A SAVAGE TRIANGLE

Edythe Klumpp had worked at the Sky Galley restaurant at Lunken Airport for four years, mostly taking the noon lunch shift on weekdays and sometimes a Saturday breakfast and lunch. During her taped interview at city hall on the Wednesday evening following the discovery of Louise Bergen’s body, she told police that one Sunday afternoon in late February or early March 1958, she was filling in for a girl who called off sick when Bill Bergen came into the Sky Galley with some friends after his flying lesson.

“I didn’t really talk too much at that time,” she said. “As they were leaving they were talking about flying. There was a young girl with them who was taking flying lessons. Tom [the friend] was trying to talk me into flying.”

Three or four weeks later, she was filling in again when Bill came in with someone else, someone she didn’t know. “When he came in I was making coffee over behind a partition,” Edythe said. “He came over and said, ‘Where you been?’”

“I said, ‘Making coffee.’”

“He said, ‘No, I mean the last three or four weeks. I’ve been looking for you.’”

“I still did not remember him. Later, when I brought some coffee over he mentioned Tom and then I remembered where I met him. There wasn’t much conversation. I was busy. When he was ready to go, he wanted to know if he could call me some time. I said yes.”

He called her the next day at the Sky Galley. “He wanted to see me that night. I said I had a date and would be home at 10:30. He wanted to know if he could call then and I said yes,” she said. He called that night from a bar in Mount Washington and asked if he could come over. They sat and talked while they watched television. “I asked if he was married when he mentioned his little girl. He said, ‘In a way, but I won’t be for long. I’m getting a divorce.’ I figured the divorce was already filed, the way he said it.”

She asked him his age, and he said he was thirty-six. “I’m older than you,” she said. He said Tom told him that he thought she was around forty. Later, after they started talking about marriage, he got his pilot’s license and showed it to her. “I saw his birth date was 1928 and began figuring his age,” she said. “He got real white-faced and said he was going to tell me when we were married, that he was afraid I wouldn’t marry him if I knew he was that much younger.”

He called her several times the next day and came over again that evening. “He acted like he was interested,” she said. The third night, they went to a drive-in movie. After that, they were together almost every night, but he continued to live in the same apartment with Louise and his daughter. “I didn’t know he was living at his wife’s apartment at the time,” she said. When she found out, she asked, “How can you live there when you’re getting a divorce?”

He said it was because of financial reasons and noted that his mother-in-law lived there as a chaperone. He made it very clear that he was planning to leave his wife and that although they were still living together, their relationship as husband and wife had ended. Louise would tell Edythe the same thing before Bergen moved out of Swifton Village. By that time, according to both Edythe and Bill Bergen, Louise knew that they were going to marry and was all right with it.

The two women actually met on several occasions, mostly in passing, and Edythe said that there was never any animosity or bitterness. Bill had always told her that Louise was reserved and quiet, so Edythe didn’t expect her to be so friendly and open. In her interviews with police and during her trial testimony, Edythe said that she first met Louise in early May. Bill had loaned Louise his car so she could go to a funeral. Edythe picked him up from work that day, and they waited behind Swifton Village until Louise got back from the funeral home. Edythe and Bill were going to look at a house together and waited until Louise brought the car back.

“Bill introduced us,” Edythe said. “She said she was glad to know me and that she had been anxious to meet me. Then she went in the house.” A week or two later, Bill called Edythe early in the evening, telling her that he had packed his things to move into a room he had rented in Hyde Park. Afterward, he planned to come to her house. Louise called Edythe shortly after that and asked if Edythe could meet her by the Pasquale’s pizza parlor in Swifton Center. Edythe said that she wanted to wait for Bill to get there, but Louise was insistent.

They sat in the car and talked. Louise was friendly and polite but told Edythe that hearing Bill say goodbye to Linda started giving her second thoughts about his leaving. “Well, Louise,” Edythe said, “a couple of weeks ago you were in perfect accord that we were going to get married.”

