Carl never lied. He never drank, never smoked, never chewed gum. Everyone knew. Worked in his father’s butcher shop. The ladies liked him. Worked there, then went in the Army. Joined up in 1914. About the time his mother started acting crazy. “Used to preach around,” Carl said. She had a vision that wouldn’t let her rest. Said she’d seen Carl lynched, hanging from the limb of a tree. One of Carl’s sisters—his older one, not his twin—said, “It made her despondent.” Some people say that’s why she killed herself. Slit her own throat. “Bumped herself off,” Carl said. “I was in the Army, then. I liked the Army.”
Later, when Dr. Hickson heard that, he said, “We can now add latent homosexuality to the complications.” Dr. Hickson was head of the city’s Psychopathic Laboratory. “Psychoanalysis has revealed,” he said, “that a mania for Army life is one of the inevitably distinguishing characteristics of women haters. . . . I have observed several such cases while in the Army, myself.”1
Carl was nineteen when he joined up. The Army made him a machine gunner. Then it made him a sergeant; then it promoted him to second lieutenant. People respected him. His own lieutenant said, “I was with him under shell fire in the Alsace sector for months. He was alert, intelligent, very competent, brave, a good soldier. As sane as any man I have ever known.”2
Carl never gambled. “In the Army, I never spent my money. . . . I saved $800.” (That $800 would be worth at least ten times as much today.) Carl came home in October 1919, and married Ruth Johnson a few weeks later. They’d known each other since they were kids. “I never kissed a woman until Ruth came along and never anybody else.” Ruth had sung in the choir of Holy Trinity, Lutheran for eight years.3 When Carl enlisted, she resigned from the choir. She said she didn’t want to give any other man the opportunity to ask to escort her home after practice.
A month after Carl married her, Ruth announced she was expecting. Carl was back at work at his father’s shop. He and Ruth were living in a room in her parents’ apartment. They were saving their money so they could buy a home of their own. By June 1920, they’d saved $1,500. (All dollar amounts cited in this chapter are equivalent to ten times their value today. Please see note 10 in the Afterword.) Ruth was eight months pregnant. She’d been buying little things for the baby. Kept a list in her dresser. One day, she told Carl it was time to get their money out of the bank so they could buy a house. That’s what Carl said, anyway.
“We never quarreled,” he said. “A man’s duty is to keep his wife happy. . . . I’ve always done what was exactly right and never done wrong.”4
Once Dr. Hickson heard that, he was ready to make a diagnosis. The city’s Municipal Court referred all sorts of cases to Dr. Hickson. His job was to evaluate people before they went to trial. “Dementia praecox catatonia,” Dr. Hickson said. “A very well defined case. A mind geometrically moral but emotionally ‘unmoral.’ Preoccupied mechanically with ideas of right and wrong . . .”5
Of course, if things had worked out differently—worked out as Carl had planned—Dr. Hickson wouldn’t have said that.
What happened, according to Carl, was that he and Ruth went to her bank and withdrew all but $70 of her savings. They took the money home with them. Ruth put the cash in her dresser, next to her baby list.
Carl said he stayed home the next day, all day Sunday, to guard the money. And—to guard Ruth.
That’s because, Carl said, Ruth had told him she’d noticed a strange man, “a raggedy stranger,” eyeing her. “Suspiciously.” Carl was ready for him, though. He had his side arm from the Army. An automatic. A .45.
Monday came and Carl went shopping for a new knife for his father. He worked behind the counter all afternoon. That night, after dinner, he and Ruth decided it’d be nice to go to a movie. They went to see Sea Wolf. They left the show early.
As they were walking home—it must have been almost nine-thirty by then—Carl said he noticed a man—a raggedy bum—following them. The man didn’t just follow them. He came up right behind them; he came up right beside them. The city was infested with bums: homeless men, men out of the Army, men out of work. Carl and Ruth kept walking. The man followed them right up the steps into the front hall of their building.
“My wife was opening the door,” Carl said, “but she was having trouble with the key. I spoke to her about it. She said she was going to turn on the light. The man said, ‘Don ‘t do that.’ He said, ‘No you don’t. How about the money.’ ”
Carl was ready. He reached for his gun. The man shot Ruth. Carl shot the man. In the dark. In that little hallway. Ten shots. Ruth collapsed. Carl lunged at the man. He knew he’d shot him, but Carl grabbed his head and beat it into the floor. Then he swept up his wife. She was bleeding. He carried her upstairs and told her mother to get help.
Ruth was dead. The raggedy stranger was dead. The police lieutenant who interrogated Carl said, “I thought he was entitled to a medal for bravery after I listened to his version.”6
The newspapers thought so, too. WAR HERO IN DEADLY BATTLE. “I got him, honey. I got him,” the papers wrote Carl had murmured as he cradled Ruth’s body. There were reports about how Carl had mowed down Germans in the Argonne. How he’d been awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. How the French had honored him with the Croix de Guerre. Later, much later, his commanding officer was asked about this. “He was not in the Argonne and did not mow down Germans. . . . He was in officer candidate school behind the lines when the battalion was in the Argonne.”7
Carl had fought it out with the stranger exactly nine months after he’d come home from the Army.
