confession, reporters and photographers crowded around the woman as she buried her face in her hands and wept for her daughter. “I don’t know why I did it. My poor baby—what will my poor baby do?”
The next month, when her case came to trial, however, Dornblaser recanted her confession. She pled insanity to the crime, saying now that she only remembered slapping Seymer. The “300 pound bingo-playing house wife,” as the papers were now calling her, denied even owning the gloves that ended Seymer’s life. Her husband testified that about two years prior, his wife had changed dramatically in character, becoming moody and beginning to complain of pains and mysterious noises. Of five doctors summoned by the court, two found her to be insane and three found that she was sane enough to have known right from wrong.
When called to the stand, Dornblaser gave “halting and confusing” testimony. She spoke in soft and mumbled tones, shielding her face from the jury with a quivering hand. With tears, she claimed not to be able to remember much of the incident. Asked if she gagged Seymer, she said, “If I did, I don’t remember. But I don’t think I did, I wouldn’t do something like that.” Asked if she clubbed her with the pipe, she said, “No, I wouldn’t do such a thing. If I did, I must be crazy.” Handed the pipe found at the scene, she was afraid to touch it and acted as though she was entirely unfamiliar with it. “I took something out of the drawer to hammer my shoe,” she said. “It might have been the pipe. It was such a long time ago.” She spoke of someone who was “along” with her but claimed to be alone at Seymer’s apartment. “I am taking the blame, but I did not kill her,” she said, refusing to elaborate except to say, “They must have threatened to harm me or I wouldn’t feel this way.”
After a two-week trial, it took the jury ninety-five minutes to find Dornblaser sane and guilty of second-degree murder. The next week, she was sentenced to fourteen to twenty-five years in the state prison at Taycheedah.
August 1884
PROFESSOR WILLIAM Moebius, well-known classical violinist and music instructor, stumbled out of a Grand Avenue gambling parlor, a loaded British Bulldog revolver in his pocket and death on his mind. It was just past 2:00 p.m. on a Sunday.
As a child, Moebius had been a musical prodigy, sent to the conservatory at Dresden at age nine and touring Prussia by age fourteen. He had played in orchestras in France, Spain, and Italy. After immigrating to America, he played in New York City and led his own orchestra in Louisville before returning to tour the grand concert halls of Europe.
In 1879, he brought his wife and eight children to Milwaukee. There, he taught music and performed with the city’s Bach Orchestra. But he also took to gambling in the city. A string of heavy losses had forced him into a state of horrid dejection. Nearing the foot of the Grand Avenue Bridge, he pulled the gun from his pocket and fired a single round toward the dirt. The professor was not familiar with firearms. He had purchased the weapon and a box of ammunition only an hour earlier from a West Water Street shop. The weapon was so foreign to him that he returned to the shop a few minutes later and asked the clerk if he would be so kind as to load it. From there, he hastened to Grand Avenue and played his last ten dollars. He lost.
The volley into the ground was a practice shot. Satisfied he could operate the piece, he placed it to his chest and squeezed off four shots. The gunfire drew the attention of the midday downtown traffic. A crowd had already begun to form around Moebius when some nearby police detectives placed the still-breathing, greatly stunned, and entirely unharmed professor under arrest.
The gun Moebius placed to his heart with the intention of ending his life had been filled with blanks. The clerk who had sold Moebius the pistol was so disturbed by the professor’s peculiar behavior in his shop that he had pocketed the bullets Moebius had purchased and loaded the gun with harmless imitation ammunition.
At the station, Moebius said he appreciated the clerk’s deception, and that he was glad to be alive. He also expressed concern over a small bundle of letters he had dropped in a mailbox just before his failed suicide. They were addressed to various family members and friends, explaining his plight and detailing his intention of self-murder. Before his wife collected him at the station, he asked if anything could be done to prevent the letters from being delivered. He was told there was not. It was expected that the letters would be received early the next week.
