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Speaker 4: You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking
Speaker 4: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 4: written about them. Gaesy Bundy Dahmer, The Nightstalker VTK Every
Speaker 4: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 4: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host,
Speaker 4: journalist and author Dan Zufanski, Good Evening.
Speaker 5: In the late eighteen hundreds in Rochester, New York, Monroe County,
Speaker 5: there were five sensational murders. The first story is about
Speaker 5: the home invasion murder of a young wife and mother.
Speaker 5: Her body was found in the cellar, a flower sack
Speaker 5: tied tightly around her neck and her skirt hiked up.
Speaker 5: At first, of course, her husband was arrested amid rumors
Speaker 5: he and his wife were swingers. The husband's supporters protested
Speaker 5: that he couldn't be the killer, It must have been
Speaker 5: a transient. The husband was released in favor of a
Speaker 5: preferable suspect, a damaged young tramp who had been floating
Speaker 5: around the neighborhood looking for food. In the second story,
Speaker 5: a woman's husband's head was almost severed, and she was
Speaker 5: told that he had borrowed from her former husband a
Speaker 5: very sharp razor and cut his own throat in a suicide.
Speaker 5: In another story, the resort town of Charlotte where the
Speaker 5: rich went to play along the crystal clear waters of
Speaker 5: Lake Ontario at night. It was where the pickpockets and
Speaker 5: the thugs went to fleece drunks who still had money
Speaker 5: in their pockets. After our victim checks into a hotel
Speaker 5: for the night, complaining he'd been mugged, he dies overnight
Speaker 5: from brain swelling. But who bunked him on the head.
Speaker 5: The answer seems to come the next day, when a
Speaker 5: man is going around trying to sell the victims watch.
Speaker 5: In another story, Brother Kills Brother. The book spans the
Speaker 5: last years of the gallows in Monroe County and the
Speaker 5: first of the new fangled electric chair. The book that
Speaker 5: we're featuring this evening is Filthy Murders of Ye Old Rochester,
Speaker 5: Monroe County Homicide in the Era of Jack the Ripper,
Speaker 5: with my special guest historian and author Michael Benson. Good
Speaker 5: evening and welcome back to the program. Michael Benson, how
Speaker 5: you doing Dan.
Speaker 6: Great to be back.
Speaker 5: Thank you so much for this interview and congratulations on
Speaker 5: this latest book.
Speaker 6: Thank you.
Speaker 5: Now The Filthy Murders of ye old Rochester, Monroe County
Speaker 5: homicide in the area of Jack the Ripper the table
Speaker 5: of contents. The stories involved are a Stone Killer, the
Speaker 5: Hayward Avenue Horror, The second one is the murder of
Speaker 5: Charles Demico, the third is carnage at the Cottage Hotel,
Speaker 5: and fourth is death on West Avenue and Practress I
Speaker 5: rounds crossing. Now, first off, remind us of your true
Speaker 5: crime origin story. Why do you write about crime and
Speaker 5: murder in Rochester.
Speaker 6: Well, I grew up in a rural area south of Rochester,
Speaker 6: New York, at the end of a dirt road, and
Speaker 6: when I was nine years old in nineteen sixty six,
Speaker 6: my babysitter, George Anne Formacola, and her friend Kathy Bernhard
Speaker 6: from down the road, went swimming in a swimming hole
Speaker 6: behind my house and never came back. It was the
Speaker 6: first day of summer vacation, the night of graduation at
Speaker 6: the high school, and they were missing for a month
Speaker 6: and their bodies were found in a field to the
Speaker 6: west of my dad's property and they disappeared from the
Speaker 6: swimming hole which was almost directly behind my house. So
Speaker 6: then they were found horribly butchered. It was a Jack
Speaker 6: the Ripper type prime with sexual mutilation and parts removed,
Speaker 6: implied cannibalism, all of the Jack the Ripper trademarks, and
Speaker 6: it changed my life horribly. And when I grew up
Speaker 6: I became a true crime writer. Not a coincidence, Yes,
Speaker 6: I wrote a couple of books that took place in Rochester,
Speaker 6: Betrayal and Blood and Killer and Killer Twins, and then
Speaker 6: went back and teamed up with a private detective in
Speaker 6: the mom of one of the victims who was still
Speaker 6: alive at the time, and we, as they say in
Speaker 6: podcast land, we propelled the investigation into a startling new direction.
Speaker 6: So it's good as good I sort of. I put
Speaker 6: a band aid at least on a wound from my
Speaker 6: childhood with that book, and it became very popular in Rochester.
Speaker 6: They wanted to know what I was going to do
Speaker 6: for an encore, so I wrote Nightmare in Rochester about
Speaker 6: the double initial murders that took place there between nineteen
Speaker 6: seventy one and seventy three, still one of my most
Speaker 6: popular books. And then after that we took on cold
Speaker 6: cases and those turned into mosquito. Point wrote in Rochester's
Speaker 6: Most Startling Crimes, And during my stint as a cold
Speaker 6: case investigator, I was very unhappy and wore me down
Speaker 6: emotionally because I was dealing with brieving loved ones and
Speaker 6: some seriously bad people that I was investigating. So in
Speaker 6: order to get myself an emotional break and to still
Speaker 6: please by Rochester audience, I decided to write about nineteenth
Speaker 6: century Rochester murders, which are every bit is juicy, but
Speaker 6: I don't have to feel bad about it and have
Speaker 6: trouble getting to sleep, and I went to write about
Speaker 6: them absolutely.
Speaker 5: In the forward of this book you title The Sordid Underbelly.
Speaker 5: You write about a killer in eighteen eighty eight London
Speaker 5: who came to be known as Jack the Ripper, and
Speaker 5: one of the suspects was Francis Tumblety from Rochester.
Speaker 6: That's true, Yes, not my favorite suspect, but one of
Speaker 6: the top five, I would say amongst experts. He was
Speaker 6: a Rochesterian. As a boy, he tramped around Eerie Canale.
Speaker 6: He sold snake oil that's fake medicine, usually some sort
Speaker 6: of liquor that pretends to cure all your ills, and
Speaker 6: he sold pornography along the Erie Canal. He was arrested
Speaker 6: and jailed for a time for possible involvement in the
Speaker 6: assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He knew John Wilkes booth I
Speaker 6: was in London and frequented the dirty streets of Whitechapel
Speaker 6: for unsavory purposes at the time of the Ripper murders,
Speaker 6: and he was arrested as a suspect before being released
Speaker 6: for lack of evidence and then fleeing back to America.
Speaker 6: And what's always pointed out is that the murder started
Speaker 6: soon after he arrived and stopped when he left. Now
Speaker 6: December eighteen eighty eight, word got back to Rochester that
Speaker 6: Tumbley was a jack the Ripper suspect and a fellow
Speaker 6: named Edward Haywood of the Bureau of Accounts in the
Speaker 6: State Department in Washington, DC. He's our primary source on
Speaker 6: all things Tumbley. He had an uncanny ability to run
Speaker 6: into this guy in different contexts throughout his life, so
Speaker 6: I remember him very well. Used to run about the
Speaker 6: canal in Rochester, dirty, awkward, ignorant, uncared for good for
Speaker 6: nothing boy about eighteen fifty five, he encountered Tumbley in Detroit,
Speaker 6: where Tumbley was pretending to be a doctor. To say
Speaker 6: that Tumbley had no medical training wasn't quite true. He
Speaker 6: worked briefly with an abortion in venereal disease doctor named
Speaker 6: Lis Bernard in a downtown rocket office in the Reynolds Arcade,
Speaker 6: but the only known responsibility he had in the doctor's
Speaker 6: office was sweeping the floors. We know because a patient
Speaker 6: undergoing an abortion died and Tumbley was arrested, but he
Speaker 6: was quickly released and it was said that he wasn't
Speaker 6: really involved. In eighteen sixty four, he's in Brooklyn, New York.
