We do not count a man’s years unless he has nothing else to count.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1870)
DeLancey Louderback may have left home at an early age, but he kept in close contact with his siblings. When the youngest member of the clan, Sarah Eckert Louderback—eighteen years younger than her half-brother—lost her husband to a stroke, DeLancey had a solution. Sallie (as she was known) had married Chicago attorney Henry App Ritter in 1891, and when he died suddenly in February 1913 at the age of fifty-five, she had no means of support. Their twenty-one-year-old son, Henry Jr., was in college, and their younger son, DeLancey Louderback Ritter, had died a year or so earlier.1
At the time of Henry Sr.’s death, the Ritter family was living next door to Louderback at 4920 North Kimball on the block he owned, quite possibly in a home he had built for them. Henry Ritter had been a successful attorney, but income ceased at his death and Sallie would soon be alone, when her son went out on his own.2
Sallie’s big brother proposed something that would benefit both of them: Sallie and Henry Jr. would move into the “Crystal House” at 4918 North Bernard Street, where she would supervise all the household affairs and pay DeLancey $75 per month toward expenses. Louderback would pay everything over $75. (It sounds like a terrific deal for Sallie and young Henry, until you realize that $75 in 1913 is the equivalent of $1,682.) Ever the businessman, Louderback had his sister sign a written contract that would expire in September 1914, unless Sallie wanted to terminate it earlier.
As an example of what it took to run this household of three in 1914, here are a typical month’s expenses with today’s equivalents in parentheses:
groceries, $70 ($1,555)
wages for Tony, the butler/chauffeur/handyman, $70 ($1,555)
laundry sent out, $3 ($67)
telephone, $8 ($178)
ice, $7 ($156)
dairy products, $13 ($289)
electric lights, $16 ($356)
gas, $4 ($98)
Although some of these figures would fluctuate from month to month, on average the household expenses came to $200 (around $4,444), of which Sallie would be responsible for $75 ($1,666) and DeLancey the remainder. Ordinarily, Louderback would have had to pay a housekeeper/cook for the services Sallie performed, and that would have added another $70 ($1,555) or more to his budget, but without the benefit of Sallie’s $75 offset.
In July 1913, Louderback had contracted with architect Charles Bostrom to design plans for a residence at the corner of Kimball and Ainsley, on the opposite end of the block from the “Crystal House” at North Bernard and Ainsley. (If this was the site of the Ritter residence—and it seems to have been—perhaps the plans were for renovations rather than an entirely new house.) Who was going to live there? Another relative? Or perhaps Minnie Ketcham? If this house had been built or renovated, it was sold before April 1914.
In January 1914, Louderback had Bostrom draw up more plans, this time for a combination store and apartment building at Western and Sunnyside Avenues. A much more ambitious project, these plans cost twice as much as those for the house, but this building never materialized. However, both events illustrate that, as of January, anyway, Louderback was looking to the future.
In February 1914, several things happened in DeLancey Louderback’s life. He made plans to retire with an eye to spending the rest of his days in Europe, and on the seventh drew up a new will, which he had not done since his wife’s death in 1911. In it, he left a life interest in one-quarter of his estate to “my friend, Mrs. Minnie Wallace Ketcham.” Then he sold off all his real estate and railway stock holdings in the amount of three and a half million dollars.
Around this time, Minnie was on her way back to Europe, and Louderback undoubtedly was making plans to join her there when his affairs were wrapped up in the States. This is a logical assumption, as her address in London was in care of a business owned by Louderback’s brother-inlaw Charles Braun, widower of his sister Claribel. In fact, as the proceeds from the real estate and stock sales were never found, it may be that he entrusted Minnie with them, or sent them to her, to hold for him or invest with Braun until he arrived in Europe.
