Are The Houses In Colorado Springs Still There?

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Google Street View

This keeps coming up and so I want to address it in its own post so that there isn't any confusion. The Burnham and Wayne houses were torn down by the landlord in early 1912. They aren't there any more. The address didn't change. They are gone and have been for over 100 years. The people who keep getting bothered by others coming by DO NOT live in the Burnham home. There isn't any confusion on this. The houses are GONE. Leave whomever lives in the house in Colorado Springs alone. The only people who are confused by this whole thing are people who refuse to believe history or listen to me. The picture on the right is the Google Street view of the corner in question. As I noted in the screen grab, the house pictured is not the Burnham house. The entire neighborhood is over 100 years old. All of the houses surrounding this corner were standing in 1911.  The old grocery store is there. The house Mrs. Brown lived in is still there. The Evans' house is still there. But the house Arthur Burnham rented and the house that Henry Wayne rented are not there any more. However, the empty space they occupied is still there. If the owners of the house with the arrow over it believe there was an axe murder in their house, it's because they have been convinced there was by people who think they know better. There wasn't.

The screen grab at the left is the 3D view of the same corner. The red boxes represent approximately where the Burnhams and Waynes were living at the time of the murders. The Burnham cottage faced Dale Street. The Wayne cottage faced Harrison Place. There was a bit more room between them. Now I know, "But Inspector, how do you know this?" Because it's documented. The Denver Library has a huge collection of historic maps of Colorado, including the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps. What are those? From the Library of Congress "The Sanborn map collection consists of a uniform series of large-scale maps, dating from 1867 to the present and depicting the commercial, industrial, and residential sections of some twelve thousand cities and towns in the United States." These maps are huge. The Denver Library has a special Map Room which is the only place you are allowed to view the maps. You have to wear linen gloves and the only way to make a copy is with a camera without a flash. You also aren't allowed to touch the table the maps are set on lest the oil from your skin transfer to the table top. The Sanborn maps were updated every year. 

Special Thanks to Me

The picture on the right is my photograph, tightly cropped, of the 1912 Sanborn map of Colorado Springs. This is the corner in question. Dale Street is on the top and Harrison Place is down the right. You can see the house number listed along Dale Street for the Burnham House...and no building corresponding with the number 321. If you look really close though, you can see the faint outline of the Burnham cottage through the paper overlay. The Wayne cottage faced Harrison Place along the bottom of the square.  Hopefully this post puts the issue to rest.

Once more, though, for the record, the Burnham and Wayne cottages were torn down 107 years ago. If you want to visit something, visit their graves at the Evergreen Cemetery and leave the folks in 323 alone.

Colorado Springs and Monmouth: One Clue To Link Them Both!

  

Springs Gazette
Sept. 4, 1911

"Oly" in the comments on this old post has provided a very good and plausible hypothesis regarding the flashlight found behind the Dawson's house in Monmouth, Illinois. For those of you that didn't take the time to check the other article, here's the key takeaway:

I have four different phrases reported on the flashlight. The New York Times reported in 1915 the words “Colorado Springs” and “Lovey.” Pretty damning if true, however newspapers in Colorado reported the writing to say “Lovely, Colorado Springs.” The comma is paramount here as it’s the difference between a possible name (Lovely and Loving have both been reported as Mitchell’s first name) or a phrase you might find on a souvenir from a resort town like Colorado Springs. Another Colorado paper reported “Loving Colorado Springs.” The Monmouth Review-Atlas reported simply “Colorado Springs” in 1915, and in a 1984 article rehashing the incident the same paper reported “Colo. Sprig. Sept. 4.”

Ten yeas ago (holy crap) I spent a little time trying to find the significance of September 4, 1911 in Colorado Springs. I quickly filed it under "Get To Later" and was distracted by other shiny things. Thank goodness for readers! Oly may have found the definitive evidence linking the Burnham-Wayne murders to the Dawson murders. A Labor Day picnic in Colorado Springs! Hosted, in part, by the Modern Woodmen of America! On the date reported to have been scratched into the side of the flashlight! I'm extremely excited by this!

