EVIDENCE AND ALIBI
By Saturday morning, he was a full-fledged celebrity. According to the daily news “many hundreds of people of both sexes were admitted to see Wagner on Saturday as on the previous day.” Locals, children included, hung around the jailhouse door in droves hoping to catch a glimpse of the celebrated Smuttynose murderer. They “begged for a moment’s admission” and many got their wish. Those who came to view a freakish ax murderer locked in a cage were shocked to find him a gentle and attractive young man of Teutonic origin. Wagner stood quietly at his cell door. “He said little and seemed not at all displeased that the populace were allowed to come in and gaze at him,” one reporter noted.
The first glimpses of Louis Wagner as a truly sympathetic character come from the pen of William Thayer, editor of the Portsmouth Daily Evening Times. Judging that this case would be among the biggest stories of his career, Thayer planted himself in the city’s police station for much of the prisoner’s brief stay. Although completely convinced of Wagner’ s guilt, Thayer made a journalistic effort to pull together an unbiased profile of the killer from personal observation, accounts in other newspapers, interviews, gossip, and police records. His coverage, others claimed, leaned in favor of the prisoner.
“He is a large strong man, ugly at times, but has not been considered a dangerous character,” the Times first reported. “The prisoner was a steady man who always had funds, but tended to be morose and withdrawn. His shipmates knew him as shrewd and close-fisted and had little affection for him.”
The Portsmouth Times reported that all visitors to his cell “were much surprised to meet a man with so honest, [and] kindly a face. Wagner does not look like a villain. Put him among a dozen respectable laboring men, and none would select him from the others as a bad man.” Despite his Prussian accent, the prisoner spoke “frankly and freely . . . and in all respects acts and talks like an honest, intelligent man.”
Frank W. Miller of the competing Portsmouth Daily Chronicle was even more convinced of Wagner’s guilt and amazed by his strangely calm demeanor. “We would not select him in a crowd as one who would commit murder, as his expression is one of kindness” the Chronicle suggested. Miller’s observations, however, appear more detached and well-rounded. He noted that the prisoner “sometimes hid himself” in his cell from visitors and “bursts into tears when spoken to . . . A more wretched condition than he is in can hardly be imagined.” Yet, a few sentences later, Miller noted, Wagner “liked the ladies” and told one “that he had never been happier in his life.”
Miller’s characterization is of a man more mercurial and complex than Thayer’s and presents Wagner as duplicitous and conniving. While Miller was equally willing to report on Wagner’s quirky behavior, the Chronicle suggested it was playacting. Wagner “looks squarely at everyone who takes a glance at him and evidently has made up his mind to play a game of bluff,” Miller’s paper suggested. It is clear that both Miller and Thayer made an effort to be objective, but always with an eye toward keeping the controversy going and selling newspapers. Despite the strong circumstantial evidence against Wagner, the Times reported on Saturday “it must be admitted that there is room for a reasonable doubt about his guilt.”
The newspaper debate over Wagner, though good-natured, was born out of a strong and longstanding local rivalry. Miller had founded his pro-Republican Chronicle in 1852 as the first daily in the city. In 1867, he also took over an ancient weekly known as the New Hampshire Gazette. Established in colonial Portsmouth in 1756, the Gazette, Miller proudly proclaimed, was “the oldest newspaper in America.” His Chronicle had been the only daily paper in the region until 1868. That year, a hard-bitten Democrat named Joshua Foster began a rival daily called the Portsmouth Times. It was Foster, as publisher of a pro-slavery or “Copperhead” newspaper, who had seen his printing press tossed into the river by a drunken Portsmouth mob at the close of the Civil War. So it makes sense that Charles Thayer, as the newest editor of the Times, might lean slightly in favor of the latest underdog, who in this case was Louis Wagner.
Both Miller and Thayer came from publishing families and had printer’s ink in their veins. And both knew how to build circulation and advertising revenue by milking a good story. Miller has been described as a “vigorous, imaginative newspaperman who had a flair for making a dollar.” He was elected mayor of Portsmouth by a wide margin in 1874, but that same year the Democrats gained control of the governorship and both legislative bodies in New Hampshire. Miller was targeted for his Republican views and gerrymandered out of office after serving only six months as the city’s mayor.
Both newspapers offered lengthy coverage of the prisoner’s own version of events from seven-thirty p.m. on Wednesday until six-thirty a.m. Thursday morning. Wagner insisted to the press that he never left Portsmouth during that period. From nine until eleven o’clock at night, he was down on the Portsmouth docks, he said, baiting trawls for a fisherman he had just met. Then he drank two or three glasses of ale in an oyster bar on the left side of Congress Street. Wagner said he could not recall the names of the boat, the captain, the wharf, the bar, or the bartender.
