POLYGRAPHS

The Ohio Highway Patrol and the detectives of the Cincinnati Police Department continued to work together on the case, alongside Don Roney, chief investigator for the office of Hamilton County prosecutor C. Watson Hover.

There was a professional difference of opinion about what angle to pursue. Highway patrolman Robert W. Dunbar was mostly suspicious of Edythe Klumpp, while the Cincinnati detectives believed that having eliminated Chick Haft, they should look for the mysterious weekend “hillbilly” lover and learn more about Bill Bergen—or perhaps look for another man they didn’t yet know about.

Dunbar’s suspicions were based on psychology as much as hard evidence. He pored over criminology textbooks and learned that in four out of five cases in which victims’ bodies were cremated, it was a woman who lit the fire. “I searched for every case I could find where fire was applied to the human body,” he said. While the other detectives focused on finding the Thursday-night boyfriend or some other man in Louise Bergen’s life, Dunbar was pretty sure that it would be a woman. “The female is the hardest to arouse to anger,” he said. “But once aroused, she is the most violent.”

In his report, Dunbar revealed the results of a consultation with the resident psychiatrist at Longview State Mental Hospital regarding what type of person would commit a crime of this nature (clubbing then burning a human body). The doctor said that it appeared the murderer was not trying to inflict pain by fire as the person had already been killed by other means. But a person who would burn a corpse would lack humane feelings and would likely be conceited, self-centered, have a god complex and be overly proud of any accomplishment. The crime suggested someone “methodical and an accountant type.”

Pursuing the other angle, Dunbar and a team of detectives attended a “safety breakfast” that Stillpass Transit hosted for its drivers. Dunbar and Cincinnati police interviewed each driver about his whereabouts on the day of the crime. The report didn’t say how many men this included, but the police took their pictures in groups of six.

Dr. Frank Cleveland’s continuing investigation found that the saturation levels of carbon dioxide in Louise’s blood indicated that she was alive when burned. There was 17 percent carbon monoxide saturation. Smoking a cigarette would give 9 percent; 40 percent would be fatal. He also said that the accelerant used on the body was definitely gasoline and that the victim had soot in her lungs, indicating that she was breathing when the fire started.

Charles Friend of Clarksville, a small town near the state park, brought in a pair of glasses that he had found on the side of the road near Cowan Lake. The frames had been broken and repaired, and one of the lenses had popped out and was lying nearby. Dunbar took the glasses and some shoes found near the same spot and showed them to Bill Bergen and Abbie Van Davier. They were not able to identify the shoes, but her mother recognized the glasses, pointing out where Louise had glued them back together. She had pictures of Louise wearing those frames.

Meanwhile, at police headquarters, Detectives Wilbert Stagenhorst and Eugene Moore interviewed John Kellum, the former Stillpass dispatcher whom Mel Abrams said he saw riding around with Louise one night. Kellum admitted to kissing Louise and being infatuated with her. He said that she was very cautious about dating because her grounds for divorce were adultery; she wanted a divorce on her terms, not her husband’s. Kellum said that he was home with his wife and family on Thursday.

Bill Sheridan, the man who tipped the OHP on the identity of its burned corpse, gave a recorded statement. His employer, Procter & Gamble, was a major client of Stillpass Transit; he was there a lot, and Louise would often go to P&G on errands. He had lunch occasionally with Louise but could not say anything about her personal life; he also did not know anything about whom she was dating.

The other tenants at 1870 Langdon Farm gave only spotty anecdotes about Louise’s love life. A tall, thin, young, good-looking, curly-haired blond fellow had been by, said one neighbor. Mrs. Williams and her two teenage daughters across the hall on the third floor said that they had sometimes heard a man’s footsteps going into Louise’s apartment but had never seen her with anyone. They said that she talked a lot about her boss, Chick Haft, and that Louise went out from time to time, but never very late.

Detective Moore went to see Mrs. Van Davier again, spending more than an hour with her. He got nothing.