February to May 1876
ON FEBRUARY 4, 1876, sixty-four-year-old William Krall, a basket maker, drank a half bottle of poison. Krall had long threatened suicide. Just two weeks earlier, his wife found him dangling by his neck from a tree branch and had cut him down. Mrs. Krall thought she had similarly scuttled these plans when she called a physician to their home who pumped his stomach of the poison. But when left alone, Krall finished off the bottle, dropping into a sleep from which he would not wake.
As was Krall, sixty-five-year-old Edward Plauschek was addicted to drink. He, too, had threatened suicide for years and, the week after Krall’s death, made good on his boast, shooting himself in his Galena Street home. The same day, Charles Mauer, just thirty, shot himself through the head in the Union Cemetery. He had been despondent over the recent death of his father. The body lay at his father’s grave for more than a day before it was discovered.
Barbara Hammer was afraid for her life when she hanged herself in the attic of her Market Street home. For months, she had been telling anyone who would listen that her neighbors were conspiring to murder her. The tipping point came when she finally believed her husband to be in on the plot. It was her husband who eventually found her, dangling from a rope tied to the rafter with an overturned washtub at her feet.
Three weeks later, a body was recovered from the city outskirts, a young man with a self-directed bullet in his brain. A young woman identified the body as that of her former lover, Mathias Boehm. While trying to contact the father of the departed in Berton, Wisconsin, a telegram was received from none other than Mr. Mathias Boehm. He denied shooting himself. The Milwaukee Sentinel joked that the man could be charged with perjury. The body was never identified. While the city was still sorting out the Boehm matter, Adam Sedow was found hanging from an oak tree on an Elizabeth Street farm. He left behind a large family with no means of support.
A month later, a woman was seen at the foot of Mason Street, pacing the beach as if, according the Milwaukee Sentinel, “possessed of a mania for rapid pedestrianism.” She paid a boy fifty cents to row her out into the lake and back. On the way out, she began to sing and shout in incoherent tones. The boy became scared and tried to row back to shore, but as he turned, the woman leapt from the tiny craft. Other boaters tried to save her, but none could reach the woman in time. As the police attempted to recover her body with grappling hooks, a large crowd gathered on the beach. Among them was the mother of the victim, later identified as thirty-year-old Mary Daily. Mrs. Daily had a suspicion upon arriving at the scene that it was her daughter the lake held. She told police that Mary had been subject to psychotic fits since the age of nine and was prone to drunkenness.
Four days after Daily drowned herself, police arrested a man named Fritz Frowitz on suspicion of possessing stolen goods. Frowitz was better known as the Red Butcher due to his bright orange hair and occasional profession. The butcher was also a known petty thief and drunk and was in his typical stupor when pinched. Still in his boozy haze, he hanged himself in his jail cell. The two stolen items he was accused of possessing were a woman’s shawl and a photo album.
The next week, a man named Peter Brecker shot himself after being diagnosed as an “incurable.” Three days later, Amelia Bolkenius drowned herself off of South Point. Bolkenius had been declared insane some forty years earlier and was under the constant watch of her family. In an unguarded moment, she stole away and made haste to the lake.
On May 18, just months after being discharged from an insane asylum, James Frawley ended his life with a pistol shot to the brain. He committed the deed in the bedroom of his family home on Eighth Street. His wife was in the next room and his two small children were in school at the time. Ten days later, Elizabeth Braasch wandered into a gravel pit behind her home and lay in a puddle that was no more than a foot deep, keeping her face submerged until she was no longer of this mortal coil. The next day, Johnny Farrell fired a single shot at his mother-in-law, whom he blamed for the recent breakup of his marriage. His first shot missed, but his second, aimed at his own temple, met its mark. In lieu of a note explaining his actions, he left a short poem, blaming his troubles on love.
On May 31, the Milwaukee Sentinel reported the death of twenty-eight-year-old Christina Kindling under the headline THE SUICIDE MANIA. “Every day,” the paper wrote, “witnesses a violation of ‘the cannon ’gainst self-slaughter.’” Kindling had arisen as usual on her final morning. She began to fix breakfast for her husband, Herman, who sat in the next room of their little Reed Street duplex. Her daughters, ages two and three, were still asleep. Days earlier, she had confessed to Herman that she had carried on an affair with a neighbor during her husband’s recent jail term. He agreed to an amicable separation, but the pending disgrace was too much for Christina. A dreadful scream jolted Herman from his paper. He hastened to the kitchen and found Christina, seated in a chair, with her throat split open. A bloody carving knife lay nearby. She had run the blade across her neck twice, ear to ear and back again, with enough force to completely sever her windpipe.
