Murder & Mayhem in Columbus, Ohio

By Nellie Kampmann

Every city's history has its dark underbelly of crime. Columbus is no exception. From the turn of the century to the dawn of World War I, scandals involving an opium den and a sadistic murderer rocked a respectable downtown community. Around the same time, a cop killer masterminded a plot to free himself from the Franklin County Jail by having his gang attempt to blow the place up with nitroglycerin. In 1946, dead bodies kept popping up after a prim young teacher disappeared from a quiet Grandview Heights neighborhood. Two years later, a middle-aged housewife was killed with a butcher knife the same day that a tattooed mystery woman was found knifed to death in a downtown hotel. Join Nellie Kampmann as she explores the back alleys of Arch City history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Oct 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781439673874

Nellie Kampmann

Lifelong Franklin County resident Nellie Kampmann works professionally in the field of history. Her love of the subject has led her to volunteer with several Columbus history and historical preservation organizations, and she was a guest historian on The Dead Files. At her day job, her specialty is dealing with death records. While her co-workers have nicknamed her the "Mistress of Death," she is more of an aging hippie with a gardening addiction. Her previous book, A Haunted History of Columbus, Ohio, reflects her interest in all things spooky.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

In the end, we’ll all become stories.

—Margaret Atwood

Whenever crimes happen in the modern world, one typically hears a chorus of: Things like this never happened in ‘the good old days.’ Historians know better. If you spend some time looking through Columbus newspapers from the Victorian era or the first half of the twentieth century, you’ll find reports of crimes strongly reminiscent of those found in today’s world. Like today, some are minor—others are downright bloodcurdling.

Postcard of South High Street at night, circa 1910. Night Scene, South High Street, Columbus, Ohio. Courtesy of the Columbus Metropolitan Library, F.M. Kirby and Company.

A 1909 photograph of the Ohio Penitentiary. Courtesy of Columbus Metropolitan Library.

A random selection of crimes can be found in a scrapbook in the collections of the Columbus Metropolitan Library. The unidentified scrapbook, which covers the years between 1932 and 1940, appears to have been compiled by either Jacob E. Sandusky, who was the Franklin County sheriff from 1937 to 1947, or someone close to him. The clippings start off with a headline story about sheep rustlers. A couple of others expose the scandals of gambling and immoral dancing at a nightclub. These may sound quaint to modern ears. A clipping about a peaceful sit-down protest at the governor’s office that ended in violence from the police echoes more recent events in Columbus’s history. Violence against police can be found in others. One set of clippings describes the shooting of a deputy by a teenage girl’s mother when he went to investigate a juvenile delinquency case. Some apparently common crimes in the scrapbook might take a modern reader by surprise. Recurring themes of hit-and-run homicides and women jumping from or being thrown from cars are found sprinkled throughout the scrapbook. There were also clippings of the more expected crimes, such as bank robberies. A particularly striking newspaper clipping shows convicted bank robber Carl Boettcher being wheeled on a hospital gurney to his new home at the Ohio Penitentiary. Boettcher was gravely wounded in a shootout that killed a police detective. That is covered in the first chapter of this book.

The stories told in this book will feel familiar to the modern reader. There are tales of addicts turning to unlawful activities to support their habits, racially motivated attacks, domestic abuse and gang activity dating back a century or more. Then there are the all-too-common cases of murder for no apparent motivation other than to give the killer a sense of power.

The aftermath of these crimes was often as dramatic as the crimes themselves, the true stories rivaling the most twist-filled fictional detective and criminal trial TV shows. Investigations turned into roller coaster rides of hopes raised, dashed, then raised again. Just when a promising lead looked like it would solve the case, it turned out to be nothing of worth. Key evidence disappeared, and witnesses’ testimonies shifted. New, unrelated crimes were discovered as the detectives combed possible crime scenes for clues. Occasionally, the loved ones of murder victims found themselves affected years later in ways that they could not have anticipated. Often, the criminals were caught and duly punished. Other times, there was no retribution.

It seems that when it comes to crime, some things never change.

1

THE GANGSTERS

When people think of criminals from the 1930s, gangsters and bank robbers usually come to mind. The two converged in Columbus on February 4, 1938, resulting in blood and death.