“The mother is old and bordering on senility,” Dunbar wrote in his report. “She is either holding something back to keep from running down her daughter’s name or else she just doesn’t know anything.”

BOB KLUMPP TOLD POLICE that since the divorce, and after the restraining order she had issued against him was finalized, his meetings with Edythe were contentious, so he got most of his information about her activities from their children when he would pick them up on Saturdays. But just before this business with Louise Bergen started, sometime in early October, Edythe suddenly turned nice toward him. “I was ready to drop over dead” in surprise, he told police. Although she never told him directly that she and Bill Bergen were married, during this period of congeniality, she once mentioned in passing that Jan, the youngest son, was “real good” with Bill when they first got married.

Of course, he said, there was a motive: “She wanted to know if I would [sell her my share of] the house for $4,000. I said, ‘Okay, go ahead and get it over with. I’m getting tired of it.’ She told me Bill was going to leave in a couple of weeks anyhow.” Bob Klumpp told police that he didn’t believe that Edythe and Bill were really married. “It felt kind of funny,” he said. Bob also told Stagenhorst that he used to take the family up to Cowan Lake to go swimming quite a bit, perhaps six times altogether.

After that interview, Dunbar and Stagenhorst decided to talk again to Edythe. She seemed more nervous than before but offered no additional information, simply repeating the story of her activities on the evening of October 30 in almost exactly the same words.

Her car, a 1956 Chevrolet, was parked in the street in front of the house. Stagenhorst asked for the keys. “We observed that the trunk had recently been cleaned,” Stagenhorst would later testify. Stuck between the front seat bench and back was a bobby pin that appeared to have some kind of matter in the open end of it, like a chip off a tooth or broken bone. “In holding it up to the light, why, we saw a slight reddish cast to it,” Stagenhorst said. “We placed it in a cellophane bag and returned the keys to her.” They took it straight to Dr. Cleveland without telling Edythe what they found. At first, Dr. Cleveland didn’t believe this was human flesh or a tooth, but testing proved that it was indeed a “bony substance” from a human with type A blood, the same as Louise Bergen.

Edythe’s 1956 Chevy. University of Cincinnati Archives.

Dr. Cleveland finished his examination of the body on November 14 and released it for burial, keeping portions of the skull for evidence. He said that the weapon used to crush her skull was likely a smooth piece of metal, about one inch wide. The skin was not broken, so it could not have been square, rough or pointed. It was most likely a tire iron or a piece of pipe. She had another blow at the base of the skull that, based on how the bone fragments went into the brain, would have happened while the body was lying down.

That afternoon, police started conducting polygraph tests on some of the key people in the case. Cincinnati patrolman William Berry administered the first test to John Kellum. He again said that he was in love with the victim at one time and that Louise said she wanted to marry him; he claimed that she told him she was unhappy with her home life and believed that her husband was running around. Kellum had not seen her for some time, but he did talk to her on the phone. Berry said that he was telling the truth.

Mel Abrams also “ran a clear chart,” confirming Bill Bergen’s activities on the night of October 30.

When Bill Bergen arrived, he appeared outwardly calm, but he was too nervous for the test to be effective, so they asked him to come back to try again at 8:30 a.m. on the eighteenth. Edythe Klumpp was scheduled to take her test at 1:00 p.m. that same day.

On Monday, November 17, Stagenhorst called Dr. Cleveland to talk more about the possible causes of the wounds on Louise Bergen’s head. Stagenhorst wanted to know if the “small diameter pipe” could be the barrel of a gun. Dr. Cleveland said that it could.

Stagenhorst called Bill Bergen and found that he owned two guns, a rifle and a handgun, both of which were used for target shooting. They were at the house on Bloomingdale Avenue. Stagenhorst went straight there, and Edythe gave him the guns. The detective sent them to Kettering Crime Laboratory for examination. He also went to the Swallen’s Retail Outlet in Fairfax, where Edythe said she had been window shopping for furniture at the time Louise Bergen went missing. He described Edythe Klumpp to a clerk and a manager, and neither said she sounded familiar. They told him that the five o’clock hour is usually pretty slow and that they didn’t remember anyone being in the store at that time.

