From The Comments: Nathan B. Harvey

Nathan B. Harvey ca. 1880

Lori writes: "My family has lived near this area for 5 generations and I'm curious if anyone knows if the old large green farm house on the North side of Johnson Creek Blvd as it goes up the hill west toward the rail tracks, was owned by the Harvey family? My grandfather at 15, around 1918, was pulled from that house in the middle of the night by his father after his mother read of a murderer owning the house. My grandfather had been working in the fields of the owner and sleeping over at the house with some other boys at night. My great grandmother said something about the murder of a young girl being found in the fields and the perpetrator owning this home. I still drive by this house often, tempted to ask the new owners but I hesitant to freak anyone out."

Lori – First of all, thanks for the comment! Secondly, please don’t knock on anyone’s doors and ask them about axe murders. I’m uncertain about the house you are referring to, but it definitely never belonged to Nathan B. Harvey. Harvey purchased the land he lived on, about a mile south of the 32^nd Ave. bridge over Johnson Creek, in 1882 and, after 1900, he never lived anyplace else. I don’t know who might have been living there in 1918. I had started a short response to you but found it needed more exposition so here I go.

Suspect Roundup: William Riggin

William Riggin - 1917

I have previously discussed William Riggin with regard to the murders of the Hill family in Ardenwald, near Portland, Oregon.  However that was written a long time ago and I would like to revisit Mr. Riggin in a little more depth and perhaps discover a little more about what made him tick.  William Riggin was born in 1883, in Yamhill county, Oregon, to George and Susan Riggin.  For George, William was his third child and for Susan it was her first.  Susan was George's second wife and was about 10 years younger than him.  Not much can be said for William's younger days except to say that his mother died sometime between 1883 and 1885.  William wouldn't grow up with any full siblings and his only mother figure would be a step mother.  George married his second wife, America Thomas, in 1885 and had six more children with her.  There are a couple of things to note at this time in William's young life.  The new "mother" of the family was just seventeen years of age when she married George, literally young enough to be George's daughter.  She would have married into the responsibility of caring for a a teenage girl of fourteen, a boy just entering adolescence at eleven and a just barely two-year-old boy, none of whom where her children.  By the age of five, two new babies would have come into the family and it would have been easy for a rambunctious young boy to get lost in the chaos.  And lost he was.  At the age of eleven he stole a horse, a major crime in 1894.  Because of his age he was sent to Salem and the Oregon State Reform School, with occasional visits home, until he was eighteen.

A quick wrap up

It has been 97 years since the "worst crime in Iowa History" was discovered by a concerned neighbor.

Just five days after Rollin and Anna Hudson were discovered bludgeoned to death in their home in Paola, Kansas, the Moore family and two Stillinger girls were discovered to have met a similar fate. Go to the Villisca blog or hit their Facebook page and find out more.

In Paola, there was a brief memorial service, attended by hundreds, for the young couple. Rollin Hudson's father, Jonathan, took the bodies back to Ohio for burial. The memorial in Paola included a viewing of the bodies. Investigators began looking for "Hooky" Adams and the stranger who had visited just hours before their murders. They also began a search for an "affinity" letter. George Cole had told investigators Rollin had insinuated he had in his possession a letter or note proving Anna to be untrue. This letter was believed to have been received by Anna on the morning of Decoration Day, May 31st. Hooky Adams turned out to have an air tight alibi but as far as I know, the stranger was never found. Something like an affinity letter was left on a stairway between two businesses with a note on it suggesting it be turned over to the proper persons. I'll get into this letter in another post.

Who was the stranger visiting the Hudsons that night? The description of the clothing would suggest a traveling salesman, likely out of Kansas City. A dark suit and a straw boater were pretty posh items to travel around in at the time. He may have been a friend from Ohio passing through Paola on sales calls and stopped by the Hudson's home on the way to the train station, leaving after a brief visit. The items inside the house were situated in such a way as to suggest some brief reminiscing. A photo album was out on the table as well as a box of letters; the dinner dishes had not been cleared and it looked as if the laundry had been interrupted. This suggests an unplanned, hurried visit. The stranger was invited into the house immediately and may have told Rollin and Anna he was on his way to catch a train. Anna might have thrown together a quick meal and they sat down to look at photographs from back in Ohio. The stranger may have asked about a mutual friend so they pulled out the box of letters in order to find out what city the friend lived in. After the visit the stranger left; Mr. and Mrs. Pryor may not have seen him leave due to being occupied elsewhere or just not paying attention to something that really wasn't all that interesting. The stranger boarded his train and took off to his next location; with the way news traveled (and in comparison to other crimes, Paola received very little press) he may not have known they had been killed for a year or more. It's very possible he didn't know he was the last person, other than the killer, to see them alive.