Speaker 6: He's charged with fraud for selling snake oil, selling twenty
Speaker 6: dollars bottle of booze that's supposed to cure people's asthma,
Speaker 6: seven years before the Whitechapel murders. In eighteen eighty one,
Speaker 6: he's in New Orleans, gets arrested for picking of pockets.
Speaker 6: Now amazingly, Heywood cross paths with Tumbledy on a third time,
Speaker 6: this time in Washington, d C. Where Tumbley was dressed
Speaker 6: in a bogus military fatigue uniform and claiming to be
Speaker 6: on a general staff now. He was arrested in Whitechapel
Speaker 6: at the time of the murders. They're charged with gross
Speaker 6: indecency after an incident involving a male sex worker. Records
Speaker 6: show that he was not in jail at the times
Speaker 6: any of the jactor for murders, and when he fled
Speaker 6: England the murders stopped. He was later found to have
Speaker 6: in his possession a collection of women's uteruses fascination with parts.
Speaker 6: As they say, he fits the Ripper profile in some ways.
Speaker 6: His wife worked as a sex worker, so he may
Speaker 6: have had a grudge against people practicing prostitution. He was
Speaker 6: a hater of women, with some medical knowledge sold pornography.
Speaker 6: I'm an Aaron Kasminsky fan. I think he was the
Speaker 6: best suspect of the time of the murders. But Tumbley's
Speaker 6: a good one. No evidence that he was a killer
Speaker 6: by nature, but he was certainly weird and a horrible man,
Speaker 6: and he was there in Whitechapel when everything happened. He
Speaker 6: died in nineteen oh three and is buried in Rochester,
Speaker 6: New York, in Holy Spical Cemetery.
Speaker 5: You write about Jack the Ripper because at the same time,
Speaker 5: eighteen eighty eight crimes were shocking. The murders were shocking
Speaker 5: residents in Rochester. And you talk about Rochester at that
Speaker 5: time eighteen eighty seven. In fact, Rochester, New York, a
Speaker 5: fifty thousand population, called it the Flower City. First it
Speaker 5: was flower like baking, then it was flower like the flower.
Speaker 5: It was the twentieth biggest city in the United States
Speaker 5: at that time.
Speaker 6: And growing very rapidly. A lot of the industries that
Speaker 6: would become part of Rochester's tapestry were just starting up. Sibley,
Speaker 6: Lindsay and Kerr the department store was starting up, and
Speaker 6: Kodak was just starting that course. Eventually Kodak would be
Speaker 6: a major employer. Probably almost half of Rochesterterians worked for
Speaker 6: Kodak one time or another, and that was all just
Speaker 6: starting up. But I found that crimes in eighteen eighty
Speaker 6: eight were a lot like I felt like an archaeologist.
Speaker 6: I felt like I was peeling back changes in time
Speaker 6: and looking at the way things used to be. You know,
Speaker 6: no radio, no TV. When there's a murder, the way
Speaker 6: people find out is because little kids would run up
Speaker 6: and down the street shouting murder on Hayward Avenue like
Speaker 6: town criers and crowds would gather at crime scenes because
Speaker 6: that was the major form of entertainment on that particular
Speaker 6: roads are not the major thoroughfares railroads and the Eerie Canal,
Speaker 6: or the major thoroughface of the Canal goes right through
Speaker 6: downtown Rochester at that time. Today and for many years
Speaker 6: even before I was born, they diverted it so it
Speaker 6: now goes around the southern border of the city of Rochester,
Speaker 6: not through downtown. But at the time they needed the
Speaker 6: canal to deliver goods and to take goods out. In
Speaker 6: terms of crime fighting, well, the first thing I noticed
Speaker 6: was that once a bullet went into a body, it
Speaker 6: tended to stay there. I mean, we're used to having
Speaker 6: X ray machines handy in hospitals and they can take
Speaker 6: a picture, locate the bullet, and then take the bullet out.
Speaker 6: Doctors had no clue where the bullet was, and sometimes
Speaker 6: trying to find the bullet would hurt the patient more
Speaker 6: than leaving it there. In one case, in filthy murders,
Speaker 6: the victims injuries are not thought serious at first. The
Speaker 6: guy's take it to the police station rather than to
Speaker 6: the hospital, and he has to moan and slump before
Speaker 6: somebody thinks to pull up his shirt and there's a
Speaker 6: gaping wound. There very little consideration given to the rights
Speaker 6: of the accused. System in which authorities can railroad someone
Speaker 6: whenever they want to, not that that always happened, but
Speaker 6: they always could if they wanted to. There was no
Speaker 6: obviously no miranda rights. In the book's featured story, the
Speaker 6: prisoners kept isolated in the women's jail, which is otherwise empty,
Speaker 6: which because this set's a sign of the times as well,
Speaker 6: no women prisoners at the time. And he's refused a lawyer,
Speaker 6: and what he's asked. He asked to talk to somebody
Speaker 6: with legal knowledge. They tell him to talk to the
Speaker 6: district attorney, and the district attorney tells him, if you
Speaker 6: don't confess now, you're going to be executed. So what
Speaker 6: do you think he does now? In the courtroom, I
Speaker 6: was pleased to find that things are not that different
Speaker 6: from there the way they are today. The key difference
Speaker 6: was there's no recording equipment in the courtroom, so every
Speaker 6: newspaper plus the court itself had multiple stenographers taking shorthand
Speaker 6: during testimony, and those squiggles were later transcribed and published,
Speaker 6: which made research ridiculously simple in some cases for me.
Speaker 6: Now in the world without TV or radio or movies
Speaker 6: even hadn't been invented yet, the murder cases became the
Speaker 6: primary sources of entertainment for the residents of the city
Speaker 6: and everything that has to do with the crime, the funerals,
Speaker 6: the court hearings, everything. Crowd control is always an issue
Speaker 6: because a lot of people in Rochester in eighteen eighty
Speaker 6: eight had nothing better to do than to want to
Speaker 6: be the first to find out the news when it
Speaker 6: came to the most recent horrible thing that had happened.
Speaker 5: Yeah, let's talk about your first story, which demonstrates and
Speaker 5: illustrates so many of the things that you just mentioned.
Speaker 5: Let's talk about Stone Killer and the Hayward Avenue horror.
Speaker 5: Let's talk about the Stones and their neighbors, the Jones
Speaker 5: and the August sixteenth, eighteen eighty seven.
Speaker 6: Well, yeah, let's start with the Stones in the Joneses,
Speaker 6: because they were two married couples that the Stones had
Speaker 6: a little boy, the Joneses were childless, and throughout the
Speaker 6: entire case, there's a little smirk in everything you read.
Speaker 6: Everything everybody says, the Jones and the Stones were close friends,
Speaker 6: really really close wink. And the implication is, and the
Speaker 6: whispers start almost immediately following the murder, which we'll get to.
Speaker 6: But they did a lot of things together. When one
Speaker 6: couple moved, the other did two the relationships. If you
Speaker 6: ask them about the relationship of the foursome, they always
Speaker 6: used the word intimate, which maybe wasn't intentional, but it's
Speaker 6: a word that's filled with dynamite, and it just implies,
Speaker 6: and dirty minded people applies all sorts of things. The
Speaker 6: story came out that Isabella Jones had once visited the
Speaker 6: Stone House, which she did most days, and when she left,
Speaker 6: she left behind a shoe, and that forgotten shoe became
Speaker 6: Rochester symbol. But they were certain was a pit of
Speaker 6: depravity in the Stone House.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 6: It reminds me a little bit about the John Dennay case,
Speaker 6: where some people will just always believe that something horrible
Speaker 6: was going on inside that house that led to the murder.
