LOUISE

William Bergen told detectives that he met Martha Louise Van Davier in 1947 at a USO dance in Norfolk, Virginia, where he was stationed during his service in the U.S. Navy. She was from Galveston, Texas. He was from Manasquan, New Jersey, and joined the navy in July 1946. They were married in 1948 and made their home in Norfolk. After his discharge, he started working for the Federal Civil Service at the navy yard and the naval base. They had one daughter, Linda Louise, in 1949.

In 1953, Bergen went to work for Colonial Stores, which sent him to Cincinnati in 1955. They moved into the Swifton Village apartments on Langdon Farm Road. When he and Louise separated in May 1958, she moved to an apartment in a different building of the same complex.

“We had been contemplating such a move,” he told police. “We wasn’t [sic] too satisfied with our apartment, and there were a lot of children in that building, and directly above us they were very noisy, of course. It wasn’t enough to actually make us up and move, but it had been discussed. Then she decided at first we would cut down to a one-bedroom apartment, being as I was going to leave, and they investigated the prices and the different apartments, and came up with this one, which was one floor higher, ten dollars a month cheaper and still had two bedrooms. So they decided on taking that one.”

Abbie Van Davier, Louise’s mother, lived with them off and on both in Norfolk and Cincinnati. During the summer months, she would take their daughter, Linda, up to a family farm in Pennsylvania for a month or two to visit with relatives.

When police asked him about his marital troubles, Bergen frankly took the blame, saying that it started while they were still living in Norfolk. He went out a lot and didn’t like going out with her. He played in a band off and on, but he went bowling a lot, sometimes joining a league every weeknight. “A lot of times she wanted to go, and I said, ‘No, I’d rather go alone,’ and that sort of thing,” he said. “A couple of times, I had dates with other individuals. Nothing that ever became serious.”

“In the meantime, she was just lonely,” he noted, and she apparently started seeing another man. The affair was the reason he accepted the transfer to Cincinnati when his company offered it. As far as he knew, she had been faithful since, but he had “vague suspicions.” Still, there was a lot of tension in the marriage and no sex. He moved out in May 1958, after he became interested in a waitress he met at the Sky Galley Restaurant, a divorcée named Edythe Klumpp.

“I became interested in her, you might say serious, and Louise finally asked me about it,” Bergen told police. “I told her that I was seeing her, and I thought that I wanted to leave, for her to get a divorce. We discussed that over a period of about a week or two, before I actually left. Finally, I just decided tonight’s the night…I started packing my things and started to leave.”

Abbie Van Davier and Linda went to Pennsylvania shortly after, leaving Louise alone in the apartment for the summer. Bergen said that he had no clue what she did with her time, although he said that if he were in the neighborhood, he would occasionally drive by the parking lot to see if she was home. “It was on my mind all of the time, what I was doing, what I had done,” he said. “How unfair it was to Linda, and I got to thinking more about Louise, and how wrong I really was.”

Although he left Louise so that he could be with Edythe, he started changing his mind by the end of the summer. Edythe started to sense his unease, sparking some tension between them. She started dropping hints, Bergen told police, that she knew who Louise was dating, and he tried to coyly get it out of her.

“You know Louise is going with somebody else,” she said when she saw him in a funk a few days before Louise disappeared.

“I know it,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with that, doggone it. It’s my own durn fault. I can’t hold that against her.” Edythe gave him a cat-that-ate-the-canary look, he noted. “Oh, you don’t know who it is,” he said.

“I know somebody that knows her,” Edythe said.

“Who is this individual?” Edythe wouldn’t spill it, so he didn’t press it anymore, he said at the time.

Bergen did not see Louise all summer until she got back from Pennsylvania, he said, around Labor Day. She had gone there for a two-week vacation and to bring Linda and Abbie home. The week after Labor Day, Louise visited attorney Larry Eichel to begin divorce proceedings with a letter to Bergen requesting a meeting.

Around the same time he got the letter, Bergen was going to visit Mel Abrams at Stillpass when he spied Louise in a car with her boss, Charles “Chick” Haft; he followed them to the Rocking Horse restaurant. He left them there having lunch but was shaken and didn’t go in to see Mel. He knew that “it meant nothing, really. He [Chick] took the other girls in the office the same way. But he was still the one that kept coming up in my mind that she was seeing.”