Could this stranger have been the killer? Sure; was he? Probably not. I think it is safe to assume the late night intruder into the Longmeyer house was the killer of the Hudsons or had something to do with it. If it was our stranger then the scenario gets stupidly complex. Said stranger is invited into the house; he then subdues the couple (investigators thought chloroform may have been used but never explain why), lays them on the bed in a sleeping position and bludgeons them to death with the pick axe he had hidden under his jacket the entire time. He then washes up, steals Anna's robe for kicks and leaves through the back room window. Before leaving he pulls out the photo album and letter box to make it look as if they had been sitting around looking at them the entire time. The album may have been sitting on the table to begin with but it was sheer luck he found the box of letters without needing to ransack the place. Once outside, he decides to go try to kill the next door neighbors so he breaks in through a back window but before he can begin, he drops the chimney, wakes the occupants and flees back through the house, leaving his souvenir from the first murder behind.  Setting aside that it is near impossible to chloroform two concious people back to back, why go through all the other trouble of making the crime look like a burglery but not do anything inside the house to make it look like a burglery.  Typically, when a killer "stages" a burglary-gone-wrong, they tear the place up but fail to take things in plain sight like money and jewelry.  In this case, Anna's jewelry was untouched and the house was in order.  The perpetrator here was of a single mind; kill.

Who was Charles Marzyck?

I find people interesting. I like to watch people walking down the street and try to guess their story. Where are they from; what is their job; have they ever been arrested? The primary reason I started this little blog was to talk about the other victims and players in these murders and I’d like to write a little about Charles Marzyck. The only crime I am certain Charles Marzyck ever committed was stealing wheat from James Vopat. Marzyck’s ex-wife claimed he had forged checks, written bad checks and even deserted from the army after a stint in the Philippines. He was never convicted of any of those crimes and I haven’t found anything showing service during the War in the Philippines. The primary question a researcher needs to ask is “would this suspect commit this kind of crime?” As I have said before, I’m not certain Marzyck would have. But let me give you a little background on Charles.

Denver Museum of Modern Art & formerly the "finest bordello in Denver"

Charles Marzyck was born in New York City around 1878. His parents were Charles and Mary and were emigrants from Bohemia (Czech Republic). Charles was one of five children in the family. He had two sisters, Julia who was about four years older, and Annie who was about four years younger as well as a younger brother, Joseph. The family lived in the Manhattan borough and his father worked as a cigar maker. Sometime between 1880 and 1885 his family moved to Denver, Colorado where Charles’ father set up a cigar making factory in the section of town now referred to as LoDo (lower downtown). When I say factory I mean a place where stuff gets made and not a large industrial building with hundreds of employees; the older Marzyck had only five employees and probably had young Charles helping around the place as well. The Marzyck’s lived on Holladay Street and this may well be important. Holladay Street was notorious as a “red light” district. Bordellos, gambling halls and saloons were everywhere. Only “high class” prostitutes operated in the bordellos but “dollar girls” roamed the streets in front of the gambling halls and theatres. At the time young Charles Marzyck was living on Holladay, it was said there were one thousand girls for a man to choose from. The Marzycks did not live in the actual area known as the red light district but they were only a few blocks away. Marzyck’s neighborhood housed mostly railroad workers.

Denver's police department was notoriously corrupt in those days and the city was so  relaxed with regard to prostitution that it wasn't uncommon for a young man with some money in his pocket to head down to  Holladay (later changed to Market street at the request of the Holladay family) and consort with the "fallen doves" of Denver.  There is no evidence  suggesting young Charles ever made that trip; not even his ex-wife was willing to accuse him of that.

