Gruesome Illinois: Murder, Madness, and the Macabre in the Prairie State: Gruesome, #2

By Nick Vulich

Gruesome Illinois 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 - such as the Monmouth Ax Murders have ever made it into print. Except maybe in musky-old county histories. Even then, they are lucky to rate a paragraph.

Included inside:

H. H. Holmes told investigators he killed eighteen people outside of the White City in his Murder Hotel.

Henry Spencer, better known as the Tango Murderer, confessed to killing twenty-nine people. When detectives finally caught up with him, he said: "After my first stretch in the penitentiary, I became cold-blooded, and for five-cents, I would kill a man and drink his blood."

Henry Bastian murdered nine people on his Milan Murder Farm rather than pay them, then hung himself, just as his secret began to leak out.

The Sunday Night Murderer stepped off the train in Monmouth, Illinois, butchered the Dawson family with an ax, then mysteriously disappeared on the same rails he rode into town.

Ray Pfanschmidt became the Lizzie Borden of Payson, Illinois, after authorities discovered his family, chopped up and roasted in the kitchen stove. He was initially found guilty and sentenced to hang, then released three years later after he won a new trial. Even then, people couldn't help asking, was Ray Pfanschmidt a psycho-killer?

Of course, there's more, but you get the idea. Gruesome Illinois covers 16 brutal murders that occurred in Illinois between 1867 and 1920.

Read them now, if you dare.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nick Vulich
• Release date: Jan 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393767374

Book preview

Gruesome Illinois

Murder, Madness, and the Macabre

in the Prairie State

Copyright © 2019 / 2023 Nick Vulich

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Table of Contents

Introduction

The Tango Murderer

I Was Born with the Devil in Me

The Sunday Night Murderer

Mass Murder in Payson

Stuck Like A Pig

Killed by Catholics

Milan Murder Farm

They Hanged the Wrong Man

The Chillicothe Wife Murderer

I Haven’t Had My Dinner, and I’m Hungry

Murder and Robbery in Silvis

Rock Island Street Duel

Short Takes

He Died Fishing

Hammered and Burned on Island B

Murder in Little Sicily

She Just Left Me. That’s All.

Bonus Chapter

Introduction

I

started digging into local history several years back. The first thing I discovered was most of it is unwritten. No, a better word is undiscovered.

Everything you want to know is locked away in old newspaper vaults and musty old courthouse record books. The only way you can find it is to read it. I might read a hundred newspapers a day, sometimes two hundred.

You never know what you’re going to find. Sometimes I come up blank. Other times, you wouldn’t believe the stuff I find.

It’s incredible—murders, fires, storms, you name it. Most of the folks I meet are ordinary, everyday people like you and me. They were trying to get by, and something happened. 

Shit got in their way!

They drove into a flood. A tornado came out of nowhere and blew their house into a tree. Some drunken assholes tried to kill them after a friendly game of Euchre on Christmas Day. They went to work for a psycho killer. 

Things happen.

You never know what’s waiting around the corner. That’s what makes life so exciting and entertaining, and scary.

It’s all there in the newspaper, but it’s not easy to find. You need to know the correct search terms to pull up the information you need. 

To learn about crimes, you can search for murder, murderer, killer, killing, trials, hangings, lynchings, and so much more. There are many choices, and each one takes you to a different place.

There’s no right or wrong. 

History happened—it is happening all around you. So be open, and take what comes your way. 

Run with it. 

When you find a name or a place, go back and search for it. Maybe it will turn up in twenty papers, maybe fifty.

Sometimes just one.  

Learn to work with what you’ve got. Slap two or three things together. Find a common denominator that connects them and build on that.

You will be surprised where it takes you. 

History is nothing more than a set of building blocks that bridge the past to the future, much like how Count Frankenstein slapped his Creature together.

You gotta love it.

The Tango Murderer

C

hicago serial killer Henry Spencer (aka Jinrich Skarupa) is the most intriguing serial killer you’ve never heard of. He took credit for killing twenty-nine people (primarily women) during his twenty-year run. He bragged to detectives that he bagged twelve in as many months after being released from the Joliet Prison in 1912.

I never knew my parents and never knew my name. The first I remember, I was in the reform school at Feehanville. I got my first prison term after running away from the school. He bought a suit from some man on the street for a nickel. He knew it was stolen, but what did that matter? The police arrested him. 

The judge and prosecutor encouraged him to plead guilty and take thirty days. His attorney convinced him to plead not guilty. He promised he could get him off. 

