Spine-Chilling Murders in Des Moines: Spine-Chilling Murders, #4

By Nick Vulich

Spine-Chilling Murders in Des Moines is a collection of true-life stories - most of them rescued from old newspaper accounts published over 100 years ago. Only a few of the events in this book have ever made it into print, except maybe in musky-old county histories. Even then, they are lucky to rate a paragraph.

Read them if you dare.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nick Vulich
• Release date: Dec 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393558293

Book preview

Spine-Chilling

Murders in Chicago

Copyright © 2020 / 2022 Nick Vulich

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Table of Contents

Outraged, Strangled, and Dragged Across the Prairie

A Lover’s Spat at the Palmer House

The Cook County Lady’s Murder Club

A Wild Canary or a Vampire

Love and Death on Aldine Avenue

Henry Spencer—The Tango Murderer

Chicago’s Man-Girl Murderer

Murder at St. Nicholas Cemetery in Aurora

Calumet Avenue Death House

Sometimes Children Kill

It Could Have Been Murder

Murder in the Palace Hotel

Sweating a Confession—Chicago Style

Chicago Murder Bureau

Research Methodology

About the Author

Footnotes

Outraged, Strangled, and Dragged Across the Prairie

A party of ice cutters found the body of a young woman on their way to Taylor’s Quarry on the extreme northwestern limits of Chicago on the morning of January 16, 1884. 

The body lay on its back. It was well-covered, but the girl’s torn skirts lay nearby. The face and limbs were frozen, and the body itself, reported the Chicago Tribune, though thoroughly covered, was cold as ice. There were marks of violence upon the neck and throat and a dark bruise near the mouth.[i]

Fifty to one hundred onlookers gathered around the next morning as the police collected evidence and loaded the body onto a patrol wagon. As they were getting ready to leave, a twelve-year-old girl demanded to see the body, then threw herself on it screaming. 

She said her sister, Amelia Olsen, had not returned home from work the previous evening. The family had been watching the path from their window all night, and when she saw the crowd gather, she feared the worst and ran over to check. 

Reporters described Amelia Olsen as a comely, nineteen-year-old who weighed about 150 pounds and was considered quite attractive in her own circle. 

She was a seamstress for Emma Carlson on Indiana Street, making $5.00 weekly. Carlson said Amelia left work at about 7 p.m. the previous night and said she was going straight home. Typically, the girl walked over to Chicago Avenue, then took the streetcar to Leavitt Street. After that, she walked the rest of the way home. 

Where the streetcar ended at Thomas Street and Western Avenue, there was a shortcut through the prairie that Amelia usually took home. It saved time over following the sidewalk but passed through some dark, shadowy places. Detectives assumed someone grabbed Amelia somewhere along the path, raped and killed her, then dumped her body where it was found.

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Sketch map of the murder scene showing where the body of Amelia Olsen was found in relation to her home. The shortcut shaved several minutes off Amelia’s trip but cost her her life on that cold winter night. (Chicago Tribune. January 17, 1884)

At the autopsy, County Physician Theodore J. Bluthardt and his assistant, Dr. Krost, determined Amelia had been strangled to death. They found marks on her neck that suggested she had been choked with a cord or rope.[ii]

Detectives arrested two suspects within days of the murder, but neither was a promising subject. One man admitted he was on a drunken binge in the general area, but the papers reported: the evidence upon which he is held is of the flimsiest character.[iii]

The only real clue was the imprint of a man’s shoe in the snow. It was a rubber overshoe in good shape with little wear, probably a size eight. 

The other suspect was a married man who lived near the murder scene. A neighbor told police he had been trying to meet the girl for some time, and he had seen him arguing with the girl near the shortcut the day before she was murdered. Police did not take the lead too seriously and refused to release the man’s name.

Another suspect held in jail almost from the first was Tom Shehan. Shehan was a loner who worked at Crane’s Machine Shop. His fellow employees described him as a course and morose man who did not talk much. Moreover, he was generally so vulgar that when he did speak, the girls especially would have nothing to do with him, and the boys also avoided him.[iv]

Shehan had been out pounding the nearby bars earlier in the day and said he headed home at about 5:30 p.m. His shoes did not match the tracks found at the murder scene, and his mom and sister said he slept on the couch all night, beginning about 6 p.m., but detectives had some lingering doubts.