Speaker 6: That there wasn't in this case. It wasn't announce of
Speaker 6: evidence to support any of it, but the community's beliefs
Speaker 6: always was there, and it didn't helped that these Stones
Speaker 6: were showbiz types Missus Stone was a singer with the
Speaker 6: Rochester Opera Company that appeared in the Musketeers, and her
Speaker 6: husband was in the course, and that was how they met.
Speaker 6: And do show people had a reputation for not being
Speaker 6: the most Christian and moral.
Speaker 5: Now tell us about Aida and Alonzo Stone. But right
Speaker 5: away you open to Ada in a cellar, and two
Speaker 5: detectives in that cellar, and the examination of Alonzo by police.
Speaker 6: Right well, on August sixteenth, eighteen eighty seven, there was
Speaker 6: a warm, perfect day in Rochester, not a cloud in
Speaker 6: the sky, temperature in the high seventies. And Ada Stone
Speaker 6: is doing her laundry, tending to her three year old
Speaker 6: boy when they live in a cream colored cottage with
Speaker 6: a cluster of well tended nestertiums on either side of
Speaker 6: the door. A lovely little place. And even though it's
Speaker 6: Hayward Avenue, very urban now pretty a rural spot. That time,
Speaker 6: there's a pond in a woods. The Alonzo is an
Speaker 6: industrious young mechanic, the wife's good looking, and they've only
Speaker 6: been living in that house since May. And of course
Speaker 6: the Joneses moved so they could be nearby. The police
Speaker 6: noticed that the cottage was somewhat isolated. The nearest building
Speaker 6: was one hundred and fifty feet away rather and there
Speaker 6: was a house nearby where the construction crew had been working,
Speaker 6: and that was where mister Stone had been working that day,
Speaker 6: so he was never very far away from the house.
Speaker 6: The body of Missus Stone was found on the dirt
Speaker 6: cellar floor. She'd been interrupted while doing the laundry. A
Speaker 6: bag had been tied very tightly around her neck with
Speaker 6: a single knot. Under the right ear was a flower
Speaker 6: sack blood stained. Detectives assumed the sack must have been
Speaker 6: one of the items eight had washed that day, because
Speaker 6: there was not a trace of flour found inside it.
Speaker 6: The body was dressed in ordinary working clothes, which were
Speaker 6: soiled with sand, coal and charcoal, mostly things you would
Speaker 6: find on the floor of the cellar, and the soiling
Speaker 6: significantly was on both the victim's inner and outer clothing on.
Speaker 6: Her hair had been pulled out of its dew or
Speaker 6: loose hair pins in it, and her clothes were all
Speaker 6: still on, but her dress and skirt had been pulled
Speaker 6: up somewhat. Her head was lying on its right side
Speaker 6: facing left, and body was on its back. Right arm
Speaker 6: was stretched out towards the west, over her head hand clenched.
Speaker 6: This will give you an idea of the euphemistic manner
Speaker 6: which newspapers reported the facts back then. It's a quote
Speaker 6: the left leg. The left leg was flexed slightly at
Speaker 6: the knee, and the right leg was flexed nearly at
Speaker 6: a right angle, so in other words, her legs were open.
Speaker 6: Face was discolored as dirty yellow color, eaches were swollen,
Speaker 6: tongue protruded slightly bloody froth exuding from the mouth. There
Speaker 6: was a puddle of blood under her head, mostly coming
Speaker 6: from a large gash down to the bone on the
Speaker 6: right side of her forehead at the hairline. There was
Speaker 6: no blood on the victim's hands, but there was bruising
Speaker 6: around the forehead wound, which the detectives asked made it
Speaker 6: to be about three inches from her eye. The wound
Speaker 6: appeared to have been made by a roundish blunt instrument.
Speaker 6: Mister Stone was promptly jailed. Alonzo was taken and put
Speaker 6: in a cage. Their son, Raymond, was whisked away by
Speaker 6: relatives and he was arrested basically because police figured the
Speaker 6: husband always did it. Nobody else cared enough to kill
Speaker 6: the woman.
Speaker 5: Right, how did they proceed? You talk about the coroner's inquest,
Speaker 5: but how do police proceed and what is the result
Speaker 5: from the coroner's inquest in terms of any kind of
Speaker 5: sexual assault?
Speaker 6: Well, Corner determines that no sexual assault was completed, but
Speaker 6: because of the state of the clothes, District Attorney was
Speaker 6: determined to include attempted sexual assault as part of the
Speaker 6: indictment package. What happens after Alonzo Stone is arrested is
Speaker 6: that there is there's a meeting held in the town,
Speaker 6: an indignation meeting they called it, and it was led
Speaker 6: by a fellow named Professor Coates, the learned Professor co
Speaker 6: It's a theological scholar, and he holds this meeting in
Speaker 6: a church, and they decide that it's ridiculous that Alonso
Speaker 6: has been put in jail for this shocking and horrible crime.
Speaker 6: Could not possibly have been committed by any by a Rochesterian.
Speaker 6: That's out of the question. Rochester was too Christian and
Speaker 6: moral for anything like this to have occurred one of them.
Speaker 6: And they kind of stormed the police station and the
Speaker 6: next morning the crowd into the courtroom chant and the
Speaker 6: judge says, well, there's really no evidence that Alonzo did it,
Speaker 6: so they let him go. Now Coats had the year
Speaker 6: of the Press by that time. The voice from the
Speaker 6: press all standing around scribbling notes, and he reminded them
Speaker 6: and all Rochesterians that the gross cornfields and nurseries on
Speaker 6: the outskirts of the city were infested by scores of tramps,
Speaker 6: whose only visible means of support is theft. Authorties heard that,
Speaker 6: and a light bulb went on over their head. Now
Speaker 6: there's an idea, a tramp, a no good, dirty tramp
Speaker 6: that fit the bill. But they went looking for tramps
Speaker 6: and arrested the woman who was too slow to run away.
Speaker 5: You right, that he didn't even fit the description. And
Speaker 5: yet they found an older tramp, and then two boys,
Speaker 5: they said, and then like as you right, they tried
Speaker 5: to arrest them, and two of them ran away, and
Speaker 5: they were left with one boy, and he fit the bill.
Speaker 6: And yeah, and the boy they catches a pathetic creature.
Speaker 6: I mean, it turns out he's only sixteen years old.
Speaker 6: They never stopped and asked themselves. I think this would
Speaker 6: be the first thing I would have asked myself if
Speaker 6: I had been an arresting officer back then, is this
Speaker 6: guy capable of doing the crime. He had been beaten
Speaker 6: as an infant. He had a caved in ribcage, had
Speaker 6: trouble breathing, had one side of his face was badly battered,
Speaker 6: nearly one eye no longer faced in the right direction,
Speaker 6: gave people the creeps, and he was scrawny, and he
Speaker 6: looked like a fellow who mostly crept around here, a
Speaker 6: funny way of shuffling when he walked, probably also due
Speaker 6: to childhood injuries. And he looked like he was trying
Speaker 6: to avoid confrontations rather than start them. The thing that
Speaker 6: he had going against him was that he was a tramp,
Speaker 6: He was an outsider, and he admitted being in the
Speaker 6: area at the time of the murder. The primary piece
Speaker 6: of evidence against him at the trial was his confession,
Speaker 6: when he repeated a few times because he was told
Speaker 6: that he would be executed if he didn't confess, during
Speaker 6: which time he said he entered the stone house seeking food,
Speaker 6: ran into an angry aid of Stone who called him
Speaker 6: names and tried to push him out. He angered and
Speaker 6: hit her over the head with his stick. He choked
Speaker 6: her until she was unconscious, and maintained through all of
Speaker 6: his confessions that he never intended to kill her and
Speaker 6: never never planned to sexually attack her. He admitted to
Speaker 6: dumping her in the basement. He later claimed that the
Speaker 6: confession was false and that he'd been told that confessing
Speaker 6: was the only way to save his life, and that
Speaker 6: he'd been put in solitary finement for weeks, denied a lawyer,
Speaker 6: and pretty much brainwashed into believing that this was the
Speaker 6: best thing he could do was to admit to the crime.