In October of 1885, when Charles was eight, his father purchased a bale of Sumatra Tobacco from a man named Waggner for $279.35. Marzyck only paid half of the money but convinced Waggner to allow him to take the tobacco. Marzyck then sold the tobacco to Joseph Benesch who operated his own cigar factory. It isn’t clear what Benesch paid for the tobacco but Marzyck failed to mention to Benesch that the tobacco wasn’t completely paid for. Marzyck didn’t pay the other half to Waggner and somehow pushed the blame over to Benesch. Waggner made a complaint and the tobacco was seized by police. By the time it was over, Waggner and Benesch where both out the money they paid to Marzyck and the bale of tobacco while Marzyck got away without even a slap on the wrist. Whether this “fraud” was intentional or not is unknown.

Records of the young Charles Marzyck disappear after 1885. I don’t know when he married Minnie Kratky or where he went after his trial in Ellsworth; my guess would be Canada. Charles’ mother Mary died in 1903 in Colorado. His youngest brother Joseph married and had his own children and was still corresponding with his brother in 1911. After that, I have no idea. Perhaps someone reading can lend some information?

Thoughts and ruminations...

Charles Marzyck is an interesting subject. The common belief of many relatives of the Showman family is that Marzyck killed the entire family because he was secretly in love with Pauline (his sister-in-law) and she did not return the feeling. In a rage of passion he struck the entire family down and then was able to escape justice. The other theory, the one advanced by the prosecution at the trial, was this was an act of revenge on those he felt had wronged him and sent him to prison.

There are a couple of questions that come to my mind here. The first I already touched upon; why did James and Minnie Vopat not show for the trial? I am not a profiler nor am I a psychologist (and maybe I should leave it at that but...my blog, my rules) but it seems to me James and Minnie were genuinely frightened of Marzyck. I believe there was a love triangle involving Marzyck but it was between him, Minnie and James. Marzyck had been involved in a few criminal enterprises before his prison term, all non violent and all the product of a "con." Bad checks, forged checks and a possible event involving the sale of tobacco that wasn't entirely his to sell*. The crime that got him "cheesed" was stealing wheat. The victim was James Vopat. Pauline may have testified against Marzyck in that trial but Will Showman clearly felt Marzyck had been wronged somehow. While in jail awaiting the trial, Will would visit Charles and bring him tobacco and food. While in prison, Will wrote letters and petitioned for his release as well as corresponding with Marzyck. These are not the actions of a man who's wife's life had been threatened.

If Marzyck followed his previous MO then the "theft" was likely that of fraud. A bad check or possibly paying half the money owed for the full order of wheat then selling the wheat elsewhere and skipping town with the money (the scam run with the tobacco in Denver). Minnie may have had enough of her husband's dishonest ways and confessed the crime to Vopat and Sheriff Bradshaw. If this is the case then not only did Minnie betray her husband but then she married the man he had tried to swindle, a double betrayal. This explains the actions of Marzyck during the murder trial. He practically burned holes in the heads of the Vopats during their testimony. Clearly Marzyck's beef was with the Vopats and not the Showmans. But Will Showman was a good and honest man by all accounts and it's hard for me to believe he would have taken up the cause of a person he believed to be a genuine criminal. Not to get to close to tin foil hat territory but the possibility exists that Marzyck was set up by Minnie and James in order to get him out of the way of their relationship. Clearly the authorities believed a piece of evidence, the cigar cutter, was planted. Conveniently this cigar cutter was IDed by Minnie Vopat as belonging to Charles.

I must stress that I DO NOT think the Showman's were killed in order to frame Marzyck and put him away for good. So James Vopat is not a suspect and shouldn't be considered at all; neither should Minnie. But should Marzyck? While his alibi put him in Denver at the time of the Ellsworth murders, it also put him within a short train ride of Colorado Springs. If Minnie is to be believed, then Marzyck also had relatives in Monmouth, Illinois. He represented himself in a trial that if lost, would have certainly lead to his swinging from a gallows so he was level headed. If I were to find out he was a gandy dancer for a railroad I'd say he was a great suspect. But Charles was a "clever" fellow and was a good talker. His crimes relied on his ability to convince others he could be trusted and he was comfortable talking to people. His crimes were that of the lazy man; working hard to con a person out of a few bales of wheat without realizing his talent for selling ice to Eskimos. The killer of the Waynes, Burnhams, Dawsons and Showmans had no such ability. He had to attack his victims in their sleep because he wasn't confident enough to get them while they were awake. Further, Marzyck had no history of violence (although he was said to be a nasty drunk) and the life of the con man is to get the money or items and get the heck outta there. I believe Marzyck was innocent of this and the other crimes but I can't rule him out completely; he's just to tempting a character.