According to a news item whose contents were possibly apocryphal, Minnie gave DeLancey Louderback a special sleeping potion before she left for Europe. She said it would prevent him from lying awake at night, sleepless from missing her.3 In that critical month of February, then, Louderback began taking various sleeping powders to cure his insomnia, whether due to his missing Minnie or from some other cause. He also developed severe headaches, sometimes so bad that he bandaged up his head in a futile effort to dispel them. His friend William Stuart, chief clerk of the election board in Chicago, visited him one day that month and noticed eight to ten bottles on Louderback’s dresser. DeLancey told him they were to help him sleep. Louderback’s headaches and general ill health got so bad that he went to California to try to cure himself (many people in that era were great believers in going to another climate to regain health), but it didn’t work. He returned to Chicago.
In March, with his plans firmly set to leave for Europe in April, Louderback’s friends gave him a big send-off dinner at the Blackstone Hotel. By the end of that month, he was suffering from a severe cold along with the headaches.
At the beginning of April, Louderback closed up the separate apartment he had kept on Wilson Avenue just off Broadway—the one he had taken Agnes Sowka to in 1912. His current love interest, spied on by the neighbors as much as they could get away with, was a tall, beautiful young woman whose taste in dress suggested that she was a secretary or stenographer. She was described as “strikingly handsome” rather than pretty, somewhere between a blonde and a brunette in coloring. This was probably not Minnie Ketcham, as her hair was decidedly black and she would have been forty-five years old then—hardly considered young. Moreover, the mystery woman’s wardrobe seems more subdued than Minnie’s characteristic glamor. Also, Minnie was in Europe in April 1914.
The security surrounding this apartment was enormous. Clearly, Louderback wanted to prevent the very thing the neighbors wanted to do most: determine the identity of DeLancey Louderback’s frequent female visitor. The door of the hallway leading to the apartment had six locks on it and the windows of the apartment itself had double blinds. Still, despite all the secrecy, the two were frequently seen riding together on the “L” and shopping for candy in the local confectioner’s shop.
Louderback himself supervised the removal of the furnishings on April 5. There were ornate mirrors, exotic Oriental rugs, and expensive furniture. Coincidentally, Louderback’s secretary, thirty-three-year-old Bertha Schneider, whose home was farther down Wilson Avenue, received a shipment of furniture that same day. In the will that Louderback had drawn up just two months before, he left $5,000 to Miss Schneider, and there were rumors that he had proposed to her. However, this seems unlikely, as his plans to spend the rest of his life in Europe did not include Bertha Schneider.
From the beginning of April, Louderback’s health seemed to get worse. On the first and the fourth, he had Sallie Ritter send Minnie cablegrams in London (contents unknown), and somewhere in there he had an associate send her a package (likewise unknown). Despite his illness, he was still able to get up and take his meals at the table, but after breakfast on Thursday, April 9, his condition grew severe, and a doctor, Paul Kelly, was sent for. By the time he arrived, Louderback was in a coma. Among the bottles on the patient’s dresser was one labeled “cyanamide,” which undoubtedly caused Dr. Kelly’s next action: He pumped Louderback’s stomach.
Cyanamide had only recently been developed, around 1896, as a pesticide and a fertilizer. It came in crystal form and had no known medicinal function because it was so deadly. However, the Online Medical Dictionary says that “cyanamide often occurs as calcium salt” and that calcium salt, to which citric acid has been added (“citrated”), is used to treat alcoholism.4 Was this known in 1914? If so, would Louderback have taken it with that in mind? It seems strange that he would have deliberately taken crystals from a bottle clearly labeled “cyanamide” to help with his insomnia. However, Louderback’s symptoms—the headaches, the severe cold—are those associated with the inhalation or ingestion of small amounts of cyanamide.
Dr. Kelly’s stomach pumping was too late to help DeLancey Louderback, who died at 9:40 A.M. that same day. His body was sent to a funeral home for embalming in preparation for shipment to Philadelphia, where he would be buried next to his wife, Virginia. But after the embalming, someone became concerned enough about the circumstances of Louderback’s death to call in the coroner, who promptly ordered an inquest.
Rumors immediately began to circulate that Louderback had committed suicide because Chicago residents had just that Tuesday voted down a subway bond pertaining to a route along which Louderback had extensive real estate holdings. However, he had sold all those in February, so that wouldn’t have affected his economic status.
