Where there is beauty, one finds death.
—Charles Baudelaire (1857)
John Berdan Ketcham, born in 1846, was the second of the four children of Valentine Hicks Ketcham and Rachel Berdan, the wealthiest people in Toledo, Ohio. Valentine was the founder and first president of the First National Bank of Toledo, and Rachel’s father had been the first mayor of Toledo. Their three sons eventually became bankers themselves, and their daughter married the man who succeeded her father as president of the First National Bank.1
When V. H. Ketcham died in 1887, he left each of his children the sum of $500,000. John invested his money wisely, in stocks, bonds, and real estate, and went on to start a private bank of his own, which later became the Ketcham National Bank. He bought land and real estate parcels throughout Toledo, Chicago, Indiana, and elsewhere.
When John Ketcham’s first wife, Mary Granger, died, he married socialite Nettie Poe (the “Belle of Toledo”) on October 22, 1885, just as the Walkup trial was beginning in Emporia, Kansas. Nettie, a cousin of the famous author Edgar Allan Poe, was also from a banking family: Her father, Isaac, was the director of the Toledo Savings and Trust.2
Nettie and John were “leaders of the gay social life” in Toledo, which meant they gave and attended a lot of parties. John loved horses, as did Nettie, and so they had several of them with all kinds of carriages, from tiny dog carts to large broughams. And they drank, John especially. Although he maintained his investments, at a relatively young age he retired from the business world to travel, tend to his horses, and party.
In 1892, John and Nettie Ketcham moved to Chicago’s luxurious Lexington Hotel. John was what was known as a “club man” and belonged to several of them: the Calumet, the Chicago, and the Chicago Athletic. These all-male clubs had their heyday in the Gilded Age and were refuges for wealthy members to escape the confines and responsibilities of family and business. There, a man could take his meals, meet with his fellow rich men, and play chess or backgammon. Some clubs could even accommodate an overnight stay. The club man
was a social man, known and knowing in a totally socialized world. . . . [H]e entered a zone of belongingness scarcely imaginable by the hustling anonyms in the mean streets outside. Wherever he chose to go—to the Member’s Table to eat, to the paneled bar for a drink or a game of backgammon, to the library for a snooze, or to the sweet-smelling rest room for relief—the Club Man moved along paths of affiliation and affinity so sure, so deeply traced, he might have been a member of an ancient tribe following the song-lines of a collective destiny. To be social as the Club Man was social was to be cradled in a nexus of shared memories, comfortable expectations and instant, familiar (but not too familiar) recognitions.3
In Chicago, John’s drinking increased. He began squiring around various young women, ignoring his wife, hanging out at race tracks, and—maybe the most egregious act of all—depleting his once considerable estate.4 Leaving Nettie at the Lexington Hotel, John moved into the Auditorium Annex, where he acquired a new friend and drinking pal, Robert “Pony Bob” Haslam, whose once proud accomplishments were now reduced to his lowly position as greeter or doorman.5
“Pony Bob” had been a rider with the Pony Express, whose prominence in our national lore belies the fact that it only existed for eighteen months in 1860 and 1861. Haslam could change horses in twenty seconds and was a fearless rider. During the Paiute Indian uprising in Nevada, his replacement refused to carry the mail onward because of his fear of Indians, so Pony Bob did it for him. At another station, he found that the Paiutes had killed the stationmaster and everyone else had run off. There was no one else to continue the mail run except Haslam. By the time he got back to his original station, he had ridden 380 miles, the longest round trip in Pony Express history. He had also ridden himself into Wild West legend.6
From then on, Pony Bob was a true western hero and his tale of derringdo was recounted as an example of courage, loyalty, and responsibility. It was the stuff of dime novels, yet it was real. After that, he did some scouting for the army and appeared in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Now in his fifties, however, Bob Haslam had become an impoverished drinker for whom someone, out of respect for his storied past, had arranged to get the job at the Auditorium.