Colorado Springs – 101

Henry and Blanche Wayne

Four years ago I wrote a brief summary of the murders of two families in Colorado Springs, Colorado.  These crimes are now one-hundred-one years old this week and as far as I know, no one is any closer to naming a possible suspect then they were over a century ago.  I certainly haven’t got any answers but I still dig.  I have corresponded with relatives of the victims as well as other researchers.  I have had promising leads disintegrate into nothing, pleasant surprises from vague guesswork and countless dead ends.  By focusing on then entirety of the series of crimes I have created a lot of work for myself.  The number of facts and fantasies I can delve into on just one of these crimes is enough to bore people (or scare) people over conversations at parties.  Yet, I feel like I am missing something.  Just one more bit of evidence that can snap everything into focus.  Allow me to give a brief update of some things I now know.

Victimology: May A. Burnham

Victimology is becoming a much more important area of study in the larger field of criminology. Most often a criminal is caught by tracking down points in time and locations at which the victim may have contacted the perpetrator. What were the victim’s habits or actions that might have led to this contact? Often times a victim who seems to be a low risk for violent crime is discovered to have engaged in high risk behaviors such as drug use or prostitution. Victimology is not without controversy. Victim’s advocates have argued this is a way of assigning partial responsibility for the criminal’s actions to the victim themselves (the old “[he, she] was asking for it” fallacy. In fact there is a term in sociology, penal couple, which assigns near equal blame to the victims of violent crimes. As an anthropologist I think this, along with a lot of sociology, is utter crap. But that’s for another day. For now let’s look at May Burnham.

Twenty-five year old May Alice Burnham was the oldest daughter of John and Emma Hill. John met Emma while working for the railroad making railroad ties and they were married about 1882. John’s job would require him to move his family on down the line as the rails were built. May and her younger sister Nettie would be born in Kansas before John picked up and moved the family on into Colorado Springs. Around 1890 Emma had had enough and it was time her daughters went to school. John purchased a house and took a job as a wagon maker, giving his family some geographic stability for a change. May and her sister were extremely close growing up, likely owing to their constant relocation, and this closeness remained strong even after both of them had married. John, it seems, took up with the railroad shortly after Nettie had married. This time his work as a carpenter for the railroad took him south into Mexico. This is where he was at the time of his oldest daughter’s murder. Shortly before this, Emma, now making pastries at a local hotel, petitioned for a divorce.

May would marry Arthur, then a recovering “lunger” around 1904. Arthur worked as a store clerk in various locations throughout Colorado Springs, including a candy store near the neighborhood they would later live in. When Arthur’s tuberculosis became worse and he moved into the sanitarium almost full time, May became essentially a single mother. She and the children moved into her childhood home to live with her mother for a while. Sometime in the middle of 1910, Arthur was deemed well enough to leave the sanitarium occasionally and he moved his family out of Emma’s house and into the upstairs rooms of Anna Merritt. It was during this time that Anna and May would become good friends. Some time in early 1911, Arthur would discover the little cottage on the edge of town, near the railroad tracks. It was a quiet little neighborhood and very near the road out to the sanitarium.

One thing to examine when putting together a victimology is the kind of behaviors a victim has that put them into contact with strangers. In order to make ends meet, May would take in “overflow” from Anna Merritt’s house when someone needed a bed for the night. This often involved renting the bed in one of the two rooms of the house. The door between these rooms had a lock on it and could be secured from one side although I admit I do not know which side it was. May also allowed borders to rent the hammock on the front porch of the house. This would have brought her into contact with strangers regularly and in the few weeks the Waynes lived in their home, would have brought them into contact with these strangers as well. Because of the proximity to the D&RG railroad tracks and with the prevalence of “stowaway” passengers on (yes I know, hobos) they would have seen more then their fair share of itinerant strangers as well. For a general timeline of the Burnham’s movements on the day of the murders, go here.

Entrances, Exits and Procurement…

The neighborhood the Burnham and Wayne families lived in was decidedly lower class and populated by people of very little means. It was just a half a block away from the Denver & Rio Grand railroad tracks. To the west of the homes ran a trolley line which ran late at night in order to accommodate the late shift workers of the Golden Cycle Mill to the west. Below is a (not scale) map of the neighborhood from 1909. The map is running with North on the right side. The arrows indicate the two houses and are pointing in the direction the front doors faced. The houses running along the trolley tracks were all vacant but due to the high use of the road they faced, there were electric street lamps running in front of them. The “Alley” to the east of the two houses was dark.

