Lovey Mitchell was not indicted by the grand jury in Monmouth. He was brought up on three counts of murder but the charges were thrown out and the indictment was "stricken." I'm guessing the stricken part explains the lack of information on the actual trial. I'm not giving up yet but I'm guessing there aren't any records from the trial either. Numerous affidavits were reportedly signed but my guess is they all ended up in the furnace. I have some information coming but I'm not sure how valuable it might be.
Coming up I will start a series of posts about other axe murders that occurred around the same time frame. The period between 1909 and 1914 was a bad one for people who owned axes. I will kick this off on Halloween and I will be discussing cases that may or may not be related to the Midwest Axe Murders. People often hear about linkage blindness when discussing serial crimes but with historical crimes such as these you often run into linkage puzzling or trying to fit as many crimes as you can into an entire picture. An axe pretty much does the same kind of damage no matter how you use it. In the age before silencers it was the only way to kill a person quickly and quietly and with little chance of the victim fighting back so it isn't surprising that a large number of murders during that time frame were committed with axes. Drawing out signature elements in these murders becomes more important lest you lay the murders of 100 people at the foot of one perp. Some "Ripperologists" have speculated the "Servant Girl Annihilator" of Texas could have been Saucy Jack. A series of prostitute murders in Denver were also attributed to the Whitechapel ripper. The only way to really differentiate similar crimes is by teasing out those elements that make them different and you can only do that by finding detailed descriptions of the crime scenes themselves. I don't have this for some of the crimes I will be posting about so it'll all be speculative fun. Feel free to comment and share information you might have.
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