Those two events intensified his second thoughts about divorcing his wife to be with Edythe. He took to randomly driving by Swifton Village on the off chance that he would catch Louise coming or going. It finally worked. They sat in his car and talked in the parking lot. “I told her I was pretty sure I wanted a reconciliation,” he told police, “but she did not actually say yes or no. She was just in between.”

“We talked quite a while as to how we actually got separated, not exactly who was at fault, [but] more or less how it came about and the fact that we didn’t get along for some time,” he added. “All the while I was trying to make her think I knew she was seeing someone, but I did not want to come out and ask her. I only surmised she did. I did ask her how she felt about this individual. She stated that she loved him and wanted to marry him and she did not know if he would get a divorce. There were children in the family and she did not want to get involved. She said they had to meet secretly. She didn’t like that.”

Louise said that Chick Haft let her drive the car to Pennsylvania to get her mother and daughter and gave her fifty dollars, telling her to bring him back a bottle of whiskey and keep the change. He told her that when she got back, it might be better to put the car in her name as people might be inclined to talk if she were using a company car. Louise said that she was planning to buy the car from Chick, but Bergen didn’t know if the title had ever been transferred.

Having broken the ice with the “chance” meeting, he felt secure enough to call her at work about a week later. They made arrangements to talk, and on a September Saturday afternoon, they sat in the car behind the apartment again and had generally the same discussion. Bergen told police that by this time, he was fairly well convinced that Louise was dating Chick Haft and that his chances for a reconciliation were dwindling. He mentioned the fifty-dollar bottle of whiskey and asked what her mother thought about that. She didn’t like it at all, Louise told him. She said that even though they were separated, her mother wouldn’t like her seeing other men until there was a divorce.

“She said, ‘If she had known Mr. Haft was in my apartment until a quarter of three in the morning, she would have a fit,’” Bergen said, “[but] she did not come out and say that he was the one she was seeing. Strictly assumptive on my part.”

Regarding the letter from her attorney, “I asked her if we could hold off and we could consider thinking about it more for a couple of months and she agreed to do that and promised to contact her lawyer.” She told him that she only started moving on it because it seemed that he and Edythe were getting serious and that he should marry her. She didn’t want to see Edythe get hurt.

DESPITE BILL BERGEN’S INTIMATIONS of a secret relationship between Louise and Chick Haft, the people who worked at Stillpass had quite a different perception.

Haft was a generous man with all of his employees, not just Louise, and seemed to have a genuine fatherly interest in Louise’s well-being. She, in turn, looked to him for fatherly chores. His interviews with the police expressed sympathy for her plight and a bit of bemusement at her naiveté. And he had an airtight alibi. On the evening of October 30, he was playing golf with four prominent businessmen.

Back in the early part of the summer, Haft had heard that Louise and Bill were separating and that she found out Bill had a girlfriend. Soon after, she came into his office with a beleaguered look on her face.

“Would you have any objections to a divorced woman working at Stillpass Transit Company?” she asked.

“No,” he assured her, but he advised her to not be in such a hurry to get a divorce unless she had a really good reason. “Do you have another man or something?”

“No, Mr. Haft,” she said. “You know better than that.”

“Well, you may as well remain married and maybe you can better yourself until it is time to get a divorce,” he said. “In the meantime you should stay married and maybe after a separation of 30 or 60 days you and Bill will go back together.”

“Let’s hope so,” she said.

When Bill moved out, he took the car with him and left Louise without transportation. It wasn’t far between Swifton Village and Stillpass Transit, but it was too far to walk and a complicated bus ride. Haft would give her a ride when he could, he said, and others working in the office and garage would do the same.

One day, one of Haft’s golfing buddies picked him up at work for a golf game. He gave Louise his keys, telling her to drive his car home and that he’d have his friend drop him off there when they were done. It was late when he got there, but he hadn’t had dinner yet. When she brought the keys down, he asked her if she was hungry. They went to a nearby restaurant, and it was after midnight when they got back to her apartment. He went up, and they talked until 2:00 a.m. Louise told a co-worker that he didn’t seem to want to go home and that she couldn’t get him to leave, but nothing untoward happened.