Speaker 6: The trouble was that his confession had details in it
Speaker 6: that only the police and the killer could know, and
Speaker 6: when he eventually went to trial and denied that the
Speaker 6: confession was real, they asked him, how did you know
Speaker 6: the details, and he said, well, it's easy to fake
Speaker 6: a confession. They would ask me a question like did
Speaker 6: you move the baby carriage off the trap door before
Speaker 6: pulling the ring and opening it? That was a typical
Speaker 6: question on future statements. Deacons always used the ring in
Speaker 6: the trap door and the baby carriage and his detailed descriptions,
Speaker 6: and eventually he got it to the point where he
Speaker 6: could pretty much describe in a vague way the inside
Speaker 6: of the stones house. One thing he got wrong in
Speaker 6: which they never called him on because that was the
Speaker 6: last thing they wanted to do, was the stick. He
Speaker 6: hit missus Stone with the stick. That the murder weapon
Speaker 6: was a squared off steak was designed to be pounded
Speaker 6: into the ground. And Deacons and all of his confessions
Speaker 6: said that it was just a branch that he'd found
Speaker 6: lying on the ground, so and he didn't know what
Speaker 6: he did with it afterwards, when the actual killer had
Speaker 6: put the had put the stake behind the stove right
Speaker 6: there in the stone house. If you take if you
Speaker 6: take out the confession, and in today's court, that confession
Speaker 6: would not be allowed into evidence in a million years.
Speaker 6: He did it without legal representation, without knowing his rights,
Speaker 6: misknowing his rights, and you've taken away the confession. The
Speaker 6: evidence against him was flimsy. Prosecution maintained that Deacon's put
Speaker 6: in knowledge of the crime. The murderer could know and
Speaker 6: therefore he had to have done it. And women claiming
Speaker 6: to be Deacon's mother and sister arrived at the trial.
Speaker 6: Of course, the trial's a circus, the only entertainment in town.
Speaker 6: These two women show up saying that they're the tramp's
Speaker 6: mom and sister. They are angrily greeted by the people
Speaker 6: of Rochester because this was a boy whose life was
Speaker 6: ruined before he was one years old. He'd been horribly beaten,
Speaker 6: and nobody knew exactly what mom and sis had to
Speaker 6: do with that, but they weren't greeted warmly, and to
Speaker 6: show up at well the kids on trial murder while
Speaker 6: leaving him to tramp around from age ten to sixteen.
Speaker 6: This struck everybody as despicable.
Speaker 5: What about the three year old? The three year old
Speaker 5: boy is seen by the next door neighbor, Missus McGee,
Speaker 5: So tell us what it was rumored the boy had
Speaker 5: said he had seen. What did the boy actually see?
Speaker 6: We don't know. We don't know what little Raymond said.
Speaker 6: There was a story very early on, I think even
Speaker 6: while Alonzo Stone is in still in jail, there is
Speaker 6: a rumor that the little boy says he saw a
Speaker 6: dirty man beating his mother, which would bugs Hoonneri Alonso
Speaker 6: and would point the finger in an h tramp, not
Speaker 6: necessarily Deacons, but someone like Deacon's. Well, we don't know
Speaker 6: if that's what he actually said. And it was just
Speaker 6: a rumor at the time, and he was whisked away
Speaker 6: and never again is publicly mentioned. In any context. But
Speaker 6: part of the story that didn't make it into the
Speaker 6: book was an article ran in the Rochester Sunday Herald
Speaker 6: Tember eighteenth, eighteen eighty seven. The Sunday Herald was not
Speaker 6: associated with the Weekday Herald. It it was kind of
Speaker 6: a scandal sheet that came out on Sunday sensationalists, and
Speaker 6: the paper included publication of something purporting to be the
Speaker 6: Autobiography of Edward Deakins. Was a weird poem in which
Speaker 6: the writer confessed to killing Missus Stone, and though no
Speaker 6: one had seen the original, the copy read like a
Speaker 6: dime novel, pulpy and purple and not nothing like one
Speaker 6: would expect a sixteen year old boy to right. The
Speaker 6: so called autobiography contained many adventures, a harrowing accident at sea,
Speaker 6: a visit to the South complete with conversation in dialogue,
Speaker 6: a dialect like in Huckleberry Finn. There were rapes as perpetrator,
Speaker 6: attempted rapes as victim, and two murders. The other transient
Speaker 6: characters in the story had nicknames like four Track, Whitey,
Speaker 6: Albany Read Syracuse Charlie, and Troy Shorty. Well, there was
Speaker 6: no way you could believe at all, and some of
Speaker 6: it was clearly obviously fiction. But that particular Sunday paper
Speaker 6: sold out, and the next Sunday they reprinted it and
Speaker 6: sold out a second time. But it contained details of
Speaker 6: sex crimes men and women of Rochester had never heard before.
Speaker 6: Reminded me of the Arthur Shawcross trial, which was on
Speaker 6: live TV in Rochester, and a lot of Rochesterians got
Speaker 6: certain concepts in their mind for the very first time
Speaker 6: listening to that trial.
Speaker 5: What I wanted to ask was about the eyewitness testimony
Speaker 5: from the neighbors, the people that said they saw him,
Speaker 5: and then you write about the actual statements that they
Speaker 5: said concerning his guilt that trial.
Speaker 6: Well, right, I think that if you take away the confession,
Speaker 6: Edward Deakins is not even a terribly good suspect. He's
Speaker 6: in the area that morning. He talks to a deaf woman,
Speaker 6: There's no doubt about it. Talks to a deaf woman
Speaker 6: is as her daughter translates for them. He gets some food.
Speaker 6: He's hanging around with other tramps and they're going around together.
Speaker 6: They stop at an orchard and get apples. But the
Speaker 6: eyewitness accounts of him are always hey, there's there's nothing
Speaker 6: to that. Specifically, deacons saw a man with a strange
Speaker 6: walk and oddly an odd eye, a good eye and
Speaker 6: a bad eye. That would have been evidence that you say, okay,
Speaker 6: well it's him. But he's pretty specific in his appearance,
Speaker 6: and yet all of the descriptions by the eyewitnesses pretty vague.
Speaker 5: You write about the trial and the verdicts, and then
Speaker 5: the amazingly the jurors come by to say to the accused,
Speaker 5: nothing personal.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you know, the world was civilized in a really
Speaker 6: strange way. Two things happen in this book that I've
Speaker 6: never known to happen in recent times. One is just
Speaker 6: that that the jurors say, say nothing personal, or the
Speaker 6: killer says nothing personal to the jurors, nothing personal to
Speaker 6: the eyewitnesses, yeah, nothing personal to the to the people
Speaker 6: who who railroaded him. I think that his life had
Speaker 6: been so miserable that perhaps happy ending for him had
Speaker 6: never occurred to him. So he went rather quietly into
Speaker 6: that good night.
Speaker 5: I think he still denied and said he was innocent
Speaker 5: right to the very end.
Speaker 6: Absolutely, with the noose around his neck, he said, you're
Speaker 6: you're hanging an innocent man, and he referred to himself
Speaker 6: as a man, although to look at him, he was
Speaker 6: clearly a boy.