The coroner expressed his opinion that Louderback had not died of cyanamide, but this was before the autopsy (which was made difficult because of the stomach pumping and the embalming, which would have removed much of whatever poison remained in the body). The dead man’s addiction to sleeping potions now became public knowledge, and people indulged in rumors regarding his supposed proposal to Bertha Schneider and the identity of the mystery woman in the Wilson Avenue apartment.
In Chicago in 1914, people were highly critical of Dr. Paul Kelly for having pumped out Louderback’s stomach and for sending the body in for embalming so quickly after his death. Louderback’s business partner, Michael J. Faherty, who was also a witness to the will, defended Kelly’s actions and his refusal to talk to reporters about his decisions. Faherty made a strange statement, indicating that possibly he, too, thought his partner had committed suicide: Louderback, he told reporters, was now dead and left behind no widow or children, so just leave him alone and Paul Kelly, too.
Despite the coroner’s assurance that the cyanamide found in Louderback’s room did not cause his death, the autopsy proved otherwise. The cause of death was ruled to be “an overdose of cyanamide, taken medicinally”—this, despite the earlier statement that there was no medicinal value to cyanamide.
By this time, the contents of Louderback’s will had been made public, and there was a great buzz about Minnie’s inheriting a quarter of the estate, especially as most of DeLancey’s colleagues had no idea that the two were friends. Besides the generous gift to Bertha Schneider, there was a $500 bequest to the nurse who had attended Virginia Louderback throughout her illness, with the rest of the estate being divided among DeLancey’s living siblings or the sons and daughters of deceased siblings (with the notable—and unexplained—omission of a living son of his dead sister Claribel). And, while other siblings or their children got outright bequests, Sallie alone of all Louderback’s relatives received exactly the same inheritance as Minnie Ketcham: a one-quarter life interest. After Sallie’s and Minnie’s deaths, their shares were to be vested in Louderback’s other siblings and their heirs. This meant that Sallie’s son Henry would not get any share of the estate. Maybe Louderback did not trust him, or possibly he felt that he had done enough for the Ritter family.
As Sallie Ritter was testifying at the inquest, a young man entered the courtroom and claimed that he was a distant relative named Albert Louderback Jr. and that he was upset at having been left out of the will. His request to ask Sallie a question was granted by the judge and it concerned another mystery woman: “Did a Mrs. Hopkins visit the Louderback home at any time during the past two months?” “No,” Sallie answered, “I never heard of such a woman.”
The young man, a waiter at the prestigious Union League Club, said that he had heard from his brother that the traction magnate had often escorted “Mrs. Hopkins” to dinner at the Grand Pacific Hotel. Michael Faherty then stepped forward and spoke sternly to “Albert Louderback”: “You don’t belong here. You get out.” The young man replied, “Yes, sir,” and left the courthouse. (“Waiter meekness heard the voice of command” was the Chicago Times’s comment.)
At least one reporter was sure that “Mrs. Hopkins” was really Minnie, and possibly he was right. When she was living in New York City and traveling around, she used the Grand Pacific as her home base while in Chicago. Minnie was not averse to making up names for herself (Mabel Estelle Wallace in 1895, not the last time she used a pseudonym) when she wanted to avoid publicity. But Minnie was probably already in Europe the two months before Louderback’s death.
Although the bottle in Louderback’s room was labeled “cyanamide” and this term was also used by most newspaper articles, the official terminology used by the inquest jury and on the death certificate was “Acute Pulmonary and Cerebral Oedema, caused by Potassium Cyanide poisoning.” And the most startling part of the jury’s decision was that the cyanide was “self-administered unintentionally [emphasis added] in excessive quantities on April 9, 1914.”5
It’s hard to believe a verdict of accidental overdose. The jury was probably influenced by the lack of any obvious motive, the reputation of the deceased, and all the testimony regarding his addiction to sleeping potions. Because, unless he were deluded as to the true nature of cyanamide, Louderback would not have taken it unless he wanted to kill himself. There could be no “unintentional” overdose if, in fact, it had come from the bottle labeled “cyanamide.” Other than suicide, then, the only possibility is murder.
