Speaker 1: Hello, it is Ryan, and we could all use an
Speaker 1: extra bright spot in our day, couldn't we just to
Speaker 1: make up for things like sitting in traffic, doing the dishes,
Speaker 1: counting or steps, you know, all the mundane stuff. That
Speaker 1: is why I'm such a big fan of Chumba Casino.
Speaker 1: Chumbuck Casino has all your favorite social casino style games
Speaker 1: you can play for free anytime anywhere with daily bonuses.
Speaker 1: That's you brighten your day, lowe actually a lot, so
Speaker 1: sign up now at Chumbuck Casino dot com. That's Chumbuck
Speaker 1: Casino dot com.
Speaker 2: No personesses every d every by loss in terms conditions eating.
Speaker 1: Plus, Hey guys, it is Ryan. I'm not sure if
Speaker 1: you know this about me, but I'm a bit of
Speaker 1: a fun fanatic when I can. I like to work,
Speaker 1: but I like fun too. It's a thing, and now
Speaker 1: the truth is out there, I can tell you about
Speaker 1: my favorite place to have fun, Chumbu Casino. They have
Speaker 1: hundreds of social casino style games to choose from, with
Speaker 1: new games released each week. You can play for free
Speaker 1: anytime anywhere, and each day brings a new chance to
Speaker 1: collect daily bonuses. So join me and the fun. Sign
Speaker 1: up now at chumba casino dot com.
Speaker 2: No personesses every d every by Lost Eaters is a
Speaker 2: leading labe.
Speaker 3: You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking
Speaker 3: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 3: written about them. Gasey Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker VTK every
Speaker 3: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 3: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your
Speaker 3: host journalist and author Dan Zufanski, Good Evening. Just before
Speaker 3: Christmas nineteen oh two, Alfred Knapp strangled his wife in
Speaker 3: her sleep. He put her body in a box and
Speaker 3: sent the box floating down the Great Miami River, telling
Speaker 3: everyone that had had left him. When the truth came out,
Speaker 3: Knapp confessed to four other murders. Newspapers across the Midwest
Speaker 3: sent reporters to interview the handsome strangler. Despite spending most
Speaker 3: of his adulthood in prison, he had a charming, boyish
Speaker 3: manner that made him an instant celebrity serial killer. True
Speaker 3: crime historian Richard O. Jones examines the Strangler's alleged crimes,
Speaker 3: the family drama of covering up Knapp's atrocities, and how
Speaker 3: a brain damage drifter became a media darling. The book
Speaker 3: they're featuring this evening is the first celebrity serial killer
Speaker 3: in Southwest Ohio, Confessions of the Strangler Alfred Knapp, with
Speaker 3: my special guest, true crime historian and author Richard O.
Speaker 4: Jones. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much
Speaker 4: for this interview.
Speaker 5: Richard O.
Speaker 4: Jones.
Speaker 5: Thanks for having me, Dan, it's pleasure to talk with you.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much. An incredible story. Let's talk about
Speaker 4: your background in journalist and a little bit about how
Speaker 4: you came to be the author of the first celebrity
Speaker 4: serial killer in Southwest Ohio. What brought you to this story.
Speaker 5: Well, basically, I spent my first career twenty five years
Speaker 5: as a reporter for my hometown newspaper, the Hamilton Journal News.
Speaker 5: And part of my coverage was it pretty broad ranging stuff.