*Turns out this may have been his father

A suspect...

If you read any of the articles on the Millers Paranormal website then you know of two of the suspects in the Showman murder. One was a John Smitherton or Smithson or Smith who was passing through on his way to Kanopolis looking for work in the salt mine there. The other was Charles Marzyck, ex husband of Minnie Vopat (Pauline Showman’s sister) and one time wheat thief and forger. Marzyck was the only suspect ever put on trial for the Showman murders and in short was acquitted of the crime. The Ellsworth County Independent published an article about the Showman murders in July of 2008. It is a good rundown of the motive Marzyck may have had for killing the Showman family. The article’s author, Lisa Lindsley has kindly written up a summery of Marzyck’s trial which I will post soon. Marzyck is an intriguing character and I have actually been researching him for a while. There are a couple things we know about Marzyck that makes him a least an interesting suspect. First he lived in Colorado at one time and was reported (indeed it was his alibi) to be living in Colorado in 1911. His brother lived in Denver and it is quite likely Charles lived with his brother and when he and Minnie were married they lived in Colorado where Charles had written some bad checks and forged some other checks. Second, Marzyck had been heard by several witnesses to make threats against those who had helped send him to prison for the wheat theft. Pauline had testified along with her sister in that trial. So he can be placed within a train ride of Colorado Springs in 1911 and made threats of violent retribution towards (in a general way) Pauline Showman. Minnie Vopat also believed Marzyck had relatives in Monmouth, Illinois but that might have been a fib.

Ellsworth County Courthouse - 1908

Was the Showman family massacred out of revenge? Was it a crime of passion incited by the unrequited love of Pauline Showman? The descendents and relatives of both Marzyck and the Showmans don’t like to talk about the crime. Those on the Showman side generally believe Marzyck was a killer regardless of the verdict of the trial. I’ll discuss a bit more about Charles Marzyck and my own opinion after I post Lisa’s trial summery.

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.

Lovey Mitchell

The M&StL Depot Today

On March 19, 1915, Monmouth police chief G. W. Morrison and the mayor of Monmouth left for St. Louis to gather information on Lovey Mitchell, a black man who worked at the M&StL roundhouse in Monmouth at the time of the Dawson murders. They believed Mitchell was living in Kansas City at the time and were surprised to find him in St. Louis instead. He surrendered without incident and was escorted back to Galesburg which had a stronger jail. The arrest of Mitchell was the result of continued “investigation,” primarily by a Monmouth lawyer named John H. Hanley. Hanley had not been satisfied with the police giving up on the case. Interest in the Dawson case had been renewed when in July of 1914 the Mislich family was found bludgeoned to death in their beds in Blue Island, Illinois.

Warren County Courthouse

There isn’t much information about Lovey Mitchell’s life before or after his arrest. The case against him was tenuous to say the least. A former co-worker, John O. Knight, also black, who was already serving a prison sentence for burglary and larceny, was reportedly “confessing” that Mitchell was the murderer. His wife was brought into the fray as a witness and was put in jail in Peoria in order to “protect” her. Reports out of Peoria had Chief Morrison telling reporters Mitchell had confessed while the Monmouth paper was denying any such interviews even took place. By the end of the month it was clear either the newspapers were just making things up or someone “inside” was feeding the reporters phony information. Mitchell was denied a lawyer and not allowed to speak to reporters. While Morrison would not state whether he felt Mitchell was guilty of the Dawson’s murders, he did state he “did not believe [Mitchell] was guilty” of the other axe murders that had occurred. The editor of the Monmouth Review-Atlas in 1915, L. A. Ryan, didn’t believe Mitchell was guilty of anything. Newspapers reported that Mitchell would face a Grand Jury in April of 1915 but there isn’t any record of this trial officially or in newspapers. Mitchell’s arrest made national headlines but his trial or lack thereof didn’t even register in Chicago. The records of the Monmouth Review-Atlas appear to be incomplete as well. A 1984 revisiting of the incident gets some of the facts right but misses on others. It states John Knight was tried, convicted and sentenced for the crime, but Knight, an early suspect due to the proximity of the M&StL roundhouse to the crime scene, was given an alibi by his foreman. The article also states the murder weapon was an axe when it was actually a gas pipe. It appears any charges against Mitchell were dropped and he may have died in January of 1979 near East St. Louis, Illinois.

