Introduction
SOMETHING WICKED
THIS WAY COMES
Detroiters love a good murder mystery. They always have, long before Detroit became the Motor City and even longer before it earned the dubious nickname “Murder Capital.” This fascination with horrific homicides goes back to the gaslight era when the most popular attraction in the city depicted grisly recreations of murder and mayhem in wax.
This captivation with crime was evident in the long lines leading out of the Wonderland, an amusement complex located at the corner of Woodward and Jefferson. The most popular attraction was the first-floor Chamber of Horrors—a wax museum that re-created the late nineteenth century’s most heinous crimes with near photorealism. The blood-spattered exhibits contained around a dozen tableaus peopled by over one hundred wax villains. The flickering of dim gas lanterns added to the sinister aura.
As visitors strolled through the galleries, they could witness Kemmler strapped into the electric chair moments before the executioner turned on the juice; the room of Mrs. Mary Latimer, murdered by her son Robert, as it appeared the day after police found her body propped against a chair in the bedroom of her Jackson home; a Port Huron lynching victim dangling from a tree; and other ghastly scenes.
Museum manager M.S. Robinson, a former lawyer from Chicago, had a knack for staging scenes so revolting that the city’s more puritanical succeeded in shutting the wax museum down in 1890. After the mandated closure, Robinson reopened the Chamber with new and even bloodier scenes.
Detroiters loved it.
They spent hours studying the grim exhibits. It became so popular, particularly among women, that Robinson kept the Chamber open from 10:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. and enlarged the accommodations for ladies.
While Detroit’s upstanding women watched their greatest nightmares materialize in wax, Michigan’s most dangerous women lived and worked in the city’s real Chamber of Horrors. The women’s wing of the Detroit House of Correction housed sadistic serial killers, wives who murdered their husbands for insurance money, con artists, madams, prostitutes, shoplifters, and others.
THE WOMEN’S WING AT THE OLD DETROIT HOUSE OF CORRECTION, CIRCA 1899
On the eve of the twentieth century, the Detroit House of Correction—one of four state penitentiaries at the time and Michigan’s sole institution for long-term female inmates—contained sixty-five women serving sentences that varied from several weeks for violations of minor city ordinances to life for the “big M.” At any one time, the old House held about two to three women serving life sentences, and over its life span, from 1861 to 1926, it housed about three dozen women serving the maximum penalty allowed under Michigan law. Prison authorities did not segregate female inmates by crime, so these felons—the most dangerous women in Michigan—rubbed elbows with short-timers.
A Detroit Free Press article, written by a reporter who visited the Women’s Wing of the House of Correction in 1899, captured a scene of the city’s most wicked women paying their debts to society in one of the prison shops.
The women sat facing one another on long wooden benches, their flannel prison-issued dresses draping to the floor. An occasional whisper rose above the din, but this was a rarity since the prison matrons strictly enforced the silence rule. Their fingers jerked spasmodically as they sewed buttons onto cards—the partial penance they paid for prostitution, public drunkenness, theft, and murder. Sunlight streamed in from a line of windows and fell onto the tables, and at least once during the shift, each one gazed through the bars at the world on the other side of the whitewashed brick wall. The inmates all wore the same prison-issue garb, but they all took different paths into this room.
Although serious offenders knew in the papers as Pope, Echols, Roberts, and Lawrence had swapped their surnames for inmate numbers and had disappeared from the public eye behind layers of brick and iron, they remained subjects of curiosity for years after the papers documenting their crimes had yellowed.
Nellie Pope, who conspired to murder her husband in 1895, frowned as a matron led a reporter into the factory. The matron thought it best to walk past the volatile Pope, known to use physical violence if she felt threatened. A head taller than the other inmates, the statuesque Pope was an intimidating and frightening figure best left alone.
Tucked into one corner of the room, Fanny Echols, whose murder of her husband fifteen years earlier led to a life sentence, toiled away at the buttons. The writer described Echols as “a buxom good-natured looking colored woman.” Next to Echols sat convicted thief Dora Roberts. Dora and her husband, Walter, robbed a Champlain Street saloon owner of $200. A constable in the right place at the right time caught Dora with her hand in the cookie jar when, as he chased her out of the saloon, she dropped a roll of stolen greenbacks into a spittoon.