A week passed. Lieutenant Wanderer, Heartbroken Hero. Mourns. Etc. Then the papers found other stories to tell. Carl went back to work behind the counter of his father’s shop.
About the time Carl was mustered out of the Army, the Chicago Police Department established its first Homicide Bureau: its brightest and best detectives, specialists in murder. The department chose a sergeant named John Norton to head the squad. Norton read the papers along with everyone else. If Wanderer was a hero, who was the dead man? There was something else: the dead man had a revolver—a heavy-duty Army Colt that fired .45s. Two big guns blazing away in a foyer. Two shots in Ruth. Three shots in the bum. One hole in the floor. Four holes in the walls. Not a scratch on Wanderer. How come?
Everyone knew who Wanderer was, but the bum didn’t have a name. He’d been in his twenties, about the same age as Wanderer. He was frail, dirty, dressed in rags. He was going bald. The strange thing was that he’d just gotten a haircut. And a manicure. Norton had only two pieces of evidence that could identify the man.
The first was a meal ticket—a commissary card—issued by a circus—in Kansas City to a man named Masters.8 Norton sent a photograph of his John Doe to the circus. A commissary agent there identified the man as a roustabout named Mahoney. Mahoney had disappeared—but not before stealing Masters’s meal ticket. The good news was that Mahoney had killed a man in New Hampshire—clubbed him to death after a bar fight. He’d been sentenced to ten years, then been pardoned and released. The bad news was that Mahoney was twenty years older and six inches taller than Norton’s corpse.9
People began visiting the morgue to view the body. The more visitors, the more identities: An elevator operator at a theater identified the man as a fellow she’d met in a military hospital in England during the war. He’d been a member of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. He’d told her his father was a “wealthy New York turfman who had everything money could buy and heart desire.”10 Norton’s squad contacted the police in New York, but they couldn’t even find the “turfman” father.
The head of a Catholic boys’ orphanage, the Working Boys’ Home, said he was sure he’d seen the dead man’s face before. He took some of his boys back to the morgue with him. “All the boys recognize him as a former resident of the home,” said the priest, “but none of them can recall his name.”
A cop whose beat was the city’s Skid Row thought the dead man was a homeless veteran everyone called “Snuffy.”11
A fellow named Pryor thought the corpse belonged to a childhood friend of his named Bill. “I haven’t seen Bill for eight or nine years . . . he ran away from home to join the circus. Gentry Brothers. He . . . did odd jobs, made himself useful. Everybody liked him. . . . Bill didn’t have any freckles though, but of course, freckles come easily. . . .”12
Norton kept the body cold and turned to the only other piece of evidence he had: the dead man’s gun. Police had found it lying next to him. An Army Colt .45. Serial number C2282.13
(In 1920, forensic ballistics relied on cartridge calibers and weapon serial numbers. The marks left by firing pins and by the rifling of barrels—all that and the parallel-viewing microscopes that made comparisons possible—came later in the decade.)
The Colt Company told Norton that it had sold the weapon to a well-known sporting goods store in Chicago. A clerk in the store told Norton he’d sold the revolver to a man named John Hoffman. There were plenty of John Hoffmans in Chicago. But this John Hoffman—what a coincidence!—this John Hoffman was a brother-in-law of Carl Wanderer. John Hoffman told Norton he’d sold the weapon to Fred Wanderer. Fred was—another coincidence!—Carl’s cousin.
The newspapers kept writing little stories about the different people who thought they knew who John Doe was. Sergeant Norton decided it was time for Lieutenant Wanderer to tell him more about himself.
Norton had Wanderer brought in. Wanderer may not have known about habeas corpus, but the attorney his family hired did. Norton knew the clock was running.
For two days, three men from the State’s Attorney’s office, three detectives, including Norton, from Homicide, and two men from the coroner’s office, including the coroner himself, played good cop/bad cop with Wanderer. They showed him pictures of his dead wife; reminded him she was looking down at him from heaven; accused him of killing her because he wanted her money or because—fool!—he thought she was cuckolding him. They bellowed and shook their fists at him, pushed him around and stomped his feet, talked to him quietly, man-to-man, with their arms around his shoulders, asked him, over and over again, to play out the scene in the front hall of his apartment building.
Wanderer smiled little smiles at them and spoke calmly, when he spoke at all. He told them eighteen different stories. His favorite story, the one he told most convincingly, had to do with how Fred’s gun got in the hands of the dead man.
“Now my wife tells me,” Wanderer said, “she hasn’t got the key. Then I start looking for mine—but it’s under my cousin’s automatic, which I have in my hip pocket. I borrowed it because Fred could have gotten into trouble for having a gun like that. While I’m reaching for it, the other man reached in and grabbed it. He shot my wife twice with it, and I shot back.” Wanderer had carried two guns to the movie.14
As for the $1,500 Ruth had withdrawn from her bank: Sometimes Wanderer said he didn’t know anything about it; sometimes he said he’d told Ruth to withdraw it; sometimes he said she’d withdrawn it on her own and he didn’t know where it was until his mother-in-law found it in Ruth’s dresser after she died. Sometimes he wondered out loud why people were making such a fuss about the money—half of it was his, from the Army.