In 1895, Minnie was trolling for wealthy men in the Auditorium Hotel when she hooked exactly the fish she was looking for. What made John Ketcham perfect, besides his wealth (which went without saying), was his vulnerability because of his drinking and his weakness when it came to female beauty. A drunken man could always be manipulated, and even Ketcham’s friends noticed that this astute businessman was losing his ability to manage his finances.7
Ketcham began accompanying Minnie to the race track, to restaurants, and to the theater. And she reciprocated by having him come to her home on Indiana Avenue. By then, Nettie Poe Ketcham had had enough of her husband’s errant ways and decided to divorce him. But first, in that era before the no-fault divorce, she would need proof.
Nettie hired the Thiel Detective Agency to follow her husband around. He led them to the Washington Park Race Track, to Chapin & Gore’s wholesale liquor outlet, and—of course—to Minnie’s home. Two of the operatives were a male-female team who showed up at Ketcham’s office in the Monadnock Building every day at the same time, which irked him. He hired William Clarke to stand outside his office door every day to intercept them and try to find out who they were and what they wanted. Clarke was unsuccessful in discovering their names or purpose, but his presence discouraged their return visits. For this service, Ketcham promised Clarke $100 and a new suit.
But Nettie eventually got the proof that she needed of his dissipation and adultery, but she was a clever woman. Instead of instituting divorce proceedings, she asked the court to appoint a conservator over her husband’s estate, as he was going through it at a substantial pace and was not competent to handle his financial affairs. If she had succeeded, he would no longer have control of his money, which would mean the end of the good times. As the price of Nettie’s dropping the conservatorship, Ketcham had to agree not to contest the divorce. In addition, he had to give her some of the Toledo real estate (valued at $100,000) and Diamond Match stock (worth $50,000).
To establish the grounds for the divorce, Nettie’s lawyers produced witnesses regarding her husband’s drunkenness and debauchery. That day in court she was accompanied by her maid and her father, who had come all the way from Toledo to stand by his daughter. John didn’t show up at all, in fulfillment of his part of the agreement.
In January 1897, John Ketcham—almost certainly at her insistence—moved into Minnie’s home. He told nobody except Pony Bob Haslam where he was going and, in fact, continued to get his mail at the Auditorium, where he had also left his luggage. Nor did he ever give up his apartment there. These were all indications that he intended to get back there at some point.8
However, from the moment Ketcham entered the yellow brick house at 3421 Indiana Avenue, he was a virtual prisoner. Whenever anyone came to the door to ask for him, they were told—by Joe Keller or by Minnie herself—that he was not there. But he was there. Unbeknownst to Minnie, John Ketcham’s mother and siblings back in Toledo, alarmed at his disappearance from public life (he wasn’t going to his clubs, he wasn’t contacting his friends, he wasn’t attending to his affairs), had taken up where Nettie left off and had private detectives watching the house. John might occasionally go out riding in a carriage, always accompanied by Minnie, but he rarely went elsewhere.9
In August, Minnie went to Dethlef Hansen and asked him how she could get Ketcham’s bonds out of his safety deposit box at the bank. Hansen told her she would have to get him to sign an order to that effect and give her the password. Around that same time, Minnie asked Hansen if he could find out how rich he was, so she could see if it would be worth her while to marry him. The “old fool” was sick, and she didn’t know how long he would live, but she obviously didn’t want to commit herself to a long-term marriage without sufficient remuneration, particularly if he was going to be an invalid.10
August 1897 was a busy month for Minnie. She rented a flat down the street at 2238 Indiana Avenue, close to where Josephine Moffitt was living, for $16 a month, telling the landlord it was for her sister, a Mrs. Kellard or Kelly from Minneapolis. She brought some of the furniture from 3421 to the little flat, and the other residents watched the proceedings unabashedly, as the elegance of the new tenant was something entirely unfamiliar. Thirteen-year-old Arthur Reutlinger, who also lived in the building, was so overwhelmed by Minnie’s beauty and her pretty dresses that he was sure she was French.11
Minnie spent many evenings at 2238, but to the disappointment of the other tenants, the curtains on her windows were always drawn. Her neighbors did notice, however, that she never had any female visitors, but only male ones. Unlike Josephine’s and Gladys’s visitors, Minnie’s were quiet and well-mannered.
