Eleanor. Lovely Eleanor. Blonde, dimpled, dark-eyed, and heavy-lidded, her hair in loose tresses. A prepubescent Gibson girl. Sometimes she looked her age—an eleven-year-old schoolkid, dressed in a shirtwaist, hands in her lap, hair in ringlets, topped with a big white bow. Other times, she looked as pensive, as chaste as a saint, a girl with a Botticelli face.
Otto Trostell, Eleanor’s father, had died when she was five. Her mother, Kate, still wore her wedding ring. Kate worked as a night manager for Western Union; she tucked the company’s little yellow pencils into every pocket and fold of her clothing; she lost or left or forgot so many of the little things that they became markers, signs of where she’d been or where she’d gone.
Kate and Eleanor now lived with Kate’s sister Margaret and Margaret’s husband. Kate’s other married sister, Ruby, lived nearby. Their brothers, John and Fred, had families of their own, but kept watch over their sisters and their niece. Kate could leave her office at midnight, catch the late trolley, and know that Eleanor was snug in a nest of family. That’s why—recently—when Kate felt “too blue” she’d stay away for a few days, even for a week, until she felt better. Her family worried—but they understood: Kate was “nervous.” Nervous people had “sinking spells.” They knew Kate’s spells would pass. They always did.
Two months ago, in September, Kate had collapsed—fainted, faded away—while she was on a walk with Eleanor. A year before, she’d had some sort of a blackout while she was by herself, on Halstead at Sixtyninth. Police had helped her. During the worst of her spells, Kate would talk about “ending it all.” That frightened Margaret and Ruby, but they knew Kate was only talking. Kate would never leave Eleanor.
There was a man in Kate’s life. A man who’d been there since they were both kids. A man Kate didn’t want, had never wanted. Arthur Foster was his name.
Arthur was a strong, solid guy. One hundred and seventy-five pounds, thick as a side of beef. Not very quick, not very talkative. Smart enough, though. He chewed tobacco; smoked it when he couldn’t chew. His clothes stank of it. He worked for a trucking company. Hauled ashes. The kind of man who wouldn’t and couldn’t be moved. A rock.
He’d loved Kate since she was sixteen. Kate was Eleanor’s age when they’d met. She may not have been as beautiful back then as Eleanor was now—but there was enough of Kate, flesh, bone, and eyes, mother in daughter, for anyone to understand why Arthur had fallen in love with her. Why he was still in love with her.
Kate had said, “No,” long ago. When she was eighteen, Arthur had introduced her to his friend Otto. When Kate and Otto married, Arthur had acted like a gentleman. Wished them well, kept his distance, behaved himself. Then, in 1916, Otto died.
Arthur had been in love for eight years. Holding his heart, taking shallow breaths, hoping. He began to court the widow Trostell. He became a family friend. Took Kate and little Eleanor out for drives. Bought little presents; let himself be invited for Sunday dinner, for Thanksgiving, for Christmas. In 1920, he took a deep breath and proposed. He and Kate had their picture taken; he sat, bathed and shaved, his hair just cut, dressed in a blue suit, a clean white shirt, and a nice tie, handsome, anxious, respectable. Kate stood next to him, one hand on his shoulder, her other arm, relaxed, by her side, not smiling, not frowning, calm.
Then she had a nervous breakdown. Margaret and Ruby had never liked Arthur. None of Kate’s friends had ever liked him. Kate tried to keep living on her own. When that didn’t work, she asked Ruby and Ruby’s husband to board with her. When that didn’t work, Kate moved in with Margaret.
And Arthur?
Arthur’s chest exploded. He couldn’t, wouldn’t, didn’t leave Kate alone. Once, he drove up to her house while she and Eleanor were out in the yard. He pulled a gun and chased Kate inside. Eleanor never forgot that. Once, he broke into Kate’s house and shot up the place. Kate’s neighbors called the police. The police arrested him. Kate didn’t press charges. Once, when Kate and one of her friends from the office were standing outside, taking a break, Arthur drove up, leaned over, and asked Kate to “go riding” with him. When Kate said, “No,” he walked up to her and hit her in the face. Kate’s friend “asked her why she didn’t tell her brother . . . Kate said she was afraid of a scandal.” “Foster threatened her more than once,” the woman said. “. . . Kate was afraid he would kill her.”
Eighteen months of this. Then, in July 1922, Arthur began showing up at the Western Union office on Saturday nights. He’d wait outside in his car. Kate would come out at midnight, headed for the streetcar, headed home. She’d walk outside—he’d ask her if she needed a ride. She’s say, “No.” He’d threaten her. That went on, every Saturday night, for six months.
Then, one Saturday night, the night of December 2, Kate left work, carrying a sack of groceries for Sunday dinner. She didn’t come home. The streetcar conductor on the trolley she always took remembered how odd it was, not seeing her that night.