Alice Lawrence, who received twenty years for conspiring to murder her husband in Holland, raised her head and watched as the reporter slowly passed her bench. When their eyes met, Lawrence felt a pang of shame and quickly dropped her head. Most of the Women’s Wing residents were serving brief sentences for any number of minor offenses, many of them leaving the house only to return later for identical convictions.
The matron led the reporter to a table where two gray heads bobbed in rhythm with their hands. Both women had done so many stints in the House for drunk and disorderly convictions that they considered it home.
The matron pointed to one of them: “That’s Mary Scanlon at the end.”
When she heard her name, Scanlon glanced at the writer just long enough to reveal a face crisscrossed with deeply etched furrows and skin the color and texture of an old paper bag. One side of her mouth curled up in a halfhearted attempt at a smile. “She’s an old offender,” the matron noted.
“Who’s that?” The writer pointed at the woman sitting next to Scanlon.
“Oh, that’s Ellen Bushey—this is her home, poor Ellen.”
Scanlon and Bushey had plenty of company. A majority of the House’s female residents served short-term sentences for public intoxication. Women such as Minerva Maxwell and Lizzie Lawson, who was once described as a “colored maiden of 31 summers,” earned thirty days each as “tipplers.”
Murderers like Nellie Pope fascinated the writer, but something about Scanlon and Bushey absolutely captivated her. In her article, she pointed out the double standard prevalent in turn-of-the-century law enforcement. “In the gilded café, the man in the dress suit drinks something to drown his sorrows,” she noted. He becomes violent and smashes a window, but nothing happens to him. “But it isn’t so with the old gray-haired castaway. She has troubles, too, and tries to get rid of them. She begs a drink somewhere and then crawls off into the alley. The policeman finds her, rings up the patrol wagon, and off she goes to jail.”
The tone of the unnamed reporter’s article, and the mentioning of this she-pays, he-doesn’t-pay double standard, suggests the Free Press writer was a woman with an eye for social reform.
She had a point. Many of the women carding buttons in the prison factory that sunny afternoon in 1899 ended up inside the prison after convictions for public drunkenness. Other repeat offenders included shoplifters and liquor law violators: selling alcohol without a license, running a blind pig (an unlicensed saloon) or selling on a Sunday.
The residents of this House were the wicked women of Detroit.
The legal system that brought them to the House was much different than its twenty-first-century descendant. To fully understand their stories, it becomes necessary to examine law and order of yesteryear, particularly the role and treatment of women in the legal process.
FEMALE DETECTIVES, OPERATIVES AND MOLES
In the prim-and-proper world of the late nineteenth century, at a time when a man riding in a carriage with a married woman became a subject of scandal, female perpetrators had a leg up on male detectives. A gentleman didn’t search a lady, especially if it involved any bodily contact. And he certainly couldn’t go undercover without whispers that he was in bed with his suspect—an accusation not unknown to Detroit constables, particularly those who worked vice cases involving brothels. Sometimes, these investigators literally went under the covers with madams and their inmates as payment for looking the other way, which led to good copy for reporters but migraines for police chiefs. Police brass attempted to avoid such scandals by hiring female operatives.
The stories of these operatives, who often shielded themselves with anonymity, are fragmentary and present an interesting challenge for the historian. They also represent some of the most interesting tales in the history of the Detroit underworld. Sometimes, they worked in an official capacity, like Theresa Lewis (see “Blood Feud”); sometimes, like Annie Smith, they worked as unofficial informants with ulterior motives of their own. Smith wanted to rid old Delray of the competition, so she had no qualms about betraying her fellow madams for offenses like violating the city’s liquor laws (see “The Great Bordello Scandal”). Minnie McMurray, a crusading do-gooder who characterized herself as a “high-class detective,” played a key role when, in 1906, Detroit authorities decided to crack down on physicians practicing without licenses. McMurray slipped undercover as an ailing patient, purchased a bottle of “Juniper Jelly” from “Dr.” Eliza Landau for one dollar and subsequently trapped the elderly woman for practicing medicine without a license.
Female private detectives working in a quasi-official capacity, as well as full-time female officers hired as Prohibition agents, also played a key role in busting bootleggers during the Roaring Twenties. They succeeded in large part because they could put their hands where male agents couldn’t.
