A MOST THOROUGH INVESTIGATION

Hamilton County prosecutor C. Watson Hover was suddenly okay with a renewed investigation of Louise Bergen’s death, as long as it his office wasn’t involved. “I agree thoroughly that if he still has questions about the case, the Highway Patrol is the most appropriate agency to investigate,” he told the press.

In fact, Hover himself had just asked the highway patrol and Corporal Robert Dunbar for some help in tracing the path of the newly discovered evidence to determine why the items were never connected to the murder of Louise Bergen.

As the reinvestigation progressed, the prosecutor’s investigator, Don Roney, worked closely with Dunbar and Sergeant T.B. Morgan, who was named head of the investigation, going with them on many of their trips. Roney’s presence rankled Governor Michael DiSalle since Hover had declined repeated requests to reopen the investigation. In early March, he ordered the state police to quit allowing Roney access.

Even so, barely a week later, with Hover’s blessing, Roney accompanied Dunbar and Morgan to the D.C. suburb of Rockdale, Maryland, to interview Bill Bergen and get a sample of his blood. Bergen at that time was a newlywed, having just married a nineteen-year-old woman. “They had a tape recording of an interview they’d had with Edythe in Ohio,” Bergen told the Post. “It lasted about four hours.” Otherwise, he said, “It was the same old thing.” They didn’t even ask him if he killed his wife. He danced around the blood issue, saying that when he was in the navy, he was type O but that when he went to Washington, he was type A. The Post confirmed with the Red Cross that this was indeed what it had on file for him.

Bergen didn’t relate his most damaging revelations to the press following the patrol’s visit, however: that he had amended his alibi for the night of the crime, saying that between the time he left work and went to Mel Abram’s house at 7:30 p.m., he was with a prostitute named Ann Anderson, who lived in Avondale. Bergen said that he had met the woman at a massage parlor. That night, he went to her house about 6:00 p.m., had sex with her twice, paid her and left by 7:00 p.m.

Anderson’s affidavit noted that Bergen visited her on two occasions. October 30, 1958, was not one of them. And when he did visit, it was closer to 10:00 p.m., when her husband was in bed asleep upstairs, not 6:00 p.m. On that occasion, she took him to the basement and gave him a scotch but didn’t have sex with him. “He talked about playing a musical instrument,” she said, “and told me he could have done something with his music if it had not been for his marriage and family ties…He was not a pleased man when he left…He called 10 days to two weeks later. In the meantime, I had read about Louise Bergen…I told him, ‘Man, you are in a world of trouble. Don’t call me.’”

Bergen said that the highway patrolmen asked him if he would take a truth serum test. He consented, but that was the end of it. The highway patrol did not follow through on the request, Bergen told reporters, but he did not tell them that a D.C. lawyer called the highway patrol two days after they left and withdrew consent, saying that Bergen would no longer participate willingly in any tests or interviews on the matter.

After leaving Maryland, Roney also went with Dunbar and Morgan to Tampa, Florida, to talk with Reverend Oscar Minyard. The governor was furious. “I had reservations about assigning Corporal Dunbar to the investigation from the beginning,” he told the press. He said he had been assured by Dunbar’s superiors that he would be objective in the investigation, and they wanted him on it because he had been there from the very beginning and knew more about the case than anyone else.

Now DiSalle wanted to investigate the investigation. He called the state’s highway safety director to find out why a representative of the Hamilton County prosecutor went on these trips and to determine how many other phases of the investigation Hover’s office participated in.

The highway patrol’s Colonel Scott Radcliff announced the next day that he had replaced Morgan as the lead investigator with Sergeant William George from headquarters in Columbus, but he kept Dunbar on the case for the time being. He admitted that Morgan’s connection with Hover’s office was partially responsible for the reassignment but then said that Morgan was only on the case temporarily anyway, as the highway patrol was short-staffed when the reinvestigation began.

Around Labor Day 1961, DiSalle distributed a twenty-page summary of the renewed investigation. He remained adamant that the case was not closed. In addition to changing the location of the crime, the report concluded that Edythe could not have acted alone, ruling out her first story that she went to Cowan Lake during daylight hours and burned the body. If she did it at night and had slipped out while Bill Bergen was sleeping, she would have had only three hours to sneak out of bed, obtain gasoline, drive alone in the dark to the park, pull the body out of the car by herself and then go home and sneak back into bed.

In addition to Bergen’s revelations about being with a prostitute on the night of his wife’s murder, the report also disclosed that a woman who lived near Stratton Drive had called the police on the night of October 30, 1958, saying that an excited young man came to her door asking her to call the police because a woman was being murdered on the dead-end street. She never heard anything about it, however, and presumed that nothing came of it until she read about Edythe’s new confession and the actual site of Louise Bergen’s death. Then she called Cincinnati police.