Speaker 5: I did arts and entertainment mostly, but I also did
Speaker 5: the cultural institutions in town, the historical societies and things
Speaker 5: of that sort. And so in doing the job, I
Speaker 5: kind of developed a interest in local history and I
Speaker 5: ran across Alfred Knapp as I was well. He was
Speaker 5: just kind of a common thing in Butler County, Ohio,
Speaker 5: because he was our first electric chaircase. I'm getting ahead
Speaker 5: of myself here, but he was our first electric chaircase
Speaker 5: in Butler County, and so we're kind of known about
Speaker 5: him through that little tidbit of information. But about two
Speaker 5: thousand and eight, a friend of mine who had spent
Speaker 5: some time in Hollywood as a documentary filmmaker, he approached
Speaker 5: me to do a story. He wanted to do a
Speaker 5: documentary about another murder in Hamilton, the nineteen seventy five
Speaker 5: Easter massacre, in which a fella, James Urban Rupert, shot
Speaker 5: eleven members of his family on cold, blustery Sunday after
Speaker 5: East Easter afternoon. And he wanted to do a documentary
Speaker 5: about that, And so I started doing a ton of
Speaker 5: research into that, and just in the periphery of that
Speaker 5: was all these other murders in Hamilton through the ages.
Speaker 5: And this one really stuck out to me because of
Speaker 5: the I call it Shakespearean. I wrote the book in
Speaker 5: five chapters because it just strikes me as a kind
Speaker 5: of a Shakespearean, very odd reaching drama. Not only was
Speaker 5: there the murders that he confessed to, but because of
Speaker 5: the nature of the coverage the newspapers from all over
Speaker 5: the Midwest descended on Hamilton, and they were all buying for,
Speaker 5: you know, some kind of hook or some kind of exclusive.
Speaker 5: So there was a lot of newspaper coverage not only
Speaker 5: of the crimes, but also of his family, dynamics and
Speaker 5: other things that were going on in Hamilton at the time.
Speaker 5: And so as I started launching into this career, the
Speaker 5: second career of writing true crime, I wanted to do
Speaker 5: the Rupert book, which I did, but it's not published yet,
Speaker 5: But this one was a kind of a better sell
Speaker 5: for me for the publishers I was working with because
Speaker 5: of the real, truly historical nature of it having taken
Speaker 5: place at the turn of the previous century. So that's
Speaker 5: a long winded way of how I came about it.
Speaker 4: Right, Let's talk about eighteen ninety four. As you opened
Speaker 4: the book and you feature Hannah Goddard and she's twenty
Speaker 4: one years old and she has two half sisters, and
Speaker 4: she's going to Cincinnati for work. Tell us what kind
Speaker 4: of work is she doing, and who she meets when
Speaker 4: she's in Cincinnati, and what happens after she tell us
Speaker 4: how she ends up meeting.
Speaker 5: Okay, she goes to work in a restaurant as a waitress,
Speaker 5: and one of the waitresses there was a lady by
Speaker 5: the name of Mamie King. She was the hostess of
Speaker 5: the restaurant where she worked, and she took Hannah and
Speaker 5: a couple of other young girls under her wing, so
Speaker 5: to speak, gave him a place to live. She was married,
Speaker 5: her husband had a really good job, and so she
Speaker 5: was just kind of taking care of these two young girls.
Speaker 5: And it was through her association, through hands his association
Speaker 5: with Mamie King, that she met Maimie's brother, Alfred Napp.
Speaker 4: What did she know about Alfred Knapp at that time
Speaker 4: and who was he?
Speaker 5: Basically, well, Alfred Napp was kind of a strange character.