The Second Suspect at Ardenwald

William Riggin - 1915

In May of 1917, William Riggin was serving out a sentence in the State Penitentiary in Salem, Oregon for stealing a gun in 1915. Riggin was a well known thief and had been first convicted of stealing a horse when he was eleven years-old. For that crime he went to the reformatory in Salem and after his release, was arrested for larceny and served his first term in the Pen. His reputation for being a thief was so great that the Washington County Sheriff decided to take him to the town of Hillsboro, Oregon in an attempt to clear up some other thefts. Much to the surprise of the Sheriff, Riggin blurted out “you want me for the Booth murder!”

William Booth had been shot and killed in 1915. It was two weeks after the shooting that Riggin was arrested for stealing a gun. Booth’s wife and an alleged lover had been convicted of killing Booth as a means to get him out of the way. They had been convicted on purely circumstantial evidence that hinged entirely on the alleged affair, which was all but proven to be a fantasy of the populace. Riggin’s confession was corroborated when he lead the Sheriff to the exact location where he had buried the murder weapon, a .38 pistol. In his confession, Riggin felt his crime had been justified because Booth “always had it in for [him]” and he freely confessed to being the trigger man. Perhaps feeling the weight of that crime lifting, he made another statement to the Sheriff that he had been involved in the murders of the Hill family at Ardenwald. This was shocking for a couple reasons: first, Riggin volunteered the information completely of his own volition, and second, he had never been a suspect in the crime. He actually made two confessions within a span of about two months in 1917. With his first confession he stated he was the lookout for two others who went into the house and did the killing. His two companions where Charles Brown and William Flynn. The name William Flynn was an alias of Ed Ramsey’s and no one is quite sure if Charles Brown actually existed. He stated he never went into the house and that when it all was over, the three split off and met the next day in an area about five miles south of the Hill’s house. This confession was short and vague on some details and wrong about others.

His second confession was much more detailed and those details were correct. Charles Brown disappeared and this time it was only he and Ramsey who took part. He still wouldn’t say he had actually killed anybody but he admitted he had been inside the house. Riggin’s presence in Ardenwald at the time of the murders was corroborated by his family as was his association with Ed Ramsey. Was Riggin’s first confession an attempt at notoriety and his second confession the result of coaching? Details that changed from statement to statement were pretty big. In the first confession he was one of three men, Brown took the axe from the woodshed (wrong), he never went into the house and all three escaped in different directions on foot, Brown and Ramsey going one way and Riggin the other. In the second confession he was one of two men, he stole the axe from a house on the way to the crime scene (correct), he was in the house after the murders were over and he and Ramsey walked some distance to their waiting horses before splitting up. In both confessions the motive was robbery and the killers entered and exited through the back door (correct). To further confuse things, Riggin made another statement to the D.A. in 1918 re-implicating Brown and gave his reason for omitting him in the second confession as trying to protect an old friend who had “always been good to him.” Even more confusing is the fact that Brown was an alias of Charlie Daniels (!) who did exist and was an inmate at the same reformatory in Salem when Riggin was there! I’m going to write on Charlie Daniels in my next post. For those of you who may be wondering why I’m spending so much time talking about suspects in a crime I myself have declared to be unrelated to the Midwest Axe Murders, I leave you with this: I may be wrong.

*Confessions and mug shot of William Riggin taken from Why Some Men Kill by George A. Thatcher
*On vacation next week, no posting