What went on at these get-togethers? There may have been pornographic pictures and films. We know there was liquor because Minnie later reneged on the bill (see chapter 13, pages 53–54). And we know there was food because Joe Keller was charged with bringing sandwiches. If there were no women visitors, then Minnie was not providing sexual partners for her guests, nor was it likely that she was taking part in orgies as the only female. Given Minnie’s personality and incredible vanity, her “at-homes” were probably more in the nature of salons where she would hold court and accept the adoration of her worshipful subjects.
As Minnie got settled into her new life, John Ketcham was becoming more and more an invalid. For the first few months at 3421, he could not stand on his own and had to be wheeled around the house. From about September, however, he was bedridden. Although, certainly, Ketcham was suffering from cirrhosis of the liver, his infirmity nonetheless came on suddenly: One month he was running about town with his lady friends, drinking with Pony Bob, eating at one of his clubs, and spending part of every day in his Monadnock Building office, and the next he was in a wheelchair, his health on a downward slide.
What was Minnie’s part in this? For one thing, she was keeping Ketcham—or allowing him to be—in an almost constant state of intoxication. He was going through a case of claret every ten days, plus other liquor as well.12 Her wine cellar was stocked with champagne. She even declared later that it was necessary to give him alcohol just to keep him alive, and Sena Torrey frequently saw him with small bottles of liquor squirreled away in his pockets.13 It is also possible that Minnie was drugging him.
On September 15, Minnie went back to Dethlef Hansen. She didn’t think Ketcham would live much longer, and she wanted to hurry up and marry him, but she was afraid that a Chicago wedding would cause the newspapers to dig up the Emporia case. Hansen told her to go to a Milwaukee hotel under a false name, then find a preacher there. Well, this is what Hansen said he told her, but the odds are great that he meant not just any old preacher, but specifically “the marrying preacher.”
Wesley A. Hunsberger was known as “the marrying parson of Milwaukee.”14 If there had been a Guinness Book of World Records then, he would have won the “Most Couples Married” category, hands down. Couples swarmed to him because he had his system so mechanized that he would have been the envy of any modern Las Vegas Chapel o’ Love, and the wait in Chicago for a marriage license was very long. In August 1895 Hunsberger married eighty-seven couples, and in 1897, the number was a thousand—most of whom were from Chicago. The “suggested contribution” from the groom was anywhere from $5 to $50, with most people selecting the former (still a lot in the 1890s—equivalent to $134 today).
The Chicago Daily Tribune had run a lengthy article on Reverend Hunsberger in 1895, when it sent two undercover reporters, a man and a woman, to pretend they were waiting for friends to show up and get married. (They took their bicycles with them on the ferry so they could beat the crowd to the parsonage.) The reporters got a look at the operation, and Hunsberger—not knowing they were from the Tribune—gladly answered their questions. Dethlef Hansen probably remembered this article and thought that for sheer anonymity Minnie couldn’t beat the marrying parson, who was processing so many couples he would never remember this particular one. But he reckoned without Minnie’s overbearing personality.