Speaker 5: Now you're right too that once he was condemned again,
Speaker 5: not like today. The newspaper men were obviously let right
Speaker 5: into the the jail, and you write that he at
Speaker 5: least pretended to be upbeat, somewhat happy, but they said
Speaker 5: they could see the ruse that it was that he
Speaker 5: wasn't so happened.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and you imagine that the social pressure on this kid.
Speaker 6: He's just been condemned to death. He's waiting to be
Speaker 6: transferred to the prison death house, and you know, the
Speaker 6: boys from the press come in to observe like he's
Speaker 6: a he's a monkey in a zoo, and he puts
Speaker 6: out a little shew for them. You know, I don't care.
Speaker 6: I'm fine, I'm fine, but they could tell. And I
Speaker 6: think at one point he starts to laugh and he
Speaker 6: can't stop laughing. And the laughter is heard throughout the
Speaker 6: throughout the jail and the adjacent police station, and it's
Speaker 6: given people, you know, really weirding people out. And finally
Speaker 6: he stops, and you know, one of the guys from
Speaker 6: the press is what's so funny. He says, well, I
Speaker 6: never did it, And some people thought that was, you know,
Speaker 6: one of his final denials of hitting the crime. But
Speaker 6: E and others thought that he was confessing to being
Speaker 6: a virgin and that the attempted attack on missus Stone
Speaker 6: had been unsuccessful and that was what he was really
Speaker 6: feeling bad about. But I don't know, I don't know
Speaker 6: about that.
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Speaker 5: let's talk about the next chapter. The Murder of Charles
Speaker 5: Demico December twenty third, eighteen ninety one.
Speaker 6: Yes, uh yeah, almost Christmas time, silver Bells. Yes, takes
Speaker 6: place closer to the center of Rochester. I mean, the
Speaker 6: first story was out in the outskirts. To the outskirts anymore,
Speaker 6: but it was at the time. This one takes place
Speaker 6: right in the gritty eighteen ninety one center of Rochester,
Speaker 6: New York. By gritty, I meanthing. It's probably hard to
Speaker 6: imagine how sooty everything was at that time. Everybody burned
Speaker 6: coal and wood for heat and code. The air was
Speaker 6: always smoky, and there was especially at night. Everything was
Speaker 6: was smoky and dark. Anyway, it's December twenty thirty, eighteen
Speaker 6: ninety one, and Charles Demico and his wife Mary, they're
Speaker 6: a poor couple. They have three kids, all from Mary's
Speaker 6: previous circumstances back when she was named Mary Culin, and
Speaker 6: they lived downtown on Pinnacle Avenue, which is now known
Speaker 6: as South Clinton Avenue. Both worked different shifts, so missus
Speaker 6: Demico would leave the house in the morning when Charles
Speaker 6: was getting home from the graveyard shift. Now on this morning,
Speaker 6: Charles twice sends out two of the girls to the
Speaker 6: corner saloon, once with a diamond, once with a nickel,
Speaker 6: and they returned with jars of four and then two
Speaker 6: fingers of whiskey. So Dimko's habit is to drink after
Speaker 6: he gets home from work, which coincides with the girls
Speaker 6: getting ready to go to school. Now, he was just
Speaker 6: at the smack and the kids around stage. He did
Speaker 6: drink all of his whiskey and was flapping him upside
Speaker 6: the head tell him to hurry up to get to school,
Speaker 6: when he complained of a headache and he laid down
Speaker 6: in the master bedroom. Now, while Mary and the kids
Speaker 6: were away, Charles was almost beheaded by a razor sharp blade.
Speaker 6: There was so much blood that it hit so the
Speaker 6: bed dripped to the bedroom floor formed a river that
Speaker 6: ran into the hall, down to the end of the hall,
Speaker 6: to the stairs, and then down the stairs, and a
Speaker 6: pool of blood was forming on the main floor at
Speaker 6: the base of the stairs. It's amazing how much blood
Speaker 6: is inside one human body. And the force of the
Speaker 6: blade had been so strong that it cut all the
Speaker 6: way through the neck and sliced into the pillow under
Speaker 6: Domiko's head. Victims windpipe and jugular were severed. Now, when
Speaker 6: the people downstairs saw the river of blood, they ran
Speaker 6: screaming to the nearby home of the homeowner of Pella
Speaker 6: named William Cargus, and the landlord went into the house
Speaker 6: found the body. He ran out to fetch a doctor
Speaker 6: and then halfway changed his mind and instead went to
Speaker 6: Bender and Shaman's undertaking rooms to find a corner. Now,
Speaker 6: hands down the funniest killer in the book is Jacob Wolfschlager.
Speaker 6: He was Mary's previous husband from him she'd never divorced.
Speaker 6: She told police that he'd gone away and she thought
Speaker 6: he was dead, but that turned out to be on
Speaker 6: Tree's true. She'd been married to Domiko and to wolf
Speaker 6: Schlager by the same preacher who had been told that
Speaker 6: wolf Schlager was dead. Wolf Schlager had said he was
Speaker 6: going to go out west, which in eighteen eighty eight
Speaker 6: meant Minnesota. He got a job there, and he was
Speaker 6: still sending Mary money because she was his wife, And
Speaker 6: although he seemed to take it well, he was none
Speaker 6: too pleased to hear that she'd married Damika, telling people
Speaker 6: that she was a widow, and she replaced him in
Speaker 6: her bed with a younger man. Now, the funny part
Speaker 6: is wolf Schlager spoke a torture German that even German
Speaker 6: speaking translators didn't get, and his English was so bad
Speaker 6: they didn't communicate well that way either. Now, as the
Speaker 6: corner arrived on the scene, wolf Schlager was dancing around
Speaker 6: screaming he killed himself. He killed himself now the guy's
Speaker 6: actually practically beheaded. But little by little Barty's figured out
Speaker 6: that Mary was a big a mist, but she said
Speaker 6: it was okay because wolf Schlager had a previous wife
Speaker 6: he'd never divorced, so he was a big a miss too,
Speaker 6: and fair, it's fair. Early in the investigation, a cop
Speaker 6: asked Mary how old wolf Schlager was and she said
Speaker 6: sixty three years old, much older than me. But I
Speaker 6: dare say he has a vigor appearance of a younger man.
Speaker 5: Oh my yeah.
Speaker 6: The one interesting and sad footnote to this story is
Speaker 6: that well during the investigation, a reporter went to the
Speaker 6: Demico home and mom was not there and dad was dead.
Speaker 6: Previous dad was in jail, the actual dad was unknown. Anyway,
Speaker 6: he goes to the Demico home and the only person
Speaker 6: home is the twelve year old daughter Mary. She lets
Speaker 6: him in. She's very precocious. He writes extensively about this
Speaker 6: interview with the twelve year old. She says that our
Speaker 6: areas in the house that have been taped off, and
Speaker 6: they're only allowed to go to the places that aren't.
Speaker 6: So she gives him an interview and gives him a
Speaker 6: little background and more facts that don't jive at all
Speaker 6: with Mary was saying when she first talked to police.
Speaker 6: So the anecdote understand though, when we learned that years later,
Speaker 6: two of Mary's daughters, and we don't know if one
Speaker 6: of them was marry or not the twelve year old,
Speaker 6: but two of Mary's daughters were arrested for vagrancy and immorality.
Speaker 6: So yeah, I guess the notion of constantly looking for
Speaker 6: the next husband who will pay the bills even increased
Speaker 6: in the next generation of girls and Mary's daughters.
Speaker 5: What did Mary tell police initially about Wolfschlager? Again, you
Speaker 5: just mentioned that the idea that she was married to
Speaker 5: him comes out, But what did she tell police initially
Speaker 5: that Wolfschlager had said had happened with involving the husband?