Reporters, digging up everything they could on DeLancey Louderback, discovered that the title to the “Crystal House” was not held by the dead man, but by his secretary, Bertha Schneider. This was revealed to them by people who said they were relatives of Louderback—possibly Sallie or Henry, as they were the only ones living in the Chicago area. When a reporter telephoned Bertha about it, she refused to talk to him. “I don’t care to say anything about the matter at all,” she told him, then hung up abruptly when he tried to get her to say what the quid pro quo was in exchange for the house, obviously intimating that it was sexual favors.
The so-called relatives who had first alerted the reporters as to this arrangement also voiced their concern about Bertha Schneider and the large monetary bequest she was given. They wanted to contest the will, but Louderback—anticipating exactly that—had put in a clause awarding only one dollar and no more to anyone who did so.
Bertha Schneider would have been better off squelching all this talk by telling reporters what was really going on, that the title was put in her name to disguise the house’s true owners from the public. The Ravens-wood house and property didn’t belong to Louderback after all, or even to Bertha Schneider, but to his Northwest Land Association, of which he was president. Bertha had to sign a separate contract stating that she would transfer the property to the NWLA whenever they asked for it. Given Louderback’s past dealings, this whole contrivance must have been concocted to achieve some tax or other economic advantage. But the bottom line was that Louderback did not own the house personally, so his heirs didn’t, either. And, in fact, it is not even listed in the probate files. (There was even a later rumor, one that never materialized, that Minnie would come back from London and live in the famous house.)
As for Minnie, despite her bequest, in March 1915 she hired a stateside law firm to represent her in her suit against the Louderback estate for the amount of $2,550, which she said she had deposited with DeLancey over a four-month period in 1904. Then, on March 20, having applied for her new passport in December of 1914, she boarded the RMS Lusitania and arrived in New York City on Monday, March 26, 1915—just six weeks before the fatal sinking of that ship by a German U-boat off the coast of Ireland on Tuesday, May 1. She gave her address in Chicago as 156 West Washington Street and shaved a year off her age.6
Eventually, Minnie would drop her lawsuit against Louderback’s estate, possibly feeling it would prolong the time before she could get her life interest. For some reason, the Louderback attorney, John Cummings, dragged his feet on presenting the final accounting and even had to be threatened by the probate court in December 1917 to take care of it or be fined. It was finally settled in 1918, and the entire amount of the estate, consisting solely of personal property, was a mere $10,000. A newspaper from Emporia, a city periodically embarrassed about its connection with Minnie and her inability to stay out of the news, commented that the depletion of the millionaire’s assets was “due to the expensiveness of Mrs. Ketcham’s friendship.”
As it turned out, Bertha Schneider probably profited the most from DeLancey Louderback’s estate. His $5,000 bequest to her and the $500 gift to Virginia’s nurse, as well as payment of his debts and funeral expenses, were to be taken care of before any other inheritances were disbursed. Minnie and the relatives got percentages of the remainder instead of actual dollar amounts.
Minnie Ketcham was overseas when DeLancey Louderback took his fatal dose of cyanide, but otherwise the circumstantial evidence is just too coincidental to be dismissed in her favor. What are the odds that one woman would have three men intimately connected with her—all of whom left her substantial inheritances—die soon after making out their wills? Her first victim, James Walkup, was poisoned exactly a month after she married him. Her second, John Ketcham, died two months after she married him and two weeks after he made out his will. DeLancey Louderback, potentially her third known victim, died of poisoning two months after making out his will. In addition, it is safe to assume that he gave her or allowed her access to the proceeds of his $3.5 million real estate and stock sales, and this would have given her an even greater motive than the inheritance.