“Yeah,” she said, “but when it came right down to him leaving, tonight I changed my mind.”

“Do you still love him?”

“I just don’t want to be alone,” Louise said, dodging the question. “I’d like to find a man I could love and who could love me and have a good life.”

“Why don’t you just go out and find one?” Edythe asked.

“It’s not so easy to do.”

“Well, Louise,” Edythe said, “I understood that you two were really broken up before I came into the picture.”

“Yeah,” she said. “That’s true.”

“Well, I didn’t really feel like I had stepped in then,” Edythe replied, thinking how Louise knew all about their plans to be married in the next year or so, had seemed excited about it and never said anything against it. “I’m not going to give up on Bill unless that’s what he wants.”

“I just wanted to let you know that I’m going to talk to him about it again,” Louise said.

“Well, it would have to be up to Bill,” Edythe said. “I won’t give him up unless that’s what he wants.”

“Okay,” Louise said. “I am going to talk to him again.”

Edythe gave her a ride home, and no more was said about it. Louise remained friendly and thanked Edythe for the ride. Bill, already at her house when she got there, seemed agitated. Louise had already called him and asked him to stop back by the apartment on his way home that night.

“He was a little upset because of Linda himself,” Edythe said. “He felt a certain responsibility to her. We were sitting there watching TV, and [Louise] called again about 12 o’clock. I called him to the phone, and I heard him say, ‘Well, when I get good and ready, I’ll be there.’” He left at 2:30 a.m. He later told Edythe that he saw Louise on the way home.

The next day, Bill asked Edythe to meet him for lunch. He told her that he was struggling with all the choices he had to make and all the possible ramifications and said that he wanted to take some time away from everything so he could think about it. Edythe told him that this would be a good idea and then reminded him that they had made plans to go swimming and picnicking with the Schaefers the Saturday of Decoration Day weekend. Bill said that he would do that and then spend some time on Sunday with Linda. The following week, he was supposed to go to Norfolk to take care of some things—maybe that time alone would help him sort things out, he thought.

They spent the Saturday of the Decoration Day weekend picnicking with the Schaefers as planned and took the young couple to see the house in Forest Park they had their eye on. “We called it ‘our’ house,” Edythe would later testify. “It was a new subdivision of houses going up and there were two of them we liked, and we more or less settled on this one. It was a little more expensive, but it had an extra bedroom [for her son Jack]. Every chance we had we’d go out there. The kids was [sic] planning the color schemes of their own room and Bill was planning how he was going to fix the basement and things.”

Bill stayed with Edythe that night. On Sunday morning, he talked about getting Linda and Louise and taking them out for the day but kept putting it off. “So after quite a while he finally left,” Edythe said, “and he was gone, oh, not even an hour. He came back looking real sheepish. He said, ‘I just couldn’t go through with it. Come on and get dressed. We’ll go out to the air show.’”

She drove him to the airport the next Tuesday, and he flew to Norfolk for the week. She kept his car while he was gone. He called her every night, told her how much he missed her and asked about her children. When he flew back to Cincinnati, he went straight to the Sky Galley. They went home together, Edythe said, and “he no sooner sat his suitcase down than he put his arms around me and said if there ever was a doubt in his mind, it was gone now. He would not leave me for any reason.”

On June 12, they were out driving around and stopped at Ault Park. “We hadn’t been talking too much about marriage,” she said. “He just came out and said, ‘Will you marry me?’ I said, ‘Don’t be silly. You are still married. You didn’t get a divorce yet.’ He suggested that we live together and when he got the divorce we would get married and no one would know it. We discussed it quite a while. Finally I said I would and he said, ‘Let’s set a date.’ I suggested June 21, but he couldn’t see waiting another week.”

The next day, he picked Edythe up from work. “The girls at work knew we were going to get married that day,” she said. “We went and got a ring.” It cost eight dollars. She didn’t put it on right away. “We went out to a show and had dinner, then after dinner we went up to Ault Park again because he wanted to go back there because that was the place we more or less made our plans so we went back there. He put the ring on my finger. We exchanged vows.”

