It is impossible to cheat life. There are no answers to the problems of life in the back of the book.
—Søren Kierkegaard (circa 1850)
The Wallaces and the Findlays
Elizabeth Wallace had died in Chicago in 1895 while living there with Minnie. Her ex-husband, James, died on Christmas Eve in 1908 at the age of eighty in a New Orleans almshouse. Cause of death was chronic diarrhea and senility.1
Dora’s husband, Edward Findlay, who had been so loyal and dedicated to his sister-in-law, Minnie Walkup, was dead by 1900, as was his son Milton. At the age of eighteen, his other son, Edwin, joined the U.S. Navy and was assigned to the USS Iowa in Bremerton, Washington, as a seaman apprentice first class. Dora and Minnie Findlay moved to Brooklyn, New York, where Dora declared herself a widow who had borne six children, only two of whom were still living.
In 1910, Dora and her two children (Edwin and Minnie) were living in Chicago, where Dora worked as a milliner in a hat shop and Edwin was a repairman for the telephone company, a job he would hold for the rest of his working life. Somewhere between 1900 and 1910, Dora married a man named Edward Smith and divorced him. Her daughter, Minnie, had married a man named Fisher, who was dead by 1910. In 1911, Minnie Findlay Fisher married a man from Indiana (on her aunt and namesake’s birthday), with whom she raised several children. Edwin Findlay married a young woman who was boarding in their Chicago home and they had one child, a daughter. He died in 1951.
When Edwin and his wife established their new home, Dora moved in with them. She died in 1921 of chronic nephritis (kidney disease) and chronic myocarditis and was buried in her sister Minnie’s second plot in Forest Home Cemetery, next to their mother, Elizabeth Wallace. Neither grave bears a stone.
Judge William T. Houston
Judge William T. Houston moved from New Orleans to New York City around 1890 and established a law practice there. In 1907, he represented a woman who claimed to be the daughter of “Silent” James Henry Smith, who had just died and left an estate of $25 million. Smith had once been considered New York’s richest bachelor, after inheriting $30 million from an eccentric uncle. Shy and retiring (hence the nickname), he blossomed into a society man and, in September 1906—over fifty at the time—married the ex-wife of another rich man, Rhinelander Stewart. He died six months later, still on his around-the-world honeymoon.2
Judge Houston’s client had a marriage certificate that showed her mother had married a James Henry Smith in 1866. Smith abandoned his wife and daughter and went to live in England. However, “Silent” James Henry Smith would have been only twelve years old at the time of the alleged marriage.
In 1910, Judge Houston was involved in another estate problem, this one concerning the will of his sister, who had left her entire estate to an adopted nephew. The Houston family claimed that the nephew had exerted “undue influence” over her, and they were trying to break the will. The nephew said he’d kill them if they contested it. No outcome of this case was ever reported.
Judge William T. Houston died in Washington, D.C., on August 8, 1918, at the age of eighty-four.
J. D. Houston continued his violent ways after the Mascot shooting in 1885. In 1888, New Orleans police commissioner Patrick Mealey was assassinated by a man who had purchased the murder weapon with a note written by Houston asking the gun shop owner to sell it to him.3
In 1889, the last bare-knuckle prize fight in the United States was held in Richburg, Mississippi, across from New Orleans, a seventy-five-round affair between John L. Sullivan and Jake Kilrain (won by Sullivan). It was held in Mississippi because such fights were illegal in Louisiana. The famous fight was organized by James D. Houston and others, and before it began someone nominated Houston as referee. However, the honor went to another man.
In 1891, Houston was one of the leaders of a “vigilance committee,” which was responsible for what has been called the “largest mass lynching in American history.” An estimated 6,000–8,000 people showed up to watch or participate in the lynching of eleven Italians who were suspected of having assassinated New Orleans police chief David Hennessy.
James D. Houston died of leukemia in New Orleans on January 29, 1894. He was forty-five years old.