Margaret worried; Ruby worried. Eleanor was frightened. They waited a day; they waited another. This wasn’t the first time Kate hadn’t come home when they’d expected her. They waited one more day, then they called the police. They were frantic. They knew. It was Arthur.
The newspapers found out. Eleanor told a Chicago Tribune reporter that she was offering a reward. The Chicago Tribune ran a photograph of Eleanor, dead center, on its back picture page, “SEEKS MOTHER Elois Mitchell offers $100 reward for return of her parent.”1 The Tribune printed a picture of Kate and Arthur next to the one of Eleanor, “WOMAN AND REJECTED SUITOR SOUGHT.”
The story of the orphan girl searching for her widowed mother caught everyone’s attention. “Everyone” included Charles Fitzmorris, the city’s chief of police, John Hughes, Fitzmorris’s chief of detectives, and Detective Lieutenant John Farrell, Hughes’s senior investigator. These men may or may not have had sisters; they may or may not have had daughters. But a widow, an orphan, and two sisters—frightened, angry, resolute—and the loss they’d suffered stirred them. Fitzmorris, Hughes, and Farrell, and all the men they commanded, began the hunt.
Detectives detained Arthur. They didn’t arrest him. They just turned him upside down and started shaking him. They discovered how heavy and thick he was. “The granite man,” they called him. Arthur’s indifference made Farrell very, very suspicious. Margaret and Ruby were agitated: anger and grief tormented them. Arthur just sat where they put him. He knew Kate had disappeared, he said. But he hadn’t seen her since Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving? Farrell said. Yes, Thanksgiving night, Arthur answered. You ever take Kate driving? Sure, Arthur said. Kate and Eleanor. We used to go driving. Where’s your car, then? asked Farrell. At my father’s place. Parked in the garage behind the house. Down on South Leavitt. Parked it there—and left it; haven’t driven it for days. And your truck? asked Farrell. Not my truck. I drive for Ripley Teaming. It’s their truck. What do you do for Ripley? asked Farrell. Haul ashes, said Arthur. That’s what I do. Haul ashes.
Farrell led two squads of detectives to the house on South Leavitt. One group examined the car; one group began to dig up the backyard. Farrell sent another squad to dig through the dump where Arthur took his loads. Ripley’s records showed Arthur had dumped six loads of ashes there one day after Kate had disappeared.
Arthur’s car was littered, smeared, and splattered. There were dark stains on an old lap robe in the backseat. There were more stains—splatters—on the car’s running board. On the floor, Farrell’s men found a brown button from a lady’s coat; on the front seat, they found a little yellow Western Union pencil. Farrell sent two men to search Arthur’s rented room. They found a new blue suit with stains on its right sleeve—the same sort of stains they’d found on the lap robe.
Suit and lap robe were sent to the coroner’s chemist. Farrell asked Margaret and Ruby to describe the clothes Kate wore to work the night she didn’t come home. Then he showed them the brown button from Arthur’s car. Margaret screamed; both women fainted.
Arthur said nothing when Farrell showed him the button. Farrell had him brought to see his car. Farrell pointed at the stains and splatters. “Is that Kate Trostell’s blood?” Arthur said nothing. Two weeks later—and still detained—Arthur gave an interview to a reporter from the Chicago Daily News. He talked about the mess in his car. “I chew tobacco when I’m driving,” he said. “Sometimes I shoot wild and hit the fender.”
Arthur was right about that. But the stains on the lap robe proved to be blood. Whose blood? The coroner’s chemist had no way of knowing. The button and the pencil were Kate’s. But they proved only that Kate had ridden with Arthur.
Farrell’s second squad found nothing in the dump; the backyard at South Leavitt yielded nothing, either. Arthur’s father’s house was a block and a half—a long, empty block and a half—from the Ashland Avenue bridge over the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. Farrell began to think that Arthur might have dumped Kate’s body there. The canal flowed south from the lake. It had a current; barges and scows used it. It was as much a swamp and a sewer as a stream.
Police had held Arthur—without charging him—for three days. Arthur had just hired a lawyer. The judge, an old dog named Oscar Hebel, was more than sympathetic to the police. Hebel warned Hughes and Farrell: they had two more days; then he’d issue a writ of habeas corpus. Charge Arthur or release him.
Arthur hadn’t been fed for two days; he hadn’t been allowed to do more than shut his eyes before a police sergeant kicked him awake. On his first day, Arthur had answered—or at least replied to—the questions Farrell had asked him. By the second day, Arthur had stopped talking. One of Kate’s friends, Dr. Edna Shaefer, was convinced that Arthur had killed Kate for her jewelry—$1,000 worth of rings, lockets, and brooches that Otto had given her. Farrell had Arthur pulled from his cell and shoved into a chair in an empty office. Dr. Shaefer walked in, carrying a Bible. She took off her coat, rolled up her sleeves, and started reading from the Book of Psalms. Arthur’s lips moved silently as he repeated the words he heard, but once Shaefer finished, Arthur still had nothing to say.