At two o’clock in the morning of the third day, police woke him up and began sixteen hours of what they called “the third degree.” Bellows, shouts, pushes—and punches. More provocations, accusations, consolations. They wouldn’t let him rest, then they gave him a big steak for lunch. His attorney threatened to file a writ of habeas corpus unless they either charged him or released him.
At six o’clock that night, Wanderer leaned over to one of the interrogation team’s “good cops”—a secretary named George Kennedy—and said, “Let me get policed-up and I’ll tell you the whole thing.”15 They hadn’t let Wanderer wash or shave for three days. Kennedy ran out to find some soap and a razor. Wanderer shaved himself calmly, a nice clean job, without a nick or a scratch. The police brought in a stenographer. Since whatever confession Wanderer might make had to be presented to a coroner’s jury, Coroner Peter Hoffman, a middle-aged man with a distinguished gray mustache, asked Wanderer nearly all the questions.
Wanderer’s confession was twenty pages long. Some of what he said sounded strangely matter-of-fact, hollow and inexplicable, the reasonings of a crazy man. Much of it, though, sounded cold-blooded, clear-minded, and very sane. As his fellow inmates in the county jail later said, “Wanderer’s either innocent or crazy or he’s not human. And he doesn’t seem crazy.”16
Wanderer said—to the police and later to the newspapers—that it took him a week to make up his mind to kill his wife. “I just thought of killing her—and decided I had to do it quick while I was wanting to or pretty soon I’d lose the idea of doing it . . . A man’s place is with his wife and I was always at home. I was always kind to her—but I got this Army idea in my head and decided to follow up on it. . . . See, I was just tired of her. I didn’t want her any more. I killed her so no one else would have her. I never thought of going in the Army until two days before I killed her. . . .17
“The thought of killing anybody doesn’t bother me as much as it would the average person. I’ve put a lot of time in my father’s butcher shop; the idea of shedding blood doesn’t offend me much. Besides that, there’s my Army experience. That taught me not to mind killing. . . .18
“Now, I want to be hanged. I want to join my wife in death. . . . Her lying in that vestibule after I shot her . . . haunts me. I wonder if she will forgive me. I loved her too much to let another man have her. I didn’t want her, myself. It was the Army I wanted. . . .”19
When the coroner asked Wanderer why he’d borrowed his cousin’s gun, Wanderer answered, “To make out like it was a stickup job.” He knew Fred’s gun was the same caliber as his, so he “planned to leave it, lay it there on the floor to make out like it was the other man’s gun.” When Hoffman asked, “Did you think this gun could be traced?” Wanderer answered, “I did after a while.” “Is that the reason you didn’t leave your own gun there?” “Yes,” answered Wanderer. “Because you thought your own gun could be traced?” “Yes,” said Wanderer.
The longest part—the most unnerving part—of Wanderer’s confession concerned the course of his relationship with the man he used to murder his wife. Wanderer used that man’s hunger to serve his own. The cheapest whores worked for better wages. Later, the newspapers described the dead man as “the poor fool who hired himself out to be killed.”
On Monday morning Wanderer went shopping for a new butcher knife; he also went shopping for a man. After he bought the knife, he told his interrogators, he “went for a walk.” He said he crossed Lasalle Street to Madison, then kept on Madison, walking west, across the river. He was headed for a neighborhood that the newspapers called “notorious . . . a resort for mendicants, bums, and derelicts.” At the corner of Madison and Halstead, Wanderer spotted what he was looking for. Standing in front of a cigar store. Young and hungry. Wanderer asked the man if he wanted a job. “He says, ‘What kind?’ I says, ‘Driving a truck, working in our business.’ He says, ‘How much do you pay?’ I told him, ‘Twenty-five dollars a week.’ He says ‘Alright.’ ”20
(Twenty-five dollars a week was a good wage in a good year, but 1920 was not a good year. A depression began in 1920, a severe depression, that would last two years.)
“He says, ‘When can I get the job.’ I says, ‘Meet me at Logan and Western at half past 6:00.’ I gave him car fare—a quarter.” The corner of Logan and Western was one block from the Wanderers’ butcher shop. It was also the first in a series of rendezvous points that Wanderer would arrange, like a hunter leaving bits of food along a path that led to a pit he’d dug and camouflaged. Times, itineraries, and meetings—Wanderer described them clearly and carefully throughout the rest of his confession.21
At six-thirty, the man showed up as Wanderer had instructed; Wanderer told him to follow him. They climbed onto a streetcar. The man didn’t ask any questions; Wanderer told the man to follow him off the car. He told him to wait on the corner. He said he’d be back.
Wanderer walked to his cousin’s house and asked to borrow his gun. Fred asked why. Wanderer told him he needed it for a bet—a bet about how quickly he could take it apart, then reassemble it. Fred believed him. Wanderer walked back to the man with the weapon in his pocket. They got back on another streetcar; it was too crowded for them to talk. At Lawrence and Lincoln, “right by the restaurant, one door from the corner,”22 Wanderer signaled the man to climb off with him. The corner of Lawrence and Lincoln was two and a half blocks from where Ruth and Wanderer lived.
