It was the twenty-second of November, two days before Thanksgiving. Thomas lied to his wife—told her he’d gotten a job with a freight company, downtown. “I’d been walking the streets . . . until my feet were sore.”1 No one was hiring. Lean times. People with plenty of money sent their cooks to buy fresh, young turkeys and veal roasts and smoked hams and chickens for fricassee. People like Thomas and his wife—they couldn’t afford a handful of walnuts or a couple of oranges. Maybe—if they were careful—they could make their money last another two weeks. Then—nothing. The streets for Christmas.
Thomas had been in the Navy. That’s when he met his wife. He’d joined up in 1917; came out in 1920. A mechanic: a fellow with a future. He proposed. They were both in their twenties. They married just as the bottom dropped out of everything.
They lived in Springfield for a while. Thomas’s hometown. His old man had died when he was just a kid. Thomas had eight brothers and sisters. He and his brother watched out for each other. It didn’t matter: there was no work.
Thomas’s brother-in-law (his wife’s brother), Clarence, told them that things were a little better up in Chicago. Clarence had a job in an REO truck plant. Clarence’s wife, Betty, had just had a baby. “You can live with us,” they said. “You can stay with us until you find something, here.” So they did. Thomas found work with Western Electric. They got an apartment of their own. Six months passed. In August, Western Electric let Thomas go. Now it was nearly Thanksgiving, and all Thomas could do was lie to his wife.
Ten o’clock in the morning. It was cold. Thomas walked over to Clarence’s place to get warm. Betty was there, tending the baby. She asked Thomas if he was hungry. He said he was. She made him some coffee and sent out for some cake. They sat and talked. Time passed.
Betty wrapped presents. She was pregnant again. Eight months pregnant. She’d bought little gifts for her new baby, her Christmas baby.
She knew Thomas had been looking for work. Thomas told her, “If things don’t happen pretty soon . . . my wife and I’ll be destitute . . . we’ll have no place to live.” “Well,” said Betty, “don’t worry about that, Tom. You folks are welcome to come and live with us anytime that you want to and we will get along all right.”2 Thomas said he didn’t want to do that, “but she insisted. . . . I finally agreed I would talk it over with my wife. . . .”
Someone knocked at the door. It was Betty’s neighbor Mrs. McClune, from across the hall. Thomas excused himself to go to the bathroom.
Mrs. McClune said she was going downtown. Did Betty need anything?
“I wish you would get me four yards of corduroy to fix the baby buggy,” Betty said. “Use your judgment about the color, but I want to get it ready for Christmas.”3
Thomas came back and sat down at the table. Mrs. McClune nodded hello. Betty opened her purse and took out a bankbook. There was cash between the pages. Fresh, flat, green bills. “Here’s $10,” Betty said to Mrs. McClune. “I don’t know what the stuff will cost.” Mrs. McClune left.
“The sight of the money seemed to craze me,” Thomas said. “I’d been walking the streets. . . . I asked her for the money. She told me she was going to use it for Christmas presents—but she might spare part of it for me.
“I said, ‘No. I want it all or nothing. . . .’ I got up and walked toward her. She turned pale. She said, ‘Why, Tom . . . you wouldn’t hurt me, would you?’ ”4 She dropped the bankbook and backed away. She kept looking at him. She didn’t cry out; she didn’t want to wake the baby. She didn’t struggle; she was so pregnant.
“I grabbed her by the throat and pushed her into the bedroom, on the bed. Her face turned white. . . . I believe that I had killed her. . . . I thought I might as well do a good job.
“I laid her across the bed and pulled a rope out of my pocket. I wrapped it around her neck four or five times and pulled it tight. Her face turned black. . . . Why I did it, I do not know.”5
Thomas took the money out of the bankbook, threw the bankbook in the stove. The baby was still asleep in his crib. Thomas walked out of the apartment; the door latched and locked behind him. He headed home.
He took a streetcar, then another. He peeked at the money: a twenty and three tens. He was disappointed. Very disappointed. He wadded up the bills and pushed them under his pipe tobacco, deep down in his pocket tin.
When the streetcar reached Thomas’s stop, he felt so restless he didn’t know what to do. He walked into a barbershop and got a haircut, then he went home. His wife thought he’d come back early from his new job.
Clarence came home from work at six. The baby was crying. He found Betty. There was a thimble on her finger. He ran next door. Mrs. McClune told him about Thomas.
“The rest was simple. . . . Within an hour, police had Catherwood under arrest. . . . The slayer was grilled all night. . . . At 3:00 AM, he broke down and confessed. From the bottom of a can, beneath a layer of pipe tobacco, he brought forth the spoils of his crime.”6 “I had to get money, some way,” he said. He handed over the cash. Fifty dollars. Fifty dollars. “That’s all,” he said. “I didn’t spend a cent.”7
When Thomas’s wife heard he’d confessed, she became hysterical. His jailers put him under a suicide watch. The State’s Attorney’s office declared Thomas’s crime to be “the most cold blooded murder case ever committed in Chicago.”
Thomas pleaded guilty at his arraignment. He threw himself on the mercy of the court. The judge acknowledged his plea. He sentenced Thomas to life.
More than twenty years passed.
More than three hundred convicts (a record number, the papers said) applied for parole in 1943. One was an automobile thief who’d killed a federal agent; one was a bank robber; one was a cat burglar who liked to terrify women. One was a bomb maker; another was a hit man. A fellow named Frank Kohler had been sentenced to fourteen years for killing his own baby boy. Frank claimed the kid’s crying drove him crazy. Frank applied for parole. Thomas did, too.
There’s no record of what the Parole Board decided about Frank or the cat burglar, or even the man the papers called the “Hoosier Romeo”—a man who’d specialized in marrying, then swindling women.
The mass killings and collective insanities of the Second World War may have affected the board’s attitude toward the individuals who petitioned them. Perhaps the hit man was released and the cat burglar wasn’t. One thing is clear: the board turned Thomas down.
Thomas applied again in April 1945. In Italy, Mussolini had just been captured, shot, and strung up, next to his mistress. In Berlin, Hitler and Eva Braun had just killed themselves.
Back in Springfield, the board denied Thomas’s petition.
Every year after that, in May, Thomas asked to be paroled. Every year, the board said no. Truman defeated Dewey; North Korea invaded South Korea; Senator McCarthy investigated Communists in the Army and the State Department; the United States tested its first hydrogen bomb. Years passed. Sunrise; sunset.
In May 1954, Thomas made his eleventh application for parole. He’d broken the rules only four times since he’d been in jail: he’d talked during chapel; stolen some soup; taken food with him from the mess hall; been caught while engaging in what was called “self abuse.”
The board voted to let Thomas go. He was fifty-nine years old. A heating company in Springfield agreed to give him a job. He reported to his parole officer for the next five years. Then he vanished.