Although he had rented a room where he kept his clothes, he spent most of his evenings and some of his nights at Edythe’s house. When they woke in the morning, Edythe would put some blankets on the sofa and pretend that she had slept there when the children woke up.

By June 14, they had given up that pretense and begun another: “We told everybody, my friends, that we got married,” Edythe said. While Bill lived at the Bloomingdale Avenue house, Edythe continued to pay all the expenses, with the understanding that the money he saved from his salary would go toward buying a home. They even looked at a few different houses and took friends to see them.

Edythe said that they had a happy summer living as though they were married. They’d take the children to the airport to watch the planes, or they’d play golf or shoot archery. They never argued, she said. On August 6, they took their delayed honeymoon to the resort at Spring Mill State Park in Indiana. “That’s what we were saving our dimes for,” she said. “Even the kids put their dimes in for the honeymoon.”

On Labor Day, they went on another picnic with the Schaefers at Winton Woods and stopped by their dream house again. As they were touring the subdivision, they found another house that they liked. Bill asked the owner about it, what the payments were like and so on, and then they started talking about getting a house like that one instead. “It was a split-level,” Edythe said. “I was more interested in the one-floor plan, but we kind of discussed it.”

After Labor Day and throughout September, however, Bill seemed to cool on her, Edythe testified, after getting the letter from attorney Larry Eichel. She said that she had cooled on him, too, because of his emotional struggle, even though she had gotten pregnant. “He’d call and say he was working late, and it didn’t seem likely and I figured maybe he was seeing Louise again.” She testified, “I asked him one time. I said, ‘Bill, is it between Louise and I or is there a third party?’”

“He said, ‘You don’t know, do you?’”

“I said, ‘No, I don’t care.’”

He said that maybe it would be better if he moved out. “What about me?” she said. “I’m going to have to quit work [on account of having a baby] and won’t be able to go back for a while.”

“You’ll make out alright,” he said.

“What do I tell my friends?” she said. “We just got married and now all of sudden we’re not? What about the children? They consider you their father.”

“Well, I have to think about Linda, too,” he said.

“Are you going back to Louise?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “I’ll go and get a room somewhere.” But he never did.

“He had a vacation coming up [toward the end of October], and I suggested when he had that vacation, he could just get away to himself then,” Edythe said. Their wedding plans weren’t off, exactly, but were certainly postponed.

A few weeks before Louise disappeared, in the middle of October, she called Edythe out of the blue and asked to meet again at Swifton Center. She was still smiling and friendly when they met, but Louise had quite a different agenda this time, Edythe said. Spending the summer alone had made her more settled about divorcing Bill, and she went to see a lawyer, who sent Bill a letter requesting a meeting. As soon as he got that letter, however, Bill came over and tried to talk Louise out of it or to at least wait a couple of months while he sorted things out.

“She told me that she definitely would not go back with Bill and that she was going to get the divorce,” Edythe would testify, “but she had promised him she would wait a couple months, and she wanted to know how we were getting along and I told her that I didn’t think I was going to stay with him either, that we were more or less drifting along…I had been finding different things out about him, and I figured either he was seeing Louise or someone else, and I asked her if she had seen him and she said she hadn’t.” She added, “I said I was just waiting for him to make up his mind what to do, really.”

Louise worried that if Bill contested the divorce, he might bring some married man into it, and Louise didn’t want to get him involved. Louise never said who it was, but Edythe guessed that she was talking about Chick Haft, her boss at Stillpass Transit—the man who had given her a car. But Louise confided that she’d met another fellow, who was single. “He’s a big ol’ hillbilly,” Louise said with a laugh. “But he’s very affectionate.”