William Pitt Kellogg
William Pitt Kellogg, the former governor of Louisiana who scandalized America by traveling around the country with Minnie Walkup after her trial and who bought the house for her in Chicago, died in Washington, D.C., on August 10, 1918. He left an estate of $1.2 million but made no bequest to Minnie.4
The Walkup Family
Elizabeth (Libbie) Walkup married John Elmore Martin, son of a former governor of Kansas, on October 10, 1886, a little over a year after the death of her father. They had two children, both sons. John was elected mayor of Emporia in 1892 and, like his father-in-law, James Walkup, belonged to many fraternal organizations, including the Ancient Order of United Workmen.5
Martha (Mattie) Walkup Hood and her husband, Harry, never had children. They lived in Emporia for the rest of their lives. Mattie Hood’s father-in-law, the redoubtable Major Calvin Hood, died in Emporia on February 4, 1910, at the age of seventy-eight, just thirteen months after the death of his wife.
Eben Baldwin
After James Walkup’s death in 1885, Baldwin took over his job of figuring out the road taxes for the Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe Railway Company. His great-grandson’s widow reports that the beautiful stone barn that Eben Baldwin had built in 1879 is still standing off Highway 70 near Lawrence, Kansas. He died on August 4, 1917, in Lawrence.6
Dr. Luther Jacobs
Dr. Jacobs continued practicing medicine in Emporia. In 1904, he contracted blood poisoning and went to Chicago to find a cure. He died there, just short of his sixty-second birthday, on April 28 of that year.7
Luther Severy
In 1898, at the age of seventy, James Walkup’s old neighbor and witness to Minnie’s spilling the box of arsenic, decided to run for mayor. He lost the election, and the young, callow new owner of the Emporia Gazette, William Allen White—who would eventually become that city’s most well-known citizen—wrote an unkind article about Severy. “I had no grudge against him,” White said later. “I was just a young smart aleck, and he was a man of seventy.”8
The next day, having completely forgotten the article, White saw the defeated candidate on the street and greeted him. Before White even knew what was happening, Severy, who hadn’t forgotten, had taken his walking stick and broken it over the younger man’s head. White good-naturedly figured he had it coming to him, so he went back to his newspaper and wrote a humorous article about the encounter. The day after that, he saw Severy again: “I saw his hand fluttering and quickly reached out to grab it. There we stood, he with tears in his eyes, and I tried to say quickly that I was sorry, then he said it, so we both said it—and it was all over. It was a case of temper with him and idle meanness with me, put into rather cutting and unjustified rhetoric. I think it taught me a lesson.”
Oscar Milton “Mit” Wilhite, teenage son of the sheriff at the time of the Walkup trial, had sworn under oath that he and a companion, Ed Gutekunst, had had sex with Minnie while she was in jail, then later recanted. Around 1909, Mit went into the hotel business with some financial help from Major Hood, who also took Wilhite into his confidence concerning a memorial the major wished to leave the city when he died. Mit’s hotel-restaurant combination in Emporia was called the Mit-Way.9
Mit Wilhite married a woman named Emma and had two daughters. In 1933, at the age of sixty-seven, he committed suicide. Mit’s father, Sheriff Jefferson Wilhite, died in 1904.
Mary Jay
Mary Jay, the daughter of William Jay, who sat by Minnie every day during her trial, never married. She lived for the remainder of her life with another single woman, named Mary Richards, whom she designated as her “partner” in the 1910 census. As neither had any occupation or owned a business, but were independently wealthy, the appellation is puzzling. It probably did not signify the sort of relationship that it does today, but it’s possible that to Mary Jay, it did. And maybe she, like her father, had a crush on the captivating Minnie Walkup back in 1885. Mary Jay died near Kansas City, Missouri, on August 30, 1926, at the age of seventy-five.10
The Lawyers
Chief prosecutor Colonel John W. Feighan moved to the Pacific North-west after the Walkup trial and became city attorney in Spokane, Washington. In 1890, he applied to the government to receive an invalid pension for his Civil War service and was dead by 1898, when his widow filed for her pension.11
Clinton N. Sterry, hired by Harry Hood to assist in the prosecution of Minnie Walkup, later became a judge and, like his colleague Colonel Feighan, moved to the West—in his case, to New Mexico and then Arizona, where he was general attorney for the Santa Fe Pacific Railroad Company. In 1900, he and his family were living in Los Angeles, California, where he died before 1910.
Minnie’s defense attorney Thomas P. Fenlon died suddenly in the Ryan Building in Leavenworth, Kansas, while he was there on business. He was sixty-five, still practicing law.