With the horrific demise of Christina Kindling, Milwaukee’s “suicide mania” ebbed. At least fifteen suicides occurred during the troubled four-month stretch—an unlikely proportion of the reported total of twenty-five for the year.
August 1881
HERMAN HILDEN was unaware that his mother, Louisa, was married to Paul Krimmer when he paid the couple a visit at their south-side tavern, but he knew of their relationship. Indeed, most of Milwaukee knew of the relationship, thanks to the scandal it had caused just a year earlier. Louisa was still married to Sebastian Hilden, Herman’s father, when she met and took up with Krimmer, a schoolteacher whose wife had recently passed away. The Hilden divorce was gossiped about breathlessly, costing Krimmer his job and driving Sebastian to flee to St. Louis with Herman. Herman had not seen his mother in more than a year when he entered her barroom and introduced himself to Krimmer.
Louisa wept when her husband told her that her son wished to see her. Herman’s disapproval of her relationship with Krimmer bordered on mania. Just seventeen years old but appearing even younger, the boy had once already tried to kill his mother. Another time, in a fit of depression, he turned a gun on himself, plugging a single bullet into his chest. But such history did not overwhelm the bounds of family, and Louisa set a table for her son and husband and poured a round of drinks.
In St. Louis, Herman had taken up his father’s habit of overindulging with the bottle and absorbed every bit of anger that festered inside the elder Hilden for his wife. The Hildens had been married in Germany, where Sebastian made a good living as a wool spinner. He first suspected his wife of infidelity in the old country, saying later that she was “very much given to flirtations with other men.” For reasons not given, Louisa fled the situation in Germany, abruptly packing up her children and whisking them across the Atlantic while Sebastian was out of the country. It was months before he was able to join them, steaming across the Atlantic and into Milwaukee, where Louisa had eventually settled. There, he felt duty-bound to reunite the family he accused her of trying to ruin. It was shortly thereafter that she met Krimmer.
As mother and son caught up over drinks, the conversation in the tavern was light and pleasant. But when Louisa turned the discussion toward weightier topics, her son bristled. She asked if the wound in his chest gave him much trouble. “Only in warm weather,” he replied. She asked him if he was still drinking as much as he used to. “Yes,” he replied with a snort. At that, Herman arose and declared himself ready for bed. He reached into his breast pocket, as if to look for a billfold, and asked how much he owed for the drinks. Krimmer replied that there would be no charge. As Herman insisted, his mother noticed something in his pocket with a long, white handle. She asked him was it was. “Nothing dangerous,” Herman answered as he removed the object, a pearl-handled revolver, and aimed it squarely at his mother’s chest. He fired once, tearing a hole through her ribs and sending her flailing to the floor. Krimmer leapt up in terror, but he was already in Herman’s sights. A single shot to the heart sent him tumbling backward.
“Oh, Herman!” his mother cried as he hastened across the bloody floor toward the exit. “What have you done?” She managed to pull herself to her husband and took him in her arms. “Pa!” she wailed. “Is it as bad as all that?” The man’s only reply came as a blood-choked gurgle. Minutes later, he was dead.
As his stepfather died in his mother’s lap, Herman jumped on a streetcar and rode to a tavern at Fourteenth and Cherry Streets where he met an old friend. After a round of drinks, the boy admitted what he had done. The friend convinced Herman to head to another bar, where a policeman they knew was having a drink. After recounting his story, he went with the officer to a nearby police station. Inside, he laid down his pistol and confessed.