Speaker 5: His family traveled a whole lot when he was young,
Speaker 5: and it's not real clear why. His father was pretty
Speaker 5: much a common laborer. I think the most the biggest
Speaker 5: job he had was he was a conductor on a
Speaker 5: what they called it the Incline. It was a street
Speaker 5: car that went up a hill in Cincinnati. But he
Speaker 5: grew up in various parts of Indiana and Ohio. He
Speaker 5: was the oldest of five children, or three daughters and
Speaker 5: two sons. Alfred was the oldest of them, and he
Speaker 5: was kind of an itinerant drifter himself. Once he grew up,
Speaker 5: he had a penchant for getting in trouble and he
Speaker 5: did several terms in prison. And when he met Hannah
Speaker 5: the first time, he was married to a young girl
Speaker 5: named Jenny that he had met in Lawrenceburg, Indiana. She
Speaker 5: was from Connorsville, Indiana, and he had married her, and
Speaker 5: she stuck by him when he did a couple of
Speaker 5: prison terms, and she turns up dead in the Cincinnati
Speaker 5: Canal and it was ruled a suicide, and it would
Speaker 5: come out that she was pregnant with Alfred's child and
Speaker 5: didn't know what to do about it. And he went
Speaker 5: into the Cincinnati in Choir offices to put an ad
Speaker 5: in the paper looking for work, and when he came out,
Speaker 5: she was gone, and a couple of days later they
Speaker 5: dragged her body out of the canal. And this is
Speaker 5: at the time that Hannah was living with him sister
Speaker 5: many in Uh in Cumminsville, a northern suburb of Cincinnati,
Speaker 5: and Uh he got to know Hannah through that association
Speaker 5: and they married, despite May and Mamie's objections. Uh they
Speaker 5: married about six weeks after Jenny Knapp was found in
Speaker 5: the canal.
Speaker 6: Mm hmm.
Speaker 4: So where did he find work and how would you
Speaker 4: characterize this this marriage?
Speaker 5: Well, he uh, Alfred, he had this sort of fantasy
Speaker 5: that he wanted to be in show business. He worked
Speaker 5: for the There are a lot of you know, theaters
Speaker 5: and opera houses in Cincinnati at the time, and he
Speaker 5: would get work as a supernumerary, which would be, you know,
Speaker 5: if it's a big battle scene, they've got guys hanging
Speaker 5: around with in you know, Greek costumes and and carrying spears.
Speaker 5: You know, they don't have any singing parts, but they
Speaker 5: have to be part of the background. So he got
Speaker 5: a lot of work with that. He also got a
Speaker 5: lot of work with He worked for a couple of
Speaker 5: circuses that would come through town. And I guess the
Speaker 5: circus that they were talking about were like human oddities
Speaker 5: and things of that sort. And one of them had
Speaker 5: a beauty pageant as was part of their attraction, and
Speaker 5: Alfred would get into a lot of trouble creeping on
Speaker 5: the girls there. And he also got in a lot
Speaker 5: of trouble for stealing from people there, and so he
Speaker 5: did a couple of his He spent one year in
Speaker 5: the pretty much in the Cincinnati Workhouse as a result
Speaker 5: of his thievery. But he also did a lot of
Speaker 5: odd jobs, you know, just common labor things, digging ditches
Speaker 5: and shoveling gravel. And when he was in Hamilton for
Speaker 5: a time, he drove a coal wagon that delivered cold
Speaker 5: to people's houses.
Speaker 4: So what did to Maimie and her husband, ed King?
Speaker 4: They took in took in Hannah. Well, what did they
Speaker 4: think of Alfred and how much did they interact?
Speaker 5: Well, Alfred was apparently a frequent visitor to their house.
Speaker 5: He was living in Cincinnati between between his jail stints.
Speaker 5: He would often come to Cincinnati to live. His parents
Speaker 5: also lived there for a time, and his other sister, Sadie,
Speaker 5: operated a candy shop there for a time, So he
Speaker 5: was a frequent visitor to the King home. Ed King
Speaker 5: was not a big fan of Alfred. He just thought
Speaker 5: he was kind of a weird fella. And you know,
Speaker 5: one of the things about Alfred that would come out
Speaker 5: later is that he took a couple of blows to
Speaker 5: the head when he was very young. I think one
Speaker 5: time he fell off of a porch and was unconscious
Speaker 5: for a few days, and another time he was kicked
Speaker 5: kicked in the head by a horse, and in fact,
Speaker 5: just getting a little ahead of ourselves here. His lawyer
Speaker 5: had him cut his hair really short when he went
Speaker 5: to trial so that they could see the hoof mark
Speaker 5: that was embedded in the side of his head. So
Speaker 5: he wasn't he wasn't a very bright fellow, but he
Speaker 5: seemed to have, you know, like these savant tendencies in
Speaker 5: that he had a really good memory about things, and
Speaker 5: he would act out these stories and he would write plays.