Louderback must have intended to connect with Minnie when he got to Europe, since he knew her mailing address, and he was wiring cablegrams to her there. And the day after his death, Sallie Ritter sent her two cable-grams, indicating that Minnie had a close connection with that household, not merely a casual one.
Minnie went to Europe around February, when Louderback began taking—or increasing his intake of—sleeping powders. After that, he experienced severe headaches and cold symptoms, which could have come from cyanide. If the news item about Minnie’s giving Louderback the sleeping potion is true, then that could have been the source of the cyanide that killed him—either the actual bottle labeled “cyanamide” or one that was unlabeled. Since both cyanide and cyanamide occur only in crystal or powder form, she could have mixed it in with other kinds of crystals or powders. Or she could have given him the cyanamide bottle, telling him it was a new, effective kind of sleeping potion, or a cure for alcoholism (which Louderback might have had at that point and assuming Minnie knew the poison was used for this).
Another possibility is that Louderback was slipped the fatal dosage by Sallie or Henry or both, either on their own or as part of a conspiracy with Minnie. It is interesting to note that although Minnie always allied herself to older men because of their wealth, in the case of each death, there was a young man living in the household: her cousin Willie Willis (Walkup), butler Joe Keller (Ketcham), and Henry Ritter (Louderback).
The Ritters, mostly Sallie, had the means, the motive, and the opportunity to kill DeLancey Louderback. He seems to have received a large dose around breakfast time on the day he died (with cyanide, any decent amount produces immediate results, usually fatal, so we can assume it was taken close to his collapse), a time he would ordinarily not be taking a sleeping potion. Sallie might have been afraid of what would happen to her when DeLancey left for Europe and her contract expired in September. Her son Henry was just getting out of college and about to go out into the world, so he would be unable to support his mother for a while. Surrounded by excess and privilege, as she was, it might have been an incredible temptation. If she is the relative quoted by the newspapers, her consternation over Bertha Schneider’s supposed ownership of the “Crystal House” is evident.
Yet, nobody ever suggested that Louderback had been murdered, so nobody was ever looked at closely for it. What about suicide? This, too, is a distinct possibility. Louderback had pretty much taken care of his affairs in preparation for leaving for his retirement in England and France. Moreover, he was feeling so poorly by the time of his death that he must have wondered how much longer he actually had left. He would have preferred ending his life in familiar and comfortable surroundings. But this begs a very important question: Why was he feeling so sick? Because he was ingesting or inhaling small amounts of cyanamide, something he would not have done on his own if he wanted to commit suicide. Why torment himself in little bits when he could get it over with in one big dose? In an ironic ending, it may be that the cyanide given to him by Minnie—or Sallie—was causing him so much distress that he killed himself instead.
If we could only know what was in those cablegrams and the package that Louderback sent to Minnie just before he died, we might have important clues that would shed light on the mystery. As it is, readers will have to decide for themselves which is the most likely solution: murder by Minnie, murder by Sallie, murder by Henry, murder by two or three of them in a conspiracy, or suicide.
The verdict of the inquest jury (accidental overdose) was the only one that could not have been the cause of death. Louderback was either murdered or he committed suicide, and if Minnie had been anywhere near Chicago, she would have been an immediate suspect once that will was filed.
Although Louderback was probably infatuated with Minnie when he first met her and throughout their trip to Europe in 1902, he had plenty of opportunity to marry her after his wife’s death in 1911. It’s hard to see why she would not have consented to this, as she had said “yes” twice before to older wealthy men she was obviously not in love with, so it must have been his own choice. By the time of Virginia’s death, Minnie would have been in her forties, a little older than DeLancey liked his women.
In the end, then, the designation in his will—“my friend”—was probably just that. Louderback seems to have been more a William Jay to her than a John Ketcham. And she may have even helped him out in the procuring of his young women, given her own associations with people like Gladys Forbes and Josephine Moffitt.
With the death of DeLancey Louderback, our story is nearly at an end. It only remains to be seen how some of our “characters” fared in their later lives and whether Minnie Wallace Walkup Ketcham, the consummate adventuress, had any more “adventures.”