Chief Armstrong and 100 degrees of separation...

In 1911 Denver Police Chief Hamilton Armstrong stated he believed the murders in Colorado Springs had been carried out by a woman.  Why?  I have no idea.  Chief Armstrong had been appointed in 1908 in an effort to clean up the Denver Police Department.  This was not his first stint in that position and it was a promotion from Chief Detective.  Hamilton Armstrong has the distinction of being the first sheriff of Denver county, which in 1902, the year of his appointment, was the same position as Chief of the Denver Police.  In 1904 the sheriff became an elected position and he won the election but was later removed due to some technicality.  He became the chief license inspector for the city & county of Denver until his re-appointment to Chief of Police in 1908.

Hamilton Armstrong was a first generation U.S. citizen born to Irish parents in Jackson, Mississippi.  He was a bookbinder by trade and moved out to Denver in 1880.  In 1892 he won a term as state senator and when his term was up in 1894 he began his first, short term as police chief, resigning in June of 1895.  He went to work at a newspaper in the bookbinding department until 1897 when he was appointed chief detective.  Nothing in Armstrong's background made him particularly qualified for his law enforcement positions but that was very common in those days.  His assessment of the crime scene in Colorado Springs  would certainly be considered reckless today and might have been seen that way in 1911 if the case weren't so botched already.  Besides his brief involvement in the Colorado Springs investigation, Chief Armstrong had a loose connection with the crime in Villisca.  If you recall in my post about the Pfanschmidt murders two of the investigators on the Villisca crime traveled to Illinois in order to ascertain whether the two crimes might be related.  Well, in 1892 Hamilton Armstrong married Mary Jennie Ruckman, formerly of Quincy, Illinois.  Kevin Bacon has nothing on me.

Technorati Tags: Villisca,Colorado Springs,Denver,Hamilton Armstrong

Tragedy in Harrisonville...

Early in the morning of June 10th, 1913 Mr. Bagshaw was awakened by a tapping at his bedroom window.  He looked out and saw his neighbor, Ida Keller.  He opened the door and she told him an intruder had killed her husband and oldest child with an axe.  She was carrying in her hand the bloody axe and a lantern.  He allowed the woman to use his phone in order to call a doctor and she left, taking the axe and lantern with her.  Neighbors arrived at the Keller house about ten minutes later and found Arthur Keller lying in bed gasping for breath, his skull smashed.  Ida Keller was kneeling beside her seven year old daughter, Margaret, bathing her face.  Arthur Keller died a few hours later and Margaret would die the following evening. 

Ida recounted how she had been woken up by a loud "slamming" sound, like a door might make.  As she sat up in bed she saw a man carrying an axe walking into her room from the room her husband and daughter were sleeping in.  He swung the axe at her but she was able to catch the handle and redirect the blow to her bed frame.  She then struggled with the intruder until he finally gave up, released the axe and fled through the kitchen door, first unlocking it then re-locking it behind him.  A burning "paper hat sack" illuminated the room where her Arthur and Margaret lay and in this light Ida was able to make out the intruder was:

[wearing] a black hat, had a red handkerchief tied over his face, that his hands were those of a white man and that he wore brown socks.

When investigators took note of the crime scene they found a burned paper sack sitting in a chair in the husband's room and the kitchen door locked with key still in the lock on the outside of the door.  The key was attached to a key ring with many other keys on it.  A piece of the bed frame where Ida had slept had been broken off, apparently where the killer's swing had missed its mark.  When asked how it was she could see the color of the man's socks in such low light, Ida responded the socks were those of her husband's and she knew them very well.  Hard as it might be to believe, the case of this homicidal sock thief would get weirder.  Have a safe and happy Halloween - lock up your axes.

12k plus!