After a few weeks of Louise struggling with transportation, someone from a Ford dealership in Lockland brought her a car to test drive. She asked Mr. Haft to take a look at it for her and advise her if it was a good deal for $385.

“I drove the car out with her,” Haft told police. “We drove around the place a couple of times at noon one day and I advised her that I thought the price of it was a little bit too high and just to be patient and something would come along that would be more economical for her to buy.”

A few more weeks passed, and she still hadn’t found a car. Haft told her that she could use the old Oldsmobile. The car was eight years old and well used. Mel Abrams had been using it when he quit the company for a spell and had to return it to the garage. There was a lot going wrong with it, so Haft started driving it himself and gradually fixed things as he noticed them. When Louise left for vacation in late August, Haft told her that she could drive it to Pennsylvania if she thought it road-worthy.

When she came to return it, he said for her to keep it, noting that they’d work something out so she could buy it from him for $100. They never got around to doing the paperwork.

CHICK HAFT INTRODUCED LOUISE to Ann Tabar, a twenty-eight-year-old secretary at Fruehoff Trailer. Haft did a lot of business there and felt like Louise needed a good friend to help her through her separation and likely divorce, noticing that she had been moody, depressed and discouraged. He gave Louise and Ruth Walters, a part-time typist in his office, tickets for a girls’ night out on August 15 to watch the Cincinnati Reds play the Pittsburgh Pirates at Crosley Field. He thought it might help her get her mind off her troubles. He also gave two tickets to the office girls at Fruehoff Trailer, but only Ann could make it.

They ate at the Vernon Manor first, and after the game, they went to Stein’s Hideaway for “two or possibly three drinks,” Ann Tabar told police.

After that night, Louise and Ann spoke frequently on the phone and occasionally got together. On Friday, October 24, Ann met Ruth and Louise at Stillpass, and they took a long lunch at the Wigwam restaurant in College Hill. She and Louise each had a drink, and they chatted for an hour. On Tuesday, Louise called Ann at Chick Haft’s behest to invite her to an office furniture and equipment show that was at Music Hall all week.

Ann, who was also taking classes at the University of Cincinnati, said that Thursday was the only day she could go. “However, I have a 5:30 appointment out in Elmwood, and I don’t know how long it will take, but give me your phone number and when I get home, I’ll call you and we can make plans from there,” she told Louise. “I figure I should get home at 6:15.”

Ann actually called closer to 6:30 p.m. Abbie Van Davier said that Louise had not come home from work but had mentioned that she had plans to go to Music Hall. “She should have been home long ago,” her mother said. “She could be laid up at the office.”

So Ann called Stillpass and spoke to Kirk Tolford, who said that he thought Louise was going directly to Music Hall from the office. “I thought perhaps she may have gone shopping at the Swifton Center,” Ann told police. “So I ate dinner and waited. I had a phone call, and when I got through with the phone, I thought perhaps she may have tried to call me, so I called her home again.” She still wasn’t there.

“Perhaps she may have misunderstood,” Mrs. Van Davier said, “and went directly down to Music Hall.”

“I’ll go down and see,” Ann said. “It’s a big exhibition room, but I’ll try to see if I can find her, and if I do, I’ll have her call you, and if I get down there and don’t find her, I’ll call you.”

Ann got to Music Hall at about 8:00 p.m., but she was worried and office furniture was the furthest thing from her mind. It wasn’t very crowded, and since Louise was a tall lady and easy to spot in a crowd, Ann felt pretty confident that her friend was not there. She checked both entrances and then telephoned her mother to see if Louise had called there. She then called Louise’s house again to report in. Ann stayed at the show, spoke to some people she knew and then came home a little after ten o’clock, “quite upset.”

On Friday morning, she called Stillpass, and they told her that Louise wasn’t expected in until 8:30 a.m., as she was running office errands on her way in. Mrs. Van Davier called Ann at her office, saying that Louise did not come in all night. “I thought maybe she might have stayed at your house,” she said.

“No,” Ann said, “she certainly didn’t. If I had found her she would have called you like I told you.”

There were calls back and forth all morning among Louise’s mother, Ann Tabar, various people at Stillpass Transit and Bill Bergen, who first learned that Louise was missing when a frantic Abbie Van Davier called him at his office.