Speaker 5: Of course, he never got anything produced professionally, but this
Speaker 5: was just kind of the way his fantasy mind worked.
Speaker 5: Another thing about him that I thought was kind of
Speaker 5: interesting is when he was staying in Cincinnati, his companions
Speaker 5: were the children in the neighborhood, and he would would
Speaker 5: hang out with them until he got into a little
Speaker 5: bit of trouble for doing things like throwing rocks at
Speaker 5: the women who worked in the factory when they came
Speaker 5: out from doing their job, you know, very childish things
Speaker 5: like that. So I think, you know, my opinion of
Speaker 5: it is that that Alfred was kind of a you know,
Speaker 5: a man boy. That he was, you know, kind of
Speaker 5: kind of bright in some ways, but generally kind of
Speaker 5: a stupid fella, and it kind of clumsy and and childish,
Speaker 5: I think is the way that he comes across to me.
Speaker 4: You write about August eighth, eighteen ninety four, and there's
Speaker 4: a guy fishing and he finds a body of a woman.
Speaker 4: Tell us what happens with this inquiry into who this
Speaker 4: woman that was found?
Speaker 5: That woman you're talking about, his first wife, Jenny Knapp. Well,
Speaker 5: they they fished her out of the body out of
Speaker 5: the canal, and she had a lot of cuts and
Speaker 5: her brasions and her head, you know, injuries to her head.
Speaker 5: Most of that they attributed to, you know, being run
Speaker 5: over by the canal boats or or the glass that
Speaker 5: was embedded that was laying at the bottom of the
Speaker 5: canal and things of that sort. So when they they
Speaker 5: didn't really do an autopsy, but the post mortem examinations
Speaker 5: they didn't see any real reason for a murder. In fact,
Speaker 5: Mamie King and his soon to be wife, Hannah Knapp,
Speaker 5: both testified at the coroner's inquest to Jenny's despondency, the
Speaker 5: fact that she was pregnant with Alfred's child and really
Speaker 5: didn't want to have a baby with him for obvious reasons.
Speaker 5: He couldn't hold a job. He was in jail, in
Speaker 5: and out of jail all of the life, so it
Speaker 5: was ruled a suicide.
Speaker 4: Now you talk about that they were married, and this
Speaker 4: is only five weeks after what you had mentioned, five
Speaker 4: weeks after Jenny's death. So the couple winds up in
Speaker 4: West Indianapolis, Indiana, in the summer of eighteen ninety five.
Speaker 4: And then you introduced thirteen year old Bessie Draper and
Speaker 4: she had come to West Indianapolis from Tara Hot to
Speaker 4: live with her aunt. She wanted to get a job
Speaker 4: to send money back home. So tell us about August
Speaker 4: twenty ninth and what happens with Bessie Draper and who
Speaker 4: does she meet.
Speaker 5: Well, on August twenty ninth, Bessie Draper met a fella
Speaker 5: who was struggling to move a dresser in a wheelbarrow,
Speaker 5: and she helped him out and he followed her around,
Speaker 5: or he kind of took her around through uh through
Speaker 5: a lot of back alleys and in West Indianapolis, and
Speaker 5: the further they went, the more scared she got. And
Speaker 5: eventually he led her down into a dead end alley
Speaker 5: that had a stable, and she really got frightened then
Speaker 5: and took off running and and escaped him. But she
Speaker 5: knew where he lived because she'd helped him deliver this dresser.
Speaker 5: And so she went to the police and told them
Speaker 5: of what happened. And so with one of the police matrons,
Speaker 5: they arranged a little sting and that she went to
Speaker 5: the house and she was going to signal to the
Speaker 5: matron if the man who came out was Alfred Nap
Speaker 5: and then they would arrest him. And so that's what
Speaker 5: they did, and they arrested him there, and he did
Speaker 5: another prison term for assault there for attempted to assault
Speaker 5: with her.