No sleep, no food, threats, appeals to love, appeals to conscience, recitations of incriminating evidence—nothing cracked him. Farrell had only one tool left. A wedge that could split stone. Farrell talked to Hughes. It was midnight, verging on the third day of Arthur’s detention, when Hughes sent a car to bring Eleanor to the station.
“ ‘You must talk to Mr. Foster,’ Hughes said. ‘It will be for your mother’s sake. This man knows where she is. We know he knows, but we can’t make him tell us. You see if you can get it out of him. . . .’
“The child trembled with fright at the thought of facing Foster, but agreed, at last, to try. She was taken into the cell where Foster sat, haggard and weary but . . . stubbornly silent . . . Foster didn’t look up as Eleanor entered. He slouched in his chair, his head lowered, awaiting a new attack by detectives. Then he heard, instead of threats, the little girl’s frightened appeal: ‘Mr. Foster, I want my Mama. You tell me where she is. Please give me back my Mama.’ ”2
Arthur just shook his head. “I don’t know where she is, honey.”
“Eleanor went closer until she could look up at his face. Tears streamed down her cheeks and dropped onto Foster’s clenched fists.”3 “Her long tresses tumbling about Foster’s face, her arms twined tightly around his neck, and her body shaken in a paroxysm of sobs, the child begged him: ‘Tell me,’ she cried. ‘You were with her that last night. You know where she is. I want my Mama. Give her back to me!’ ”4
“Foster drew back from her as if afraid. For the first time, his voice rose above the dull tones of . . . denial. ‘I don’t know,’ he exclaimed. ‘They’re lying to you, Eleanor. I wasn’t with your mother that night.’ ‘You were!’ the little girl screamed. ‘You killed her. You know you did!’ She broke down, sobbing bitterly, and Chief Hughes led her away.
“Foster, shaken by the girl’s grief, was left alone for awhile. Then, detectives led him silently to Chief Hughes’s office and had him look inside. Eleanor lay asleep on a couch. Her face was swollen from crying. Dark circles showed under her eyes. Her hands and lips twitched nervously.
“ ‘You’re killing this little girl,’ they said. ‘Her heart is broken. Worry over her mother is making her sick. She’ll die unless you tell the truth.’
“Half an hour later, Foster confessed. ‘She’s in the Canal,’ he said. ‘She jumped in.’ ‘Where?’ demanded Farrell. ‘Where the bridge is, on Ashland.’ ”5
“Show me,” Farrell said. Detectives took Arthur to the bridge. “ ‘This is the spot,’ Foster said. ‘She jumped out . . . while we were driving.’ ”6
Wooden stairs, thick with ice, led down from the street to an old shack. Bill Scott, a former county commissioner, ran the place as a saloon. A wharf led to the canal. High weeds bordered it on both sides. Four old scows sat anchored, under the bridge. There were a few old shacks, here and there, in the distance, but no one lived in them.
Detectives followed Arthur down the stairs, then through the weeds to the bank of the canal. “That’s where she jumped in,” Arthur said. “I couldn’t help her. That’s the last I saw of her.”7
Fitzmorris ordered a harbormaster’s tug to take him and Hughes to the spot at dawn. Squads of police and detectives began the search as their commanders watched and issued orders.
The temperature was close to zero. Ice bobbed in the yellow water. The sky was lit by bursts of flaming methane, vented from refinery chimneys. Huge gas storage tanks stood, far off, in clusters.
Hours passed. Arthur had been taken back to his cell and allowed to sleep. More men—city workers and policemen—joined the search. Tugboats, flat boats, men with pikes and poles and draglines—all searched for Kate’s body. They found nothing. Someone reported finding a yellow pencil stub; someone reported seeing the imprint of a shoe—all wishful thinking.
Shortly after noon, a police sergeant kicked Arthur awake and brought him to Hughes. “Are you sure the body is in the Canal where you said it was?” Hughes asked.
Fred Mitchell, Kate’s older brother, joined the search. He stood watch on the wharf near Scott’s saloon; sometimes he joined a crew, probing the muck with a pike. “I don’t know where Kate’s body is,” he said, “but there is no doubt in my mind that she is dead and that Foster killed her. He threatened her time after time . . . when he was drunk; he said that he would kill her and throw her body in the Canal.”8
Two night watchmen for the Santa Fe railroad told police they’d heard a woman screaming, before dawn, on December 3. They said the screams had lasted on and off for four minutes. “We didn’t get there in time to see what caused the screams, but we did hear an automobile speeding away.”9
The problem was that the men had stood watch along the tracks at Thirty-fifth and Kedzie—more than a mile south of the Ashland bridge, where Arthur had led Farrell and his men.
“Are you sure the body is in the Canal where you said?” Chief Hughes asked Arthur.
Arthur reconsidered.