“Did you talk after you got off the car?” asked the coroner. “Yes,” said Wanderer. “For five or ten minutes.” “What was said between you and him at the time?” “I asked him if he wanted to make some money. He says, ‘Yes.’ I says, ‘You just carry out my instructions. When I get to a certain place, just ask for the money. I will give it to you. You just get it as quick as you can.’ ” The coroner asked what that “certain place” was. “Up in the vestibule,” answered Wanderer. “In the vestibule of what?” asked the coroner. “My house,” said Wanderer. “Then,” said Wanderer, “I gave him a dollar for to buy his supper and I left him there. I told him I would meet him. I told him I would meet him there between 9:00 and half past 9:00.”23 It was almost eight o’clock in the evening by then.
Wanderer went home and ate his own supper with Ruth. They decided it would be nice to see a movie. On the way to the show, Wanderer made sure they didn’t walk a route that would take them past the man. On the way home, Wanderer steered them to the rendezvous point.
At the corner of Lincoln and Lawrence, by the drugstore, the two men spotted each other. “I nodded my head to him. He began following us. Sometimes along side us, sometimes a couple of steps behind us.” Up into the vestibule. The key, the lock, the light . . .
The coroner asked, “Then what happened?” “He says, ‘No you don’t. How about the money.’ That’s what he said.” “Is that what you told him to say, previously?” “Yes.” “Where was he when you told him that?” “Lincoln and Lawrence.”
“Then what did you do?” asked the coroner. “Then I drew out my gun. First shot accidentally hit the floor.” “Yes?” “We did not have no money. I saw I had made a blunder, not taking the money with me. I knew . . . I had to do something—he might squeal. I drew my [other] gun and shot in both directions.” “Did you want to shoot this man?” “Yes . . . I did not have the money on me there. I knew he would squeal if I did not carry out my plans.” The coroner wanted to be sure. “Why were you going to kill him?” “Well,” Wanderer said, “just to make it look as if he had done the job.” “What job?” “Killing my wife.”24
After everyone was satisfied—coroner’s office, detectives, prosecutors—Wanderer ordered pork and beans for supper. Coroner Hoffman had his confession transcribed. Police called in reporters and photographers. Wanderer’s interrogators gathered around him as he prepared to sign his statement. Hoffman pointed at the spot where Wanderer was to sign. George Kennedy, the “good cop”/secretary, sat next to Wanderer, hunched and attentive, like an attaché at a treaty ceremony. Norton stood behind them, calm, watchful, somber, a man in his prime, the broad brim of his boater as dark and proper as his suit. And Wanderer? He sat placidly, watching his right hand lightly move a pen across the page in front of him.25
Everyone in the city began talking about what had happened to “the facts.” “The facts” being what everyone had been told—and agreed and believed—was true. A violent, vicious bum turned out to be an innocent victim. A noble man—a war hero!—was really an ice-blooded killer. No one said it, but everyone thought it: a man who’d kill his pretty, young, innocent wife and the child she carried in her womb—that man had to be crazy. “Nobody knows me or anything about me unless I tell them,” Wanderer said to a reporter who interviewed him.
“I should never have believed it,” said Ruth’s mother, “if Carl had not confessed. If I had seen it with my own eyes, I should not have believed it.” She shuddered as she spoke. “Night after night, I have seen them together, happy, loving, talking about the baby. . . . And, after my darling was dead, I tried to help Carl bear the blow. I would throw my arms about him. . . . He seemed always to be greatly affected when I tried to comfort him. And now—how could he have done this thing?!”26
Dr. Hickson from the Psychopath Lab had his theories. “A ‘shut-in personality,’ ” he said. “No contact—that is emotional contact—with his parents or his wife. Lives like a man in a cave . . . conceals his cold bloodedness or non interest in life by methodically doing everything that is right. He inherited from his mother—an out-and-out case of dementia praecox who herself committed suicide—a moral mania. He utilizes it as a sort of code. Behind the code lives the real Wanderer.”27
Three days after the newspapers published Wanderer’s confession, a pretty, seventeen-year-old stenographer named Julia Schmitt contacted Sergeant Norton. She said she lived with her family across the street from the Wanderers’ butcher shop. That’s how she’d first met Carl. They became friends. “He wrote me wonderful letters. I showed them to my mother.” She said she didn’t know Carl was married until she read about his wife’s death in the newspapers. “I was out with him six times,” she said. Four times before his wife died. “We either went on taxicab rides or to Riverview [amusement park]. He was a nice fellow and a good friend. He never said he loved me. We had our pictures taken, once. He always acted like a gentleman. I thought he was a fine chap until I read in the paper about his wife’s death. The fact that he was married was a great shock to me. I was greatly disappointed with him. He continued to write. He became more affectionate in the tone of his letters. He said I was his only friend. I told him I could never think the same way of him. I saw him twice after that. To say good-bye. He told me he was going back in the Army.”28
Miss Schmitt gave Sergeant Norton two of Wanderer’s letters. Norton asked her if Wanderer had ever kissed her. “Yes,” she said. “But he was always very gentlemanly like.”