Around 9:30 in the morning, four masked men with .45-caliber guns walked into the Hilltop branch of Ohio National Bank on West Broad Street and started yelling. One jumped the railing and held a gun to the head of assistant manager Elmer J. Hagenberger. Another, who seemed to be the leader, forced manager Curtis G. Wilcox, at gunpoint, to remove money from the vault. The four other employees and four customers were ordered to stand with their hands against the wall by two more gang members. The robbers made off with $3,500, dropping some of the cash in their rush to escape. They fled in a Ford sedan and headed toward Georgesville in the southwest corner of Franklin County.

This was the second time in one week that the area had been hit by bank robbers. The First Federal Savings and Loan bank, right across the street from the Hilltop branch of Ohio National Bank, had been robbed a couple of days earlier. Despite the proximity of these crimes in distance and time, police believed the robberies had been committed by two separate gangs. There was a big contrast in how the gangs operated. The Ohio National robbers were raucous, terrorizing their victims with noisy confusion, while the First Federal robbers operated with quiet efficiency. The license numbers from the getaway cars also did not match.

It did not take long for the police to locate the Ohio National Bank robbers. Several hours after the robbery, authorities received a tip that the gang members were hiding out at a rooming house at 183 Guilford Avenue. Chief of Detectives Harry Carson sent four detectives to follow up on the tip. What started out as a routine check soon turned violent.

Detectives Robert Cooke and Robert R. Cline got out of the car first and knocked on the front door. Since the front room was rented out, Bettie Fisk, the owner, came around the side of the house from the back to speak to them. She verified that men fitting the suspects’ descriptions were there. They had rented rooms from her, presenting themselves as students. Their behavior had been suspicious. Fisk mentioned that they had insisted on keeping the doors locked and changing the lock on the garage. They had explained to her that they were worried about their car, claiming that it had been burglarized while it had been parked on the street.

Cooke and Cline signaled to Detectives Leo L. Phillips and William J. Danner to come. As the latter approached, the first two detectives went around to the back of the house. One of the robbers, later identified as Jake, noticed the police approaching.¹ He opened fire through the front window. At the same time, a flurry of gunfire peppered the back of the house. That volley hit Detective Cline twice in the abdomen. He called out to Cooke to let him know that he had been hit and then crawled to the porch, where he collapsed.

Detective Cooke entered the kitchen and shot Jake through the heart as he came in from the living room. Jake fell down, dead, by the kitchen door. Cooke then saw Violet Wotring, a tenant who had been ironing in the back of the house when the gun fight started. He shoved her under the sink to relative safety. One of the robbers started firing on him from the living room but hit Wotring in the hip instead. Cooke shot the crook in the chest. The man fell back onto the couch in the living room. While Detective Cooke went into the living room, Wotring, whose injury was not serious, grabbed the dead gangster’s gun and went out into the backyard.

When Detective Cooke entered the living room, another bandit opened fire on him. He retreated to the backyard, intending to sneak around to the front. There, he saw Wotring holding the gun. He took it from her and used the bullets from it to reload his own revolver. Cooke started heading around the outside of the house when one of the robbers called to him from the kitchen. The gang member, identified as twenty-year-old Stephen Figuli from Cleveland, came out with his hands in the air, giving himself up.

Detective Robert Cline. Courtesy of Columbus Metropolitan Library.

Neighbor Lillian McGeary called the police for backup when she saw Detective Phillips gesturing for her to do so. She said that she had heard at least thirty shots fired during the gun battle. In the course of the fight, robber Carl Boettcher jumped through the front window and ran down an alley toward the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks. Detectives Phillips and Danner pursued him. They caught up with him by the tracks at the end of Stevens Avenue. Danner shot Boettcher and disabled him but received a serious gunshot wound to the groin in the process.

Boettcher also managed to shoot Phillips in the corner of his eye. Had the shot been straight instead of at an angle, Phillips would have been killed. As it was, he did not require hospitalization. This was a lucky break for Phillips, who had been off duty the day of the robbery but rushed to the call to pursue the robbers.