What do you suppose I got? I got ten years. If there was ever any good in me, that killed it. Ten years for a suit of clothes![1]

When I came out, I wanted blood—anybody’s blood. I wanted to kill people and see it run. The penitentiary gave him ten dollars when they turned him loose. He spent eight dollars on a pistol and started robbing people. 

I have been killing people...ever since. I liked it in a way: When I robbed anyone, it was a sort of satisfaction to clean up the job by shutting the victim’s mouth forever.[2]

After my first stretch in the penitentiary, I became cold-blooded and, for five cents, would kill a man and drink his blood, said Spencer. The treatment I received down there was enough to drive a man crazy. They would beat me and hang me up by the fingers for some slight infraction of the rules.[3]

I’ve always had a natural hatred for women, said Spencer. I killed them as I would so many flies.[4]

Whenever I felt like killing anyone, I’d hit them with a hammer or shoot them, whichever happened to be handiest.[5]

Everyone’s gotta make a living," is how he explained the murders to the police. Killing was just another business transaction—like writing a check or signing a document.

I’ve been a thief all my life, said Spencer. He killed women to get their money."

Women! Damn them! I hate them! exclaimed Spencer. They always played me for a sucker, and I killed them just like flies.[6]

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Henry Spencer. (The Cairo Bulletin. October 13, 1913)

"I found it the easiest way to live. It cost me $400 or $500 a week to enjoy myself the way I wanted to in these cabarets and dives, and the easiest and quickest way to get the money was to get some girl off by herself and kill her.

Why, I spent $700 in two nights in Charley West’s last week. It takes a lot of money to hold up your end in these cabarets. He had to rob at least two bars or restaurants a week to support his lifestyle.

Mrs. Rexroat was easy, said Spencer, pausing to think before he continued. "She thought we were going to be married. She came along just as I told her.

I took her by the right arm, pulled out my gun, and shot her through the head. Then I laid her on the railroad track so that she would be tore up.[7]

It was never just I killed him or murdered her. Spencer had a story for every victim.

On the ride back to the police station, he told Detective John J. Halpin, you’ve got the goods on me. I know I’ll swing.

I have killed so many I can’t remember them all, Spencer told authorities where the skeletons in his closet were buried. 

He disposed of two of them—a man and a woman, at Fox Lake. There’s three feet of mud on the bottom of that lake where I put them. Of course, if you can’t find them, it isn’t my fault. I can only show you where I put them.[8]

While Captain Halpin was trying to work that one out, Spencer remembered another job he pulled between February and June 1890. A man caught him snooping around the Auditorium, a loop hotel. He popped him on the head with a hammer and dropped him down the elevator shaft.[9]

He set fire to the Ingram and Kail Flats at Sixtieth Street and Blackstone Avenue on February 11. He snatched $2000 in cash and jewelry on that one. The janitor, Dad, Benham roasted in the fire. 

I went to the building to rent a flat, said Spencer, but found I couldn’t have one. They would not let me have one, as none was vacant. Anyway, it made me sore, so I set fire at the base of the elevator shaft in the rear of a delicatessen store.[10]

There were more. Maybe as many as thirty, the way he told it. Spencer remembered all the details—names, addresses, where he stashed the bodies, and how much money he got away with.

"I met a man one night who looked as if he had money. I shot him in an alley in the South Side Levee. He didn’t have much money, but enough for me to go to a hotel for a few days. 

"I met another fellow. We got friendly. He looked like money.

I was disappointed in that fellow... He told me he had a lot more money than I found. I rolled him into a swampy place where they were dumping. The papers had a lot about it and called it a suicide.[11]

While all this was happening, Henry Spencer was in and out of the Joliet Prison for parole violations. One time, after he got out, he visited New York City.

He married a young German girl there—for three days. She was a parlor maid at the Hotel Martha Washington and had managed to put away $800 in the German Bank in the Bronx. I told her we would go west and buy a farm and live happily. So, they withdrew her money from the bank the next day and embarked on their adventure. 

I took her then about twelve miles on foot to show her some land I owned. We left the roads and went into the woods when I struck her with the hammer—two blows on the head and killed her. 

Spencer slept in the woods that night, then went back into the city the following day.[12]

Back in Chicago, he met a woman named Thompson in the cafe of the Germania Club on North Clark Street. They spent two days at the Plaza Hotel, then moved to a rooming house on Michigan Avenue.

I was attracted to her by the diamonds she had. That, and $85 in cash. I killed her while she was sleeping by choking her and tied her hands.[13]

Another time, Spencer shot a man just for walking too close to him. "I was walking along Forty-first or Forty-second Street between Indiana and Prairie Avenues... I was not feeling well, and a man walked toward me, passing so close that it aggravated me. I stuck him up and shot him. He fell on the sidewalk. I dragged him to