Norton was delighted. Finally! A familiar, venal—sane—motive. Detectives searched Wanderer’s room and found a single letter he’d written to Miss Schmitt, but never mailed. It began, “Sweet-heart—I am lonesome.” He’d torn it up, but he’d kept it.
Norton took Miss Schmitt to visit Wanderer to see what would happen. Wanderer was polite, but indifferent. “She was just like a lot of other girls who came into the butcher shop,” he said. “I just happened to like her better than the rest—liked to go out with her. I liked a lot of others, too. . . . I never told her I was going to marry her. I had no bad intentions. I just liked her better than the rest.”29 His only regret, he said, was all the money he’d spent—$40 wasted!—on taxicab rides to take her out.30
Wanderer’s father and his sisters visited him the next day. They brought him a Bible and a prayer book. They prayed with him and they wept.31 Even the guards were moved. Not Wanderer. “A man’s got to take his medicine,” he said. “I’ll plead guilty. . . . I’ll ask him to hang me as soon as possible.”32 Sergeant Norton wasn’t impressed. “A man without a soul,” he said as he locked Wanderer in his cell that night.
A week passed.
One of Wanderer’s guards tipped off a reporter. Wanderer had told him: He’d changed his mind. He’d decided to plead not guilty. “They will have to fight to hang me,” he’d told the guard. “I’ve got a swell lawyer and we’ll beat the case yet.”33 His lawyer had told him to change his plea.
Three months passed. The day before his trial—on the charge of killing his wife (no mention of their child)—Wanderer gave an interview to a group of reporters. They asked the obvious: Wasn’t he denying his own confession? How could he do that? Wasn’t he denying everything he’d told everyone—press, police, family—for months?
“Life is sweet and I’m fighting,” Wanderer answered. He ended the interview. “I can’t talk anymore now. You’ll get it all tomorrow.”34 He stood up and walked away. As he strode down the corridor, the reporter could hear him whistling, softly, “There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding.”35
Lieutenant Wanderer was back. He’d told eighteen different stories before he’d confessed. He had a new one, now.
Wanderer’s trial opened on October 4, 1920. There were no women on the jury. (The Nineteenth Amendment, the one that enfranchised women, had become law in late August—too soon for women to become part of any jury pool. Amendment or no amendment, there were no women on any of the juries who heard any of the cases described in this book.) But from the first day of Wanderer’s trial to its last, the courtroom was crowded with women. “Court regulars” were a scruffy lot—an unkempt crew of men, has-beens, pensioners, and rumormongers. Wanderer’s spectators were different: “Women attired in the latest fashions . . . corpulent dowagers . . . mothers holding the hands of boys and girls.”36 The women who came early and stayed late brought sandwiches to eat so they could keep their seats during the noon recess. The judge was offended. “This court is no lunchroom,” he said, then ordered the ladies to eat in the corridor. The women did as they were told but they kept coming: Ruth had been young, pretty, innocent, and pregnant. Eating in the hallway was a small price to pay for justice.
The prosecution took two weeks to present its evidence: Fred’s Colt and its serial number, Ruth’s money and the timing of its withdrawal. The prosecution rested its case by reading aloud Wanderer’s confession. Wanderer’s lawyers confided their strategy to the press: they would argue that Wanderer was insane; that his so-called confession had been coerced; that even if Wanderer had shot his wife, it had been an accident. Reasonable doubt joined with mental incapacity.
On October 20, the defense called Wanderer’s family and friends to testify about his mental health: Carl was the son of a mother who had been insane for at least five years before she committed suicide; when Carl was a boy, he’d tried to commit suicide after he’d caught scarlet fever and been quarantined. In France, in the Army, he’d somehow or other been hit in the head with a baseball bat and been unconscious for three hours. Another time, he’d fallen off a horse and been hospitalized for three weeks.
The next day, the defense called Wanderer to the stand. His lead attorney began by asking him if he’d shot his wife. “No,” he said. Then what about his confession? “They bullied and beat me,” Carl said. A detective sergeant had come into his cell and, while he was still in his underwear, had beaten him up. Coroner Hoffman, himself, had shaken his fist in Carl’s face and then punched him in the head “several times.” “It was all forced out of me,” Wanderer said. He repudiated everything as calmly as he’d once admitted it. All that talk about “taking his medicine” and wanting to be hanged—he denied he’d ever said it. Whatever it was the press, the police, his family said he’d said—he denied it all.37
More and more people pressed into the courtroom as Wanderer held forth. “Old women, young girls, politicians who knew bailiffs, a noted orchestra leader, an artist, several leading criminal attorneys.”38 “Let no one else in,” ordered the judge.