Speaker 4: Now you talk about this, he's forty years old and
Speaker 4: he gets convicted and he's thrown in prison. He serves
Speaker 4: seven years. Most of his adult life was spent in
Speaker 4: prison for petty larcenies and assaults on women and girls.
Speaker 4: What happens when he gets out of prison Hannah.
Speaker 5: He was married to Hannah at the time. And the
Speaker 5: last prison sentence he did was for assaulting a teacher
Speaker 5: in Burnett Woods and Cincinnati. And the story goes that
Speaker 5: he was just had this wagon that he was making
Speaker 5: some deliveries and he just stopped and got out and
Speaker 5: started chasing this woman who was a school teacher, and
Speaker 5: he ended up going to the Ohio Penn Tentary for that,
Speaker 5: and Hannah, to her credit, God lover, she's stuck by him.
Speaker 5: And she was living again with Mamie and Ed King
Speaker 5: in Cumminsville when he was due to get out of prison.
Speaker 5: But the Kings didn't want Alfred to come and live
Speaker 5: with them, so Hannah moved back to Hamilton, Ohio, my
Speaker 5: hometown to live with her uncle Charlie, and she was
Speaker 5: setting up house there. She had two half sisters who
Speaker 5: lived there and so it was kind of her home.
Speaker 5: So she moved back in with Uncle Charlie. So when
Speaker 5: Alfred got out of prison from assaulting this teacher and
Speaker 5: they took a house on They lived with Charlie for
Speaker 5: a little while, and then they took the upper floor
Speaker 5: of a house on South Fourth Street in Hamilton, which
Speaker 5: happened to be next door to Hamilton Mayor Charles Bosh.
Speaker 5: Charlie Bosh, and Charlie Boss thought that he was kind
Speaker 5: of a sweet but odd fella. He noted later on
Speaker 5: that when Alfred was driving his coal truck, as he
Speaker 5: would come down the street, he would ring the bell or,
Speaker 5: you know, and if Hannah didn't come out to give
Speaker 5: him a little kiss, he would park his horse in
Speaker 5: front of the house and run in, and he'd be
Speaker 5: in there for ten or fifteen minutes, and then he'd
Speaker 5: come back out all turpy and happy. And so they
Speaker 5: were living seemingly a really good life, you know, for
Speaker 5: who they were and for the time they lived in
Speaker 5: there on south Forth Street.
Speaker 4: Pause for a moment for this commercial. He talked about
Speaker 4: everything seemed to be normal in this household with Hannah
Speaker 4: and Alfred Knapp and.
Speaker 1: Hello, it is Ryan, and we could all use an
Speaker 1: extra bright spot in our day, could we just to
Speaker 1: make up for things like sitting in traffic, doing the dishes,
Speaker 1: counting or steps, you know, all the mundane stuff. That
Speaker 1: is why I'm such a big fan of Chumba Casino.
Speaker 1: Chumpbuck Casino has all your favorite social casino style games
Speaker 1: you can play for free anytime anywhere with daily bonuses.
Speaker 1: That's you brighten your day, Lotte actually a lot, so
Speaker 1: sign up now at Chumbuck Casino dot com. That's Chumbuck
Speaker 1: Casino dot com.
Speaker 2: No prigs ness, every DAOI overby lost he terms conditions eighteen.
Speaker 6: Plus Judy was boring.
Speaker 3: Hello.
Speaker 6: Then Judy discovered chumbucasino dot com.
Speaker 5: It's my little escape.
Speaker 6: Now Judy's the life of the party. Oh baby mama
Speaker 6: is bringing home the bacon. WHOA Take it easy, Judy,
Speaker 6: jump the chumba life is for everybody. So go to
Speaker 6: chumpacasino dot com and play over one hundred casino style games.
Speaker 6: Join today and play for free for your chance to
Speaker 6: redeem some serious prices. Jump chumpacasino dot com.