George S. Dodds of Hazlehurst, Mississippi, the young heartthrob of the Emporia ladies, had a successful career as an attorney, and in 1904 he argued a case before the U.S. Supreme Court (he lost).
Dr. S. Emory Lanphear
S. Emory Lanphear was the defense witness whose answers on cross-examination caused so much disruptive laughter in the courtroom, much to the chagrin of Judge Graves. At the time of the Walkup trial, Lanphear was only twenty-six and had earlier run into some legal trouble for selling alcohol out of a drugstore.12
Dr. Lanphear’s specialty was gynecology. In 1908 he wrote to the chief of police of Newark, Ohio, for information on that city’s “red light” district for an article he was writing. Eventually, he moved with his family to Campbell, California (near San Jose), but in 1914, his wife divorced him on the grounds of desertion. He had been gone for some time before that, as in 1910 he was living in St. Louis with a twenty-nine-year-old female “lodger” who was a ceramic artist.
In 1915, Dr. Lanphear was arrested in St. Louis because two women there accused him of having fathered their children. At the same time, he was being investigated for violation of the Mann Act (taking a woman across a state line for immoral purposes). Possibly he was still researching for his “red light” article. Lanphear died in Tampa, Florida, in 1920, at the age of sixty-one.
Dethlef C. Hansen
A month after the Hansen v. Ketcham trial, Minnie’s former partner in crime accused two young women of robbing him of $50 in a restaurant. He had them arrested but then never showed up at the trial to testify against them. It would be interesting to know the details: Were they prostitutes? Prospective clients? And how, exactly, did they rob him?13
By 1904, Hansen had moved to New York City, where he then represented a young woman named Violette Watson (a “casino girl”), who was suing an elderly, wealthy Colorado mine owner named Thomas F. Walsh for breach of promise to marry her. She claimed that she had been on vacation in Europe with her family and encountered Walsh, who then convinced her to leave her family and accompany him to New York City as his ward. She was sixteen at the time and he was in his fifties (shades of Minnie and James Walkup!). He had promised to marry her, Miss Watson said, and in the meantime was to give her $15,000 a year to live on. He had already showered her with many expensive pieces of jewelry and other gifts when he was enticing her to come to the United States with him.
However, no marriage was forthcoming and, in fact, Walsh was already married. In the summer of 1905, he and his family were renting Grace Vanderbilt’s Newport estate, Beaulieu, for $100,000.
Violette Watson went to Dethlef Hansen (he was never more than very vague as to how she found him; to be more specific would reveal his reputation as a “blackmail” lawyer) to file three separate suits against Walsh:
1. $250,000 for assault (presumably sexual)
2. $100,000 for breach of promise to marry
3. $40,000 for failure to keep his promise to support her with the $15,000 annual maintenance
Watson and Hansen agreed that the lawyer would receive 40 percent of whatever he could get in a settlement from Walsh. It was obvious that these two never intended the case to get to trial, nor did they even desire that. But she double-crossed him, settled with Walsh on her own for $55,000, then refused to pay Hansen. She told him to file a dismissal of the suits, but he didn’t want to let go of his fee, so he refused. In addition, he let on to the court that the cases were still alive when, in fact, they had been settled. For his trouble, he was suspended from practice for a year for “unprofessional conduct” and for not dismissing the suits when his client instructed him to.
Although he was suspended from practicing law, Hansen was still entitled to represent himself. The desperate attorney went back and forth between Walsh and Watson, trying to get his money from either of them. Naturally, it was Walsh who had the deep pockets, so Hansen filed suit against him. But Walsh was shrewd and had the money to hire shrewd lawyers, so for Dethlef, it was like coming up against a brick wall.
In late June 1907, he got an order to depose Violette Watson on the grounds that she was about to leave New York City and he needed her testimony for his case. But Walsh got the order vacated by showing that Watson had no plans to leave the city, and the judge who granted it also stated that, since she was a minor at the time she signed the 40 percent agreement with Dethlef Hansen, it couldn’t be enforced. Walsh’s attorney asserted (probably correctly) that the deposition of Violette Watson was merely for the purpose of forcing a settlement from Walsh because of the facts likely to come out during it and the resultant scandalous publicity.