The prosecution called five people to bear witness to Wanderer’s sanity. Two of them were the parents of his dead wife.39 The prosecution pressed on. What about Julia Schmitt? the prosecutor asked Wanderer. (Miss Schmitt’s age dropped from seventeen to sixteen by the time the prosecution ended its cross-examination.) What about the love letters and the taxicab rides and the trips to the amusement park? prosecutors asked Wanderer. Wanderer said such things had never happened or, if they had, he didn’t recall them.
“Kisses for Julia; bullets for Ruth”40 stormed the prosecutor in his summation. The prosecutor was an old pro. He’d worn a red tie for the occasion. “The most remarkable story ever told in the history of Cook County,” replied Wanderer’s lead attorney. Dramatic or not, said the attorney, the facts remained: Carl didn’t kill Ruth; his confession had been extorted; if Carl had shot Ruth, her death had been an accident. Most important: Carl “was not mentally perfect, but an insane man, suffering from dementia praecox.” Thank you, Dr. Hickson.
The jury took twenty-three hours to make up its mind. “We decided,” the foreman later said, “that his confession was forced out of him” by Homicide Detective Norton. “We did not for a minute believe the story told in the confession. . . . The state did not present enough evidence in regards the ownership of the two [weapons]. We had difficulty deciding whether Wanderer or the stranger owned them. We finally decided Wanderer owned both of them. Some of us were afraid that if we found him insane, he would be committed to an asylum for a year or two and then be released. We didn’t want that. We finally decided he was sane. Some thought fourteen years would be sufficient. Some wanted life. We compromised on twenty-five years.”41
Wanderer was jubilant. “I knew they couldn’t crack me. . . . I knew I’d never swing.” Was this the same man who’d said he wanted to join his wife in death?
His defense attorneys expressed surprise. The newspapers described his lead attorney as “astonished.”
The prosecutor, who’d told reporters throughout the trial that he was certain Wanderer would hang, said he was “dumbfounded. What absurdity! What ineptitude! What fallacy! What foolishness!”
“You have erred,” said the judge to the jury. “You told me that you believed him insane, but that an insanity verdict would not keep him locked-up. Now you find him sane. Why, men, I would have sent him away for so long a time that he would never again kill. . . . A grievous error. A regrettable error.”42
Sergeant Norton was a bit more insightful. “They should have a woman’s jury try that wife killer. Women would certainly have done no worse and chances are they would have done much better. That bird should swing, if ever a man should.”43
The jury’s official verdict was “manslaughter.” Manslaughter was (and is) defined as “a crime without malice, express or implied. This may be voluntary, upon sudden heat or excitement of anger, or involuntary, but during the commission of some unlawful act.” If Wanderer behaved himself while he was in jail at Joliet, he could be out in “thirteen years and nine months.” The state decided that this would never happen. If Ruth’s death had been a lethal accident, the state still had “the commission of some [other] unlawful act” to use against “the butcher boy Lieutenant.” Carl had shot two people.
The prosecutors still had Mr. Doe.
Or, at least, they thought they did.
The same day the jury made up its mind, a visitor to the city’s morgue gave John Doe his fourth—or was it his fifth?—new identity.
“I’d know him in hell,” said Herbert Potter. “He’s an ex-Canadian soldier named John Barrett. He stayed at the old Ironsides Hotel.” The Ironsides was a Skid Row flophouse, much like the place where Mr. Potter, himself a Canadian, down on his luck, currently lived. “I loaned him $15 last February on a couple of baggage checks he had.”
Potter was certain Mr. Doe was John Barrett because both men had a protruding front tooth. Better yet: Barrett had signed his name, big and bold, in the Ironsides hotel register, every day, as the hotel required, until the day John Doe was shot. One day, “John Barrett,” the next day, nothing. “Do you think I’d loan money to a man and not know him again,” Potter said. “I’m not that easy.”44 Potter’s story held—until a new set of visitors claimed Mr. Doe as their own.
Police continued to keep the stranger cold and on view for more than sentimental reasons: no one had ever prosecuted a John Doe case in Cook County before.
The newspapers began to refer to John Doe as “that poor boob.” The state decided its best hope of hanging Wanderer was to prove him sane. Sane and guilty of killing Mr. Doe. Wanderer’s new attorneys—a man named Bartholomew and a “lady attorney” named Lefkow—decided their only chance was to prove the opposite.
The governor appointed a “Special Board” of experts45 (including a psychiatrist employed by the Public Welfare Department named Singer) to evaluate Wanderer (yet again) and testify as to his sanity. Wanderer’s new trial judge ordered the experts to conduct their exams in the presence of both the defense and the prosecution.
Although the state’s specialists hadn’t released their findings by the time Wanderer’s John Doe trial began, his lead attorney, Mr. Bartholomew, declared to the jury: “Results show conclusively that Carl Wanderer had the mentality of a child of eleven. We shall prove this by four alienists [psychiatrists], none of whom is paid by us, that Carl Wanderer is and has been insane for some time. We will not ask you to acquit him, but we shall ask you to send him where he belongs—to a hospital for the criminally insane.”