Despite the seemingly open-and-shut nature of the case, the saga of Herman Hilden was far from complete. He went to trial seven months later and pled not guilty by reason of insanity. The jury hung itself, seven voting for acquittal and five for the penitentiary. While awaiting retrial, Hilden escaped by locking a guard in a furnace room and fleeing through an open door. The escape was part of a plan hatched by him and his cell mates one evening after a sympathetic jailer allowed them a bottle of whiskey. Hilden was supposed to brain the guard with a fire poker, steal his keys, and free the entire prison population, but he lost his nerve and ran. He made it as far as Appleton before wiring the Milwaukee sheriff, asking for someone to come get him and take him home to his cell.
While awaiting his retrial, Hilden became a wealthy man. A relative in Germany passed away, leaving the young man a small fortune. Even as he was unable to enjoy the fruits of his windfall, Hilden was a model prisoner after his abortive escape. His father and siblings visited him regularly. His mother, now remarried and living in Chicago, refused to visit, even declining to testify at his trial.
In March 1883, a jury reached a peculiar verdict in the case, finding Hilden to have been insane at the time of his crime, but presently of sound mind. The declaration freed Hilden of any responsibility for the murder and forbade the state to continue to hold him as a potential threat. Once mad but now cured in the eyes of the law, Herman Hilden was set free and given his fortune. He was still just twenty years old.
March 1876
JOSEPHINE WILLNER, a woman of about forty years, trim and displaying a fading beauty, was surrounded by enemies. They had murdered her husband, her father, and her brother. They had chased her from Milwaukee, followed her to Ohio, and even pursued her across the ocean on her European vacations. She was certain they meant to end her life.
Some of these enemies were human, but others were in the form of “medicated odors.” The odors found her everywhere—they clouded her home, lay in her bed, and penetrated her food. And there were doctors behind it all. A small clutch of Milwaukee physicians, she believed, meant to do away with her. Finally, at wit’s end, she purchased a pistol and set out to defend herself.
Abraham Willner, Josephine’s husband, had died in 1873 under mysterious circumstances, taking ill shortly after their marriage and quickly passing away. His doctors believed he might have been poisoned. When Josephine suddenly became wealthy after his death, rumors flew that she was the beneficiary of a substantial life insurance policy. She insisted her fortune was an inheritance.
As a widow, Willner began to behave strangely. She rarely slept and was known to wander the streets at night. She was often agitated and impulsive, engaging in numerous sexual encounters and partaking “in a thousand queer whims and impossible fancies.” But perhaps most notably, she became extremely paranoid about doctors. She ranted about certain Milwaukee doctors who were attempting to kill her. Fearful for her life, she left the city and moved back to her birthplace of Geneva, Ohio.
Willner became particularly fixated on Dr. John E. Garner, a highly respected and well-established Milwaukee physician. She blamed Garner for the death of her husband, then those of her brother, father, and cousin. Willner herself admitted that Garner had not treated any of the departed. She did, however, claim to have been treated by Garner herself, saying that he had diagnosed her with “female weakness” and had filled her with “horrible drugs and stinking medicine.” Asked for specifics about her illness, she demurred, replying, “Oh, I can’t tell you. It’s too vulgar.”
In 1875, Willner visited friends and family in Milwaukee. Even during her short visit, her behavior frightened her loved ones. If they found her to be acting strangely in the wake of her husband’s death, they now thought her absolutely mad. Family members planned to confront her on the matter, but she fled before they had a chance. In the spring of 1876, she bought a gun, a nickel-plated five-ball Wesson and Harrington. The torment of her enemies had become too much to bear.
On March 2, Willner rode the Chicago and North Western line from Ashtabula, Ohio, to Milwaukee. She arrived in the city around 8:30 p.m., hired a hack at the lakefront depot, and instructed the driver to take her to Dr. Garner’s home at 464 Jefferson Street. Willner was highly agitated during the short ride. Arriving at the doctor’s house, she instructed the driver to wait, and slowly made her way to the front door. She rang the bell and Dr. Garner’s daughter answered. Willner asked for the girl’s father and the daughter called for him. He approached the door, and without a word between them, Willner pulled out her pistol and shot him in the chest. “My God!” he exclaimed, falling to the floor, “I’m shot!”