“Load me down with irons and chains if you must,” Wagner reportedly told the police, “but I ask you, carry me out there that I may point out the saloon. I will show you them people I was with that night.” Unwilling to risk the prisoner’s safety with the jail surrounded by blood-thirsty protestors, the police instead brought in every potential witness they could find to identify Wagner. One bartender testified that he had served Wagner one glass of ale at seven-thirty that evening, but no one could be found who had seen him after that.
Unused to drinking and drowsy from the ale, Wagner said he walked to Court Street downtown. There he slipped and fell on the ice near the town pump. He lay there for a long time. He returned to Johnson’s boarding house through the back door at about three a.m. Wagner swore he could see John Hontvet and his crewmen baiting trawls through a window, but by this time he was too tired and ill to join them, so he fell asleep on a sofa in the back room of the shop. By the time he awoke, Hontvet was gone. Wagner said he went to the breakfast table at Johnson’s, but was too sick to eat. With a sudden urge to visit friends in Boston, he hopped on the morning train. Arriving in the big city, he decided to make himself more presentable by getting his whiskers and hair cut. Then he bought a new set of clothes and shoes, leaving his old fishing outfit behind.
The essential details of his inventive story never wavered. And it was upon this fragile skeleton of events that Wagner’s life hung. Proving his alibi, without a single corroborating witness, would be no easy task for his yet unnamed defense attorney. Deconstructing that skeleton of events, bone by bone, was the job of county attorney George Campbell Yeaton. Born in 1836 in nearby South Berwick, Maine, Yeaton was a local boy with deep family roots. His ancestor Richard Yeton (an earlier spelling) had petitioned the royal court for leniency in 1715 on behalf of the poor fishermen at the Isles of Shoals who were, as always, overdue on their tax payments. “The people are very few in number [and] most of them are men of no substance,” Yeton wrote of the early Shoalers. “They live only by their daily fishing and not one-third of them are single men and threaten to remove and leave us, if the tax be laid which will prove our utter ruin if our fishermen leave us.”
George Yeaton’s father owned a sawmill on the Salmon Falls River that flows into the mighty Piscataqua. His father’s success allowed George to attend Berwick Academy and Bowdoin College and to settle on Academy Street in the center of the picturesque village. In 1870, Yeaton’s office and many valuable papers were destroyed in a fire, perhaps influencing his decision to accept the job as attorney for York County the following year. Yeaton also served as the lawyer for the burgeoning Boston & Maine Railroad. He was a prominent local Mason and served as the president of local banks. He and his wife, Harriet, had only one daughter who died at age four. Yeaton dedicated his life to practicing law in Maine and was best known for the Wagner case that was hailed as “a classic in criminal prosecution.” Following his death in 1918, Yeaton was eulogized as “the last of the polished, highly-cultivated legal minds of the old school.”
By Saturday morning, March 8, 1873, Yeaton was “virtually certain” that Smuttynose Island fell under the jurisdiction of Maine, not New Hampshire, so he headed to the Portsmouth jailhouse to collect his celebrity prisoner. But before delivering the defendant to Maine, Yeaton needed to visit the murder scene on Smuttynose where the bodies of Karen and Anethe still lay. Yeaton shipped out aboard the USS Mayflower at noon headed toward the Isles of Shoals.
At that same moment, the back door to the station house opened. Still unable to walk, Maren Hontvet was carried from her carriage by two police officers and set on a lounge in the city marshal’s office. She “seemed to be suffering” and was accompanied by her husband, John, and the near comatose Ivan Christensen. The prisoner was led into the office to confront the woman he had tried to destroy. Wagner looked at Maren with a mournful expression.
“Louis, you killed my two sisters, you know you did!” Maren shouted repeatedly in “broken English,” raising herself up painfully on one arm on the lounge.
According to William Thayer of the Portsmouth Daily Evening Times, who was a witness to the conversation, Wagner showed no excitement. Then with a voice “full of feeling and earnestness” he responded.
“Mary, I did not do it. I did not go out to the Shoals that night. I never put my hand on any woman to hurt her. You can’t say that for true, Mary.”
Half-sitting, half-lying down, Maren continued to fiercely condemn her former friend and lodger.
“Louis, didn’t we take you in and feed you while you had no money and might have starved?” the Chronicle reported. “Did we deserve to be treated so by you?”
“No Mary, not by me or anyone else,” Wagner said.
“Would you not like to kill me?” Maren then asked, according to Wagner’s version. But when he tried to respond, he was told by the marshal to keep silent.
“I had no right to answer her,” he later testified. “I was not allowed to.”
After a lengthy confrontation with the prisoner, a city solicitor named Frink asked Maren to tell her full story once more, for the record, and her words were set down on paper. Wagner listened, his face unchanged, as Maren described the figure in the dark who struck down Anethe with an ax. She said she heard Anethe cry out “Louis! Louis!” But Maren admitted that the killer had remained silent and kept his back toward her, so she did not see his face or hear his voice.