Whoa!  According to my little web counter thingamadoodle I have had over 12 thousand visits!  Why?  It has to be an accounting error right?  Must be a lot of bored people out there or maybe it's the Halloween season and people are just searching scary stuff like axe murder?  If you are someone who found this place on purpose, make sure to look around and don't be too shy.  For those of you doing a word search I have an upcoming post on an axe murder in Missouri that didn't involve anyone named Moore.  For now I'll just get back to building my balloon.  Boy I hope to fly to Colorado Springs in it one day :)  Anyway, if those numbers are correct; thank you.

Another axe murder in Colorado

On Friday December 4, 1908, Nicholas Fernandez returned a wagon to the home of Cosmo Garcia. Fernandez had borrowed the wagon earlier in the day. He had knocked on the door repeatedly receiving no answer and apparently there had been some arrangement made for the use of the wagon because Fernandez borrowed it anyway, assuming the family was still asleep. Upon returning the wagon, Fernandez noticed the cabin looked as quiet as it had in the morning so he broke into the house, assuming something was wrong; he was right.

Cosmo lived in a remote cabin with his wife, Viviana, and two daughters, Maggie and Toribia. Maggie was the younger of the two at fifteen. Her sister was twenty-five. A friend of the family, 60 year old Luz Garrule was also staying with the Garcias at the time. Two weeks prior Cosmo had hired a man named Francisco Martinez to help about the place and he lived with the family. Cosmo and Viviana were laying in the front room, both beaten to death with an axe that lay next to their bodies. In other rooms were found Toribia and Luz. It was apparent that the two women were killed in their sleep and the parents were killed when they came out of their room to investigate. Maggie was gone as was the hired man. The murders had been committed on Wednesday night, December 2nd.

Now this case was pretty cut and dry. A posse tracked Francisco Martinez to a canyon roughly thirty miles away from the Garcia cabin. Martinez shot at the posse and shielded himself with his hostage as he began to take her up a rocky trail too narrow for horses to follow. He was cornered in a remote canyon by the posse but before a move could be made on him he killed the girl then himself.  

I discovered this crime while systematically searching for crimes similar to Colorado Springs in the area. Now the Garcia cabin is near Colorado Springs the same way Tallahassee is near Miami; that is to say they’re in the same state. The area where the crime took place is so remote, the place names are known only to the locals and no pictures exist of the area, at least for public viewing. This was a pretty typical mass murder crime. The killer may have had some idea he could get away with the crime but he was fully prepared to end it all if he became cornered. It’s hard to say what the Midwest axe murderer would have done if he had been successfully tracked. The methodical nature of the crimes suggests he had no intention of being caught.  

You don't know Pfanschmidt...

As I have said in comments, a major problem with the investigation of these crimes was the use of detective agencies. The federal agency that would later be called the FBI was only three years old and, just as today, didn’t come into a state case unless asked. I have picked a crime which occurred a few months after Villisca to highlight what I feel is illustrative of this problem. The Montgomery County, Iowa officials asked the Burns National Detective Agency to work on the Villisca case and Burns sent C.W. Tobie, later to be manager of the agency’s Chicago office. Already in town was Detective Thomas O’Leary of the Kirk’s Detective Agency and so the competition was on. The reward in Villisca was growing and professional and amateur detectives were descending on Iowa.  

In September of 1912 a fire was discovered at the home of the Charles Pfanschmidt family outside of Quincy, Illinois. The fire completely destroyed the house and when the metal roof was removed, the bodies of three females were discovered lying on a blood soaked mattress in what would have been an upstairs bedroom. The bodies were those of Matilda and Blanche Pfanschmidt and Emma Kaempen. Matilda was the wife of Charles and Blanch was their fourteen-year-old daughter. Ms. Kaempen was a school teacher in Quincy who boarded with the family. All three women had been bludgeoned with an axe while lying in bed. In the cellar of the house was found another body: 

Also found in the cellar was an axe head with, what was later identified as human blood, “baked” onto it from the intense heat of the flames. The handle of the axe had been completely burned off.