I think the most likely path of the killer was along the Alley. He could have come in from the west but would have risked being seen entering the back yards of the vacant houses along the trolley line. By coming in from the railroad tracks in the east and cutting south into the Alley, the killer would have been moving in almost complete darkness. Why did he then choose the Wayne’s house to enter? By coming from either the south or the north through the alley he would have passed two other occupied houses first; Joseph and Martha Evans to the south of the Wayne’s house, and Mrs. C. L. Brown's house just across the Alley from the Burnhams. There are two characteristics that stick out to me as possible reasons for skipping those two houses. First, the Browns were African-American. Second, the Evans were in their fifties. Opportunity didn’t seem to be a factor since the killer forced entry into both murder houses so if he was willing to break into those two houses, why not the Evans or Brown homes? "But Inspector...you are implying the murders weren't random!" Kind of, yeah. I don't think the killer actively stalked the victims in Colorado Springs but I also don't believe he just broke into a house without any idea who might be in there. There is circumstantial evidence to suggest the killer observed his victims at Ellsworth and Villisca. I think it is likely he did the same in Colorado Springs. There were numerous spots, including vacant houses, surrounding the crime scenes where the killer could have hidden and observed his targets. A worker on his way to the Golden Cycle Mill reported that he observed a man "loitering" in the vicinity around midnight on the night of the murders. Could this have been our guy?

Maybe one of these guys knows?

Victimology: Blanche V. Wayne

I have already gone into Blanche Wayne’s family background here so I won’t repeat it. I want to try, as best I can, to follow her movements before the night of September 17^th, 1911. Blanche had just turned 23 and from photos and descriptions was quite pretty.

Based on Arthur Burnham’s statement that Henry Wayne had called him on August 23^rd (a Wednesday) then it is likely that the entire Wayne family arrived in Colorado Springs either on or near that date. Burnham stated that he spoke to Wayne about the cottage and the next time Burnham went home (Wednesday the 30^th) the Waynes had moved in. The little cottage was $6 per month rent (about $138 today) and Henry paid for two months in advance. Lulumay and the Burnham children played in the back of the houses from time to time and May Burnham had told Arthur “[Blanche was] a nice little woman.”

Colorado Savings Bank (1950s)

From the time the Waynes moved into the little cottage, Blanche would be seen around the neighborhood with her daughter while on walks to the corner store and to the park a few blocks away. To a person, those in the neighborhood said they didn’t know the Waynes well. The only exceptions were apparently May Burnham and Grant Collins, the owner of the corner store. Collins told investigators he saw the Wayne family almost every day but hadn’t really talked to them until the Sunday afternoon before their deaths. Blanche apparently did speak to her neighbors as some of them stated she told them the $55 Henry placed into savings was from the sale of furniture in Indiana. Some time during the week of September 17^th, 1911, Blanche spoke to her neighbor, Martha Evans, about barrowing her axe, which would ironically become the murder weapon. There hasn’t been anything in my research to indicate Blanche or Henry were high probability targets for violent crime. If anyone has any more information about Henry or Blanche Wayne, particularly from relatives, I would really appreciate hearing from you. I would like to flesh out these victimologies with a bit more info and history.

Victimology: Henry Wayne

September 17^th, 2011 will mark 100 years since the (unofficial?) beginning of the series of murders known as the Midwest Axe Murders. I am in the camp of these murders being the work of a highly mobile serial killer. Of particular interest to those who study serial killers are the victimology. What traits, characteristics or actions lead to the killer choosing this particular victim? Ideally I want to start examining the victims a bit more in order to gather information that could lead to, at least a few, conclusions about victim selection by the killer. Since the Wayne’s were possibly the very first victims of the Midwest Axeman, I’ll look at them first, starting with Henry “Frank” Wayne.

Henry Wayne was the third of eight children born to George and Terrissa Wayne. Henry grew up in Pulaski County, Indiana, near the small town of Medaryville. George was a farmer, originally from Ohio, and made sure his children went to school. Henry alternatively went by Frank which was the short form of his middle name, Francis. Henry married Blanche McGinnis in 1908 and their daughter, Lulamay was born in 1909. Probably around September of 1910 Henry left for Colorado Springs to receive treatment for tuberculosis at the recently opened Modern Woodman Sanatorium. He stayed in the Sanatorium for 11 months and was released. Arthur Burnham told investigators he had told Henry about the cottage next to his and Henry decided to move in. According to Burnham that was the extent of their socializing. In early August of 1911 Burnham was told by the cook at the sanatorium that Henry was to be his replacement in the kitchen. Henry worked there for a few days then went back to Indiana to bring out his family. On August 23, Henry placed a call with the operator to Burnham and asked about the empty cottage next door. On August 31, 1911 Henry made a deposit of $55.00 ($1300 today) in a local bank. Blanche Wayne had told neighbors this was from the sale of furniture in Indiana.