Because a male agent didn’t dare frisk a female suspect and therefore couldn’t find her hidden stash, perhaps tucked into a brassiere or a stocking, bootleggers were quick to exploit the loophole by employing female smugglers. These bottle smugglers effortlessly slipped through the grasp of agents until U.S. Customs officials wised up and hired female operatives to conduct searches on women suspected of violating Prohibition laws
FEMALE SUSPECTS, REPORTERS AND “JUNIOR G-MEN”
Sometimes a male suspect walked into a police station and, after a vigorous interrogation with a blackjack or rubber hose, limped back out of it. Because the police didn’t want the prying eyes of the press to see evidence of this heavy-handedness, they kept reporters away from men in custody.
This desire to avoid accusations of impropriety had the opposite effect when it came to female suspects. Often, police allowed reporters to sit in on official interviews with women accused of crimes, and in this context, reporters became de facto detectives who even posed questions to the accused. Quick to point out an inaccuracy, discrepancy or downright lie, they helped police identify soft spots in a suspect’s story or holes in an alibi. This “Junior G-man” status is best illustrated by the story of Gertrude Schmidt, who had to face a hostile crowd of reporters that shadowed her every move The result of a reporter’s semi-official status is a historical legacy to true crime buffs. Entire impromptu conversations with female suspects, which would never appear in court records or police files, have survived in the historical record through newspaper articles, in which women accused of crimes are fleshed-out through dialogue, description, and nuances such as facial expressions and hand gestures.
THIS IS A MAN’S, MAN’S, MAN’S WORLD…
The trials of high-profile, headline cases became popular forms of entertainment, particularly among women, who often overpopulated the single pew assigned to them in the courtroom. This overcrowding became such a problem, newspaper reporters regularly carped about straining their necks to see over the broad brims and massive floral decorations of the era’s “Merry Widow” hats. The drama that occurred behind courtroom doors, such as tearful admissions, verbal sparring, and vivid descriptions of sexual impropriety—especially interesting to spectators since these types of things did not appear in the expurgated print media of the day—doubled as reality entertainment in an era long before television came into existence.
There was one place in the courtroom, however, strictly off-limits to women: the jury box. Except in a few western territories, juries consisted entirely of men until women achieved the right of suffrage.
While this male-centric jury system bothered many women on the right side of the law, it pleased many on the wrong side of it, particularly women accused of murder.
Illinois state attorney John E.W. Wayman of Chicago, who faced an epidemic of husband slayings in 1912, criticized the male juror as putty in the hands of a manipulative female murder defendant. After watching, helpless, as all male-juries acquitted one defendant after another despite overwhelming evidence of guilt, Wayman concluded it was nearly impossible to convict a woman of murder under the current system and so became an early advocate of judicial reform.
According to Wayman, the male juror’s inability to see a female defendant with any objectivity became particularly evident when the woman stood accused of murdering her spouse. “The standard man like a panelist is found it tough to differentiate between the associate exceptional and abnormal lady, as most murderesses square measure, and also the everyday lady he has He was known from a young age, "Wyman argued during an interview in 1912. “When a lady seems for trial before him, straightway in his own mind he manufactures some exculpatory circumstances, some excuse, to account for her commission of the murder.”Wayman provided an interesting dissection of the male juror’s perceptions of female defendants: When asked if a female defendant needed to be good looking to beat the murder rap, Wayman responded, “Not at all. All that is necessary is for her to be a woman. A jury of men will do the rest.”
He then went on to explain how appearance swayed a jury: The male juror, he continued, “does not understand a normal woman’s mental processes. When it comes to dealing with the mental processes of an abnormal woman he is a rudderless bark on an uncharted sea drifting helplessly and hopelessly.”
Crafty women facing all-male juries quickly realized how to take advantage of these “rudderless” jurors. Notorious con artist Carrie Perlberg, who made her living by fleecing the naïve, yanked hard on the jurors’ heartstrings when she noted that a conviction would leave her poor child motherless and destitute. None of the jurors knew, or even suspected, that the childless Perlberg had rented the baby from a friend for her appearance in court. Her ploy worked. She beat the rap despite overwhelming evidence of her guilt. “There is but one remedy,” Wayman concluded. “That is, to give women the right to serve on juries.”