He changed his story.
Kate was sick and depressed—“despondent and in ill health,” he said. “Because of a recent operation,” he said.10 That’s why she killed herself, he said. Arthur gave Hughes the name of the doctor and the midwife who’d performed the abortion. “Squads of police were sent to find those named by Foster.”11
“As God is my judge,” Arthur said, “Kate jumped into the river. . . . She jumped in after a quarrel. . . . I couldn’t save her. I didn’t kill her. . . . I’m not afraid to die. Give me some wire and I’ll hang myself.”12 Arthur said he’d spend his last paycheck—$28—all the money he had—to buy flowers for Kate’s funeral. If and when anyone ever found her.
A day passed.
No one—no reporter, no detective, no coroner, no lawyer—not even Arthur—mentioned Kate’s abortion again. Kate’s fainting in September, while she’d been out on a walk with Eleanor—had that been a sign of anything other than her frailty? No one asked, no one speculated, no one answered the question: “If Kate had had an abortion, who was the father of the child?” No one asked how or why Arthur knew the names—never published—of the doctor and midwife who may (or may not) have performed the abortion. No police detective and no reporter asked if the abortion that Kate (may have) had led to the quarrel that—Arthur said—caused Kate’s suicide.
Instead, one day after Arthur said he wanted to hang himself, he gave an interview to the Chicago Daily News. Two police detectives sat in the room while he spoke.
Arthur denied he’d ever confessed. He’d never said anything about anything to Hughes. “The bunk,” he said. It was all nonsense.
Kate throwing herself in the canal?
“I don’t know where she is,” Arthur said. “I’m not even sure she’s dead. About two months ago, while we were crossing the Ashland Avenue bridge, she told me she had half a mind to drown herself there. That’s all I know about it.”
What about all those stories—all those reports—about him threatening Kate? Pulling a gun? Chasing her into her house? Firing shots?
“That’s all bunk,” Arthur said. “I never fired shots at her in my life.”
Didn’t they have their “ups and downs,” though?
Sure, Arthur said. But he’d seen Kate Thanksgiving Day. He’d taken Kate and Eleanor out for a ride. “She was in good spirits,” Arthur said. “As friendly as ever. We didn’t have a single unpleasant word. . ..
“Other times, though, she acted blue. Ever since her breakdown, she was despondent. She talked about killing herself—but I didn’t pay much attention. I thought she was just ‘down in the mouth.’. . .
“That’s how I got the idea she might have drowned herself in the Canal. She told me she had half a mind to jump over the . . . bridge. So I told the cops to look there. I didn’t confess anything because I don’t have anything to confess. See?”13
Two days later, searchers pulled a woman’s coat and hat from the canal. Hughes rushed to the spot. Judge Hebel put Fitzmorris on notice: Police had one more day to find evidence of murder. A police explosives expert briefed Hughes about the use of dynamite to bring bodies to the surface. Searchers found Kate’s pocketbook the following day. Her Western Union ID card and her bankbook were in it. Margaret burst into tears when Hughes showed her the pocketbook. Judge Hebel extended his deadline: one more day.
It was December 18. Arthur had been held since December 6. Fitzmorris asked the sheriff of Cook County to take custody of his prisoner. Fitzmorris and the sheriff planned a legal shell game: they’d shift Arthur from one jurisdiction to another; each shift would reset Hebel’s clock. Hebel found out and stopped their game. It didn’t matter whose jail cell Arthur occupied: December 19 was the date of Arthur’s habeas corpus hearing.
“If Judge Hebel will not help us,” Fitzmorris told a reporter, “I’ll call State’s Attorney Crowe . . . to determine what steps we can take . . . ” Crowe had been waiting for the call. A dead widow, a pretty little orphan, two grieving sisters, a foul-smelling brute—Crowe was pleased to be seen helping Fitzmorris do his job.
City workers began carting dynamite to the canal. Hughes said he’d dynamite all thirty-five miles of it, down to Lockport, if he had to. Crews set off their first charges at dawn on the day Hebel convened Arthur’s hearing.
Arthur’s attorney began by asking Arthur to take off his jacket, pull up his shirt, and turn around. “That lump you see on Mr. Foster’s back, Your Honor, is the result of police beating my client while in custody.” Hughes and Farrell testified next. They said that the blood in Arthur’s car, the recovery of Kate’s pocketbook from the canal, and Arthur’s statement that he’d been present at the time of Kate’s alleged suicide—all argued against Hebel issuing a writ. Hebel acknowledged the strong “circumstance of the evidence.” No matter: he ordered the county to release Arthur in four days. Police had permission to continue to question Arthur. Hebel’s deadline was real.