On Thursday, September 23, 1897, Minnie and John, accompanied by Joe Keller, took a hack to the train station and went to Milwaukee. Ketcham was so ill and so weak he could not stand on his own. At the Plankinton Hotel, Minnie signed them in as “A. B. Young, wife, and servant, Boston.” The next morning at 6:30, they headed off for the Hunsberger parsonage—or, rather, Minnie headed off with John Ketcham in tow. Keller stayed behind in the hotel. Everyone who encountered them that day noticed that she was in charge and making all the decisions. The groom seemed to be doped up and seriously ill. Many wondered why a beautiful, vibrant young woman would want to ally herself with a dying old man.15
At the Hunsbergers’, Minnie exited the cab and rang the doorbell, leaving Ketcham behind with the driver. When Mrs. Hunsberger answered the door, Minnie informed her that they wished to marry but that Mr. Ketcham was very ill. Would it be possible to have the ceremony performed in the carriage? “We wish to be married as soon as possible,” Minnie told the minister’s wife. “Mr. Ketcham has been ill and we want to return to Chicago at once.” Mrs. Hunsberger said that Ketcham would have to be brought into the house; there would be no ceremony in the cab. Minnie then walked into the house, leaving Mrs. Hunsberger and the cabbie to bring Ketcham up the stairs by themselves.
The marrying parson was out of town at a conference, but the minister across the street, Reverend I. P. Roberts, was available. John Ketcham was all wrapped up in blankets and robes and had a muffler around his head, but he was able to answer the questions in a clear, albeit weak, voice. Minnie asked if he could be seated during the ceremony, and this was granted.
The official record shows that Minnie gave her name as Minnie Walkup, which must have been a legal requirement, or she would never have revealed it.16 The list of married couples was routinely sent to the Chicago papers because of the large number of people who had come from there, and Minnie went to Milwaukee solely to avoid publicity. But she would not want to do anything, such as using the wrong name, that would later invalidate the marriage. However, the list was delayed until the following Tuesday, and apparently nobody ever picked up on it.
But, to Minnie’s eventual chagrin, she had not gone unnoticed among the unending stream of couples entering the Hunsberger parsonage. It was not just her imperious, take-charge attitude but the incredible discrepancy in age, health, and vitality between her and the groom that caused all the people there that day—the cab driver, Reverend Roberts, Mrs. Hunsberger, and the two witnesses, Miss Annie Miersch (an assistant) and Miss Mae Daugherty (the stenographer)—to carry a vivid memory of the Walkup-Ketcham wedding.
Once more back in Chicago, Minnie locked the marriage certificate in her husband’s safety deposit box (she must have finally gotten the password from him). She told nobody that they were married. Joe Keller knew (he said) because Ketcham had told him. Minnie said she was angry at her husband for that, as she did not want anyone to know it, but this alleged statement might have been invented to prove that John Ketcham was compos mentis at the time of his marriage.
On October 1, Minnie went back to Dethlef Hansen’s office and told him she had married “the old man.” She wanted Hansen to draft a will but expressed doubt that she could get her husband to sign it—which indicates that, for all the seeming loss of his faculties, perhaps there was a remnant still left of Ketcham’s business acumen. And, in some dim recess of his mind, he may have understood what was happening to him.
Hansen drew up two handwritten copies of the will, bequeathing everything to “my dearly beloved wife,” and sent them on to Minnie. Once again, Ketcham exhibited signs of suspicion, as manifested in this note from Minnie to Hansen: “My Dear: A new idea has entered his head. He wants to know just what you want for having written those papers [the two copies of the will]. I told him I would send for you and let him talk with you, but he says he has no desire to meet you. Of course, I repeat our conversation because I know you care nothing about what he says. However, it will be as well for you to write a formal letter which I can show to him. As ever, M.”