Speaker 6: Now, Wolflagger said that Charles had asked to borrow his razor,
Speaker 6: and his razor was sharper than Charles's apparently, and that
Speaker 6: was the reason why while attempting to shave himself, he
Speaker 6: accidentally cut his head off. Yeah, that was the story police,
Speaker 6: even eighteen eighty eight, they knew that wasn't right, But
Speaker 6: eventually I think they figured it out that that Wold Schlager,
Speaker 6: although seemingly a genial guy who was getting along with everybody,
Speaker 6: there was a time before he went west when he
Speaker 6: and Mary and Charles all lived in the same apartment
Speaker 6: while he and Mary were man and wife, and Charles
Speaker 6: was the border. And of course he suspects that when
Speaker 6: he went away to work, you know, they were doing
Speaker 6: the deed back to the apartment and all of it
Speaker 6: under his nose without him knowing it until he can't
Speaker 6: marry the guy before he realized that she was cheating
Speaker 6: on him.
Speaker 5: It was about the trial and Judge Rumsey.
Speaker 6: The trial was actually pretty brief in this one. There
Speaker 6: wasn't There wasn't a lot of argument other than the
Speaker 6: guy is insane, which jury's almost never go for that.
Speaker 6: The big problem with the trial was that you had
Speaker 6: a defendant that nobody could understand. You know, the story
Speaker 6: came out that he was not actually German. He was
Speaker 6: Belgium and spoke a weird kind of German, but it
Speaker 6: wasn't Belgiamy either. They couldn't find a translator to figure
Speaker 6: out what the guy was saying half the term. But
Speaker 6: he was guilty and everybody knew that.
Speaker 5: And you say that he was sentenced to a second
Speaker 5: degree murder and a life sentence.
Speaker 6: Oll. Yeah, there was no way to show premeditation. Clearly
Speaker 6: this was a situation that was that was coming to
Speaker 6: a head. But I don't think that there was a
Speaker 6: way to demonstrate that wolf Schlager had plotted out that
Speaker 6: he was going to go in there chop off his
Speaker 6: rival's head and then claim it was suicide. Chris, I
Speaker 6: suspect that it isn't what happened. It was a hot
Speaker 6: blooded crime, and those are usually second degree murder or manslaughter. Yeah,
Speaker 6: it's it's cold blooded means that you did it for fun,
Speaker 6: that you're a cool as a cucumber when you did it,
Speaker 6: you did it for money. If you did it because
Speaker 6: you're really really steamed and you're just so angry you
Speaker 6: can't stand it, it's harder to show premeditation because that
Speaker 6: moment of snapping usually occurs just before the act.
Speaker 5: Let's talk about another story, just briefly, Carnage in the
Speaker 5: Cottage Hotel.
Speaker 6: Yes, well you know this is a This was a
Speaker 6: revealing story for me because I grew up in Rochester,
Speaker 6: in which the neighborhood shalot spelled like Charlotte, but it's
Speaker 6: pronounce Shalot, right, was a the northernmost neighborhood in Rochester.
Speaker 6: It was the part that bordered on Lake Ontario. But
Speaker 6: back then in eighteen ninety four, Shalot is a tourist town.
Speaker 6: It's where you went on weekends. You would take the
Speaker 6: take the train out of Rochester, which was the southern
Speaker 6: part of what we now consider Rochester. You would go
Speaker 6: up the finger of Rochester along the river up to
Speaker 6: the up to the lake, and there were all sorts
Speaker 6: of hotels and nightclubs and bars and saloons, things like that.
Speaker 6: And it was a place where people with money went
Speaker 6: to play and a place where people without money went
Speaker 6: to steal. There's quite a prime problem in Chillott at
Speaker 6: that time. And in August second, eighteen ninety four, the
Speaker 6: dead body of Howard Abbot was discovered in a bed
Speaker 6: at the Cottage Hotel Ontario Beach salat New York. We
Speaker 6: analyzed the moments during the story of both sets of people,
Speaker 6: both the people without money who are there to steal
Speaker 6: and the people with money who are there to play,
Speaker 6: and they interweit weave. On the night of Abbot's death,
Speaker 6: one nefarious team works the same scam. Every night. There's
Speaker 6: a they tell a stranger that there's a corpse over
Speaker 6: on the beach. I want to go over and see
Speaker 6: it again. This is a world without radio and television badly,
Speaker 6: I need have entertainment. Yeah, let's go see the dead body.
Speaker 6: And then this works and the cours he get up,
Speaker 6: They get the guy out on the beach, and then
Speaker 6: they rob them. And that was naturally what everybody thought
Speaker 6: had happened to Abbot. He'd been robbed and cunked over
Speaker 6: the head. Now. The hotel saloon where he was found
Speaker 6: was on the west side of what was then known
Speaker 6: as Broadway, today it's Lake Avenuet. The main dining room
Speaker 6: had a high ceiling with a balcony, tables and chairs
Speaker 6: covering the floor. And Abbott was a fairly well known
Speaker 6: guy around Rochester. Rochester was a smaller town then, and
Speaker 6: he was a rich kid parents reputation as a man
Speaker 6: around town, ladies man, well known because well, mostly on
Speaker 6: Rochesterian men, because he had been for years the young
Speaker 6: and charismatic proprietor of a downtown cigar store on East
Speaker 6: Main Street. Now, as he lay dead in the hotel room,
Speaker 6: literally the victim of violence. His watch and chain are missing,
Speaker 6: and his friends and family thought he'd been the victim
Speaker 6: of highwaymen mugged and robbed. So the next day a
Speaker 6: Neir Duell named Patrick Gavin is arrested after he goes
Speaker 6: into a series of bars trying to sell Abboit's watch
Speaker 6: and chain. So the fact that this near dwell had
Speaker 6: the dead man's watch and chain and the man was dead,
Speaker 6: this was circumstantial evidence enough to warrant and his arrest.
Speaker 6: Now the trouble was Gavin said he found the watch
Speaker 6: on the ground and had never seen habit in his life.
Speaker 5: And so how do police proceed with determining that he
Speaker 5: was involved.
Speaker 6: I mean they're desperate for witnesses to demonstrate that it's
Speaker 6: Gavin who killed Abbit, and now with a lot of luck.
Speaker 6: It's very dark at night back then, very difficult for
Speaker 6: to recognize anybody more than twenty thirty feet away. The
Speaker 6: people themselves are sometimes partying, and some of the witnesses
Speaker 6: were the conductors on street cars going to and from
Speaker 6: who may have been the only sober ones involved. But
Speaker 6: we're also on the move and working and had distracted attention.
Speaker 6: So it's very difficult to get any eyewitness testimony to
Speaker 6: corroborate that Gavin was Abbit's killer, but they try, and
Speaker 6: they find that the Abbot has some more than one
Speaker 6: fight during the night. He's very drunk early. He's seen
Speaker 6: at one point with two women on his arms, and
Speaker 6: those women are gone, and he seems to be unconscious
Speaker 6: on the ground very close to a streetcar line that
Speaker 6: he is seen in the what they called the closet
Speaker 6: would be the men's room at the hotel, which would
Speaker 6: be a small building and outhouse just outside. He seen
Speaker 6: it on the ground just outside the outhouse with a
Speaker 6: man on top of him, and were to assume that
Speaker 6: they're fighting and he is being robbed, although there are
Speaker 6: explanations for that that didn't occur to anybody back in
Speaker 6: the nineteenth century. And eventually they do come up with
Speaker 6: a man who claims to have seen a guy who
Speaker 6: looked like Gavin hitting a guy who looked like Gabbott
Speaker 6: over the head. He had a girlfriend who didn't corroborate
Speaker 6: that she saw it as well, but corroborated that the
Speaker 6: guy saw what he saw at the time and told
Speaker 6: her about it. But that's what they had. It was
Speaker 6: not a great case, and there ended up being two trials.