December 20, December 21, December 22, December 23. Laborers, tugboats, and dynamite: they found nothing but an old whiskey barrel. Hughes decided to use Eleanor again. He brought her to Arthur’s cell. She rushed to him. “Please, Mr. Foster, bring me back my Mama. Bring her back for Christmas.” Arthur picked up Eleanor and kissed her. She let him. “I’d like to, honey,” he said, “but I don’t know anything about her.” Hughes showed Kate’s pocketbook to him; Arthur looked at it as if it were a tin plate or a stool. Eleanor wept. “I don’t know anything,” Arthur said. He thought for a minute. “Maybe she ran off to be married to someone else.”
State’s Attorney Crowe offered Fitzmorris some legal advice. The result:
On the day of Arthur’s release, Kate’s sister Ruby swore out a murder warrant against him. Guards escorted Arthur from his cell. He stood before Judge Hebel. Hebel ordered his release, then immediately accepted Ruby’s warrant for his arrest. Guards marched Arthur back to his cell. Arthur’s attorney made a motion to dismiss Ruby’s warrant. He told reporters he hoped Arthur would “eat Christmas dinner at home.”14
Christmas Eve.
Hughes had Arthur driven to Ruby’s house. Detectives walked Arthur up the steps and into the living room. Christmas at home. A fire, crackling in the grate; the smell of baking in the air; a tree, strung with garlands, hung with ornaments. Presents. And—little Eleanor. Tearful, lovely little Eleanor. She wept and pleaded. “Tell me where my Mama is,” she cried. “I wish I did know,” Arthur said. He took Eleanor in his arms. She let him. “Maybe she’s run away with some fellow,” he said. Detectives drove him back to jail.
While this was going on, a young man whom no one knew walked into an ice cream parlor in Oak Park. People looked up as the little bells on the door jingled. The young man stood still and then, as everyone was returning to their sodas and ice creams, he said, in a calm, clear voice just loud enough for everyone to hear, “I’ve just swallowed four grams of strychnine. I’m going to kill myself. Good-bye.”
He collapsed. Someone called the police. An ambulance took him to the hospital. Doctors pumped his stomach. They thought he might live.
Christmas came.
Eleanor spent the day on the banks of the canal, shivering and flinching as crews exploded their charges.
Late in the afternoon, the young man who’d swallowed the strychnine regained consciousness. A police officer from Oak Park leaned over and asked him his name. “John Shippie,” the young man whispered. He motioned the officer to come closer. He could barely speak. The officer thought he was about to hear some sort of deathbed confession. He was right. Almost.
“Arthur Foster . . . ” whispered the young man, “. . . told me . . . he killed Mrs. Trostell. I saw her body . . . in his car. He said he’d kill me if I talked. I was afraid. That’s why . . . I tried to kill myself.”
Hughes didn’t know any of this until the next day. That’s why he had Eleanor picked up from Ruby’s house, late on the night of Christmas Day. Eleanor was still all Hughes had. He asked her help. She didn’t refuse.
Arthur’s attorney had bought him a Christmas dinner and had it delivered to him in his cell. Arthur was feeling better than he’d felt in weeks. That may be why he didn’t crack when Eleanor walked in again. She pleaded with him until daybreak. Sometimes he’d shrug; sometimes he’d answer her. She’d fling herself at him, snuggle into his lap, twine her arms around his neck, plead and pull at him and cry. Arthur kept chewing his tobacco. Sometimes he’d chew a little faster. Sometimes he’d turn his head away and squirt some juice on the floor. Hughes had Eleanor bundled up and taken home.
Oak Park police called Hughes with John Shippie’s story. Judge John Haas had just ordered Arthur to be evaluated by the city’s Psychopathic Laboratory. Dr. William Hickson—the same man who’d evaluated Carl Wanderer and Harvey Church—was asked to test Arthur’s sanity and IQ. The call from Oak Park came in soon after that. Hughes immediately sent a message to Judge Haas. “John Shippie’s amazing confession has caused Judge Haas to override the protest of Arthur Foster’s attorney and order the suspect held until January ll.”15
This was Shippie’s story:
“I’ve known Foster for about two months,” Shippie said. His voice was weak. Doctors had cautioned police not to press him. Shippie would pause, close his eyes, take a few breaths, then resume his story. “That Sunday night,” he said, “we arranged a party. My girl—I’ll never tell her name—Foster and Mrs. Trostell. . . . We met Mrs. Trostell and Foster . . . he was driving his car. . . . We drove to Scott’s saloon. . . . We stayed there a short time. . . . Then Foster drove us to North Clark and Superior. . . . I dropped my girl off. . . . The three of us continued driving around. . . . I got out and bought a pint of whiskey in a Greek saloon. I gave Foster a drink and arranged to meet him at 10:30. . . .Foster arrived on time—I climbed into his car. . . . I saw Mrs. Trostell huddled in the rear seat and . . . I thought she was asleep. Foster startled me. . . . ‘Kate is dead and I’ve got to put away the body’ . . . I was terror stricken. . . .Foster saw me shudder . . . he became hard. ‘You’ve got to help me and you’ve got to keep your mouth shut or I’ll fix you so you’ll never talk again.’
