A GOOSE CHASE

After Edythe Klumpp spilled her guts to Bill Bergen in the presence of police investigators, she asked again to see her children. With Colonel Henry Sandman’s permission, the detectives took the unusual step of accompanying an arrested prisoner under a murder charge back to her home to say goodbye to her family.

“She also stated that she wanted to lie to her mother because she didn’t want to get her mother unduly upset,” Detective Eugene Moore would testify. “She knew at this time that her mother was in her home watching her children, and arrangements were then made to take Edythe Klumpp to her home.”

“She said her mother had a heart condition,” Wilbert Stagenhorst would testify. “She was afraid her mother might hear a news broadcast and it might kill her. She said, ‘I want to speak to my mother. I will tell her I am not involved. I will have to come back down there and answer some more questions, but she shouldn’t worry. She is concerned about my children.”

Ohio highway patrolman Dunbar accompanied Stagenhorst, Moore and the prisoner to Bloomingdale Avenue. “At that time her mother was there and became quite excited demanding to know why she was being kept down at the station all day and generally causing quite a bit of trouble,” Dunbar wrote in his report. “Edythe told her that she was not involved in anything but there were still some facts that she had to clear up and she would go back to the station with us.”

While Edythe gathered up a toothbrush and some other personal items, the detectives went down into the basement and found a gas can. Edythe confirmed that it was the one she used to buy gas to pour on the body of Louise Bergen. They continued to question her when they got back to the station, trying to sort out the lies from the truth.

“I told her we did not believe her story about Louise having a gun,” Moore testified. “I told her we did not believe her story about Louise Bergen calling her on the telephone at ten minutes to five. I pointed out to her that on this day Louise Bergen had an engagement that she fully intended to keep, and that it was highly improbable that she would be calling her to make another engagement. I told her that there were many things in her story that were not true and urged her to tell us the truth, the real facts as to what happened.”

At about midnight, Clinton County prosecutor George Schilling and Sheriff Floyd Foote both came to Cincinnati Central Station and listened to the interrogation on the monitoring system. When Edythe continued to insist that Louise had been shot in the head, Moore called Dr. Cleveland to come and explain to the prisoner that the injuries to the body in no way matched her narrative, that the lines of the fracture could not have possibly happened from her head striking the ground when Edythe pulled her from the car and that there was no trace of a bullet or bullet wound.

Moore asked her if she had hit Louise with the gun. “I may have hit her over the head,” she said. “I don’t remember.” Dr. Cleveland immediately went back to the Kettering Crime Laboratory, X-rayed the victim’s skull and found two metal particles in the head. He decided that he wanted to go over the rest of the victim’s body more thoroughly, but it had been released that afternoon and was on its way to Pennsylvania. Dunbar used the Ohio Highway Patrol system to track down the train, which had already left and was due in Columbus at 2:00 a.m., and make arrangements to return the body to Hamilton County.

At 1:10 a.m., now November 19, Edythe began writing out the story of Louise Bergen’s death in her own hand. There was one more field trip that night, to Caldwell Circle at 2:30 a.m., where Edythe pointed out the location of the shooting.

News of her arrest made the morning headlines, although the story was scant on any details of the crime. The afternoon Post quoted extensively from her handwritten confession but had also spoken with Bill Bergen. He called himself “the man in the middle” and immediately threw his lover (whom he called “an extremely nervous woman”) under the bus. “I’m glad it’s over,” Bergen said. “I knew all the while police had me down as a suspect. I never thought she would do anything like this.”

Edythe’s booking photos. Cincinnati Police Department.

That afternoon, he told an Enquirer reporter that he didn’t know whether he loved Edythe or not but that he would certainly never have married her. He claimed that he was trying to reconcile with his wife when she was slain. In follow-up interviews with police, Bergen seemed to be careful to keep some distance between himself and Edythe’s incredible story, saying, for instance, that he was a sound enough sleeper that Edythe could have slipped out in the middle of the night of October 30 without his knowing. But he also said that he called Edythe at home between noon and 1:30 p.m.; Edythe said that she didn’t get back from Cowan Lake until 2:00 p.m.