A restored TB hut on the old grounds of the Modern Woodman Sanatorium

Initial investigations of the murders focused around love triangle hypotheses and it wasn’t just regarding the Burnhams. Remember I said in a previous post that Denver Chief of Police Hamilton Armstrong believed the murderer was a woman? Well the hypothesis behind this belief was Henry, away from his family for so long, had been friendly with another woman and Henry broke the whole thing off when his wife and daughter got to town. There isn’t anything to suggest this was the case at all. In fact it’s very likely that Henry spent the majority of his time at the sanatorium before he was released. According to accounts in the newspaper, Henry had no friends in the city and only vague acquaintances at the sanatorium any way. The only solid evidence of Henry interacting with anyone was an argument he was seen having with another man in the front yard of his cottage the week before the murders. No one could say what the argument was about and the man was never found.

A question to get me back on track…

John asks: What is the deal with covering victims and mirrors with bedclothes?

Admittedly I have gone slightly off track with the original intent of the blog. Perhaps comparing other axe murders of the time to those I consider part of the Midwest Axeman’s reign interests me more than readers. So let me get back on track by addressing John’s question.

I’ll give my usual caveat: I am not a criminal profiler. The opinions expressed are mine.
The crime scenes in which at least one victim was covered with bed sheets or clothing were: both of the crime scenes in Colorado Springs, Monmouth, Ellsworth, Mount Pleasant, Paola and Villisca. Only one crime scene had the mirrors covered, Villisca, but at Ellsworth the phone was covered. Let me address the covering of the bodies first. In some post somewhere I said this usually indicates some amount of remorse on the part of the killer, an attempt to “take it back” if you will. Psychopaths don’t care about their victims so remorse was less likely to be a reason. More likely this was a compulsion or something the killer felt he had to do. It is important to note the killer only attacked the heads of the victims, usually obliterating their facial features. This was not only a means to an end (the end being the death of the victim) but a way to depersonalize the victim. Covering the victim further insured they did not have to “see” them... or perhaps for the victim to “see” the killer.

Why cover the mirrors? Contrary to what was written at the time, covering mirrors in a house after someone has just died was common place in the United States. It was speculated the reason was due to an East European superstition about the dead seeing their reflection and becoming trapped in the house. However it has long been a Jewish tradition while sitting Shiva to have mirrors covered as well. It was also common place among the “lower” classes of England to cover mirrors and windows after a person died. I don’t think we’re looking at a simple superstition here but a psychological need being fulfilled. Investigators in Ellsworth speculated the killer covered the phone in order to muffle the sound of it ringing. This seems fairly ridiculous unless the killer had a reasonable expectation the phone might ring at one in the morning. I believe the phone was covered for the same reason the mirrors and victims were covered (dramatic pause); the eyes. 

The "eyes" of a Western Electric #317 - ca. 1909

The killer either didn’t like to be watched or didn’t want to be looked at, maybe due to a perceived (or real) physical scar or defect (since I think the killer worked for the railroad perhaps it was due to a train accident). After the killer had murdered the victims he covered windows in order to block the view of any pain in the neck witnesses then proceeded to carry out his rituals, in complete anonymity, safe from the eyes of his victims and himself.

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

From the comments...

Sherri in comments asks a good question that I haven’t really addressed: Why not Rev. Lyn Kelly? Any of you who have read about the Villisca crime know who Lyn Kelly was and those of you who don’t need to get over the Villisca Axe Murders blog and study. In brief, Lyn Kelly was a tiny, weird little preacher who was in Villisca on the night of the murders. Rev. Kelly was absolutely howl-at-the-moon crazy and had a bit of a peeper’s fetish. He’d been busted in one town for peeking in a window, arrested in another town for trying to hire a young lady to type and pose nude for him and in another town had cornered a young girl and spent the better part of an hour trying to talk her into undressing for him. His relationship with his wife was more like that of a mother and it is believed the two never consummated the marriage. But was Kelly a psychopath?  