Willner walked back to the hack as calmly as she had climbed the stairs and asked the driver to take her the Newhall House, where she planned to stay. The driver was terrified over what he had just witnessed and obeyed her in a near trance. As they pulled away, Garner’s family gathered in horror around the dying man.
The driver took off in a tear toward the hotel, but approaching downtown, Willner called at him to instead go to the law offices of Finches, Lynde & Miller. He did so and waited pensively as she tried the front door. It was locked, and she returned to the carriage and said she wished to go to the hotel. The driver started out, but again she called to him to reroute. Now, she wanted to be dropped at the home of Dr. Spearman, another Milwaukee physician whom she suspected of plotting against her. But again, after changing course, she stopped him. To the Newhall, she again told the wearied man. He beat there in a flash and quickly deposited his passenger, no doubt thrilled to be rid of her company.
At the Newhall, Willner registered under her own name and took a late supper. About twenty minutes after she went to her room, police officers knocked on her door. With a small crowd of gawkers looking on, Willner was placed under arrest for the shooting of Garner. “Oh, I meant to do it,” she told a detective. “I couldn’t help it. He killed my husband, father, uncle, and brother and has made my life a torment. I did it in selfdefense. I had to defend myself, for he sent them to follow me everywhere.” She made no resistance to her arrest but objected strongly when police seized her pistol. She needed it still, she claimed, as there may be others who wanted her dead.
From the hotel, Willner was taken back to the Garner home, where the wounded doctor lay dying in a second-floor bedroom. After being positively identified by several people there, she was whisked to the central station, where an even larger group had formed as the news of Dr. Garner’s bizarre assault had spread.
The next day, a Milwaukee Sentinel reporter interviewed her in her cell. Willner “was dressed in deep mourning and wore a heavy black veil.” Her hair was done neatly in black curls and her eyes beamed a stunning blue. She “must have been beautiful in her youth,” the paper noted. When informed that the doctor had died, she was unmoved. “I am glad of it,” she said. “That is what I came here for. Oh! I couldn’t stand it any longer. He made my life a torment. Wherever I went he followed.”
Two months later, Willner pled not guilty to the murder by reason of insanity. She was initially found to be sane and given a sentence of life, but this verdict was thrown out on appeal. A retrial found her to be insane and she was sent to the women’s asylum at Oshkosh, where she would spend the rest of her days in the constant company of doctors.
April 1895
PATROLMAN D. J. O’Connell was walking his Sunday night beat along a fashionable stretch of Grand Avenue when he recognized a figure staggering toward him through the calm evening air. The man, under the influence but not in a stupor, was Emil Sanger. O’Connell knew Sanger, a prominent if not somewhat disagreeable character, and urged him to head for home. Sanger refused, saying that he was out to find his wife, whom he thought to be at the home of Sam Luscombe, her father, which stood within sight of where the two men talked. O’Connell knew there was a feud between Sanger and his wife’s family. Sanger’s agitated state told O’Connell that there might be trouble. He searched the man for weapons and, finding none, let him pass. Sanger marched across the grass of the Luscombe home to a side door, where he pounded and demanded entry. While O’Connell lingered on the sidewalk, Sanger called back to him. “Come up here, I want to speak to you.”
“Come here if you want to speak to me,” O’Connell answered. Just then, a curtain behind a plate-glass window in the door lifted. Seconds later, a shotgun blast shattered the evening calm. Sanger reeled back and fell dead to the pavement, his face torn apart by the twin-barreled weapon. O’Connell called to his nearby partner to fetch more officers and a doctor. The side door opened and a man in a long coat emerged. He called out to O’Connell, saying that his name was Robert Luscombe. “I am the man who did it,” he continued. “I want to go to the central station and give myself up.”
The gunman and the deceased had a history. Emil Sanger was the son of Casper Sanger, one of Milwaukee’s most prominent practitioners in matters both financial and political. His firms employed hundreds, and he had served in several elected capacities. Robert Luscombe had been employed for years within the Sanger empire, working side-by-side with Emil until Luscombe left the city to study law. By 1886, both young men were prospering, Sanger running a silver mine in California, and Luscombe back in Milwaukee, serving as a city attorney.