Louise told Edythe she didn’t get to see him very much because he only came in on the weekends. Sometimes he came on Thursday, and she got to see a little more of him. “We went over to Walgreen’s and had a Coke,” Edythe said. “I made the remark while we were sitting there, ‘No one would ever believe this is wife No. 1 and wife No. 2’ because we were laughing and kind of cutting up and getting along real good.” She continued, “I told her I would stay with Bill awhile to see how things worked out, kind of let things ride, unless he definitely left, but I felt sure there was a third party now, being I knew he hadn’t seen her, and probably the reason he asked her to hold up the divorce was because he had met this third party and in that way it would be a good opportunity to marry me if she got a divorce.” Altogether, they spent about an hour together that day. Louise didn’t ask her to keep their meeting confidential, but Edythe never mentioned it to Bill.

Bill was supposed to take a vacation the third week of October, to go away by himself for a while and make up his mind about what he was going to do. But when Edythe asked him where he was going, he said, “I am not going anywhere. I am going to stay here.”

“What makes you think I want you to stay?” she asked. After that, she said, he started being sweet to her again, reminding her that there was a baby on the way. “Well, you weren’t that concerned about the baby before,” she said. “You said that I could get along. I can get along. I don’t need you. So don’t use that for an excuse to stay.” He reminded her of her own children. “Well, you didn’t think of them either in September when you were talking about going.” There was a lot of discussion that night, she said, a lot of coaxing and a lot of promises. Finally, they agreed to let things ride until Christmas because of the children and then “see how things stood.”

While Edythe never mentioned that anything was compelling her to settle up with Bob Klumpp, she said she was unclear about the partition suit between them but knew that something needed to be done. She contacted her ex-husband’s lawyer and told him she planned on selling the house. According to her testimony, the lawyer advised her to keep the house because she would never be able to find anything comparable considering her finances. “Why don’t you talk to Bob and ask him if he wouldn’t settle for less money?” the lawyer suggested. So she spoke to Bob, and he agreed to settle for $4,000 in cash instead of $6,000 via the suit.

Bill also thought it was a good idea to borrow the money to pay off her ex-husband instead of selling the house and suggested that they postpone the purchase of their Forest Park dream home. Because this took place the week he was supposed to have gone on a soul-searching getaway, “he kind of bent over backwards to be extra nice,” Edythe testified. “He didn’t go anywhere, except one day he went flying by himself.” He seemed to come to terms with leaving Louise and Linda and began to talk about a future with Edythe again.

As Edythe noted, “He said, ‘Let’s wait about a year or so and that way we would have more money saved and we would get a more expensive house, and let’s go ahead and make a loan on this one and pay Bob off’ because that had to be settled right away, and then in the meantime, we could save more money while we were at it.” She said Bill was perfectly willing to put his name on a loan to borrow $9,000 on the house instead of selling it. “He said, ‘We might as well make it out in Bergen, because we are going to get married anyhow. There would be no point in making it out in Edythe Klumpp and changing it to Edythe Bergen later.’”

On the morning of October 30, Edythe was getting ready to take her mother on some errands when the bank called and told her that the loan was approved pending a check of Bill’s credit reference. She would have to set a time for her, Bob and Bill to sign the documents.

Six Girl Scouts came to Edythe’s house at 4:00 p.m. for an hour of sewing lessons, she told police. Just before they left, she called Bill to see if he would be home for supper, but he said he had stuff to do at the office. She told police that she went to Swallen’s department store in Fairfax to look at bedroom sets for girls. The Chevy didn’t start, so she was out there fooling around with it when the phone rang. She let her daughter Jill answer it. It was Bill, but Jill thought that Edythe had already left. The car started then, and Edythe went on to Swallen’s, where she looked at bedroom sets and toys. She didn’t buy anything. She got home at about 6:15 p.m. and tried to return Bill’s call, but he had already left the office.