The Attorney General of Illinois requested help from the Burns Agency and Detective Tobie decided to assign himself to the case. Montgomery County continued to pay Tobie for this investigation in order to see if the two crimes might have been connected. Thomas O’Leary also went to Quincy for the same purpose. Before either detective had arrived, the Adams County sheriff arrested the Pfanschmidt’s son, Ray. Ray had moved out of the family house in August to commence work digging out a location for a train switch on the Burlington (C. B. & Q.) Railroad. He had established a work camp near the location for him and his helper to live at. The main evidence against Ray was a set of buggy tracks leading from the Pfanschmidt barn to this work camp. A set of bloody clothes was found and Ray’s “girlfriend” identified them as belonging to Ray. Charles Pfanschmidt owned considerable amounts of real estate and his wife, Matilda, also owned large shares of land from her father which would, upon her death, pass to the children so Ray stood to gain a large inheritance (over $100,000 today) from the death of his family. In the weeks prior to the murders, Charles’ bank sent a note stating that his account had gone overdraft, twice. The checks had been written by Ray and Charles had supposedly complained to a friend about Ray’s spending.

O’Leary immediately decided Ray Pfanschmidt was guilty of killing his family in order to gain the inheritance and declared the two crimes to be unrelated. Detective Tobie saw things differently. After meeting with the Burns detective, Ray Pfanschmidt hired Tobie as an “expert witness” to testify the murders could have been carried out by a roving axe maniac who had killed twenty-four people in four states. So while Detective C.W. Tobie was being paid by Montgomery County, he was hired by the man he was being paid to investigate who stood to gain financially if acquitted. No conflict there! Ray was tried and convicted of murdering his sister in March of 1913 and scheduled for the gallows in October of that year. He won an appeal by the Illinois Supreme Court in February 1914 on the argument his request for change of venue should have been granted and that certain evidence, including the letter of overdraft from the bank, was not admissible. He was retried for the murder of his sister and found not guilty. He was then put on trial for the murder of his father and found not guilty. The case for the murder of his mother was dismissed and authorities didn’t try to convict him again. He took his inheritance and left Adams County. My opinion; Ray got away with it.  But this would not be the last time a Burns detective would throw an investigation off.

The serial mass murderer…

"To me killing people is like ripping open a duvet. Men, women, old people, children, they are all the same. I have never felt sorry for those I killed. No love, no hatred, just blind indifference. I don’t see them as individuals, but just as masses." - Anatoly Onoprienko

Anatoly Onoprienko was dubbed the “Beast of Ukraine,” and killed entire families in remote villages of the Ukraine from 1989 to 1995. I bring him up because serial mass murder perpetrated by an individual is almost unheard of. Usually such actions are carried out by a group of people (The Manson Family), a government (Camir Rouge) or an ideological faction (Al Qaeda). When studying the Midwest Axe Man investigators don’t have much precedent to look at. What drives a person to not only kill an entire family but to actively seek families as their victims? In the case of Onoprienko it was revenge. Revenge for his father abandoning him to an orphanage; revenge for his mother dieing while he was a young boy and allowing his father to take the action he did. He would burn down the houses after killing the occupants because he didn’t want to just kill the family, he wanted to destroy it. To Anatoly the concept of a family was a cruel joke played on him by society.

So why do I bring this up? Mostly for comparison; in the next few posts I am going to be comparing a few crimes with similar characteristics, mostly as an academic exercise, in order to shed light on the possible psychology of the Midwest Axe Man. I’ll try to be careful because I could easily get into trouble with this kind of analysis and I will add the caveat (again) that I am neither a criminal profiler nor am I a criminal investigator.

Onoprienko’s actions indicated clearly he hated his victims, or at least what they represented to him. He wasn’t killing people; he was killing “family,” literally and symbolically. His preferred weapon was a sawed-off shotgun except when it came to females. In two different crimes he used the more personal bludgeoning weapon (in one case an axe, the other a hammer) on the female victims. With the Midwest murders this hatred isn’t evident except in one crime scene, Ellsworth. In contrast, he covered his victims and this is just one signature element present at all the crime scenes. As I’ve said before, covering the body shows a certain amount of remorse, whether for the victims, the crime or both is what is hard to ascertain.