Looking at two of the crime scenes you can draw a few conclusions without needing to be a trained profiler. In Colorado Springs the killer acted strangely. Think Jack the Ripper on the night known as the double event. A run-of-the mill breaking and entering crime gone wrong would have the killer fleeing the scene after the first murder and getting away as fast as possible. Instead the unsub went to the neighbors’ house and killed them as well. The risk involved was substantial with houses all around the area, trolleys clanging down the street and men walking to work. Absolute calm had to be maintained through all of it. In Ellsworth, while the chance of discovery wasn’t as great, it was still there. The killer apparently made an attempt to break into another house but was interrupted by the owner (in this case it was Marshall Merritt) but this near brush with discovery did not dissuade the killer at all. With Bill Miller’s axe in hand, the killer walked south among other houses for quite some distance until he came to the Showman house. If the bloodhound trail was accurate, he hid in some bushes behind the house in order to observe. After he killed the family he washed his hands, wiped the axe down and posed Pauline. He then stepped out the front door, hopped a train and left town. In order to do this there had to be an escape strategy other wise the entire getaway would have been based on whether or not a train was passing by. Did he wait inside the house until a train came or did he lounge on the front porch? Or did he have an idea of how long to stay inside before hopping the train?  

Judging by the way Kelly reacted while in jail and during the trial it is clear he couldn’t handle high pressure situations. He shrank in his chair during the trial and while he had some peculiarities with regard to children it seems he just didn’t have the nerves required to break into a house without waking anyone, kill the occupants without waking anyone and then escape unnoticed through town. Now Dr. Epperly knows a lot more about Rev. Kelly than I do and I look forward to reading the upcoming book once it comes out but based on what I know I just can’t see Lyn Kelly as being able to pull any of this off.

Justice for all...

Kelly Rundle over at the Villisca Axe Murder Blog posts today about the recent AP article relating to the reinstitution of after dark Trick-or-Treating in Oil City, PA. He makes a good point about how towns deal when tragedy strikes.

It is possible that cancelling Halloween for many years contributed to a focus
on the murder.

However, there are no handbooks or instructions available to cities wounded by violence, and communities are left to define themselves via action or inaction in the immediate and enduring wake of a tragedy...as they have done in Villisca, Iowa.

Some towns embrace it, like Fall River, Massachusetts, while others run from it without much success, like Amityville, NY (I know, not really a town but leave me alone). The Oct. 26, 1911 edition of the Ellsworth Reporter warned

that the children of this city [not] follow their usual custom of inflicting
petty annoyances upon the people of Ellsworth on the nights of Sunday, Monday
and Tuesday, which are known as Tick-tack, Corn, and Halloween nights. Our
people are still considerably wrought up over the murder and it is said that a
great many have purchased firearms with which to defend themselves in case of an
attack.

Everyone in Ellsworth today knows there was an axe murder on the outskirts of town. It’s part of the local lore and the place where the Showman house once stood is referred to as “The Hatchet” but very few resident’s know the family’s name. In Monmouth, Colorado Springs and Paola (KS) the crimes are completely unknown except by a few locals. I look at the strife Villisca went through after the crime and I see the way the town struggles with the crime today and I wonder if it’s worth the effort to drudge up murders that haven’t been thought of in a generation or more. Shauna’s killers have been brought to justice and while it may not be enough for some, it is more justice than many victims ever get and certainly more than any of the victims of the Midwest Axe Man have received, and at this moment, knowing the victim's names is all we can do.

From Murders to Mayors

George G. Birdsall - 1935
Courtesy of Pikes Peak Library

On August 29th, 1956, George Grippin Birdsall, former El Paso County Sheriff, died after a long illness. He was seventy-nine years of age and had been a public servant and business owner for almost fifty years in the Pikes Peak area. His obituary which ran on August 30 mentioned his years of service in Colorado Springs government, starting in 1921 on the city council then in 1929 as mayor. Three years before his death, the city of Colorado Springs began construction on the Birdsall Municipal Power Plant, a steam plant designed to burn sludge oil and later retrofitted to burn used motor oil. The plant is still in use today and provides the city with 1/3 of its power using natural gas. Of his years as the El Paso County Sheriff (1909-1917), his obituary notes only “Colorado City (sic) went from a "wide open" town to a "closed" one. There had been turbulent years there.” Certainly the Burnham / Wayne murders had something to do with this but forty-five years later, no one wanted to mention it specifically. Sheriff Birdsall never arrested a suspect and officially investigated the crime for only ten days before handing it off to the Pinkerton agency. Birdsall was a special agent for the FBI in 1918 and would later be named a delegate to the Republican National Convention in 1940 but his greatest political success was his time as mayor.