Nothing came of Hansen’s lawsuit against Walsh for his fees, but we know from the Hansen v. Ketcham affair how tenacious he could be when it came to money he felt was owed him. In 1910 he sued Thomas Walsh for libel and conspiracy in a District of Columbia court for statements attributed to the latter in a July 1905 Denver newspaper, in which he called Hansen a “blackmailer and perjurer.” Hansen added the conspiracy allegation because he said Walsh tried to ruin his reputation when he was practicing law in New York. As nothing more was ever reported about this case, it must be assumed that it came to nothing.
In 1919, now back in Chicago, Dethlef Hansen represented a stenographer accused of stealing $10,000 in bonds from the brokerage company she worked for. When the police found the bonds in his client’s room, Hansen claimed she had purchased them by scrimping and saving. A few weeks before this woman’s arrest for bond theft, she had been arrested and fined $10 for throwing a book at a woman, and two weeks before the book-throwing incident, she had been in a mental hospital. Hansen didn’t have very much good luck with his clients over the years.
Dethlef Hansen never married. He was still practicing law when he died in Chicago’s Alexian Brothers Hospital on May 3, 1932, at the age of sixty-one. At the time, his sister was head of the Department of Applied Arts at Iowa State University, obviously much more successful than Dethlef, who never lived up to the talents he exhibited in law school.
Billy Pike
Billy Pike was so relieved at escaping the clutches of Josephine Moffitt that, shortly after the trial, he married a German girl. A few years later they had a daughter, then moved to Germany, where he died in Munich on April 20, 1932, at the age of sixty. He left a million-dollar estate, much of which was in trust for his daughter.14
Gladys Forbes
Gladys Forbes continued her “career” of catering to rich men by throwing nightly parties at her home, to which prostitutes were invited. In 1915, a man at the Blackstone Hotel (site of DeLancey Louderback’s farewell dinner the year before) was handing out Gladys’s cards to men who were staying there, so there was quite a parade in and out of 3132 Calumet Avenue.15
Women who lived in the vicinity of Gladys Forbes’s home, fed up with the constant late-night noise, traffic, and “ragtime music at all hours,” as well as the “uncensored living pictures glimpsed through open windows,” decided to do something about it. They armed themselves with flashlights and cameras to see license plate numbers of cars that stopped there and take pictures of the patrons. One of these irate women was Mrs. William Hale Thompson, whose husband was then mayor of Chicago.
Shortly after the town meeting at which this moral outrage was expressed, Margaret Forbes (formerly Margaret Thorpe, the young girl who tricked the foundling hospital and got to stay with Gladys and Tom Shannon) beat a female neighbor with a horsewhip for the comments she had made about her foster mother. Margaret was charged with assault.
Inspired by the women of the neighborhood, and maybe shamed by them, too, the city prosecutor decided to do a little sleuthing of his own. He hid out all night across the street from Gladys’s place, hoping to get enough evidence to apply for a warrant and raid the place, but nobody came! It turned out that someone with inside information about the raid, who was also no doubt a patron of the Forbes establishment, tipped Gladys off.
Josephine Moffitt
When last we saw “Baby Jo,” she was on her way to Europe to find Prince Victor of Thurn and Taxis, who she claimed was her common-law husband. In July 1914, she was in London, as was Minnie Ketcham, and still calling herself Princess Josephine of Thurn and Taxis. But Prince Victor had gotten married in 1911, and the real Princess of Thurn and Taxis was a force to be reckoned with. Calling Josephine “an adventuress and an impostor,” she sued her for the misrepresentation and won a judgment of $500 (although was probably unable to collect it).16
The real princess was an ambitious, wealthy socialite from Pennsylvania named Lida Nicolls, by all reports a loud, profane, and difficult woman. She was one of those rich Americans who wanted to marry a titled European, and she had done so with her first husband, Lord Gerald Purcell Fitzgerald, an admiral in the Royal Navy and nephew of Edward Fitzgerald, translator of The Rubaiyat by Omar Khayyam. Lida had three sons with him, then divorced him in 1906.