Doctors found blood on Amelia’s genitals and figured her attacker would also be covered in blood. However, Sheehan wore blood-red flannel underpants, so detectives were waiting for Dr. Bluthardt to perform a microscopic examination before they turned him loose.

Amelia’s mother had her own opinion. She was sure her daughter had been murdered in some other location, then the body was dumped where it was found.

She told reporters that she and her daughter Mary had crossed the prairie several times that night between 7 and 9 p.m. looking for Amelia. It was dark, she said, but not so dark that we could not have seen the body if it had been there. We strained our eyes on all sides as we went over the path. We both know the prairie well, and neither could have overlooked the figure of a body.[v]

As was always the case in a morbid murder, thousands of spectators rode the streetcars to visit the crime scene. They cut bloodstains out of the snow to take home as souvenirs and trampled any remaining footprint evidence left in the snow, making it impossible for detectives to search for new clues. 

Many of the spectators did not stop at observing the crime scene. They pushed their way into the house where Amelia’s body lay in an open coffin. For some unknown reason, Mrs. Olsen let anyone who wanted to come in and view the body. One reporter observed that the girl’s head looked particularly gruesome, where the crown had been reattached after being removed for the autopsy, but that did not stop people from gawking.[vi]

The next day, the family was tired of all the attention and hung a big sign asking visitors to respect their privacy on the front door. Unfortunately, it didn’t stop people from trying to get in. They walked around to the back door, thinking they might get a different answer. Many of them pushed their way in anyhow. Finally, the family hid in the loft to escape the gawkers and freaks trying to view their daughter’s body.

More than two thousand people attended Amelia’s funeral on January 21. The Chicago Tribune reported a crowd of two thousand people stood inside the Norwegian Evangelist Church to hear the services, and another three hundred huddled together outside in the cold.

Dr. Bluthardt completed more of the postmortem on January 23. He suggested that more than one man had raped Amelia before she died.

She had been drinking or under the influence of drugs that night. He could not say which. His examination also showed that Amelia was not pregnant at the time of her death. That helped to remove suspicion from her fiancé, Alphonse Wagner. Police had been watching him closely since Amelia’s body had been found but had not taken action against him.[vii]

The Inter Ocean hinted that a group of the girl’s acquaintances committed the murder. They suspected some of Amelia’s friends took her into a restaurant or bar and drugged her and another girl. Then, two men got a hack and drove Amelia off toward the prairie, where they raped her repeatedly. She screamed and fought, reported the paper, and the miscreants choked her to keep her quiet. They perhaps did not intend to murder her but found, after their hellish work was completed, that the poor girl was dead.[viii]

The other girl managed to escape, or she likely would have wound up dead on the prairie with Amelia. It added an interesting dimension to the story, but unless detectives turned up the other girl, or proof positive of the plot, they could not do anything with it.

The Inter Ocean sympathized with the girl and understood why she would not come forward. They said Amelia Olsen was mercifully murdered. Had she survived the ordeal, she would have been ridiculed and shamed in court and had to explain all the outrages she endured.[ix]

Judge Barnum released Tom Shehan on a $3,500 bond that same day.

The reporter for the Chicago Tribune followed him home. What did I do Tuesday, said Shehan. He got up at 2 p.m. and went to a saloon at the corner of Milwaukee Avenue and Huron Street. Forty-five minutes later, Shehan went to Lampkin’s Saloon and stayed there until 5:30, then went home and read the paper until supper. He slept on the lounge until 8 p.m. when he went upstairs to bed. Mrs. Jacobs and Sarah Werner saw him there.

The next morning, Shehan’s mother woke him up and fed him breakfast before heading to work at the Columbia Iron Works.

The next thing he knew, the police hauled him to jail for killing Amelia Olsen, even though he had solid proof that he was nowhere near her at the time of the murder.[x]

The coroner’s inquest concluded on January 30.

Dr. Bluthardt showed the jury the girl’s bloody underwear and explained that Amelia had been strangled to death, then dragged by the neck to the spot where the ice cutters found her body.

My opinion, he said, is that Amelia Olsen came to her death by an outrageous assault for the purpose of rape and by strangulation and by exposure to very severe cold weather.[xi]

The first policeman on the scene, William Dewald, said a veil was tied tightly around the girl’s neck. He observed an indentation on the side of her neck. It looked like a finger had been pressed there. The body was so stiff they could have lifted it into the patrol wagon without bending it.[xii]

After listening to all the evidence, the coroner’s jury ruled that Amelia Olsen was killed by a person or persons unknown.

The