Speaker 2: Nobrid's necessary boid. We're prohibited by eighteen plus terms and
Speaker 2: conditioned to plus se web see for details.
Speaker 4: He's got the mayor of this wash guy, I think,
Speaker 4: and he's not such a bad guy. What happens next
Speaker 4: with Alfred Knapp.
Speaker 5: Well, he's never really clear about why he did it,
Speaker 5: but one morning, just before Christmas, he says he woke
Speaker 5: up in the middle of the night and strangled Hannah
Speaker 5: in her sleep. Now, if we kind of go back
Speaker 5: to his childishness, his childlike nature, I think he or
Speaker 5: someone else referred to it as he did it with
Speaker 5: giving no more thought than a boy pulling the wings
Speaker 5: off of a fly to see what would happen. And
Speaker 5: you know, I don't know. He was never very clear
Speaker 5: about it, but that's what he did. He strangled her
Speaker 5: in her sleep, and then early that morning he went
Speaker 5: around town. He rented a spring wagon, you know, just
Speaker 5: like a flatbed wagon, and a horse. He went to
Speaker 5: a shoe store and got They kept calling her the
Speaker 5: shoe box, but I'm guessing it was a crate that
Speaker 5: they shipped boxes of shoes in, right, and took it
Speaker 5: back to their house on South fourth Street. And he
Speaker 5: got the box upstairs, but uh, and he put Hannah's
Speaker 5: body and some other things in it, and it was
Speaker 5: too heavy for him to get it downstairs. She was
Speaker 5: she was a petite girl, but still he had her
Speaker 5: all folded up in this box with some other stuff,
Speaker 5: and he couldn't get it down. So he even went
Speaker 5: so far as to hire a young man who was
Speaker 5: passing by, and gave him a nickel to help him
Speaker 5: carry this box downstairs. And so the young man did,
Speaker 5: and then they saw him driving off in the spring
Speaker 5: wagon toward the river. He said he was going to
Speaker 5: deliver some stuff to Sim's Corner, which was like a
Speaker 5: little village about four miles to Hamilton. He said he
Speaker 5: was going there, but he wasn't gone long enough to
Speaker 5: do that. And so when he came back and brought
Speaker 5: the horse and the buggy, the horse and the spring
Speaker 5: wagon back to the stable, they accused him of running
Speaker 5: the horse really hard, and he said, no, I did.
Speaker 5: I just you know, I just got there fast, you know.
Speaker 5: And so he came back. Now, then he went to
Speaker 5: visit the Kings in Cumminsville and he gets down there
Speaker 5: and they see him coming up the walk and he's gone.
Speaker 5: And Alfred goes to says to the Kings, well where's Hannah.
Speaker 5: And they said, well, well, Alfred, she's not here. And
Speaker 5: he thinks, well that's odd, or he says, well that's odd.
Speaker 5: I was going to meet her here. And so he
Speaker 5: stayed in town and celebrated Christmas with them, and there
Speaker 5: was a general presumption that Hannah had had enough and
Speaker 5: just left and didn't want wanting the Finder anymore. So
Speaker 5: that was kind of the presumption that they had. After Christmas,
Speaker 5: Alfred goes back to Hamilton and settles up his affairs there.
Speaker 5: He sells some of Hannah's clothes to pay off the rent,
Speaker 5: and then he just kind of disappears for a while
Speaker 5: with no sign of Hannah and the King's being very suspicious,
Speaker 5: especially ed He was very suspicious about what might have
Speaker 5: happened to Hannah.
Speaker 4: What does he? What does he tell? What does he
Speaker 4: tell her? In terms? What does he tell Edward to
Speaker 4: try to convince Edward that he's innocent? What did he?
Speaker 4: What did he? What was the indication that you said
Speaker 4: that Edward was suspicious? And so he does confront him
Speaker 4: and says to Nap, where where where's Hannah? Why isn't
Speaker 4: she you know, hasn't she been here? Why why isn't she here?