The idea of a female juror was like arsenic to female defendants such as Louisa Lindloff, a serial poisoner who tried for murdering half a dozen victims in 1912. “I need no ladies to sit down on the jury that tried Maine,” she explicit. Lindloff felt she could easily turn twelve men, but with the addition of even one woman, the dynamic changed and the jury became much harder to fool with emotional rhetoric.
This home-court advantage disappeared as women began to claim their role in the judicial process with the passage of suffrage laws. This seismic shift in the courtroom landscape generated shock waves that especially shook up old-timers who stubbornly held onto old-school thinking about a woman’s rightful place. The earthquake hit Michigan in 1919.
That year, Michigan women began appearing in the jury box, to the chagrin of some men who feared the maternal instinct would emerge during deliberations and prevent female jurors from making rational decisions based on cold, hard logic. A 1920 Detroit Free Press editorial reflects this age-old stereotype: “Whether a woman juror is fair or partial, whether she is swayed more by emotion or by the intellect, in short, whether she makes a different sort of juror from a man, is to be tried.”
Progress was particularly slow in Detroit.
Although women served in justice court as early as 1919, it wasn’t until May 1921 that Margaret McDonnell blazed a trail as the first woman juror in Wayne County circuit court. Others were not quick in following her through the thicket of male-dominated jurisprudence. The September 1921 court session contained a lone woman juror—Estella Jamieson—and the January 1922 session contained just 2 women in a pool of 188. The number of women jurors increased to 14 in 1923, and from that point on, juries consistently contained at least 1 female member.
These pioneers in the jury box were well respected by people within the system. In a 1927 interview about the subject, Detroit circuit court judges Harry J. Dingeman and Joseph A. Moynihan praised woman jurors for their attentiveness. “I notice that they take careful notes of testimony as it is given,” Dingeman said, “and I am more and more impressed with the keen grasp they have of business details that, seemingly, would be foreign to their usual mode of life.”
“Criminal work is naturally distasteful,” Moynihan added, “but never once has a woman asked to be relieved from sitting on a jury in my courtroom even when she was told that the testimony would be salacious.”
Assistant prosecutor Ben Cole’s comments provide a glimpse at how male lawyers felt about women jurors’ perceptions of criminality: Cole added that he would not want a woman juror if he was defending a woman. “They understand motives as a man can never do, and I find they weigh the motives dispassionately in researching conclusions.” In other words, female jurors were just too hard to fool with mere rhetoric alone.
A COVEN OF WICKED DETROITERS
Finding enough wicked women to fill this volume posed less of a problem than determining which ones were wicked enough to warrant inclusion. I shied away from cases involving justifiable, excusable or understandable homicides, such as an abortionist convicted of manslaughter for accidentally killing a pregnant patient or a battered wife forced into a kill-or-be-killed scenario by a Jekyll-and-Hyde drunk of a spouse. I also avoided garden-variety murders without a unique feature or fascinating twist and instead gave special consideration to cases involving feuding women or women investigators. I also selected cases representative of the various eras so the reader may follow the development of Detroit through some of its most inglorious moments. Not all of the cases involve violent crimes; indeed, some of the most fascinating stories involve con artists, thieves, smugglers, and bigamists.
To be fair, not all of the wicked women in this volume were all that wicked. Some of them were only perceived as such in their time, which made them eligible for inclusion. The wickedness of the Bluebeard’s Women, for example, was more of a media construct than a reality. The anti-German sentiment that overtook Detroit during World War I, coupled with the circumstances of the case, conspired to condemn the two women in the eyes of dyed-in-the-red-white-and-blue newspaper-reading Americans. Wipe off the mascara of media sensationalism, and sometimes clearer and cleaner (although not necessarily spotless) faces appear.
Those familiar with and interested in the mean streets of the Motor City might recognize more than a few of the place names mentioned throughout this text. Some of the places are still standing, and most of the streets still exist. If these places could talk, they would tell of wily, wicked women who did their share to turn Detroit into Murder City, USA.
To meet them, turn the page, but beware, this is not a trip for the faint of heart.
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