The state’s mental hospitals were notoriously overcrowded and understaffed; their escape rates were as high as 25 percent. The primary reason Wanderer’s first jury had—finally—voted him sane was to keep him locked up for more than a few years. But proving Wanderer sane implicitly meant that “sanity” had to be redefined. How could a man be sane and still have done what Wanderer did? Wanderer’s defense attorneys were risking the same pragmatic “public safety” verdict as before. Wanderer’s prosecutors were risking something more abstract—and profound: If sane men were crazy enough to fight the “Great War,” then a man like Wanderer (Lieutenant Wanderer!) might be judged as normal. Normal and culpable. If Wanderer was sane—then who was crazy?
The courtroom was as crowded as it had been during the first trial. Wanderer’s new judge (an incisive man named Joseph David, a German Jew born in Louisville, Kentucky, from the same milieu as Louis Brandeis) intervened quickly: no men were to be admitted to the room until all the women who wanted to see the trial had been seated.46 Most important: wives of the jurors (once again, all the jurors were men) were welcome to attend the trial; if these women wanted to sit and watch as their husbands decided the fate of Wanderer—the wife killer—that was their privilege.
On the second day of the trial, as the defense and prosecution were presenting opening arguments, a mother and a daughter announced that John Doe was really Joseph Ahrens, their missing son and brother. Twelve men, including Ahrens’s old boss at a tannery, signed an affidavit attesting to that.
A week later, Ahrens himself came to the morgue to identify his own body. “He resembles me, remarkably,” Ahrens said. “I can understand how the mistake occurred. There is a resemblance in the eyes and hair. I am going to buy the poor fellow a wreath. I hope they identify him.”47
Back in court, the alienists, criminologists, and psychologists began their debate. Dr. William Hickson, the head of the city’s Psychopathic Lab, reiterated the diagnosis he’d made the day after Wanderer’s arrest: the accused suffered from dementia praecox catatonia; it was a disease he’d had since birth. The defendant was the insane son of an insane mother. During cross-examination, Dr. Hickson added something of general interest; it was his belief, he said, that 90 percent of all criminals were insane.48
A state psychologist from Evanston followed Dr. Hickson. “Did you examine the defendant? . . . What did you find out?” “That he was only eleven years old, mentally.”49 Judge David interrupted: “What do you mean by ‘standard tests’ . . . are they the same for everybody? Suppose a man has lived on the mountains all his life. . . . Would you ask him the same questions you asked Wanderer?” “Yes,” answered the psychologist.
In their first day of questioning, Wanderer’s defense had opened a Pandora’s box: Treatment vs. Punishment. Standard tests that were not standard.
The prosecution countered with its own experts. The superintendent of the state’s psychiatric hospital testified that Wanderer was sane. “I should diagnose his case as a bad man, a criminal who ought to be cared for by the law.”50 The prosecution didn’t ask what the superintendent meant by “cared for.” Dr. Singer, the Department of Public Welfare’s staff psychiatrist, testified next. He said Wanderer had told him that his wife visited him every night in his dreams. That didn’t prove he was crazy, though. “Sane,” declared Dr. Singer. Finally, Dr. Krohn, the only specialist in private practice on the governor’s board, took the stand. “I have examined Wanderer in court and shortly after his confession and, in my opinion, he is faking insanity.”51 “Faking insanity” was a wonderful possibility: Faking required cunning. Cunning implied sanity. (Krohn and Singer would both testify again, four years later, during another, even more unsettling murder trial—the trial of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb.)
Prosecutors followed up with two civilians: Julia Schmitt, the girl Wanderer took on taxi rides; and Lieutenant Lester Atkins, Wanderer’s superior officer in France. Miss Schmitt testified that Wanderer had kissed her “Almost every time I was with him.” Nothing indecent? asked the prosecution. Nothing odd? Nothing strange? No, said Miss Schmitt. “Sane,” she said. Lieutenant Atkins said he’d met Wanderer in training camp. Then he’d been sent to France with him. He’d been with him in combat. In camp, Wanderer “was pointed out to me by a captain . . . as an efficient machine gunner.” “As sane a man as I’ve ever met,” said the lieutenant. Sane, efficient, flirtatious, mildly adulterous. Not as moral as Wanderer had said he was. But recognizably sane.
The defense called its last two experts: one was Dr. James Whitney Hall, president of the Cook County Insanity Commission (Like Krohn and Singer, Hall would also testify, four years later, during the Leopold and Loeb trial); the other was Dr. Florence Fowler, a colleague of Dr. Hickson in the city’s Psych Lab. Hall testified that Wanderer had been hearing voices since he was a child. Fowler simply reaffirmed Dr. Hickson’s diagnosis.
Wanderer’s John Doe jury took twelve minutes to reach a verdict. On its first ballot, it elected a foreman. Its second ballot determined Wanderer to be sane. Its third agreed on his guilt. Its fourth ordered him to be hung. The jury’s foreman wept as he delivered the verdict.52 Wanderer tried to smile as a flashbulb went off in his face. “I hope my mother-in-law is satisfied,” he said. “If she is, I am.”53
Of course, that wasn’t so.