Warren County Public Library - became the first free public library in Illinois in 1920

Political success was not only afforded to George Birdsall. John Hamilton Hanley had graduated from Monmouth College in 1883 and later received his Masters Degree from the same school. He began working for the law firm of Grier and Stewart in Monmouth and would become a successful lawyer in spite of his lack of a degree in the field. The local authorities in Monmouth and Warren County had given up on investigation into the Dawson family’s murder but the crime stayed in the back of Hanley’s mind long after the rest of the community had forgotten. Hanley was known by his friends as a fighter for those who could not fight for themselves and the lack of justice for William Dawson and his family would have been unacceptable to him. By 1915 Hanley had what he believed to be enough “dope” on the case to at least make an accusation which led to the arrest of Lovey Mitchell.  Hanley's involvement in this case is not mentioned in any biography I have read.  In 1917 John Hanley was elected to his first of two, two-year terms as mayor of Monmouth and upon his death of a cerebral hemorrhage on July 15th, 1936, was serving as the city’s Master in Chancery (a kind of judge’s assistant). One of the first ordinances enacted by Mayor Hanley’s city council was a regulation on weapons within city limits:

That no person shall within the City, wear or carry, concealed on or about his person, any pistol, revolver, slingshot, metallic knuckles, bowie knife, dirk, razor or other dangerous or deadly weapon, nor shall any person display or flourish any such weapon in a boisterous or threatening manner.

Very inquesting...

To the defense of all involved in the investigation at Colorado Springs, the victims were not discovered until nearly three days after they were murdered. If the killer was mobile (and it seems he was) then he was long gone from the city by then and certain missteps could be forgiven since the Colorado Springs authorities really had no hope of catching a mobile serial killer in 1911. But on the other hand if this had been an acquaintance murder then the investigation would have been an even bigger failure. At the inquest held ten days after the crime's discovery and ten days after the swearing in of the jury over the victims' bodies as they lay in the morgue, four witnesses were called, neither of them able to shed any better light on the crime than what the newspapers had already reported.  

Two people mentioned in newspaper reports were never called to testify; the milkman who on the morning of September 18 (around 2:00 a.m.) saw a peculiar man leaving the neighborhood on a bicycle and the miner, C. Marshall, who saw a man loitering in the area around midnight on the 17th. Marshall got close enough to the man to see a mustache but we don't know the context of the sighting (where in the area was he seen, what clothes he was wearing, what was the suspicious behavior noticed, ect...). The description given by Marshall was vague at best; medium height, mustache and wearing a soft hat. Who knows what details further questioning could have brought out. Also noticably absent from the witness list were Tony Donatell, Arthur Burnham, John Merritt (Anna Merritt's brother) and at least one person (a woman) who had paid for the use of the Burnham's front porch hammock a week before the murders. At least three people walked past or visited the Burnham's house on Monday September 18th; Grant Collins' son actually knocked on the front door in an attempt to deliver the Burnham's grocery bill. He tried again on Tuesday and ended up leaving the bill tacked to the front door. Anna Merritt's niece walked by the house on Monday and Tuesday and not only told her aunt the Burnham children had not been to school those days but told her the house was closed up. Anna herself walked by Monday morning on her way to and from the Meskimen-Collins grocery store and testified not only did she notice the house looking empty but had made a conscious decision not to visit since she was very busy that day. The Burnham's nearest neighbor, Mrs. C. L. Brown, was also not called to testify even though she may have been the last person, other than May Burnham's sister, to see any of the family alive. Would any of the above individual's testimony have helped the investigation? In short, probably not but the more information an investigator has, the better the chance of finding a lead.

Find A Grave...

Find A Grave is a wonderful website. If you are a genealogist I suggest you utilize it. I had never tried the "photo request" feature until the other day. I don't know why I was apprehensive about making a request but I was. Two days after I make the request and BAM! I have a photo of the Wayne's headstone in Medaryville Cemetery. Special thanks goes out to Find A Grave volunteer clanema for getting the photo. By all accounts, the Wayne's funeral was small and attended only by friends and family. This was a stark contrast to the Burnham funeral in which hundreds attended. Later funerals for later victims would have much the same carnival feel of the Burnham funeral.  

Special thanks to Beth Klingensmith for the photo of the Burnham's headstone.  