In 1920, Princess Lida was sued by a Count Bernard Francis Gregory, who had been part of the Newport and Long Island horse and society set since around 1915, for damaging his reputation with high society by calling him a “thief and a swindler” as well as a dishonorable impostor. Gregory was asking for $50,000 for the slander. In response, Lida claimed he had tried to get her involved in a swindle for $10,000.
And it turned out Princess Lida was right. “Count Gregory” of Great Britain was really Bernard Greenbaum of Brooklyn and St. Louis, and he had a rap sheet that went back to 1896 for grand larceny, passing bad checks, and obtaining money under false pretenses. In September 1915, he had taken an emerald pin from a Newport jeweler, saying he was going to take it home and decide if he wanted to buy it. As the count presented himself as a dapper, rich gentleman (complete with British accent and monocle), the jeweler let him. But then Gregory never came back to pay the jeweler for the pin and in the meantime was trying to get an associate to fence it for him.
In jail, Gregory kept up his charade. He fainted in his cell, claimed he couldn’t sleep on the iron cot because he couldn’t have his pillows, and every morning would ask, “Is my bath ready?”
In 1921, the “count” got in trouble again, this time for giving an art store a $150 bad check for a painting. When he was arrested on the street, he was dressed to the nines in a derby, a frock coat, striped trousers, spats, patent leather shoes, and carrying a cane. “Unhand me, sirs! You are making a terrible mistake in arresting me,” he protested to the police, who were richly amused at the swindler.
Josephine Moffitt, calling herself Josephine Moffitt-Thurn, was arrested in London in May 1915 for running a gambling operation in her apartment. The police, tipped off by an informant, found Josephine, eight other women, and five men in her apartment while a card game was going on. One of the men gallantly insisted that Josephine knew nothing about the cards and had let him use her “gorgeously appointed apartment” for a party. Right after she returned from an errand (so his story went), the police showed up and arrested everyone. “The idea of my being accused of running a gambling house is simply terrible,” Josephine commented in her typical histrionic style.
Ironically, when Josephine was living in London and passing herself off as the Princess of Thurn and Taxis, she was herself the recipient of blackmail letters that threatened to expose unspecified incidents if she didn’t pay up. Obviously, her high-profile lifestyle there led the letter-writers (there were two men involved) to think she not only had money but would be an easy touch. They were wrong on both counts.
Josephine returned to the United States in 1922, now going back to her birth name of Guillemet, and settled in New York City. In 1926, shortly after her fifty-seventh birthday, she auctioned off her expensive furniture, silverware, rugs, and other items through a New York gallery. The 1930 census, the last known record of her, shows her still living in New York City. She does not show up in the Death Index for New York, California, Illinois, or Louisiana.
And so ends the entertaining saga of Josephine Moffitt. She spent her entire life trying to make herself younger and richer by lying and scheming, with only a modicum of success. Yet she never resorted to murder, as did her friend Minnie Ketcham.
William Hale Thompson
“Big Bill” Thompson served as Chicago’s mayor from 1915 to 1923 and again from 1927 to 1931. One of his aides was Billy Pike’s brother Gene. Thompson was one of the most colorful of Chicago’s politicians, “the Huey Long of his time and locale.” His administration was marked by great accomplishments, but also great corruption, as he was an ally of Al Capone, who contributed heavily to his campaigns. Thompson died on March 18, 1944 (see also this chapter, page 214).17
The Lawyers
Dethlef Hansen’s lawyer, Hugo Pam, went on to serve on Chicago’s Superior Court bench as a judge for nineteen years. He died of a heart attack at the Drake Hotel in New York City on May 30, 1930.18
Minnie’s lawyer (and later Billy Pike’s), Alfred S. Trude, had the dubious distinction of having a fly fishing lure named after him. Trude owned a ranch in Big Springs, Idaho, and in 1906, Carter Harrison II (who had served as mayor of Chicago, like his father, and would be elected for another term in 1911) was visiting. As a joke, Harrison wound together some carpet wool and dog hair on a hook, named it the “Trude,” and presented it to his host. But the fly looked good and it worked well, so a new western lure was born and today there are many variations on the original Trude, most containing some type of animal hair. Alfred S. Trude died in Chicago on December 12, 1933, at the age of eighty-seven.