Speaker 5: Let Jesus as an opportunity to.
Speaker 6: Hello, It is Ryan.
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Speaker 5: Listen to these messages you talk about it wasn't a
Speaker 5: good trial, but you say one of the most one,
Speaker 5: the most important witness was the hotel the night clerk
Speaker 5: and his name was Persian and he was the last
Speaker 5: man to see him alive. In fact, he had come
Speaker 5: to the hotel and then requested a wake up call.
Speaker 6: Yeah, well that's right. He comes to the hotel late
Speaker 6: at night bleeding from a cutover his eye. He apparently
Speaker 6: has a major blump on the back of his head
Speaker 6: that nobody notices, but he's him how's my eye? How's
Speaker 6: it look? Well, you're not going to be disfigured, don't
Speaker 6: worry about you, don't need a doctor. He wants a room.
Speaker 6: There are no rooms, and the clerk gives him his
Speaker 6: room because okay, well I'm working tonight, you can sleep
Speaker 6: in my room. And Abbott used to being out. The
Speaker 6: rich kid who's in charge caught asked for a wake
Speaker 6: up call, but the wake up Paul turns out to
Speaker 6: be unnecessary because he never wakes up. He dies in
Speaker 6: his sleep overnight, and when the guy comes to wake
Speaker 6: him up, he finds him dead. And that's pretty much
Speaker 6: where the story starts. And then we have to go
Speaker 6: back in time, retrace his movements and find out what
Speaker 6: happened to him. How did he get clunked on the head,
Speaker 6: And of course, one theory was that the clump had
Speaker 6: not come from an attack at all, but when he
Speaker 6: was unconscious on the ground near the streetcar line, that
Speaker 6: he might have been hit on the head by the
Speaker 6: streetcar and unconscious, But I don't know about that. It
Speaker 6: could have been that he just had too much to
Speaker 6: drink and laid down to take a nap, and he
Speaker 6: was kind of close to the railroad tracks. At one point,
Speaker 6: the conductor of the street car does get off the
Speaker 6: car and you know, slaps his face a little bit
Speaker 6: and says, you okay, mister, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm just
Speaker 6: taken arrest, at which point he gets back on the
Speaker 6: streetcar and leaves. So I think we're not sure where
Speaker 6: in Abbott's inebriate night the fatal blow is struck, because
Speaker 6: he's already grobby in and out out of it when
Speaker 6: it happened. It reminds me of the thing that happened
Speaker 6: to me at Yankee Stadium warts. I came out of
Speaker 6: the men's room and going back to my seat, and
Speaker 6: there's a guy sitting in the next section who is unconscious,
Speaker 6: and there's a trickle of blood coming down his forehead,
Speaker 6: and I quickly get the gist that a follow ball.
Speaker 6: It's just struck him on the head. Sure, and it
Speaker 6: met and the attendants are coming and his drunk friends
Speaker 6: are all gathered around, and one of the drum friends says,
Speaker 6: you probably think he was conscious when the ball hit him. Huh, Well,
Speaker 6: I mean it could have been that the blow may
Speaker 6: have been fatal because it was administered on top of
Speaker 6: a brain that was already bleeding from an earlier incident
Speaker 6: that night.
Speaker 5: Yes, yes, that becomes a big issue. What was the
Speaker 5: contusion and ace roll in the murder or the intoxication
Speaker 5: and that combined with the contusion, so ray you have
Speaker 5: that you write that the first trial is guilty, but
Speaker 5: then there's a second trial, and we'll leave it at that.
Speaker 5: What happens remarkably at the second trial. Let's talk about
Speaker 5: briefly death on West Avenue, the shooting death of James
Speaker 5: Boven's August eighteen ninety four.
Speaker 6: Okay, early morning hours August twenty eighth, eighteen ninety four,
Speaker 6: Frank Lorenzo's Saloon on West Avenue, to the west of
Speaker 6: the center of town, two blocks west of broke Bull's Head.
Speaker 6: Rochesterians school recognize that is was a bar that was
Speaker 6: frequented by Italian men. And one thing I learned that
Speaker 6: I didn't know was it in the nineteenth century. Italian
Speaker 6: men are the marginalized minority in Rochester. They are the
Speaker 6: lowest rung on the social ladder. Jurys looked upon Italian
Speaker 6: man killing Italian man crimes with distaste. Who cares if
Speaker 6: they kill each other? Kind of an attitude, and then
Speaker 6: it's carried on into the mafia times of the twentieth
Speaker 6: century with a Italian men started. Apparently even before that.
Speaker 6: Cops must have responded to the gunshots in the bar quickly,
Speaker 6: because as they arrive at the saloon there is still
Speaker 6: a fight going on, and the man who's been shot
Speaker 6: is still speaking in complete sentences, a lot of moaning
Speaker 6: and groaning mixed in because I know who shot me.
Speaker 6: It was Frank Gallo, I unaware of the seriousness of
Speaker 6: his injuries. Bo Venz is taken to the police station
Speaker 6: and questioned he's the guy who there slumps over while
Speaker 6: giving an answer, and they pull up his shirt and
Speaker 6: they find a gaping wound. No attempts made to remove
Speaker 6: the bullet because they have no idea where it is,
Speaker 6: but there is profuse internal hemorrhaging and he eventually dies.
Speaker 6: There's a crazy scene at the hospital where many men,
Speaker 6: all speaking loudly in Italian, arrive demanding to see Bovens.
Speaker 6: The victim because he owed them money. Wow, they want
Speaker 6: him to pay up before he dies. Among the people
Speaker 6: is a beautiful woman in a red dress who has
Speaker 6: a twelve year old girl with her, and she explains
Speaker 6: that Bovenz was a gurg, the girl's godfather, and had
Speaker 6: always been kind to them, and then they would cross
Speaker 6: themselves in unison. Up until noon on August twentieth, it
Speaker 6: was hoped that Bovenz's life could be saved, but he
Speaker 6: takes a turn for the worse. There's a last minute,
Speaker 6: desperate they drill a hole in his skull. Still doesn't
Speaker 6: always work, but back then rarely worked, and that sort
Speaker 6: of hastened his death. The operation lasted for two hours.
Speaker 6: They cranked him full of stimulants, but he died. It's
Speaker 6: a funny one. He was still clanging on the edge
Speaker 6: of death, still barely conscious, when foreigner Kleindines went to
Speaker 6: the hospital to question him, and during the interview the
Speaker 6: victim fell mute. Maybe we can only imagine, but getting
Speaker 6: a visit from the coroner while you're still alive, yes,
Speaker 6: feel like it's very, very discouraging. So he survived twenty
Speaker 6: three hours after being shot and then died. Now the motive,
Speaker 6: according to the official story, was that bo Vends had
Speaker 6: recently lent Gallo forty dollars and the money was to
Speaker 6: help bring gallows sister in Italy over on the boat. Apparently,
Speaker 6: Gallo was slow to pay back the loan, but that
Speaker 6: was only one factor, because during this time, Bovenz fell
Speaker 6: in love with Gallo's sister, who was naive and brand
Speaker 6: new to the new world. He showed her the ropes,
Speaker 6: that is, he took her virginity, and one thing led
Speaker 6: to another. Gallo wanted Bovenz to keep his dirty hands
Speaker 6: off his sister, and eventually, you know, one shot the other.
Speaker 6: So his investigators pieced together what happened. The question was
Speaker 6: was it murder, Was it an accident? Was it self defense?
Speaker 6: Because there were indication that all three of those things
Speaker 6: might have happened, but that was what the jury would
Speaker 6: have to decide.
Speaker 5: You say. Remarkably, though he was sentenced to death, he
Speaker 5: was sentenced to death regardless of this would seemingly not
Speaker 5: a first degree murder whatsoever in a subscription.