“I kept thinking about how I could get away. . . . I figured that if I could get out of the car and go into some store, I could sneak out the back. . . . I told Foster I wanted cigarettes . . . he let me out . . . I ran up an alley. I never saw Foster again.”16
The next day, Shippie said, a man he knew only by the name of Howard sent him a message. Foster was prepared to pay him hush money. Howard would deliver it. Shippie agreed to a meeting, but he knew it was a trap. “I knew Howard would lead me to some secluded spot where he would shoot me.”17
Police brought Arthur to see Shippie. The Psychopathic Lab’s Dr. Hickson had finished his tests and was writing his report. Oak Park doctors had sedated Shippie with ether. Arthur was told to stand by Shippie’s door and wait for him to open his eyes. Nurses, doctors, police officers, detectives—Arthur was the only one in the crowd wearing handcuffs. Shippie opened his eyes, propped himself up on his elbows, and looked at Arthur. “That’s Foster,” he cried. “I saw Kate’s body on the rear seat of his car at Thirty-first and State on the night of December 2.”
Sniffing ether usually didn’t clarify a patient’s memory the way it had Shippie’s.
“That man is raving,” Arthur said. “I’ve never seen him in my life.”
Farrell talked to reporters in the hall outside Shippie’s room. He was as unimpressed with the young man as Arthur. First of all: Kate hadn’t left work until midnight. Second: Shippie wasn’t who he said he was. Shippie had told reporters that he was the nephew of Chicago’s recently deceased, former police chief, George Shippy. He also said he was the nephew of the mayor of Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he’d attended two elite private day schools—the Roberts School and the English High School. Police knew otherwise: Shippie had been a clerk in a steel mill in Leaf River. Three months ago, he’d stood up during a stage show at a theater in the Loop and announced that he was about to kill himself. He’d swallowed something, then collapsed. Police came; an ambulance was called. Doctors examined him. He hadn’t taken poison. They asked him a few questions, then transferred him to the city’s Psychopathic Hospital. A staff psychiatrist evaluated him. “He was suffering from a mental ailment which made him think he was the key figure in every big murder mystery.”18
The police’s first—and only—eyewitness was insane. According to Dr. Hickson, so was Arthur. Hickson’s report was very brief. Perhaps because he remembered the effect his evaluation of Carl Wanderer and Harvey Church had had on their cases.
“In reference to the case of Arthur Foster, 33 years old: Our examination shows that his case, on the intelligence side, is one of a high grade moron, and, on the affective side, to be afflicted with dementia praecox katatonia.”19
Kate’s body surfaced at the Lockport, Illinois, dam, on the Sanitary and Ship Canal, on January 23. Men who worked at the dam’s power plant spotted it in an eddy and brought it ashore with poles and hooks. There was a Western Union pay envelope with Kate’s name on it in her pocket. Diamond rings on her left hand and a locket confirmed her identity.
Eleanor had been living with her uncle John and his family since Kate disappeared. Two nights before Kate’s body surfaced, she’d appeared to Eleanor in a dream. “Where are you, mother?” Eleanor asked. “I don’t know,” Kate said. “Ask Foster.”
Hughes sent Farrell to John Mitchell’s house. “Oh, where is she?” Eleanor cried. “I want to see her. Why doesn’t she come?” Her uncle John said it was a very good thing Foster hadn’t been set loose—otherwise something bad might have happened to him. “There might have been another murder soon,” John said. “I’ll get him if police don’t,” Eleanor cried. “I want him to hang.”
Hughes sent a police car to bring Kate’s sisters and one of her neighbors to Lockport to identify the body. “It’s Kate,” Margaret said. “Her face is not changed except for the marks on her forehead. I’ll see that Foster hangs for this if I have to spend the rest of my life doing it. . . . ”
The bruises on Kate’s forehead had hemorrhaged. There were marks on the back of Kate’s right hand, caused, said Hughes, by “her attempt to shield her face.” The marks on Kate’s forehead, above her right eye, had been the result of a “terrific blow,” said coroner’s physician Dr. Joseph Springer. “The wound above the eye was distinctly discolored,” said Springer. “That proves, conclusively, that it was inflicted before death.” The blow had been powerful but not fatal. Kate went into the water, bloody, but alive. Her body had water in its lungs. Kate had drowned. “Foster can explain those bruises,” Margaret said. “I am certain they were made when he took her into his automobile on the night she disappeared. She wouldn’t have gone with him otherwise.”
Fitzmorris and Hughes knew they now had enough evidence to convene a coroner’s jury. From coroner’s jury to grand jury—Arthur was headed to trial.
Crowe sent Edgar A. Jones, his “First Assistant State’s Attorney,” to present the case against Foster. Before the hearing, Hughes had Arthur, handcuffed to a deputy sheriff, led to the bier where Kate’s body lay. Arthur flinched and pulled away. “Whose body is it?” asked coroner’s physician Springer. “I can’t tell,” Arthur said.