The neighborhood today…

Unlike the Villisca house and the Lizzy Borden Bed & Breakfast, the Burnham and Wayne cottages are gone. Many of the original houses in the neighborhood are still standing after much modernization. The photo above ran in the Colorado Springs Gazette the morning after the murders were discovered and shows the crowd outside of the Burnham cottage. The house immediately behind it is the Wayne cottage. The photo below is from Google Street View and shows the view of the neighborhood looking from west to east. Note the similarity of the houses; these houses are nearly 100 years old. If the Burnham cottage was still standing it would be at the east end of this street. In 1911 a trolley line ran north and south perpendicular to the Burnham’s street. The lines were removed in the 1930’s but the street is still a major roadway. Just a few houses south of this location another axe was found, which was tested for signs of human blood. The test was not conclusive.

Do the people who live in this neighborhood know about the history? It’s hard to say. I have intentionally kept addresses private in order to ensure the privacy of the current property owners. If the current owners know about it, they probably don’t want curiosity seekers hanging around, and if they don’t know they definitely don’t need strangers driving by all the time. The Colorado Springs Gazette called this the “worst crime in the city’s history.” Almost a hundred years later I believe it still has that designation but the crime has been largely forgotten and only the silent houses left standing can testify to the chaotic crowds that descended upon the little neighborhood on a cool September morning ninety-seven years ago.

A grim anniversary...

It’s been almost 100 years since a mine worker named Marshall noticed a strange fellow hanging around a neighborhood in what was then known as West Colorado Springs. The time was about midnight and the Marshall thought nothing of it at the time. Ninety-seven years later I am left wondering just who it was he saw. Mr. Marshall may have been one of the only people to actually see the person responsible for one of the most brutal series of crimes in U.S. history. We probably will never know; no one was ever caught and Marshall was never called to testify before the Coroner’s Jury. Those involved with the investigation would call the inquest a “farce” and useless. Sheriff George Birdsall would pass the investigation off to Pinkerton’s who would soon give up on a case with few leads and little chance of paying money. In 1929 Birdsall would become a very successful mayor of the city and even worked for a period in 1918 as a special agent for the FBI in Utah. The murders in Colorado Springs would be headlines for a less than a year and very soon, the worst crime in Colorado Springs history, labeled by newspapers as a crime that would never be forgotten, would be forgotten. History forgets more than it remembers. The people most affected by the murders are long gone. Arthur Burnham had no family left to mourn; Blanche Wayne’s parents had died before her and her siblings have all passed; the same with Henry Wayne and May Burnham. Maybe somewhere in Indiana is a trunk or box filled with old photos or a little diary whose owner cannot be identified. For today, remember the victims or ignore them. They are not the first and they were not the last. They simply lived; and 97 years ago tonight, they were brutally killed.

Walking through Colorado Springs

I recently created a virtual walkthrough of the Colorado Springs crime scenes.  The camera is a bit quick with the movement so if you watch it too many times you might hurl.  No blood or guts just a simple, 3D crime scene.  If you want to see a souped up version go to YouTube.  I put a soundtrack to it and goofed around with it on Windows Movie Maker.  I'm working on a much bigger video for YouTube so look for that in the future.  Now my drawing skills are rather...crappy so no critisizing the artwork.  I will be making virtual walks of all the crime scenes and will post them as I finish them.

Updating...

My first post on the Daweson family and their murders in Monmouth, Illinois is forthcoming.  In the meantime there really isn't anything to report.  I am following a lead that appears to be taking me all the way to the F B I but that is about it.  I am also just about finished with my "summation" of the Colorado Springs coroner's inquest and probably will make that available for download.  Has anyone heard wether or not Dwight Haverkorn ever heard back from the National Archives?

It's in the Details

Okay...when analyzing crime scenes details are tedious to Joe Sweatsock but can be priceless to an investigator. I am a Joe Sweatsock but I have a passion for details because I'm a dork. The three of you who have read anything on this blog have likely read my weak little profile of the killer. Here's a quick hit from that:

Both crime scenes were contained inside one room of small, two-room cottages with limited space available for movement.