Back in Joliet, Wanderer began to frantically pace his cell. “He’s been extremely nervous since the verdict was returned,” said his jailer. “He’s been morose and irritable and will not talk to anyone. . . . He stops his pacing once in a while to listen for his wife’s ghost.” The jailer placed Wanderer under a suicide watch.
Two months passed.
Wanderer said the Devil—and his wife—had been visiting him. The judge ordered a Chicago psychologist named William Herschfield to reevaluate Wanderer. “Dementia praecox paranoia,” declared Herschfield. Judge David was skeptical: Just because he’s visited by spirits doesn’t mean he’s crazy, said the judge. All sorts of people believe in spirits. Arthur Conan Doyle—grieving the loss of his son during the war—was the most public of many—widows, mothers, sisters, brothers—who’d lost men during the war and now attended on the spirit world. “Does that mean Arthur Conan Doyle is insane?” asked Judge David. No one knew the truth about such things, said Herschfield. No matter: Wanderer was now insane.
Agreement about Wanderer’s sanity seemed to change as often as John Doe’s identity. Doubts, possibilities, certainties—everything about the two men kept shifting. Like a magic show or a chemistry experiment, from solid to liquid, from liquid to gas. The public watched and waited for the next shape to appear in the next episode.
State law required Judge David to order a sanity trial, complete with lawyers, expert witnesses, and an entirely new jury. If that jury decided that Wanderer was, indeed, crazy, he had to be hospitalized. If the jury decided he was, for better or worse, sane, then, according to a recent State Supreme Court ruling, he was to be hung within forty-eight hours.
Ten days of psychiatric point and counterpoint played out in front of a jury. The only surprise: Dr. Singer, a member of the governor’s original “Special Board,” changed his diagnosis. Three months before, during the John Doe trial, Singer had pronounced Wanderer sane. Not this time. “Dementia praecox catatonia,” said Singer.
The jury took less than an hour to reach its verdict. “Sane.” Once again Wanderer rubbed his face and yawned.
July 28, 1921, was supposed to be his last day alive. Wanderer released a thirteen-page statement: He hadn’t killed Ruth; he and Ruth had always been happy; the police knew he had no motive to kill her, so they kept him awake for three days and three nights until he confessed to something he’d never done. “I die loving everyone. . . . I would be a poor soldier if I could not stand to be put to death by the people I fought for. . . .”
The “soldier” part must have had an effect.
The Illinois Commander of the American Legion (the legion had been founded in Paris in 1919 by U.S. veterans of World War I; it had been incorporated that same year, by an act of Congress) appealed to the governor to grant Wanderer a sixty-day reprieve. The commander asked the governor to appoint a “new commission of alienists” to determine if Wanderer was sane. The commander said that Dr. James Whitney Hall had presented new information to him. According to Dr. Hall, “the horrors of war” had deranged Lieutenant Wanderer’s mind.54 No one asked the commander or Dr. Hall why Wanderer had said, over and over again, that all he’d ever wanted was to reenlist in the Army. “Horrors of war? I was happy in the Army,” the lieutenant said.
The governor granted the commander’s request.
Wanderer smiled when he heard the news. “I guess my wife will just have to wait awhile before she sees me.”55 That night, his jailer reported, he started acting crazy again.
Wanderer’s lead attorney, Mr. Bartholomew, announced he was optimistic. In fact, he said, he had new information that would reveal the true identity of “the ragged stranger. He was a notorious gunman and his identity can be proved.”56
Mr. Bartholomew never had a chance to prove anything.
On August 6, 1921, a homeless washerwoman named Nellie Ryan told the world the truth:
John Doe was her long-lost son, Eddie. Mrs. Ryan and her two daughters, Agnes and Marie, had known it was Eddie for months.
“I hadn’t seen him since he was a boy until I came upon him in the county morgue,” Mrs. Ryan said. “Eighteen long years that was, filled with thinking of him and praying for him and trying to find him.
“My husband died when Eddie was six years old. There were six children and it broke my heart but I couldn’t support them. Sure, I wept like it was a funeral when I said goodbye to the curly haired darling eighteen years ago. He went to a farmer named Alexander Anglin in Redfield, South Dakota. . . . The other boys went other places. . . . The girls I kept with me despite everything.
“I used to write Eddie often. He stayed on the farm until he was about sixteen and then he set out to see the world. I heard many a time he was in Chicago. But it’s such a big city. I looked for him everywhere, but I never could find him.
“I read in the paper long ago about the homeless body that had been killed by Wanderer and many the prayer I said for him. I was down in St. Mary’s on last Holy Thursday and I said a prayer for him and for my own homeless boy and I burned some candles for both of them.
“Then I determined to go to the morgue and look at the boy who had been killed and whose body had lain there so long without a woman to weep over it. I went and it was Eddie. I hadn’t seen him in eighteen years since he was a little boy. But I knew him at once. He looked so much like Marie, so much like myself.”57
The governor never appointed a new sanity commission. Sixty days came and went.
“I ain’t afraid to die,” Wanderer said. “I fought in France.”58
On the scaffold, the hangman asked him if he had any last words. Wanderer began to sing. He had a baritone voice.
Down he went.