But a silver panic in the early 1890s wiped out the Sanger interests in the west. When Emil returned to the city, he was broke but not alone. In California, he had won the affections of his bookkeeper’s wife, and in 1892, he married the woman—the former Nellie Luscombe, Robert’s sister. Although Sanger and Luscombe were now kin, the relationship between the two families—and particularly between Emil and Robert—quickly eroded. His money troubles growing, Sanger began to drink heavily, irrationally pinning all his miseries on the mild-mannered and affable Luscombe. At home, he laid his rage on Nellie, beating her regularly. He once chased her from their home with a loaded pistol, cursing her as she hid in a nearby barn.
Sanger made no attempt to hide his hatred for Luscombe. He told several people, including Samuel S. Barney, a newly elected member of the US Congress, that he planned to kill Luscombe on sight. Few took these hot-tempered threats—made both drunken and sober—with any real concern. After Sanger damned Luscombe’s name in a downtown saloon one afternoon, a group of men who knew Luscombe spoke up. “Bob’s a friend of mine and I think he’s all right,” said one man. “He’s a dashed good fellow,” added another.
Sanger approached the group. “My card, sir,” he said to one of Luscombe’s defenders, handing him his calling card. “You will have to answer to me for that remark, sir. I demand that you meet me and fight a duel!” The men all laughed heartily at the gesture and Sanger stormed from the hall in a fury.
But to his wife, Sanger’s threats were deadly serious. He took to wearing a gun belt, telling Nellie he planned to use it to shoot down that “damned brother of yours!” The Friday before his death, Sanger had gone to Luscombe’s house with the intention of shooting him dead in his doorway but found that no one was home. Returning to his house, he savagely beat Nellie with closed fists and a buggy whip. “Damn you!” he screamed. “You look like your brother!” She attempted to flee, but Sanger had locked every door in the house in anticipation of the attack. Finally, he showed her a knife and threatened to kill her if she ever tried to leave him. The next day, with Sanger out of the house, Nellie fled to her father’s house. She was so badly beaten he did not even recognize her. After calling for a doctor, he dashed off a note to his son. “Nell is here all battered to pieces,” it read. “Come immediately, armed for an emergency.”
Luscombe claimed the shot he unloaded at point-blank range into Sanger’s face was an act of self-defense. He feared that Sanger was about to break down the door, kill him, and then finish off his sister. But while Sanger was certainly agitated, there was no indication he was about to break through the door or the window. And despite the numerous threats against Luscombe, Sanger was unarmed when he was shot, and indeed might not have even known that Luscombe was inside the house.
In July 1895, Luscombe went to trial. The salacious details of the case, as well as the prominence of the two families involved, made it perhaps the most famous murder case the city had yet seen. The trial lasted most of the month, but a verdict was brought in just ten minutes. Luscombe, eminently polite and likeable, was found not guilty for doing away with Sanger, a man for whom few tears were shed. Writing that the dead man had often been called a brute, the Milwaukee Journal retorted, “To compare [Sanger] to the lower animals of creation was a libel on the brute.”
October 1852
ON A chilly October morning, a group of about twenty people gathered around the front windows of the I. A. Hopkins bookstore near the corner of Wisconsin and Water Streets, gawking at a collection of caricatures the shop was displaying. Across the street, watching the watchers, twenty-six-year-old Mary Ann Wheeler stood outside of the lodging house in which she rented a small basement room. She pulled her shawl up around her shoulders and crossed the street. Among the gapers was John M. W. Lace, a theater usher and part-time fire company member. As she strode briskly across the cobblestone street, Wheeler drew a double-barreled pistol from a pocket in her dress. Stepping atop the wooden-plank sidewalk, she placed the gun to the back of Lace’s neck and pulled the trigger.