Speaker 4: And so he explains about a note? So what is
Speaker 4: this note that he explains? And how convinced is Edward
Speaker 4: of his innocence or his guilt after this?
Speaker 5: Well, he's not convinced. He's not convinced of his of that.
Speaker 5: I'm trying to find the note here in my book.
Speaker 5: I'm sorry, but everybody.
Speaker 4: You Righte that he played along with NAP's story and
Speaker 4: asked him to stay for supper, So he wanted to
Speaker 4: again question him in as much as he could. He
Speaker 4: was convinced that Nap was guilty, but he wanted to
Speaker 4: not I guess alert Nap to the idea that he
Speaker 4: was totally suspecting him of this murder.
Speaker 5: King King's father was also staying with them at the time,
Speaker 5: and so he put Alfred in and the father in
Speaker 5: law and in the same dad and and told his
Speaker 5: father in law to listen in case he talks in
Speaker 5: his sleep, see if he says anything about Hannah. And
Speaker 5: they said that he did not spend He was a
Speaker 5: very restless sleeper, but he never got anything concrete to
Speaker 5: tell him what had happened to Hannah. So so that
Speaker 5: was kind of a you know, didn't really go anywhere.
Speaker 4: For you write that Knapp calls Hannah's half sister, Linda
Speaker 4: Sterrett and asks her have you heard the latest, and
Speaker 4: told her that Hannah had disappeared. And he said that
Speaker 4: he got this information from a telegraph coming saying that
Speaker 4: Mammy was sick in Cincinnati and and Hannah had left
Speaker 4: to go there. Hence the idea that when he got
Speaker 4: to the Mammy and Edwards, is Hannah here. So he
Speaker 4: was at least consistent with that story in terms of
Speaker 4: trying to cover his tracks.
Speaker 5: Right, Yeah, but he made he made a fatal air though,
Speaker 5: and trying to convince people that Hannah had left him,
Speaker 5: and that was he went off to Indianapolis, where his
Speaker 5: parents lived, and without getting a divorce and with no
Speaker 5: body turning up, Alfred got married again. Yeah, and that
Speaker 5: kind of set off, you know, major major alarms in
Speaker 5: the King family, especially.
Speaker 4: Now as well you talked about this marriage. Who is
Speaker 4: this person that he marries and what does she know
Speaker 4: about his background?
Speaker 5: Well, he married a young lady by the name of
Speaker 5: Anime Gamble, and she was an acquaintance with his parents.
Speaker 5: They lived in the same block in Indianapolis. And she
Speaker 5: was also, uh, you know, very childish woman. She was
Speaker 5: very petite, which seemed to be Alfred's type, probably because
Speaker 5: he could overpower him. He wasn't a terribly big fellow himself.
Speaker 5: But he married this this young lady who just she
Speaker 5: just adored him. She she was gonna stick by him
Speaker 5: no matter what happened. So, uh, she married this young
Speaker 5: this young lady, and they moved into a basement apartment
Speaker 5: in Indianapolis that used to be a paint store, they said,
Speaker 5: and it was very dingy and dark. Uh. They lived
Speaker 5: there with with her foster father, who was a Civil
Speaker 5: War veteran, and they lived there and uh, and that's
Speaker 5: where they caught up with Alfred. How they caught up
Speaker 5: with him was ed King Was. He was so suspicious
Speaker 5: that he enlisted a friend of him Is who was
Speaker 5: a railroad detective. Ed was, I guess a ventilation guy
Speaker 5: for the railroad, And so he knew this detective. And
Speaker 5: it's really funny they talked. One of the papers told
Speaker 5: the story of him putting on this hideous disguise. You know,
Speaker 5: nobody in Hamilton knew him anyway, but he put on
Speaker 5: this wig and mustache. And I guess their method of
Speaker 5: investigating this report was to go to the various bars
Speaker 5: around town and ask around. And so they ended up
Speaker 5: getting quite drunk, and they went into a bar that
Speaker 5: was owned by a brother of a captain of detectives.