On October 15, George Ketcham finally managed to break through the barriers at 3421 and visit his brother, now a bedridden invalid. Minnie had hired a stenographer from a detective agency to hide under the bed and take notes on the conversation. George Ketcham was appalled at John’s condition. His brother had been asleep when he first entered, and so he was hazy and confused when he first awakened, but even after that he seemed to be mentally adrift. He could not remember the location of certain pieces of property he owned, and often he would just gaze off into space. He seemed incapable of answering many of the questions put to him. (Regardless, in a gross error of judgment, George had a couple of drinks with his alcoholic brother!) Neither Minnie nor John told George that they were married, and it is distinctly possible that John was unaware of it himself.17 After this meeting, George went to the Central Police Station to see if there were any way to extricate his brother from 3421 Indiana Avenue. But the police told him that if John were of sound mind and wanted to stay there, there was nothing they could do.18
In late October, Minnie took all the furniture out of the “party house” down the street. After that, a bill collector came looking for her a few times, but was never able to find her. On occasion, Minnie had Dr. Stephen DeVeny (who had also attended her mother) come in to see John Ketcham, but other than that—as she had done with James Walkup—she insisted on being the only one in the house to nurse him and give him his medicine.19
On November 1, 1897, according to Sena Torrey and Joe Keller, John Ketcham came to them (even though he was bedridden) and asked them to be witnesses to his will. Joe claimed that Ketcham read them the will before everybody signed, and in this little slipup the real circumstances are undoubtedly revealed. It is not necessary for the witnesses to know the contents of the will before signing: What they are witnesses to is not the will itself but the testator’s declaration that it is his will, as well as his signing of it and their signing it also, all in the presence of each other on the stated date.
But Joe (or Minnie, if she instructed him to say this) might have thought the witnessing was invalid without a reading of the will. By November 1, however, Ketcham was so weak and so mentally gone that he could never have read it aloud.
A close examination of John Ketcham’s will reveals a signature that is spidery and tenuous, uses his first and middle initials only (despite the importance of the document), and bears no relationship to his signature when he was healthy. And, although the document itself states that it is being signed by everyone on November 1, Dethlef Hansen drew up the will in early October and incorporated the November 1 date into the text at that time.
Now, it is entirely possible that John Ketcham signed this document himself. But it is even more likely that Minnie signed his name, probably after he died (she had told Dethlef Hansen that she doubted she could get John to sign a will), then bribed the witnesses to say they signed it on November 1. She would have wanted to truncate the signature so as to minimize the chances of someone’s spotting the forgery and therefore would have used “J. B. Ketcham” instead of his full name. At any rate, when Ketcham signed his will—if he did so—he also signed his death warrant.
Twelve days after John Ketcham supposedly signed his will—November 13, 1897—he was dead, just ten months after moving into Minnie’s house on Indiana Avenue. Minnie wisely called in Dr. DeVeny to sign a death certificate. He did so, indicating acute alcoholism as the cause.
However, it didn’t take long for authorities to discover that the woman claiming to be Mrs. Ketcham was the notorious Minnie Wallace Walkup, acquitted of poisoning her first husband in 1885, in a controversial verdict. In light of that discovery (with information furnished by the Ketchams in Toledo), an inquest was ordered, to determine whether the deceased’s organs contained lethal amounts of poison.
For anyone who had been in Emporia, Kansas, in August 1885 and was now in Chicago in 1897, it must have seemed like déjà vu. Once again, Minnie’s calm demeanor and lack of emotion were startling. She gave interviews in the luxuriously appointed rooms of the house where her husband’s body was undergoing an autopsy, telling reporters it was John who wanted their marriage kept a secret (even though he had supposedly blurted it out to Joe Keller). But she did learn something from all that negative publicity in Emporia, and when she knew the neighbors were watching the house, she went upstairs and sat in a window overlooking the street, striking poses of anguish for their benefit.20
John’s family was stunned to learn not only of his death but that he had been married for almost two months. They had no intention of letting what remained of his wealth pass to this woman who was obviously a gold digger. They would challenge both the will and the wedding: John could not have been in his right mind for either of those events. And they wanted their son and brother’s body for burial in the family plot in Toledo. But they knew not with whom they reckoned, notwithstanding her young age, as Minnie gave every indication of fighting them on all fronts, including burial rights. She told reporters about the plot in Forest Home, conveniently omitting the fact that her mother already occupied one of the two sites: “John will be buried in my lot in [Forest Home] cemetery, where I expect to lie beside him when my time comes.”21
There were challenges from others, as well. John Ketcham had dated quite a few women and it was rumored that some of these would come forward to claim rights as common-law wives. Indeed, two of them showed up on Minnie’s doorstep hoping to scare her into settling with them, but she did not scare easily and they were sent away.22
In Illinois in 1897, as in some other states at the time, legislation regarding common-law marriages was an open invitation to fraud and blackmail. No third party was necessary to witness the promise the couple made to each other in a private exchange of vows, as long as there was some kind of evidence that the two people intended to ally themselves. What started out as a well-intentioned law often ended up with unscrupulous people coming forward to claim this relationship when a wealthy person died, as was the case with John Ketcham.23
Minnie was well aware of the law and wisely foresaw that she would have a better claim if she could actually get a marriage license rather than stand in line with all of John’s other “spouses.” She may have moved John to her house not only to control him but to establish just such a relationship, especially since she waited so long to marry him. However, the insistence of George Ketcham and friends of John to be allowed to see him must have alerted Minnie to the likelihood of a stiff challenge to a common-law marriage—hence, the trip to Milwaukee.