How small were these cottages? According to one source they were identical floor plans and about 16 by 24 feet. That's a total of 384 square feet which was then divided into two equally sized rooms (192 sq. ft.)! Your master bedroom is probably bigger than that (hell your walk in closet might be). Small space + long, heavy weapon = small killer with efficient axe-swinging skill. Another new detail I have learned (two actually) relates to the injuries sustained by Henry Wayne. According to the surgeon's testimony at the inquest, Henry's injuries were caused entirely by the flat side of the axe rather than the blade or blunt edge (Editor's note: So what?) (Author's response: I have an editor?). Henry's body was also covered with a jacket as well as the bed sheets. Also, and this I feel is important, when the surgeon examined the bodies at the morgue, he noted that Blanch Wayne was not fully clothed. In order to avoid Occam's razor I will leave it at that (but the temptation is there). Soon I'll be starting in on what I believe is the next crime in the series, the murder of the Dawson family in Monmouth, Illinois. However I have come to the conclusion that it would be easier for me to invent and build a time machine rather than do actual research on this case. Till next time.

Is One of These Scenes Not Like the Other?

On September 30, 1911, the Colorado Springs Gazette ran a brief snippet titled “Recalls Oregon Murders.” It tells of nine victims being killed with an axe or hatchet in the Portland area. By my count it was eight and I’m not sure where the ninth victim comes from. This wouldn’t be the only time the Springs Gazette would play loose with details. For example, in the Sep. 30 article the Gazette lists the similarities as “a hatchet was used, and the heads and faces were beaten to an unrecognizable mass.” In the November 10 issue of the same paper it is reported that the two crimes were “similar in every detail to the murders committed in Colorado Springs.” That, as you will see, was not true. The Sheriff from Portland did visit Colorado Springs in order to compare notes with investigators and it was reported that Sheriff Robert Stevens believed the two to be connected at that time but later it seems he had changed his mind. What were the similarities?

In both murders the weapons, axes, had been picked up at or on the way too the crime scenes. All of the victims were killed in their beds while asleep which means the crimes occurred late at night or early in the morning. The UNSUB washed his hands on the scene in both crimes and the murder weapon was “placed” at the crime scene after the murders. I say placed to differentiate from “dropped” or “thrown away.” The wounds were similar in nature. Overkill was definitely present but not severe overkill of the type seen in Fall River, 1892. In fact, Ruth Hill was hit with only one powerful blow starting diagonally from her right eye to her left jaw. The most severe overkill was directed at the children, particularly young Dorothy. She received three blows, each of which was instantly fatal, two on the front of her skull and one on the back. Philip Hill appeared to have been beaten with a bare fist first before being struck with the flat side of the axe and killed. This type of non-overkill overkill ™ was also present in Colorado Springs.

With those similarities there are some key differences. Along with the murders, the Hills had been robbed. Enough items were taken and evidence left of robbery for the Sheriff to believe robbery was the motive. Neither the Burnham’s nor Wayne’s had anything of note stolen from their homes and even had items of value sitting in plain sight. Both female victims in Ardenwald had been raped (whether or not it was post-mortem is not clear) and then sodomized. This was not an element of the Colorado Springs crimes. The bodies of the Hill family had clearly been handled by the UNSUB(s) post-mortem with bloody fingerprints found all over their bodies. No such handling was evident in Colorado Springs. In Colorado Springs, the most sever overkill was directed at the adults, specifically the most threatening adult in each crime scene, May Burnham and Henry Wayne. The children were killed with one blow each. The bodies of at least the Burnham’s and possibly the Wayne’s were covered. Usually this indicates some type of remorse on the part of the UNSUB and there was no such remorse at the Hill house.

So were these crimes done by the same UNSUB? IMHO, no. I’m no detective or profiler but certain things don’t fit, primarily the wounds to the bodies and to whom the most sever damage was done. In Colorado, the adults were attacked the most severely and the children were attacked as a means of taking complete control of the crime scene. In Ardenwald the adults appear to have been killed in order to get control of the children. Overkill was present on William Hill and the two children but not on Mrs. Hill who was killed with one powerful blow to the head. The bodies of both children and Ruth Hill were handled after they were murdered demonstrating a need to control and manipulate those bodies and the rape and sodomy of Mrs. Hill and Dorothy Rintule reinforces this belief. As I have said before, I believe at least the body of May Burnham had been posed after death which also demonstrates a need to control but she was not sexually assaulted in the traditional sense. The covering of the bodies in Colorado shows remorse by the UNSUB and indicates he may still have seen them as people and that any posing done was for his own twisted pleasure and not to humiliate the victim. The displaying of the bodies in Ardenwald shows how the UNSUB detested his victims and felt the need to treat them like garbage. This post ran longer than I thought it would so I’ll get to the suspect(s) in a later post.

*Description of Ardenwald crime scene taken from Why Some Men Kill, by George A. Thatcher