At 8:30 a.m. on November 18, Bill Bergen retook the polygraph test. Patrolman Berry interviewed him for thirty minutes. Then Dunbar, Moore, Stagenhorst and Roney interviewed him for forty-five minutes after that. This time, the tests showed that he was telling the truth and had “no guilty knowledge” of his wife’s death.

Bergen said that he moved out of the apartment where he was living with Louise on the Wednesday before Decoration Day, May 29, 1958. He took a room on Edwards Avenue but ended up just keeping his clothes there and spending most of his time at Edythe’s house in Mount Washington. On June 14, he moved in with her. Bergen also revealed that the reason he moved in with Edythe and pretended to be married to her was because she said she was pregnant. He believed her at the time but had since concluded that she had lied to him and concocted a pregnancy to keep him from going back to Louise.

Shortly after he moved in, Edythe told him that she had a miscarriage. When he told her he was planning on going back to Louise, she got very excited and nervous and fainted. But he couldn’t make up his mind, and so he stayed with Edythe. When the fall came, she told him she was pregnant again. Under the pressure of having a new child, Bill and Edythe, under the names of Mr. and Mrs. Bergen, applied at the Fidelity Savings and Loan Company for a $9,000 loan on the house on Bloomingdale. They planned to use $5,000 to pay off the existing mortgage and the remaining $4,000 to reimburse Robert Klumpp for his share.

But Bill was still planning to go back to Louise, he said, “if she would have me…The only thing holding me up was the pregnancy. [I] just didn’t know how to go about it.”

Despite Edythe’s claim that she wasn’t under any financial stress, Bergen told police that she was living hand-to-mouth, usually buying her family’s evening meal with tip money on the way home from the restaurant.

The interviewers asked Bergen about the possibility that Edythe Klumpp killed Louise. He said that she appeared to be using pregnancy as a trick to get him to marry her. Money and security would be the motive, Bergen said. Regarding the guns—particularly the pistol, which tested positive for having traces of blood on the barrel and butt—Bergen said that Louise bought the pistol from Mel Abrams and gave it to him as a Christmas present in 1956. Bill kept it wrapped in an unlocked dresser drawer and kept the bullets in the trunk of his car, a safety precaution on which Edythe insisted.

At 10:00 a.m., Edythe called city hall to cancel her appointment. Stagenhorst spoke to her. She said she wasn’t feeling well, she didn’t have anyone to watch the children and she could not get in touch with her mother. Bergen told police that she had said the same thing that morning and added that if they asked about her, he should tell them that she was sick and about to have a miscarriage.

Stagenhorst asked Bergen to make arrangements to watch the children while Edythe came in for the test. At 1:00 p.m., Dunbar and Roney drove him to Edythe’s house. Edythe then followed them back to city hall in her car. The police by then had interviewed some sixty-four people and were pretty sure they had their perpetrator.

During a break in the testing, shortly after 2:00 p.m., Stagenhorst asked for her car keys. He, Dunbar and Roney gave the Chevy another thorough going-over, this time with a twelve-volt light they plugged into her cigarette lighter. They listened to the interrogation over a receiver.

They saw noticeable specks on the upper upholstery, none very large. They were dark brown and looked like dried blood. The spots were concentrated on the ceiling above the driver’s side and along the door panel on the left side. The front seat looked noticeably cleaner than the rest of the car. The spots on the ceiling showed evidence of having been cleaned with some type of fluid, probably a spot remover. The back seat showed no evidence of blood, but it was dirty and had particles of broken glass.

Dunbar checked the trunk again and noted that it was exceptionally clean for a car trunk. The tire wrench was in its proper place behind the spare tire on a rubber mat. When Dunbar picked it up, it left a fresh rust outline. The wrench also had a coating of fresh rust. At 3:00 p.m., Dunbar had the car towed to Kettering Crime Laboratory to test the spots in the overhead upholstery. They were indeed human blood, so Dunbar had them cut the upholstery out to test it for blood type. The tire tool gave a weak response to human blood, as if it had been washed.