When the suspicions against Minnie hit the newspapers, Gladys Forbes and Josephine Moffitt came to assure her that they knew lawyers who could see to it that nothing would happen to her. Dethlef Hansen, who was probably more astute about public opinion than Minnie and also did not want to lose “his” case to another attorney, took her aside and told her that if people saw these courtesans calling on her, it would not look good. Besides, a story about the “party house” where Minnie spent her evenings with other men as her husband lay dying had already been published. It was important to avoid any new scandal.24
So when she testified at the inquest, Minnie showed no grief but told her story in a straightforward, unemotional way. However, when the coroner wanted to postpone the proceeding to examine the organs for poison and research the drugstores in the neighborhood of 3421 Indiana Avenue, Minnie lashed out. The coroner told her he would issue her a certificate of burial, but she refused to accept it: “No, I want more than that. I must have more than that. I demand it. I demand it. You can’t imagine, gentlemen, how I have suffered. You say that you are delayed by the analysis. Can it not be hastened? Please, gentlemen.” On this last, her tone changed from one of imperiousness to one of “great sweetness.” They agreed to hurry.25
Minnie held her husband’s body hostage until she got George Ketcham to agree not to open his head to examine his brain; she was afraid they would find some lesion or other indication that John was mentally incapable of making a will or consenting to a marriage, which would interfere with her chances of inheriting the estate. When George consented, Minnie turned the body over to him for burial in Toledo. However, she would not be accompanying her late husband to that city, because she didn’t want to cause an uproar and was afraid the Ketchams wouldn’t treat her right—the same reasons she used to absent herself from James Walkup’s funeral. Although she said she would visit John’s grave “in a few days,” she never did so.26
At last the chemical analyses were completed, and the cause of death was determined to be “acute alcoholism,” although Minnie got them to change it to the more euphemistic “cirrhosis of the liver.” There were trace amounts of strychnine in Ketcham’s organs, but nothing more than could be accounted for in the medicine prescribed for him by Dr. DeVeny, and certainly nothing close to a lethal dosage.
Did Minnie kill John Ketcham? It is a certainty that she was responsible for his death in some way, although she would have been afraid—because of her past, sure to be discovered—to give him arsenic or strychnine. In fact, she probably didn’t think she would need to kill him at all, as he was already ill with cirrhosis and it would take its natural course. But it is doubtful whether the disease would, under normal circumstances, have acted as fast as it did, given his condition before he moved into Minnie’s house and his precipitous deterioration within a very short time after that.
John’s family had hired detectives to watch the house, and evidently part of their mission was to make every attempt to enter it. That’s how they knew visitors were being told the story about John’s being away when they were very well aware that he was still in the house. Minnie must have felt some of this pressure and therefore consented to let George see his brother on October 15, but she must have realized that she was losing control of the situation. The Ketchams could get a court order to remove John, and, even though she was his wife, the fight might have been a long and costly one. Minnie would not want to risk having John removed from her home; he would have to die first. The timing is interesting: Two weeks after George’s visit (and his subsequent inquiry at the police station about getting John out of Minnie’s house), the will was signed, and twelve days after that John Ketcham died.