Farrell was the state’s first witness. He described the seven-week search he’d led. Kate’s friend from work Katherine Whallon took the stand next. Jones asked her to describe Kate’s relationship with Arthur. “She lived in mortal dread of him,” Whallon said. “She once spoke of leaving Chicago to escape Foster. She said she disliked openly fighting him for fear her brothers would make trouble and she would lose her job.” Whallon described how Arthur would pull up next to them while they were walking. How he once threatened Kate’s life unless she got in his car. How Kate would come to work with welts and bruises on her face. Once, Kate told her, Arthur had beaten her with a gun butt; once he’d punched her and “cracked her jaw open.”
Eleanor testified next. She talked about the time Arthur pulled a gun and chased Kate into the house. She described all the times Arthur had frightened, and threatened, and hurt her mother. Eleanor shook her fist at Arthur. “You know you killed my mother, Art. You know you did.” Eleanor walked over and glared at him. Arthur flinched and turned pale.
Ruby and Margaret followed Eleanor to the stand. “I just ask that this dog of a murderer be given justice,” Ruby cried.
Arthur’s attorney, John Byrne (the man who’d sent Arthur that Christmas dinner), “made such strenuous objection”—insisted so vehemently that he be allowed to cross-examine witnesses—“that Deputy Coroner Kennedy finally ordered him” to leave the hearing room. Byrne refused. Police officers threw him out.
The coroner’s jury took five minutes to reach a verdict. “From the evidence heard, we conclude that the violence was committed and the body was thrown into the canal by one Arthur Foster. We, the jury, recommend that Foster be held to the grand jury on the charge of murder.”
Arthur had refused to testify during the hearing. Now, he sat silently and puffed on his cigar. “His hand trembled; but he gave no other sign.”20
“It is clear to my mind,” Hughes told reporters, “that Foster met Mrs. Trostell the night she disappeared; the two quarreled, he knocked her senseless, and then flung her body into the Canal. We have a hanging case against him, despite his denials.”
Arthur pleaded not guilty. Byrne had advised him to do that. “They’ve got nothing on me,” Arthur said. He spoke to reporters. It was Kate’s family, he said, its constant bickering and backbiting, that had driven Kate crazy. “I don’t know anything about what happened to Kate. I was at home on the night she disappeared and I have three witnesses to prove it. I told the police she was in the river because I’d heard her say, repeatedly, that she was going to kill herself that way. . . . Kate was a nervous wreck. It wasn’t today or yesterday that she started to talk about killing herself. She had trouble with her two sisters most of the time since I’ve known her—and that was most of her life. . . . The bickering had been going on, continuously. . . . The burden of that family was always on Kate’s shoulders. It was that that killed her—not any act of mine. Little Eleanor knows how unhappy her mother was. She’d admit it if her mind hadn’t been poisoned against me.”21
The grand jury indicted Arthur two weeks later.
“Eleanor Trostell, the fourteen-year-old daughter of the dead woman,” was the principal witness against Arthur.22
Eleanor—the avenger. From orphan child to vengeful adolescent in only two months. By the time Arthur’s trial began in May 1923, the Chicago Daily News decided Eleanor was really thirteen. Did the papers have such bad reporters and such inattentive editors that they’d consistently misrepresented Eleanor’s age?
Maybe Eleanor—and Margaret and Ruby and Fred and John—had decided not to tell people how old Eleanor really was. Maybe the papers just made a mistake—the way they’d first called Eleanor “Elois.” They’d quickly corrected her name, though.
For weeks, as police searched the canal and the papers reported every visit Eleanor made to Arthur in his cell—all the tears, the tresses, the hugs, the cuddling, and the pleading—Eleanor remained an eleven-year-old orphan child. The effect Eleanor sensed—and the police knew—she had on Arthur involved more than guilt. When the police began using Eleanor to crack Arthur, she was almost the same age Kate had been when Arthur had first met her. Chief of Detectives Hughes convinced Eleanor to talk to Arthur, but Eleanor did more than talk to him. Sitting on his lap, wrapping her arms around his neck, letting him kiss her—that went beyond the call of duty.
Arthur was whipsawed between guilt, fear, tenderness, and longing. Why didn’t he incriminate himself? Why didn’t he break?
Perhaps because anger and fear were stronger than guilt and remorse. Perhaps because Kate had actually jumped into the canal. Pursued by him, beaten by him, stalked by him—but not thrown into the water by him. Arthur’s aggression, combined with the emotional and physical damage caused by a (possible) abortion, had broken Kate. She jumped because she’d been pushed.
The other possibility was the one described by Hughes: Arthur had beaten Kate unconscious then thrown her off the bridge. Struck her so hard because the child she (may have) aborted was (or even worse: wasn’t) his. Thrown her into the canal to deceive police. Kate was suicidal, wasn’t she?