The dual shots crackled in a terrifying report that scattered bystanders from the scene and tore a gruesome fissure through the base of Lace’s skull. He crumbled into a lifeless heap as a crimson stream of blood sprayed from the wound. “I have done what I meant to do and to do it publically,” Wheeler declared to a gaggle of stunned onlookers. A sheriff’s deputy quickly arrived on the scene, to whom Wheeler presented her pistol. “You can have it,” she told him plainly. “I am willing. I have killed John Lace and am proud of it. I’ll go with you wherever you like.”
Wheeler was born in Clarksfield, Ohio, in 1826, the daughter of “poor, yet respectable” parents. She left home for reasons unknown at age twenty and settled in Milwaukee three years later. She found work as milliner, sewing women’s bonnets in a small downtown factory. She enrolled at dancing school but left after “certain persons made reports prejudicial to her character.” Bouts of depression overwhelmed her, and she was often sick and unable to eat. She took to smoking opium and was occasionally observed by her landlady, Miss Cleveland, “waltzing alone” in her room.
In 1851, after separating from his wife, Lace moved into the same rooming house as Wheeler and took an immediate interest in his pretty young neighbor. Miss Cleveland warned her to keep away from the rakish Lace. But he was kind to Wheeler when few others were. He assured her that they would be wed after his divorce was finalized. Wheeler fell for his charms and the pair engaged in a torrid affair.
But when Wheeler became pregnant, Lace ended the relationship. He told her he wanted nothing to do with her or their child. Wheeler wrote him constantly, begging him for money to use for an abortion. She threatened to have the child and tarnish him with scandal if he did not finance the procedure. He refused and was known to read her pitiful letters aloud to his grog house pals, boasting of the lovesick and broken condition in which he had left her. He told his bar mates that Wheeler was a common whore and that if they “wanted something,” all they need do was bring a few coins to her room.
The jolt of Lace’s sudden and cruel rejection was a crippling blow to an already unsound mind. Wheeler managed to raise the money to have the pregnancy terminated, but the emotional effects of the affair would not be so easily put away. Wheeler lost all interest in her personal well-being. She became short with housemates and coworkers and developed a strange and volatile temper. She tried suicide with arsenic and was found on various occasions beating her head or fists against the walls of her boarding room. She told anyone who would listen of her desire to die. Her prayers turned to curses at God for allowing her to keep living.
In early September 1852, she bought a pistol. She told the merchant who sold her the weapon that she was going to be traveling and wanted something for protection. The man even sawed the barrels short so it could fit inside a pocket on her dress. Wheeler made no secret of the gun. One acquaintance later told police she would take it from her pocket “as lightly as she would show a picture.” She used it at least once before the killing of Lace, chasing another woman while firing wildly at her feet and cackling madly at her terror. Just days before the killing, she also acquired a large knife and took to arming herself at all times.
Her manic behavior of the preceding year belied the relatively calm way in which she conducted herself upon her arrest. When asked at the scene why she had shot Lace, she replied, “I don’t wish to answer those questions now. I will do so at a proper time.” As her story came out, Lace was portrayed in the newspapers as the dastardly “seducer” of the poor, young Wheeler. Those who knew him well found it difficult to defend the deceased. Wheeler herself never denied that she intended to kill Lace, nor did she express any sorrow. Her only regret was that he had died so suddenly. “He might have known,” she told police, “by whose hand he died.”
Wheeler went to trial in May 1853. That she killed Lace was not in doubt. The issue to be settled was whether or not Wheeler was sane at the time of the murder. Her defense team argued that Lace was no victim at all but rather a “seducer—that worst of robbers because he plunders happiness; that worst of murderers because he murders innocence.” They further claimed her actions to be not merely those of an insane person but of one whose madness was of divine origin. “It was so ordained that the very wrongs she endured at the hand [of Lace],” her defense told the court, “should so work upon her mind as to make her an instrument in the hand of Almighty God to punish her seducer and to rid the world of a monster.”
The jury was out for three days, deliberating day and night, but returned without a verdict. Wheeler went on trial again the next month and on June 4, 1853, was found not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. With that, Mary Ann Wheeler was set free. The next morning, it was reported, Wheeler rented the finest carriage to be had in the city and “was driven around the streets like a heroine.”
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1. Now Wells Street