Assistant Chief of Detectives Glenn C. Hoffman and Detective George Ruder arrived shortly after the gun battle ended. They found a bloodbath. Detective Cline was near death on the porch. One robber was lying on the sofa, and Jake was on the floor in the kitchen. Assuming that the robbers were both dead, they proceeded to the bedroom. Detective Ruder turned around to see the robber on the couch pick up a large-caliber revolver and aim it at Hoffman. Ruder ran over and kicked the thug in the face, just in time to disarm him before he got off a shot. The villain did not live long enough to make it to the hospital.

Amid sorting out the situation, the police ended up with an unexpected arrest. Wotring’s eighteen-year-old son, Fred, who lived in the house with her and a few siblings, was wanted on a warrant for being a fugitive from the Columbus Workhouse. Three other household members were also being held for questioning.

That evening, Detective Cooke was asked to recount the capture of the gang at an annual dinner that launched the Policemen’s Pension Fund Board ball campaign. It was a bittersweet retelling, due to the serious injuries received by Cline and Danner. Cline died later that night. Military rites were planned for Detective Cline’s funeral the following Tuesday at St. Joseph’s Cathedral.

Back at the police station, Stephen Figuli filled the police in on the gang’s activities. He identified the dead man on the couch as Vincent Grinkowicz but only knew the other dead man as Jake or Mack.² Grinkowicz was listed on his death certificate as a twenty-one-year-old former bakery worker. Their previous holdup had occurred in Cleveland a few weeks earlier. Mack, who led the gang with Grinkowicz, insisted that the gang go to Columbus to rob the bank. He expected that they could get $40,000 from the stickup. They had planned the Hilltop robbery with precision. Jake and Grinkowicz traveled to Columbus several days in advance to set up the robbery, then returned to Cleveland to get Boettcher and Figuli. They holed up in a downtown hotel while Jake and Grinkowicz searched for another place to stay. At one point, Motorcycle Officer Lawrence Tucker followed their car, considering it suspicious.

Figuli’s role in the robbery had been to keep the customers lined up against the wall and to help carry out the loot. He confirmed that the gang had not been involved in the First Federal robbery. It was reported that Figuli’s share in the Ohio National Bank robbery would have been only $500. The Columbus Evening Dispatch sneered at him as being a sucker over that.³ He told the police that he never fired his gun during the ensuing shootout. That contradicted Boettcher’s story that Figuli had been the first to fire.

Figuli said that he never intended to shoot a policeman. His only reason for joining the gang was to get back at Vincent Grinkowicz. Figuli elaborated, I hated him and only joined the gang so that I could get enough money to get him out of the state and kill him. I wanted to fill him full of lead and throw his body in the lake.⁴ His anger toward Grinkowicz stemmed from an incident that had occurred several months prior to the bank robbery, when they were in Cleveland. Grinkowicz shot Figuli three times, thinking that he had tipped police off to a bank robbery committed by Grinkowicz’s brother. He left Figuli outside of the Cleveland Art Museum, expecting him to die.

Figuli, a self-described black sheep of the family, started his criminal career in high school.⁵ An acquaintance who he knew committed burglaries invited him along one night. From there, he met a safecracker who had been in the Mansfield Reformatory. He was caught after going on a couple of jobs with the guy. That earned him ten months at the Boys Industrial School in Lancaster. There, he met Grinkowicz, who was serving a year for drunk and disorderly behavior. After Figuli got out, Grinkowicz approached him about getting some guns. Figuli joined the gang from there. He had been making his living gambling and hijacking slot machines since June 1936. The young gangster admitted to taking part in a bank robbery in Cleveland on January 14.

Twenty-three-year-old Carl Boettcher was a fellow Cleveland native. He was questioned by Detective Chief Carson in a Mount Carmel Hospital room where Boettcher lay paralyzed from his wounds. Officer Everett L. McSaveney called him a thoroughly tough customer.⁶ Unlike Figuli, whom Boettcher referred to as his pal, he was mostly closed-mouthed about his previous criminal career. Upon investigation, it was discovered that Boettcher’s life of crime went back to when he was sixteen. He and three of his friends held up a confectionery shop, gaining three dollars. For punishment, he spent time in a California reform school and in a workhouse in Cuyahoga County.