Arthur was culpable and he was guilty. Guilty of what, though?
Crowe’s office decided Arthur was guilty of murder. Not manslaughter. Murder.
None of the state’s witnesses had seen Arthur kill Kate.
Worse yet: When Arthur went to trial in May 1923, Judge Jacob Hopkins quickly ruled that the bloodstains, the button, and the pencil that Farrell’s men found when they’d searched Arthur’s car and room were not admissible.
The state did have the evidence of Kate’s body—its bloody marks and bruises and the water in its lungs. It also had the two watchmen who’d heard a woman’s screams the night Kate died.
Margaret and Ruby, Kate’s coworker, and Kate’s neighbor—all testified about Arthur’s abuse of Kate. Eleanor was the state’s star witness. She wept; she accused. The jury melted.
Arthur’s lead attorney, Everett Jennings (Byrne stayed on; no reporter ever explained how a man who hauled ashes could afford two attorneys), acknowledged that Arthur had been cruel to Kate. Cruel, relentless, brutal. Arthur was guilty of assaulting Kate, guilty of threatening and harassing her. All true. But all in the past. No one had seen Arthur murder Kate. In fact: Kate had talked openly about killing herself. Talked about it for some time. No one could deny that Kate was suicidal. As to Kate’s bruises: the canal was full of chunks of ice the night she’d died. If she’d jumped from the Ashland bridge—as she’d often talked of doing—she’d probably been injured when she hit the ice as she hit the water.
Assistant State’s Attorney Sam Hamilton brushed aside Jennings’s arguments like a man sweeping crumbs off a table.
“Just put yourself in the place of that poor woman,” he said. “See in your mind the way she tried to save herself by hanging to the side of the automobile from which Foster was trying to push her into the muddy water of the Canal. Foster asked her to go for an auto ride and, when he got in the vicinity of the Canal, he picked her up in his arms and shoved her through the door of the car.
“She clung to the side of the car. He hammered her fingers to make her lose her grasp; when she could hang on no longer, he gave her a mighty push and she fell. A loud splash resounded in the night as the body hit the dirty water and went under. Foster waited for a moment or so and then drove back to his home.
“What should be the penalty of the crime? Hanging by the neck until dead.”23
The jury took ninety minutes to decide that Arthur had murdered Kate and should hang for it.
“The verdict was a surprise even to the state as rulings made by the court had barred from the record much of the evidence upon which it had hoped a conviction would be obtained.”24
Arthur didn’t move or blink or sigh when he heard the verdict. Everett Jennings immediately entered a motion for a new trial. Arthur looked bored.
Crowe called a press conference. “Two months ago,” he said, “I ordered my Assistants to strike with all their might at murderers.” Eight men had been brought to justice since then: a thief who’d killed a policeman; two crooks who’d murdered another crook; a robber who’d shot a cigar store clerk; a man who’d shot and killed a cabdriver; a man who’d murdered the wife of a traveling salesman. And now, Arthur Foster. “It is a record,” Crowe proclaimed, “an achievement that will call a halt to killing in this city.”
Two months passed.
Judge Hopkins agreed to hear arguments on Jennings’s motion for a new trial. At issue: Was Arthur a murderer or just “the innocent victim of an insidious net of circumstances”? Was the state’s circumstantial evidence sufficient to hang him?
The papers reported the hearing as if it were only a bit less consequential than the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
“There is not the slightest evidence to prove that Arthur Foster threw Mrs. Trostell into the Canal,” Jennings argued as Hopkins listened. “You cannot substitute the ingenuity and genius of the State’s Attorney for evidence.” Sam Hamilton countered with a list of legal precedents—convictions based on circumstantial evidence that had been appealed, then upheld by the State Supreme Court. Hamilton was as circumspect as he’d once been impassioned. Jennings was as emotional as he’d once been restrained. The Chicago Tribune reported that the hearing was attracting an unusual amount of legal attention: “It may prove a precedent, many attorneys say, for many another [case] to follow.”25
Judge Hopkins announced his decision three days later: “I cannot send a man to the gallows on mere suspicion. I believe Foster might have thrown Mrs. Trostell into the canal. I suspect he might have killed her. But there is no one to say that the scream that came from the canal was uttered by Mrs. Trostell. There was nobody who saw Foster with her.
“The [State] Supreme Court undoubtedly would reverse the case on some pretext or other. The Supreme Court does not send men to the gallows when there is doubt as to their guilt. Therefore I sustain the motion for a new trial.”26
Arthur smiled when he heard that. Guards took him back to his cell.
He was released on $15,000 bail eight months later. (Equivalent to $150,000 today.) The papers didn’t report who put up the money.
In October 1926, the State’s Attorney’s office filed a motion to strike Arthur’s case from the trial docket. Judge Hopkins accepted the motion.
Arthur walked.