Speaker 6: I think that's a lot of the cases in filthy murders,
Speaker 6: marginalized defendants. The tramp in the first story, the German
Speaker 6: immigrant whom nobody could understand. The Italian men. In fact,
Speaker 6: I later found a list of homicides in Rochester in
Speaker 6: the nineteenth century, and the Italian men killing Italian men
Speaker 6: crimes had not been included, considered not important.
Speaker 5: Apparently, it's interesting you say that to the victim dies
Speaker 5: after intense questioning.
Speaker 6: Yes, yeah, he managed it, grilled him before they let
Speaker 6: him die. But yeah, I mean today, I'm sure that
Speaker 6: fellow would have been rushed immediately to the hospital. They
Speaker 6: would have taken an X ray, they would have removed
Speaker 6: the bullet. They just sowed them up, give him a
Speaker 6: lot of antibiotics and he would have lived.
Speaker 5: Yeah, very interesting.
Speaker 6: Instead there was a rush to the hospital to catch
Speaker 6: in those IOUs incredible.
Speaker 5: Let's talk about the last chapter, bractuicide at Brown's Crossing.
Speaker 5: And you say this is less than three months after
Speaker 5: Frank Gallows. Well, we won't say, We'll give it away, quittle.
Speaker 5: There was another shocking, another shocking murder on the other
Speaker 5: west side of Rochester. And then of all brothers.
Speaker 6: Occurred on Wilder Street. Right, had cousins lived on Wilder Street.
Speaker 6: I can't wait to send them a copy of the book. Yeah,
Speaker 6: it's Bowers Saloon, cornered Wilder and Tonawanda Streets. I think
Speaker 6: that corner has now become part of the Expressway, as
Speaker 6: happened to many cities. Robert Jones, they designed the city
Speaker 6: to be a suburban town and took out large segments
Speaker 6: of the city to build the cressways to get cars
Speaker 6: in and out every day, and this particular intersection is
Speaker 6: now part of the Inner Loop as it's called. Wall's
Speaker 6: two brothers, Andrew was twenty eight and Robert Watt, who's
Speaker 6: twenty four, neither married. Both lived at home with their
Speaker 6: parents on Wilder Street, which is in the dutch Town
Speaker 6: section of the city, and they were two of a
Speaker 6: family of seven children. And the argument began between the
Speaker 6: brothers in a bar. They started to fight in the
Speaker 6: bar and were told to take it outside. They'd only
Speaker 6: gone a few blocks from the saloon door. Near the
Speaker 6: railroad crossing on Brown Street. Robert wattah attacked his brother,
Speaker 6: pulled a knife, fell on to him, plunged the knife
Speaker 6: twice into him, and then as a final insult, rolled
Speaker 6: his brother over and slashed him savagely across the face.
Speaker 6: Robert then fled got off the street, cut across an
Speaker 6: open field and was gone. He tries to escape by
Speaker 6: hopping a freight train on the Buffalo, Rochester and Pittsburgh Railroad,
Speaker 6: but he's caught and hauled back. They had to tell
Speaker 6: him that his brother was dead. His defense attorney prepared
Speaker 6: a temporary insanity defense. The defense may not have proven insanity,
Speaker 6: but it did vividly describe the downward slide of the
Speaker 6: defendant culminating with the murder of his brother, and acted
Speaker 6: wead a ton of guilt upon his shoulders. This is
Speaker 6: really a story of a lifelong abuse. I suspect that
Speaker 6: one brother had bullied the other for twenty four years
Speaker 6: and finally the little brother had had enough and to
Speaker 6: floop back in one savage outburst, and had to live
Speaker 6: the rest of his life in horrible guilt because it
Speaker 6: was his brother, and you know, he cried because of
Speaker 6: the pain he caused his mother.
Speaker 5: What was the defense, very very interesting that time, before
Speaker 5: the turn of the twentieth century. What was the defense
Speaker 5: of this crime?
Speaker 6: Well, yeah, the defense was that because Robert had suffered
Speaker 6: a major injury at work he worked for the railroad,
Speaker 6: he'd been burned by steam explosion and his face much
Speaker 6: of his upper body and had suffered horribly, and apparently,
Speaker 6: as part of his recovery, had become an alcoholic for
Speaker 6: of his pain killing. Because he just stayed drunk all
Speaker 6: the time, he also developed depression, and the you know,
Speaker 6: I wouldn't even come close to working today that The
Speaker 6: argument by his defense was that this combination of alcoholism
Speaker 6: and depression had made him temporarily insane and that was
Speaker 6: the reason he killed his brother, and that once his
Speaker 6: insanity was cured, he should be a free man. Now
Speaker 6: you know the defense's or jury eight insanity defenses in
Speaker 6: all of their its forms. I can only think of
Speaker 6: one ever working, Reagan's attempt at assassin. Usually it doesn't work.
Speaker 6: It didn't work here, Although I think that there was
Speaker 6: a degree of mercy on that jury because they saw
Speaker 6: a poor beaten brother who fought back once, didn't know
Speaker 6: where the limits were, and now had to pay the
Speaker 6: rest of his life for it.
Speaker 5: Yes, you're right that they He was sentenced to manslaughter
Speaker 5: in the first degree, a homicide committed without the intention
Speaker 5: of causing death, but committed with a deadly weapon.
Speaker 6: Right, Yeah, he brought a knife to the fist fight.
Speaker 5: And you say that he was sentenced to nineteen years
Speaker 5: in Auburn prison, not a psychiatric facility, and with the
Speaker 5: possibility of parole in seven years.
Speaker 6: Yes, and was unable to determine just how much that
Speaker 6: he had to serve.
Speaker 5: It's very interesting too you write that at that time
Speaker 5: it was the most expensive trial in Monroe County history
Speaker 5: at five thousand tallers total.
Speaker 6: Heyn though it lasted less than a week, and that
Speaker 6: was because of the psychiatric defense meant that the prosecution
Speaker 6: had to get their own psychiatrists and psychologist experts to
Speaker 6: come in. The defense used public funds to pay for
Speaker 6: their own experts, and there was the whole segment of
Speaker 6: the trial where competing experts saying he was insane, No
Speaker 6: he wasn't, he was insane, No, he wasn't. And they
Speaker 6: all got paid far more than your average Rochesterian which
Speaker 6: paid and that's what made it so expensive, even though
Speaker 6: it had not gone for a long time.
Speaker 5: Absolutely, I'm going to thank you very much, Michael Benson
Speaker 5: for coming on and talking about filthy murders of the
Speaker 5: old Rochester Monroe County homicide in the era of Jack
Speaker 5: the Ripper. For those people that might want to find
Speaker 5: out more about your other books? All of your other books,
Speaker 5: and do you do any social media? Tell us how
Speaker 5: they could find out about the other work.
Speaker 6: I should probably have better social media by this time.
Speaker 6: It's twenty twenty four, hitchhiking on the old Information super Highway.
Speaker 6: But if you google at author Michael Benson, all one word,
Speaker 6: the at sign author Michael Benson, all one word, you'll
Speaker 6: go to my Facebook page and Amazon page and Amazon
Speaker 6: there are more than one Michael Benson the right books.
Speaker 6: I'm the one with the white Beard. Can't miss me.
Speaker 6: Hope you enjoy Filthy Murders as much as I enjoyed
Speaker 6: writing it.
Speaker 5: It's been a fascinating time speaking with you, Michael. As always,
Speaker 5: thank you so much for Filthy Murders of the old
Speaker 5: Rochester Monroe County homicide in the area era of Jack
Speaker 5: the Ripper. Thank you so much for this interview, and
Speaker 5: you have a great night you too, Dan Tonight, Good night,