Edythe said that she got to Woodward High School at 7:10 p.m., and because she was late, she went straight to the classroom instead of checking in at the office. When she got to the classroom, she realized that she needed her attendance report and started to go back downstairs; one of the girls had just been to the office, though, and had picked it up for her. A few minutes later, one of the other teachers stuck her head in the door and said, “Oh, you’re here, huh? They just told me to come over and bring your girls over to my class because you weren’t here.”

Edythe said she went to the office at 7:20 p.m. to let them know she was in. Her students and the other teachers would confirm most of Edythe’s story, but they put her arrival time at closer to 7:30 p.m. Everyone reported that she seemed as calm and normal as ever that night. Her repeat students who had previously known her as Mrs. Klumpp now called her Mrs. Bergen, and her freshest students didn’t know her by any other name.

Mary Riesenberg thought Edythe was “a wonderful person”; she had brought in clothes that her children had outgrown and was a good sewing teacher. Mary would consider her a friend except that they never did anything socially together. In fact, she and Judy Kimmey had called Edythe up during the summer to see if she would be teaching again because they would sign up for the class if she were. “We learned so much from her and she treated us so nice,” Judy said. When she or Mary would slip up and call her “Mrs. Klumpp,” she would not answer. “She wanted to be called Bergen,” she said. “So we did.”

ON MOST THURSDAYS, JILL Klumpp would take Edythe to Woodward High School and drop her off. Bill would pick her up at 9:45 p.m. when class let out, and then they’d go back to Mel’s for a little while. Since she drove herself on that particular Thursday, Edythe called the Abrams house from the school office to see if Bill had left there yet to come and get her. He hadn’t, as he had seen her car at the school when he drove past earlier, but he was getting ready to leave. He told her that she should go on home and that he’d see her there. He was home by 10:15 p.m., and they stayed in and fell asleep in front of the television, Edythe told police. At 2:00 a.m., they woke up and went to bed.

On a normal Friday morning—or any other weekday—Jill would take her mother’s car to pick up Kila Schaefer and her two children. She’d take Mrs. Schaefer back to Mount Washington, where she met her ride to go downtown to work, and then take the two children back to Bloomingdale, where Edythe would babysit them for the day. Jay was four years old, and the baby, Jeffrey, was eighteen months.

But on Friday, October 31, it was Edythe who drove to the Schaefer house in the morning. She took the children home at about 5:50 p.m., a little later than usual but not conspicuously so. Their father noticed that Jeffrey’s snowsuit was wet. Edythe apologized, saying that she had washed her car seat and thought that it would have been dry by then. She also apologized if they smelled like smoke, as she had been burning leaves, but Mr. Schaefer didn’t notice any odor.

When asked about that day by the police, the older boy, Jay, said that he went for a long ride with a bunch of toys and that he saw a boat. He couldn’t remember anything about a fire.

Edythe told police a different story: she was babysitting the children at her home, and Bill called her from his office at about 10:00 a.m. He was excited and talking very fast, asking about whether Edythe knew who Louise was dating.

“What’s the matter?” Edythe asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “I just wanted to know.”

Edythe said that she was completely in the dark about what he was going on about. After two or three more frantic phone calls, he finally leveled with her: “Louise is missing.”

“Did she take Linda with her?” Edythe asked. He said no. Late that afternoon, between 4:30 p.m. and 5:00 p.m., Bill called Edythe from the Swifton Village apartment, telling her that he was going to stay there with Linda until they had found out what happened to Louise.

Toward the end of Edythe’s interview, detectives asked her if she had any thoughts about who might commit such a “nasty crime” against Louise Bergen. Edythe surmised:

The only thing I can figure out is that she met someone and they went out, you know, just met them on a date…If I were making an opinion, I don’t even like to say, but if I have to say something, I would say it would be this fellow that she said came on weekends. Sometimes she said he came in on Thursday night…Maybe there was an argument or something. She did mention that when she talked to him about it that he wanted her to go away with him but he wouldn’t take Linda…That’s why when Bill said she was gone, I said, “Did she take Linda?” I mean, it seemed funny that she would go away like that without taking Linda.