After being fingerprinted and photographed in the early morning hours of November 19, Edythe Klumpp went to Cowan Lake in the custody of Detectives Stagenhorst and Moore. They set out from city hall at 8:50 a.m. and were met at the scene at 10:45 a.m. by Clinton County officials from the Prosecutor’s and Sheriff’s Offices, including Sheriff Floyd Foote, and several Ohio highway patrolmen.

After another thorough search of the scene, a caravan of ten cars paraded down the country highways under the direction of Edythe Klumpp. She still had not spoken to an attorney. She and the police differed on how resolutely she asked for one.

“Edythe Klumpp showed us how she drove down this road and pointed out the charred spot in this heavy grass where the body had been burned. She showed us how she backed in, how she left,” Moore said. “We then asked her if she could show us where she threw away the eyeglasses and the shoe. She said she thought she could.” Dunbar called it “a feeble attempt.”

“She also maintained that she had thrown the gun out along Highway 22 along a field,” the patrolman said. “We went down toward Cincinnati from Clarksville Road for about two miles and almost every field Edythe would state that it was probably the place she threw out the gun. It was fairly certain that she was lying about the gun. She was being given every break possible.”

She took them through Clarksville and then had them turn around again and go the other way. She showed them where she thought she had thrown the shoes, but they could not find the missing one. She pointed to several fields that might have been the one where she had thrown the gun, but they all looked alike. When they got to Morrow, she had them turn around and go back toward Clarksville again. Finally, she pointed to a large field and said, “I believe this is the one.”

“At that point,” Moore testified, “several State Troopers [and] my partner Detective Stagenhorst searched the area along the fence way where she said she had thrown the gun. Of course, we found no gun.”

“We started from one end of the field to the other,” Stagenhorst said. “We had these seven or eight patrolmen a matter of two feet apart, and very carefully we walked from one end of the field to the other looking for the gun. As they were walking along slowly, I would walk back and forth in the rear of them to look over the areas that they might have missed. As I got towards the car, she would be smiling at me and I would continue on.”

“She was sitting in the automobile, and I had some conversation with her at that point,” Moore said. “I told her that we did not believe her story, that we knew we were on a wild goose chase, that we were certain that we had the gun involved in our possession, that it was the gun recovered in her home on the 17^th, a gun that belonged to Bergen. She denied this, and about 11:30 or shortly thereafter, we started back to Cincinnati.”

When Stagenhorst got back in the car, he said, “Edythe, you are lying about that gun. You know darn well that gun was not in that field. Every time I stopped and looked at you, you were smiling. I know exactly what you were thinking about. You were thinking, ‘He will never find that gun in that field.’ Isn’t that true?” She started to shake her head. “Now look, don’t shake your head anymore,” he said. “Every time you shook your head, you lied to us and we prove you lied. Now I want you to tell us in your own words that gun was not in the field.” She said nothing else, but Stagenhorst continued to talk while Moore drove them back to Cincinnati. “I explained to her about ballistics and how bullets can be identified through microscopic examination,” he said.

Dunbar followed behind them, and they all stopped at the Howard Johnson’s for lunch. They told Edythe that they would not talk of the case while they were eating, giving her a chance to chew on more than her food. As soon as they got back in the car, Stagenhorst started up again: “Tell us the truth about the gun.”

“If I answer that question, you will ask others,” she said. “What will they think about me?”

“You are only putting yourself in the worst possible light by lying to us,” Stagenhorst said. “I could tell by the look on your face that you knew we were on a wild goose chase.”

As they approached the outskirts of the city, she finally said, “It was Bill’s gun. I took the gun with me.” She said that she wanted to learn how to shoot on her own so that Bill Bergen would be surprised that she remembered the lesson he had given her. So, on the Tuesday before she met Louise Bergen for what would be the final, fateful time, she had taken Bill’s gun from the drawer and four shells from his car trunk, unbeknownst to him, and had practiced loading the gun in her backyard. She then went down to the riverbank and fired the gun three times.

When they got back to city hall at about 2:00 p.m., they had her repeat this for Colonel Sandman, and she amended the written statement she had made the night before. While she was engaged in that task, Foss Hopkins knocked on the door and asked if he could see his client. Colonel Sandman said they were still talking to her, but he could sit in if he wished.

Hopkins said, “No, I will wait until you are finished” and asked how long it would be. Colonel Sandman said it would be about fifteen minutes. Hopkins retired to the hallway until they finished and then went in to see his client.