The first suspect at Ardenwald

Ed Ramsey

On June 18, 1911, Ed Ramsey (aka Fredrick Alexander) was picked up while crossing the Willamette River on a raft. Ramsey was a well known vagrant who lived in Scott Woods. He was known to local young boys as “Nutty Ed” and reportedly liked to entice boys to his camp where he would sexually assault them. He worked off and on at various jobs but mostly remained a vagrant in the woods surrounding the Portland area. The day he was arrested, his physical description was given as 5’ 7”, 145 lbs. His given age was fifty-five. When asked where he was the night of June 8, he replied that his memory was bad and couldn’t recall. The local sheriff had been trying to catch him for theft for a while and it was reported that many people were afraid of him due to his peculiar behavior. An affidavit was made by a couple who lived near the Hills stating they saw a man walking on the road away from Ardenwald around 7:00 p.m. on the night of the murder. He appeared to be a vagrant and he was agitated and muttering to himself. The woman heard this man say “Damn her, I’ll ____ [sic] her yet.” Now I don’t know how much faith to put in this affidavit. I don’t want to smear the couple that signed it but it was made in 1915, coincidentally around the same time that Ramsey was arrested for vagrancy. The couple was taken to the jail and IDed Ramsey as the man they saw on the road that day. I have to acknowledge this may not be on the up-and-up. Did the couple make these affidavits before or after IDing Ramsey? I believe there is a discrepancy in the affidavit. The couple described the man as being “about 50 years old and medium height and fairly heavy set and looked as if he had not been shaved for a month.” The mug shot above corresponds to this description almost exactly; it was taken in 1915. The description of Ramsey when picked up ten days after the murders is not one of a heavy set man but one of average weight and height at best. I don’t doubt the couple saw a vagrant walking around that day but the possibility is very high they signed the affidavit after identifying Ramsey in the jail in 1915. Thrown into the mix is a detective that never got paid the $2000 billed to the county due to the fact no one was ever caught and you’ve got all the makings of a couple of coached witnesses. Ramsey apparently went to grand jury in 1915 for the Hill murders but the D.A. (who didn’t try very hard) failed to get an indictment.

In spite of all this, I’m not willing to say Ramsey didn’t do it. But I’m not entirely sure he did. His alleged pedophilia was for young boys and not young girls. Philip Rintule was not assaulted beyond the blows that killed him while the females in the house were. His previous MO didn’t show a penchant for violent apprehension of his alleged victims and the worst thing the Sheriff was trying to get him for was theft. If he had been a violent pedophile I’m sure he would have been run out of town long before the Hill’s were murdered, wouldn’t he? The people in 1911 didn’t take pedophilia any lighter than we do today, aside of course from the cultural differences like child brides (which is horrible in any epoch but you have to acknowledge the differences in mind set). That said, you don’t go from theft to mass homicide, rape and sodomy over night, but maybe Ramsey did.

*Mug shot and affidavits taken from Why Some Men Kill by George A. Thatcher

The Tale of Tony Donatel

When Arthur Burnham left Michigan for Colorado Springs his health was poor and his prospects for marriage were slim. Shortly after his arrival in 1895, he became stronger and his breathing became easier. He worked various jobs as a cook and clerk in a candy store but still love evaded him. Then he met Alice May Hill and the possibility of passing on his family name, a name which went back to the Revolution, seemed closer to reality. He only needed to win her heart with a little competition from an Italian named Tony Donatel, a childhood friend of May’s and the Hill family.

Donatel was around forty years old when the murders occurred and worked as a laborer. His wife had left him eighteen years before and he had secured a divorce from her. He was said to have an eighteen year old son. He lived alone in a little, one-room cottage and frequently visited with a couple who lived nearby. Neighbors found him a bit peculiar and he reportedly owned a number of properties he rented out. He was frequently seen scrubbing the outside of his home in order to wash away “marks left by witches.” May had told Arthur that Donatel had been a suitor of hers before Arthur’s arrival in Colorado. She insisted he no longer held any affection for her outside of friendship. May’s sister, Nettie, told investigators Donatel still had feelings for her sister and overheard him saying “May had no business to marry Burnham.” By his own admission he was friendly with May, even after her marriage, although he said he hadn’t seen her “in a long time” and didn’t know where the Burnham’s lived. The week before the murders, Donatel was working digging a sewer line within a half a block of the Burnham and Wayne homes but claimed he only knew Burnham’s house was in the vicinity. Further throwing suspicion on Donatel was an unnamed incident that happened the year before which gave cause for a judgment of sanity to be called. He was ruled sane and released.