Robert “Pony Bob” Haslam was discovered by “Buffalo Bill” Cody in a run-down Chicago apartment in 1911, crippled from a stroke. Cody launched a fund-raising campaign to help out his old friend and contributed to it quite generously. But it was no use: Haslam died—an alcoholic, impoverished, and paralyzed—in 1912. He is buried in Chicago’s Mount Green-wood Cemetery with a marker paid for by Buffalo Bill that reads: “Famed Pony Express Rider, Robert H. Haslam, ‘Pony Bob’ 1840–1912.”19
Sallie Ritter and Henry Jr.
Sallie remained in Chicago, dying there on February 16, 1923. Her son Henry moved to Passaic, New Jersey, shortly after the Louderback case and worked for a rubber company as a clerk in the auditing department. When he filed his mandatory registration for the World War I draft in June 1917, he indicated that he had served with the Illinois National Guard in the artillery branch for a year and a half.20
On September 8, 1917, Henry married Mary Turnbull Hall of Glencoe, Illinois, and they had one child, a son. By 1930, Mary was dead and Henry was a sales manager for the Manhattan Rubber Company and living in Radnor, Pennsylvania. Some time after that, Henry married Helen Krick, the daughter of a man who had made his fortune in railroads. He died suddenly on October 12, 1936, at the age of forty-four.
Agnes Sowka and Harvey Hill
Agnes Sowka obviously came to her senses after having sowed her wild oats with the incorrigible Harvey Hill. She settled down in 1914, marrying a salesman and bearing him two sons.21
Harvey Hill kept on passing bad checks. In September 1916, his father, Alonzo, then sixty-one, married eighteen-year-old Elizabeth McMillan. A month later, Harvey was arrested after a night of partying with a woman named Ella Goodchild and having a fight with a cab driver. His father had had enough and refused to post his bond. Harvey couldn’t believe it: “I don’t see why any man should let his son remain in a place like this,” he complained to a reporter. When the reporter went to Alonzo, now president of his own bank (the A. H. Hill State Bank), to plead Harvey’s case, the older man said: “Well, I am through with Harvey; I have no further interest in him. I am clean as a whip and nobody has anything on me. . . . He must extricate himself from his present difficulty without my aid. . . . Harvey needs the lesson. Let him clear himself from that disorderly conduct charge and those two cases of passing bogus checks and make a man of himself, and then, perhaps, I’ll help him again.” Two weeks after the disorderly conduct arrest, Harvey was picked up again, this time for passing a $28 bad check. At the same time, the Milwaukee police had a warrant for his arrest on a similar charge. Once again, Alonzo refused to intervene.
In February 1920, Harvey was arrested in Muskogee, Oklahoma, on a charge of bigamy filed by a woman who claimed to be his common-law wife. When reporters went to the Alonzo Hill home to interview Harvey’s father about this new charge, Elizabeth Hill told reporters that they had not seen Harvey for three years.
However, it looks as if Harvey might have straightened himself up and reconciled with his family. In 1930, he was married and living in Chicago, still a real estate salesman. When his father died, on December 18, 1937, his obituary said he was the “fond father” of Harvey and two other children (one born to him and his young wife, who was still married to him at his death).
Bertha Schneider
Not long after the death of her employer DeLancey Louderback, stenographer Bertha Schneider married Everett Peacock, a successful entrepreneur who had started his own seed company as a young man in his twenties and was also the first president of the Milwaukee-Irving State Bank, which he had founded in 1919. The couple moved into the residence formerly occupied by Bertha and her parents on Wilson Avenue.22
But in 1921, the wunderkind ran into difficulties when his bank was found to be short the whopping sum of $468,000. The shortfall was traced to Peacock and two others, who were involved in a check-kiting and Ponzi scheme to the tune of one million dollars and involving other banks besides his own. The three were indicted, and the Illinois State’s Attorney’s office questioned Bertha for several hours. They knew from the start that she had guilty knowledge, and after interrogating her they realized that Peacock still had most of the proceeds. (The bank had already made up the shortage on its own.)
Peacock’s bank was across the street from his seed company, and soon after the former was established, Peacock went to work on his check-kiting scheme. He would buy cashier’s checks, either in his name or that of his seed company, at other banks, then deposit the cashier’s checks in his own bank. After that, he “borrowed” the money from the Milwaukee-Irving bank, some of which he put into his seed company.