How did Minnie kill John Ketcham? Not with any of the classic poisons, as she would have been leery of those, in case her true identity were to be discovered. But there are a few other things she might have done with equal success. First, she was allowing him access to alcohol, and even actively providing him with it, which was exacerbating his condition. Second, she may have been using drugs to keep him sedated; the organ analysis seems to have been focused on poisons and may not have tested for drugs. If it were not for Minnie’s past, there would have been no analysis at all, and probably not even an autopsy. Since Minnie’s history was the primary reason for the analysis, it is more than likely they were just testing for the poisons she was accused of using in 1885: arsenic and strychnine, with maybe a test for cyanide thrown in for good measure. A drug overdose might have been overlooked completely. Once the poison tests showed up negative and the cirrhosis was discovered, there would be no need to look further, especially with Minnie’s clamoring for closure.
But the most probable method Minnie used to kill John Ketcham was a tried and true one, at least before today’s forensic detection methods, and that is a pillow over his face. She simply smothered him, and he was too weak to resist, as he was in a drunken stupor or drugged (or both) and debilitated by cirrhosis. The telltale petechial hemorrhaging in the eyes, indicating suffocation, might have been discounted or overlooked, as would pillow fibers in his mouth or lacerations on the tongue or the inside of the mouth, caused as the victim struggled for air.
Not long after John Ketcham’s death, a startling accusation was made: It was not John Ketcham who had been the bridegroom at the Milwaukee wedding but the butler, Joe Keller, disguised as Ketcham! The groom had had his head wrapped up in a muffler, but the Reverend Roberts, who had performed the ceremony, could see a mustache poking through. John Ketcham did not have a mustache; however, Joe Keller did. And people also noticed that the groom was much shorter than the bride, whereas John Ketcham was taller than Minnie (and Joe Keller was shorter). Tom Riley, the hackman who drove them to the Hunsbergers’, said the groom was a “little sawed-off man.” Reverend Roberts, shown pictures of both men, said that Joe Keller looked like the bridegroom he saw.27
Minnie avoided all questioning reporters by claiming to be bedridden with “nervous prostration” because all the events since her husband’s death were “too much for her strength.” This new attack on the marriage was probably the result of investigation by the Ketcham family, which was determined to show it as invalid.
Joe Keller was taken to the police station for questioning—actually, to several stations. They couldn’t arrest him then because they didn’t have enough evidence, but they were convinced he knew something, and they wanted to get it out of him before Minnie’s lawyer could spring him. Keller was reported as having disappeared, since he never went back to 3421 Indiana that night. This added to everyone’s suspicions that he had guilty knowledge, and this theory was magnified by Minnie’s becoming unnerved at his absence. Was she worried he might say something that would incriminate her?
As a result of this, Dethlef Hansen moved into Minnie’s house, supposedly to be on call should she be arrested. When Joe didn’t come back, Hansen took over his duties as butler, turning reporters away because of Minnie’s “nervous prostration.” When Minnie became more and more hysterical at Joe’s absence, Hansen left Sena Torrey to look after her while he tried to find out from the police where Joe Keller was. He had an idea that Keller was still in custody somewhere, and he was right: The police had shuttled him from the station at Thirty-fifth Street to that at Hyde Park, then on to Woodlawn, and finally to Halsted Street, all to avoid Hansen. Eventually, the lawyer got a writ of habeas corpus and Keller was released.
It all turned out to be a tempest in a teapot, though, as, one by one, those who said the groom was Keller and not Ketcham tempered their statements. Reverend Roberts ultimately stated that he believed it was Ketcham after all, and Tom Riley said it was obvious the man was really ill and not shamming. Even the Ketchams’ attorney admitted that they knew John had gone to Milwaukee (probably followed by those detectives), so the Case of the Spurious Bridegroom quietly disappeared from the newspapers. But which was the truth? And what made the witnesses change their stories?