BILL BERGEN TOLD POLICE that he was so shaken that he didn’t know what to do when his mother-in-law called. His boss had been out of town with the comptroller since the previous afternoon, which meant that Bergen was in charge, so he went to his boss’s secretary, just to be able to talk to someone.

He first went to Stillpass Transit in the hope that Louise had turned up there. She had not, so he went into the garage to tell Mel Abrams what was going on. Abrams suggested that he call the emergency rooms to see if she had been in an accident. Bergen went back to his office to do that.

“Of course, I called General Hospital Emergency Service the first thing to see if there had been an accident,” Bergen said. He called Stillpass and spoke to Chick Haft, who told him to call the police, which he did. He also called Ann Tabar, and she repeated the story of Louise’s no-show at Music Hall.

He tried to get Ann to tell him who Louise was seeing, he said, but she said she wasn’t seeing anyone. When he asked directly if Louise had been seeing Haft, she said no. “Somewhere along the line she intimated she knew of Louise’s activities and would not tell,” he said. “[I] did not press the point.” That got him to thinking about Edythe and her letting on like she knew something about Louise’s love interests, so he called her.

“I want to ask you something, and I want an answer,” he said. “I don’t want no feeling [sic].” Bergen said that he was really mad when he made the call and didn’t try to hide it. “Do you know who Louise is going with?”

“Isn’t it Chick?” she said.

“Do you know it’s Chick?” he said.

“Well, you told me it was,” she said.

“I surmised that,” he said. “I didn’t say it definitely was.”

“You said you knew.”

“Do you know who?” he asked again.

“No, I don’t know anymore,” she said, “only that you mentioned him.”

Bergen then went to see his mother-in-law, who was beside herself with worry. She gave him all the details about what clothes Louise had been wearing when she left for work on Thursday. He wrote it all down: an olive green, two-piece dress; a tomato-red topcoat without buttons; a black pouch bag; and a black leather belt.

He first went to Golf Manor Police, not realizing that the village was not part of the city of Cincinnati. They directed him to the District Four station in Carthage. By then, close to noon, Bergen had filled out a blue form but hadn’t gotten a very encouraging response. “Under these circumstances, being that you are separated, we can’t do anything for 24 hours,” the sergeant told him. “I’ll take this information and if anything should come in that I can tie in with this, I will. You either call me or come back this evening.”

Bergen wanted to get to work because there wasn’t anyone else there, so after stopping at a bowling alley for a sandwich, he went back to the office and started calling hospitals again, going through the yellow pages one by one. He spent the night in his wife’s apartment, dozing in a chair with his feet up on a footstool. “I’m afraid I’ll miss the phone if it rings,” he told his mother-in-law when she brought him a pillow and blanket.

“I’ll hear it,” she said. “You know I’m not going to sleep.”

“Well, I’ll stay here anyhow,” he said. “Just in case. I didn’t even take my clothes off.”

The next day, Saturday, Bergen took Linda to a movie with her class from school. He went back to the office while Linda was at the movies and informed his boss of the situation before taking care of a few small tasks. He picked Linda up from the movies and then took her to the YWCA for a swimming lesson. Then he ran back to Mount Washington to change clothes until he had to pick Linda up again.

He decided to confront Edythe one more time about what, if anything, she knew about Louise’s love interests. “I’m going to ask you again,” he said. “Are you sure you don’t know any more about who Louise was seeing?”

Edythe cocked a little smile. “Well,” she began slowly, hesitantly. “You didn’t know this, but I saw Louise about two weeks ago. She called me and asked me to meet her.”

Bergen was flabbergasted but tried to keep a cool air. “Yeah, I thought so,” he said. “What was it all about?”

According to Edythe, Louise tried to get her to talk to Bergen about going ahead with the divorce or at least to not contest it. Edythe claimed that Louise told her a lot of intimate details about their lives together, Bergen recalled. “Louise told me how you used to go out a lot, going bowling several nights a week,” she told him. “That’s when she got lonely and started going around, running around with this fellow. She told me a little bit about this fellow she’s going with now,” she added, saying that Louise called him “a big hillbilly” who was very affectionate and wanted her to go away with him but didn’t want to take Linda.

“Of course Louise said no, she didn’t want any part of that,” Bergen said. “[I] just don’t understand Louise telling a person almost a stranger these things.”