Arthur Burnham expressed surprise that Donatel had been arrested even though it was him who had given Sheriff Birdsall the name. During his own interrogation Burnham must have been asked about any men May might have “entertained” during his frequent absences. In light of the defense of Donatel that Arthur would give in the newspaper later, it seems particularly odd he would even have mentioned this incident. Apparently one day when Burnham returned home early and unannounced, he found his wife and Tony “in a questionable attitude.” May had hurt her chest while climbing through a wire fence near the house and Tony was helping to relieve the pain. Later Burnham would say he thought nothing of the incident and accepted that Tony was trying to help since was “a sort of a doctor.”

Donatel could not sufficiently account for his whereabouts on the night of the murders. He ate dinner with his neighbors and stayed until around 9:30 p.m. He then went home and went to bed where he stayed until morning. He visited his neighbors on Monday and Tuesday and was said to be acting normally and he never mentioned the Burnhams once.

Donatel was released after a Bertillon expert cleared him.

There was a lot of circumstantial evidence here to point the police at Donatel and there may even be some people who rightfully do not trust the Bertillon method that may think he is a good suspect. I admit his relationship with Mrs. Burnham seems a bit seedier than the explanations given but there isn't much more to go on than that. The whole scrubbing the witch symbols thing indicates some paranoia and the judgment of sanity is tantalizing but there's nothing to indicate he was a psychotic axe murderer. His post offense behavior doesn't mesh up with a man who just murdered three adults and three children in a particularly grizzly manner. My guess is he would have practically set fire to his house in order to remove the perceived symbols of witchcraft if he had been the perp. Eccentric and a bit wishful of the family he couldn't have is a possibility but he certainly wasn't capable of this. I continue to dig for more on Tony Donatel and appreciate any comments. 

We've Killed 'Em

Arthur J. Burnham

In cases such as the Burnham-Wayne murders there are always people who imagine they heard something or saw someone. At almost the very hour of discovery the crime became a sensation and the investigators were forced to run down each and every “clue” in order to satisfy the press and by default, the public. That there wasn’t a logical connection between the victims and the alleged suspects made no difference at all. Likewise the police felt pressure to get the “madman” responsible off the streets ASAP so they began rounding up any poor schmuck who had a wild look in his eye and grilled them for hours before they were released.

The best suspect authorities could come up with in the beginning was Arthur Burnham, the only surviving member of either household. He had an iron-clad alibi and would have been released immediately in today’s criminal justice system but the police weren’t taking any chances with him. Burnham’s alibi was his health. He was confirmed by his doctor and by his roommate to have been twelve miles away from the crime scene with a severe case of tubercular cough. Despite this fact, and the fact that he wasn’t healthy enough to swing an axe with enough force and as many times as needed to kill three adults, Burnham was held for two days. He attended the funeral of his family on September 22nd and was returned to his cell. Later that evening he was released and allowed to stay with his in-laws.

After Burnham’s release the prevailing theory was the murders were an act of revenge on Henry Wayne. Remember the argument he was seen having the week before his death? The theory went something like this: Henry Wayne was a gambler and the fifty-five dollars he had deposited in the bank were from playing cards and not from the sale of furniture back in Indiana. Argument-guy was a fellow card player who felt slighted by Henry’s good “luck” and so he confronted him. When Wayne refused to acknowledge Argument-guy’s (AG) hurt feelings, AG had no choice but to kill Henry and his family. So why were the Burnham’s killed you might ask? That’s easy. May Burnham was awakened by the noises next door and caught AG in the act so he had to kill her too. This of course completely ignores the fact May Burnham was killed while sleeping which meant she would have had to take the rather unorthodox action of going back to bed after discovering her neighbors being beaten to death by an axe wielding lunatic.

While this “theory” was discussed only briefly it is a great example of the imaginative nature of wannabe witnesses when it comes to high profile crimes (see also “The Idiot Who Confessed to Killing JonBenet”). I am reasonably certain this story came about due to the imagination of two teenage girls who lived on the north side of town. A seventeen year old girl told police she heard a man, known only as “John,” tell another man “We’ve killed ‘em.” This “evidence” was backed up by a friend of the girl’s, another teenaged girl. At any rate, the man the police believed to be Argument-guy turned himself in and it was quickly established he had never met nor heard of Henry Wayne before the crime was discovered.

Tomorrows post will go into the second suspect, Anthony “Tony” Donatel, a former suitor of Alice May Hill who may have kept in closer contact with May than Arthur Burnham realized.