Even if they couldn’t invalidate John Ketcham’s marriage, his family had no intention of letting the will go unchallenged. They were convinced that Minnie had used undue influence and that John was mentally incompetent when he signed the will. George Ketcham violated his agreement with Minnie and had his brother’s body exhumed and the brain examined for signs of incapacity, but nothing was found.28
Minnie, Joe Keller, and Sena Torrey appeared in court to testify as to the circumstances surrounding the signing of the will. When first informed that the Ketchams would try to break it, Minnie was furious: “Let them try it,” she snapped. “I will make someone smart for the insult of the coroner’s inquest.” James Purnell, the Ketcham family’s lawyer, had already gone to the Illinois Trust and Savings Bank to prevent Minnie from gaining access to John’s safety deposit box, but—even if he were successful—he was probably too late, as she already seems to have had access to it, keeping the marriage certificate and the will there.29
On her day in court, Minnie “fluttered” in, perfectly aware that the unusually large crowd present that day was there to see her. When she heard their dismay at only seeing her back as she faced the court, Minnie obliged by turning to them “so that her beauty might have the effect on the spectators that it was calculated to have on the attorneys and witnesses.”30
At some point, the Ketchams realized that they would not be able to break the will and either bowed out or settled with Minnie. She was then duly appointed executrix and went about settling the estate, which proved to be a protracted chore spanning the next few years—possibly because she disputed some of the claims presented by John Ketcham’s creditors. For example, in early 1897, Ketcham had boarded a horse with a veterinarian, Dr. John Hamilton, because the animal had leg problems. After that, of course, Ketcham was not allowed to leave 3421 Indiana, so the horse was neither picked up nor paid for. After Ketcham died, Dr. Hamilton told Minnie he wanted her to take the horse and reimburse him for the animal’s care, but Minnie claimed she knew nothing about it and that her husband had never owned that horse. Hamilton was forced to apply to the probate court, saying that the horse was “eating his head off every day.” In the end, he was allowed to sell the animal, apply the proceeds to the bill, and submit a creditor’s claim against the estate for the balance due.31
Another creditor was the noted architect Thomas Wing, designer of one of the 1893 World’s Exposition buildings, who had drawn up plans for a building John Ketcham wanted to erect on Dearborn Street between Twenty-second and Twenty-third Streets (close to the building eventually chosen by the Everleigh sisters for their famous brothel in 1900).32
During the estate process, Dethlef Hansen, who had no courtroom experience (and didn’t seem to want to acquire any), brought in the Trude brothers, George and Alfred, to assist him. The Trudes were infinitely more accomplished and established as attorneys than Hansen was or ever would be, so they must have decided to play second and third chairs to him on the basis of wanting to be connected in some way with this famous probate case. (In 1893 Alfred Trude had successfully prosecuted Patrick Prendergast, a mentally unbalanced and disgruntled office-seeker who had assassinated Carter Harrison I, the mayor of Chicago.)33
The Ketcham estate was not finally settled until the middle of 1900. Long before that, however, Minnie had a falling out with Dethlef Hansen, the result of two con artists trying to cheat each other. She had refused to pay his bill after all the work he had done, especially in the beginning when it looked as if she might be arrested for murder or fraud. And he had grossly inflated his bill, padding it with items such as responding to newspaper articles that brought up negative items about Minnie (when it is very likely that he himself had spread the rumors that spawned the articles!).
Despite John Ketcham’s profligacy in his later years, his estate brought his widow $250,000, the same amount she had received from her first husband, James Walkup. On a visit to New Orleans, Minnie declared that most of the Ketcham fortune would be allocated to the building and maintenance of a home in Chicago for “enfeebled and deformed” children and that she would live on the grounds and help out with the project. Needless to say, none of this ever happened.34