When he was being investigated, Peacock was unrepentant: “I do not deny that I borrowed the money,” he said. “I borrowed a lot of money. What I object to is being made the goat. I borrowed the money with the knowledge of the bank officials and some of the Directors. . . . They are as much to blame as I am.” He was fired as president of his own bank in January 1921.
The case did not come to trial until 1924. The prosecution introduced ninety-two checks that were used in the scheme, the last of which were just before the defendants were to be investigated. The prosecution thought this showed they knew they were about to be discovered and wanted to steal as much money as possible.
The jury in the Peacock case spent twenty-five hours in deliberation, and from the start the vote was 11–1 for conviction. The holdout juror could not be convinced to change his mind, so there was no choice but to declare a hung jury. Then it was discovered that the holdout juror had actually done the same thing in another trial, that of sixteen-year-old thief Willie Dalton (he had stolen three-quarters of a million dollars in Liberty bonds from his employer, the Northern Trust Company). However, he had a legitimate reason for holding out—or at least one that could not be contravened—and the decision stood. The state’s attorney does not seem to have refiled the case, probably because the bank had already replaced the stolen money.
In 1924 a printing company sued William Hale Thompson, Eugene R. Pike, and two others for $150,000 for unpaid campaign literature. The defendants won the first trial, but an appellate court ordered a new one. At the new trial, a verdict of $151,000 was granted against one of the defendants (not Thompson or Pike), but then it was discovered that some jurors had been bribed, so yet another trial was granted.
In 1928, the printing company filed a conspiracy suit against Everett Peacock and others for trying to prevent them from pursuing their suit against Thompson. Peacock was the financial manager of the printing company (possibly not the wisest hiring choice for its managers to have made, under the circumstances) and was trying to force the owner to sell it to a magazine company. So once again, Bertha Schneider’s husband found himself the subject of litigation and negative publicity.
In the late 1930s, Bertha, her husband, Everett, and their two children—Hubert and Bertha—moved to Kenosha, Wisconsin. On July 2, 1942, twenty-four-year-old Staff Sergeant Hubert Everett Peacock was killed in action in World War II. On October 19, 1949, Everett R. Peacock died in Kenosha, leaving behind his widow, Bertha, and his married daughter.
Minnie remains a mystery woman. After she returned from Europe in 1915, she settled again in Chicago. By the time of her sister, Dora’s, death in 1921, her last name had changed to Keating—it isn’t clear whether it was a pseudonym or she changed it because of marriage. (As the owner of the plot at Forest Home Cemetery, she informed the office there of the change when Dora was buried.) If there was a Mr. Keating, he was dead, by fair means or foul, by 1930, and Minnie was a widow again, living under the name of Estelle Keating in a large apartment building on North LaSalle Avenue.23
On May 10, 1957, Estelle (aka Estella) Minnie Keating (aka Ketchum [sic]) died of heart failure in San Diego, California, at the age of eighty-eight. She is buried in Mt. Hope Cemetery with no stone marker, sole occupier of her plot, which was purchased by “the Estate of Minnie Keating.” None of the twenty names buried within a fifteen-foot radius of her grave have appeared in our story. Her great-grandnephew recalls going to her funeral as a young boy, but he never saw her when she was alive, even though his family also lived in Southern California.
According to her death certificate, Minnie had lived in San Diego for ten years, which means she had gone there in the late 1940s. What brought her there? And what is the significance of the “aka Ketchum” after the name Keating? If she had remarried, that name would supersede any others, which leads to the conclusion that “Keating” was most likely a pseudonym. Still, she doesn’t seem to have been shy about letting people know that her real name was Ketcham. Maybe she spent her later years regaling people with tales of her two triumphs over the legal system.
In the end, then, Minnie outlived everyone—her parents, her sister, her nephew, her niece—and died alone in a remote western city. The information on her death certificate was not supplied by any relative or friend, as is the usual case, but by San Diego County records, which probably means she was under county care when she died.
Minnie not only outlived everyone but had probably alienated most of her acquaintances, and maybe her relatives, long before that. Now she lies, alone and anonymous, her secrets buried with her.