Dunbar also indicated, for the first time, that he had believed all along that the body had been burned at night and not during the day, as presented in court.

“I don’t suppose that in the annals of crime has a case been more thoroughly investigated or more effort put forth than was expended by the Ohio State Patrol in its reinvestigation of the Klumpp case,” Hopkins said in his memoirs. “It would appear that at long last we were going to break the Klumpp case wide open but we were once again doomed to frustration and bitter disappointment, for the prosecutor lifted Bergen right off the hook.”

Although DiSalle encouraged Hover, at the very least, to bring perjury charges against Bergen, Hover declined. “Bergen was not asked either on direct or cross examination where he was between 6 and 7 p.m.,” Hover said. “He now says, correctly or incorrectly, that he was with a woman during this period. This allegation, not being sworn, is not subject to a charge of perjury regardless of its truth or falsity,” immaterial to the question of whether Edythe Klumpp was guilty. The governor’s report still did not corroborate Edythe’s story, Hover said, and added nothing new to the case.

For more than a year, nothing came of the report except for a renewed battle of jousts and jibes between DiSalle and Hover. In May 1962, DiSalle stated on a Cincinnati news program that the case was “a dead issue.”

The battle didn’t fare well for DiSalle. His crusade against capital punishment, in this case and others, was a major factor in being defeated by more than 500,000 votes in his bid for reelection. So in December, with DiSalle’s term in office about to expire and a Republican governor about to fill his shoes, Foss Hopkins filed a clemency application. The governor said that he would not make a decision until he got a recommendation from the Pardon and Parole Commission, although he said that he wouldn’t necessarily be bound by its decision. The commission’s chairman told the governor that it needed more information and that the renewed investigation report was insufficient. It would need sworn statements.

On December 28, 1962, the Ohio attorney general, acting on orders from DiSalle, sought a subpoena from a Maryland court to require Bill Bergen to appear under oath before a commission named by the governor. DiSalle planned to be there himself to lead the questioning. Subpoenas were also issued to Mel Abrams and Ann Anderson, the woman Bergen said he was with that night, but she had died suddenly of a heart attack on May 15, not even a month after giving her statement to state police.

The Cincinnati Post sent a reporter from its Washington Bureau to speak to Bergen. He was “reluctant to answer his door and reluctant to talk,” but he said that he would answer the summons. The day before his scheduled appearance, Bergen’s attorneys filed a motion to quash the subpoena, which was granted. So, attorneys from the Pardon and Parole Commission filed a motion with the Circuit Court of Appeals for permission to question Bergen on Thursday, January 11.

The four-judge panel ruled the following day that Bergen did not have to answer the commission’s subpoena but would have to answer one issued by an Ohio court. That never happened. The Pardon and Parole Commission went into session that afternoon and voted five to none to let Edythe’s sentence stand.

DiSalle took the weekend to review the commission’s recommendation. On Monday, January 14, 1963, his last day in office, he commuted Edythe Klumpp’s sentence from first-degree murder to second-degree murder. The commutation would make her eligible for parole after ten years; she had already served three.

“I feel that in all fairness that the continued incarceration of Edythe Klumpp for a minimum period totaling 10 years would be punishment for her indiscretions, misdeeds, and her failure to tell the truth and still give the Pardon and Parole Commission ample time in which to complete their efforts in securing the testimony of William Bergen under oath,” DiSalle said.

At the press conference, reporters echoed one of Hover’s favorite questions: “If you think she’s not guilty of murder, why not give her a full pardon?” The governor said that even though she is not guilty of murder, Edythe Klumpp was guilty of perjury, of burning the body and collusion in Louise Bergen’s death. “I have no way of putting her in jail for that,” he said.

Hopkins declared it neither a victory nor a disappointment but rather “another step taken in correcting what I consider a terrible wrong, an injustice.” He said that he was “not finished.”

Hover, who in the last election had won a seat on the First District Court of Appeals, refused to comment to the press other than to say, “The ex-governor compounded this farce of his original commutation with an additional farce.”

Edythe, according to her jail keepers, took it like a grown-up. “I’d say she was pretty self-contained,” said Marysville superintendent Martha Wheeler. She added that Edythe was working in the prison’s weaving room when she got the news. “She had been hoping for a full pardon,” Wheeler said. “So she was disappointed, naturally, but she regards the commutation as an improvement over her previous situation.”

Edythe had settled into the prison routine, Wheeler said. She joined the Protestant choir and played softball and basketball. “Since doing these things she has lost a lot of weight and people who knew her before say she looks much the same.” Edythe even took to sewing again, making American flags for the state while she served out her sentence.