Today’s Playful Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
“Two colored boys” found her at nine o’clock in the morning. A naked, bloody, dead, white woman, thrown in the back of an old moving van, parked in an alley, behind some flats on Cottage Grove in Chicago. The neighborhood around Cottage Grove was changing from white middle class to black working class. Changing fast. The alley where the woman was found ran behind a block that was still white. That she’d been found in a moving van was an irony that few newspaper readers would have missed.
Police followed a trail of the woman’s blood, through a yard, up a flight of stairs. Russell Mosby was washing blood out of the dead woman’s clothes—worth some money, why throw them away?—when the police walked in. Mosby confessed immediately. That is, he blamed Tom Roach. It was Roach’s place. All Mosby did was rent a room. Sure, he knew Roach—but that lady was dead, on the floor, and Roach was standing there, having a drink, when Mosby came home. Mosby didn’t know who the lady was. Tom told him he didn’t know either. Tom said they’d had a few drinks. That was all Mosby knew. Nothing.
About the still on the stove? Sure, said Mosby. He and Tom cooked some, sold some. Moonshine. Yes it was. But he didn’t know anything about the woman. They better ask Tom.
And where was Tom?
Tom was working. At the streetcar barn. He was a conductor. The papers said he’d been wounded in France—”a wounded veteran of the American Expeditionary Force.” Tom’s mother said he’d been “a good boy until he began to run with gangs.”
Roach confessed as fast as Mosby did. He said he’d taken his wife to the hospital Tuesday night, “so I was free to do as I chose… I took the woman to my flat… We had some drinks… We danced… She got rough and hit me. I got my revolver and stuck her over the head… It was a playful tap… She didn’t laugh, then. She fell on the floor… God knows why I did it.”
Thomas Roach
And Mosby?
“Roach said Mosby walked in later. Fifteen minutes later. Or—was it?—Mosby came home, then fifteen minutes after Mosby walked in, the woman died. One thing certain: He and Mosby didn’t leave their place until the next night. They stored the woman in the bathroom; then, the next night, they stripped her and hauled her outside.
Russell Mosby
And the woman? Where’d Roach meet her?
Roach began a new story: “I met this woman Wednesday night, as I was on my way home. I was going to visit a friend of mine, Mrs. Blair… The woman asked if she could go along… I agreed. She said that she knew Mrs. Blair, but I didn’t find out her name. We stayed up at Mrs. Blair’s place for twenty minutes. Then I started home. At my door, I started to leave her, but she asked to come in and I invited her.
“She was hysterical. She told about having trouble with her husband on account of his having wrongfully accused her of going around with other men.
“She threatened to kill herself. She was very quarrelsome.
“Mosby was in the flat and said something to her and she answered back. We had been drinking moonshine. There was a general fight…
“I hit her once with the pistol, but she only laughed at that…
“She resented the attentions of Mosby… He started getting rough with her… he beat her up with his gun. Then she took something out of a little bottle she carried on her waist and she died.
“We undressed her to wash the blood out of her clothes. They we took the body out to the moving van. That’s all I know about her…
“I’m sorry I hit her. After all, she was my guest. She was very abusive.”
The Chicago Tribune described the woman’s murder as the “sequel of a moonshine orgy.” The Tribune also reported a different sort of sequel to a different sort of drunken murder:
“CORONER’S JURY EXCUSES MAN’S CRIME… Fritz Meinhausen, who, on April 4, shot and killed Mrs. Anna Peters and also his wife, was not held criminally responsible by the coroner’s jury because, quoting a portion of the verdict: ‘We find from the evidence that… the fatal shooting was the direct result of… Fritz Meinhausen’s intoxicated condition. We, therefore, do not find him criminally responsible for the death of the deceased and recommend his discharge from police custody.'”
Anna Peters was a dressmaker who’d been fitting Mrs. Meinhausen for a dress. Mr. Meinhausen came home drunk. He’d mistaken the fitting for something else. That’s why he shot both women.
“Police,” wrote the Tribune, “were amazed at the verdict….’The law makes no allowance for intoxication in killings,’ said Coroner Hoffman… ‘This verdict easily becomes the most astonishing verdict any coroner’s jury has ever brought… during any time in office.'”
Tom Roach pleaded guilty at his arraignment. Russell Mosby refused to admit anything—except helping Roach drag the woman out of their apartment. The State’s Attorney’s office charged Mosby with murder. Roach agreed to testify against him.
Police began searching for the dead woman’s identity. The only clues they had were a postcard the woman had dropped in Roach’s apartment, and Roach’s story about visiting his friend, “Mrs. Blair,” whom the dead woman said she knew.
The only useful information the postcard had on it was its postmark: New Haven, Connecticut. Nothing came of that. As to “Mrs. Blair”: The dead woman may have known a lady with that name, but it wasn’t Mrs. Blair whom Roach had visited.
Maude Correll was the woman Roach had stopped to see. Mrs. Correll told the police that she, in fact, knew the dead woman. Her name was Anna Corliss. Or was it “Corlitt”? Anyway: Anna had just been divorced. Her husband had deserted her. Mrs. Correll said Anna had rented a room from a woman named Mary Davis.
Mary Davis’s neighbors said they hadn’t seen Mrs. Davis for quite some time. Disappeared, they said. Gone missing. Police spent two days looking for her. When they found her, they took Mrs. Davis to the morgue and showed her the body. Mrs. Davis said she didn’t know who the woman was. She sure wasn’t someone named “Anna Corlitt.” Mrs. Davis didn’t know any “Anna Corlitt.” “Annie Colwell” was the name of her roomer. Mrs. Davis said she hadn’t seen Annie for a while. Of course, she hadn’t been home too often herself. Still—she’d met Annie’s mother and sister.
Police found Annie’s mother and sister and took them to the morgue. Both women collapsed when they saw her body.
Three days later, Mosby confessed. One newspaper described him as a cook; one newspaper described him as a janitor; one described him as “the colored handyman of Thomas Roche.”
A month passed.
Mosby and Roach repudiated their confessions. Prosecutors said they would charge both men with murder and ask that both men be executed. Since both men had confessed, there’d be no jury trial. A judge would hear their cases.
Two months passed.
Mosby went before Judge John Sullivan. “In return for pleading guilty and turning in state’s evidence, Roach is expected to receive a life sentence.” In a description of one of the most revolting scenes ever heard in the Criminal Court building, Roach placed the blame on Mosby, telling how the latter had beaten the woman over the head with a gun, choked her, and stamped on her prostrate body.”
Four days later, Judge Sullivan sentenced both men to life. They rode the “Murder Special” train, straight to Joliet that night. Manacled, under guard, at opposite ends of the same car.
Culled from: Murder City: The Bloody History of Chicago in the Twenties
Sideshow “Freak” Du Jour!
John Robinson, Fat Man (early 1880s)
JOHN ROBINSON
John Robinson claimed to be the heaviest man in the world. However, at the time Chas. Eisenmann photographed him, he weighted only 588 pounds, a couple of hundred pounds less than the real weight champion, John Hanson Craig. The purpose of the smirking portrait in drag is unknown.
Culled from: Monsters: Human Freaks in America’s Gilded Age
Andersonville Prisoner Diary Entry Du Jour!
This is the continuation of the 1864 diary of Andersonville prisoner Private George A. Hitchcock (see the archived version for all entries up until now).
Here’s today’s entry:
September 21st. Cloudy and rain. Very chilly and damp nights. Great numbers sick with colds. Drew a ration of mouldy sea-biscuit, molasses and beans. Bad as the bread was it was a desirable change from the “grits.”
Culled from: Andersonville: Giving Up the Ghost