The polygraph examination ended at 4:00 p.m. Berry concluded that Edythe Klumpp was lying and knew something about Louise Bergen’s death. His report noted that “her denials were weak and she appeared to be stalling for time, trying to think.”

Moore would testify that he and Stagenhorst went to Edythe at 5:00 p.m. and told her that they knew she was lying about the death of Louise Bergen. Berry explained the results of the polygraph test, and the detectives “confronted her with the fact that blood had been found in her automobile…We pressed her for an explanation as to how blood could be found in her automobile or why blood in such quantities was in her car. We told her it was Type A blood, the type blood of Louise Bergen.”

“Oh, I remember now,” she said after fifteen minutes of repeated denials. “The last time I met Louise at Swifton Shopping Center, we started to get out of the car to get a Coca-Cola in Walgreen’s and when she slid under the steering wheel, she dropped her purse and when she started to pick up her purse, she bumped her head and had a nosebleed.”

The detectives pointed out that blood spots had been found on the upholstery above her, above the windshield in a splattering effect, and told her that a nosebleed would not splatter upward. “Blood couldn’t be on the ceiling of my automobile,” she insisted, “I did try to clean off some malted milk spots. One of the kids spilt some malted milk sometime back and I attempted to remove the spots with carbon tetrachloride.”

They continued to press her, accusing her directly of killing Louise Bergen. “How could I have killed her?” she protested. “How could I have gotten to Cowan Lake and back? How could I have taught school that night? I would have panicked about it because I would have to act normal in class. I did not kill her. I am not lying.”

At 6:00 p.m., Dunbar had the car taken to the police station garage to be fingerprinted, photographed and inspected under brighter lights. There were no fingerprints, but they found small traces of blood almost everywhere—on the steering wheel, the dashboard and the air vents. Dunbar called headquarters, where Edythe was being questioned, to advise them.

At about 6:30 p.m., Stagenhorst told her that she should consider herself under arrest. “We continued the same line of interrogation, pointing out the discrepancies in her story, the blood in the automobile, the ridiculous statement that Louise Bergen had a nosebleed in her car and she continued to deny that she had any knowledge of this crime,” he said.

Dunbar noted that “most of the information obtained from Edythe had to be drug [sic] out of her. She would not offer any details and it was very obvious that she was not telling the truth.” Even while the questioning continued, Dunbar began arranging for first-degree murder warrants against Edythe Klumpp in both Clinton and Hamilton Counties.

At 8:00 p.m., Edythe requested to see her children. They told her they would take her home soon, but they wanted to make sure they had the story clear. “I can’t think,” she said. “I can only think of my children.” They let her sweat in the silence. After a long moment, she finally said, “I know how Louise met her death.”

“You know how the body got to Cowan Lake?” Moore asked. She said she did.

“Was there anyone else involved?” She said there was not.

“I want to see Bill,” she said.

“I want you to tell us the details of how her body got burned.”

“If I can talk to Bill, I will tell,” she said. Moore left the room and summoned Bergen to city hall. When he got back, Stagenhorst was showing Edythe the photos of the burned body. At 9:00 p.m., Roney brought Bill Bergen into the interrogation room. Stagenhorst and Moore were both there.

“I did not kill Louise,” she said.

“Go over there and let him put his arms around you,” Roney said. “He’ll stand by you.”

Edythe got up and went to Bill. “They said you wouldn’t stand by me,” she said.

“You know better than that,” Bill said as he held her. “Just tell the truth.”

“You won’t believe this,” she said in a low, faltering voice as he led her back to her chair. “It’s fantastic.” He sat across from her and took her hand.

“If it’s fantastic,” he said, “I will try to understand. Just tell the truth. These policemen, these officers, all they want to know is the truth.”

“I received a phone call from Louise at about ten minutes ’til five,” she began in a broken, halting voice. Edythe said that Louise Bergen accidentally shot herself with her own gun.