“No one who was there,” William Thayer wrote, “could fail to be impressed with the fact that Mrs. Hontvet firmly believes that she saw Louis.”
“I’m glad Jesus loves me,” Wagner said as the Hontvets prepared to go.
“The devil loves you!” John shot back.
As soon as Maren was carried back to her carriage to return to Johnson’s boarding house, Mary Johnson, the landlady’s daughter, was ushered into the Portsmouth police station. Her real name, according to the not-always-reliable New York Times, was Mary Ramsey, “a fine looking woman” who was in the process of being divorced although she was not yet twenty years old. Mary had been friendly to Wagner during his recent eight-week stay, but as the weight of circumstantial evidence mounted, she was now deeply suspicious. She had last seen him with a long beard wearing his signature rubber boots, overalls, blue and brown jumpers, with a dark dirty scarf around his neck. In his cell, he was well-dressed and clean shaven, handsome even.
Mary told Wagner he could not possibly have slept on the lounge in the back of her father’s shop on the night of the murders as he claimed. Mary had seen her mother lock the back door around midnight. Besides, Mary told Wagner, another tenant named George Lowd had been napping on that same lounge after baiting trawls with John Hontvet in the next room. Mary accused Wagner of acting strange and looking wild when she met him at breakfast on Thursday morning. She reminded him that he had said, “Mary, I have got myself into trouble and I feel as if I am going to be taken.”
Mary was especially bothered by a missing shirt. Wagner had only four white shirts and, having done all his ironing, mending, and washing for weeks, Mary told the police, she knew precisely what shirt he had been wearing the week of the murders. But despite numerous searches, Mary and Marshals Thomas Entwistle and Frank Johnson could not find that shirt. It was not in Wagner’s room at the house on Water Street as he claimed or in his clothes bag or in the drawer in the shop where tenants stored clean clothes. It was not on Wagner in his Portsmouth cell and it had not been among his old clothes the police recovered during his arrest in Boston. Mary recalled that Wagner had been acting suspiciously before he took the train out of Portsmouth. She had seen him with a mysterious bundle sticking out beneath his jumper. He was holding something under his arm as he went from his bedroom to the outhouse in the backyard.
“I watched him to see how queer he acted,” Mary later told the police, who returned many times to search the Johnson house and to interview Maren, who was recuperating there, “but he [Wagner] went out the back door; went out into the yard.”
Despite the tense and revealing meeting with Mary Johnson, Wagner kept his poker face intact, never showing resentment, guilt, or fear. According to his testimony, he and Mary parted with a friendly handshake. But according to the newspapers, as the prisoner was ushered back into his cell, Mary snapped, “What a liar!” and refused to take his proffered hand.
“I don’t want to shake hands with a murderer,” she told him. Time and again, Wagner’s view of events differed from that of everyone around him.
The only time Wagner’s deadpan expression cracked, according to the Portsmouth Journal, was when a gentleman asked him—if he had truly been such close friends with the Hontvets, why were they so willing to believe he had turned to murder? Wagner’s reply was as inscrutable as ever.
“I don’t know,” he said, his face reddening. “John wanted me to bait trawls, and I didn’t go to help him . . . and I thought John was mad.” In Wagner’s world, his best friends were accusing him of murder because he had not shown up for work.
Link by link, according to the media, the circumstantial evidence was beginning to bear out Maren Hontvet’s theory that the true killer was already in custody. David Burke reported that the wooden pegs, or “thole pins,” that attached the oars to his recovered dory were suddenly and significantly worn down.
Although they had just been replaced and used only once, the wooden pegs had overnight been worn down by a quarter of an inch as if they had been heavily used for hours. Someone resembling Wagner had been spotted near Devil’s Den on the morning of the murder. Eyewitnesses waiting for the ferry at the first New Castle bridge on March 6 now swore that Wagner had been there. He had not returned to the boarding house all night. A white handkerchief found “twisted around Karen’s neck” reportedly belonged to Wagner. He had run away to Boston. And there was a bombshell yet to burst. In two days, Portsmouth police would discover a white shirt, bloody and torn into three strips, stuffed behind the vault of the privy in the back of Matthew Johnson’s house. Mary Johnson was called to examine the shirt that lay in the snow. She immediately recognized the stitching she had done and the new collar. It was the missing shirt that belonged to Wagner.
“The chain of evidence seems to be tightly closing around Wagner as the murderer,” the weekly Portsmouth Journal concluded. But on Saturday, as the bodies of Karen and Anethe finally arrived in Portsmouth and an armed and angry throng congregated once more outside the police and railway stations, Wagner’s biggest problem was getting out of town alive.