Speaker 5: And when the bar owner got wind of what they
Speaker 5: were there for what was going on, he sent for
Speaker 5: his brother. His name was Lenahan, Thomas Lenahan, the captain
Speaker 5: of police, and he heard their story and he understood
Speaker 5: his suspicions that something bad might have happen them to Hannah.
Speaker 5: But the only thing that they really had on him
Speaker 5: at this point was big of me, because he had
Speaker 5: not gotten a divorce from from from Hannah, and here
Speaker 5: he was married to anime gamble. And so Lenahan took
Speaker 5: the ten point thirty train from Hamilton to Indianapolis and
Speaker 5: he roused Alfred out of his bed at four o'clock
Speaker 5: in the morning with the help of Indianapolis police and
Speaker 5: they and they brought him back to Hamilton on the
Speaker 5: on the morning train.
Speaker 4: Now, in this questioning when they finally get him to
Speaker 4: question him, there are not just the only Lenihan an
Speaker 4: instrumental person. Is this Mayor Charles Bosch, isn't it?
Speaker 5: Yeah, Charles Boss was in on it. The uh, the
Speaker 5: chief of police, I think the sheriff was there. There's
Speaker 5: a really famous picture that they didn't reproduce in my book.
Speaker 5: I wish they had, but it's on my website. And
Speaker 5: so forth posed with these detectives, the safety director, the
Speaker 5: chief of police, the sheriff, Captain Lenahan, and Mayor bosh
Speaker 5: all gathered around Alfred while he's signing this confession. So yeah,
Speaker 5: there were there were a lot of people involved in that. Now,
Speaker 5: they brought him in for bigamy with the suspicion that
Speaker 5: he might have because they didn't want to mess with
Speaker 5: with trying to get an extradition or anything. And I
Speaker 5: guess he was simple minded enough that when they said
Speaker 5: we want to talk to you about Hannah, he got
Speaker 5: on the train and came back with him. Well, the
Speaker 5: newspapers got wind of this, and before they got back
Speaker 5: on the morning train from Indianapolis, the Hamilton Son, which
Speaker 5: was kind of the most tabloid of the three papers
Speaker 5: in Hamilton at the time, they had a big headline,
Speaker 5: you know, Nap arrested for murder and all this stuff.
Speaker 5: Arrested for wife murder. Startling affair brought to light, and
Speaker 5: this came out before the train from Indianapolis got to town.
Speaker 5: So there was a crowd of about three or four
Speaker 5: hundred people waiting for him at the station. And bear
Speaker 5: in mind that Alfred always had this fantasy of being
Speaker 5: in show business, and although he was just kind of
Speaker 5: a hand for the circuses he worked for, he told
Speaker 5: everybody that he was a trapees artist, and so he
Speaker 5: kind of had this idea of wanting this kind of
Speaker 5: fame and adulation. And so when he came into Hamilton
Speaker 5: on the train and all these people were there, you
Speaker 5: know he was for him, that made quite an impression
Speaker 5: on him. And so they took him into the police
Speaker 5: station and these five very high powered officials started started
Speaker 5: grilling and started giving him the sweat they called it,
Speaker 5: started giving him the sweat, and uh, and he was
Speaker 5: he was coy, you know, he wouldn't tell he wasn't
Speaker 5: telling them anything, but they would tell him something. And
Speaker 5: and so one of the policemen would leave the room
Speaker 5: and to go check it out. And then and that
Speaker 5: happened a few times, and it came down to it
Speaker 5: was just him and Charlie Bosh sitting in his office
Speaker 5: in Charlie's the Mayor's office together in Hamilton. The city
Speaker 5: building contained, you know, everything, It was just one building.
Speaker 5: So that's why the mayor and the chief of police
Speaker 5: and everybody was in the same building. And so, having
Speaker 5: known Alfred before from when he lived next door to him, Alfred,
Speaker 5: I know you've got something on your mind. And Alfred said, well,
Speaker 5: I can't tell you what it is, but I'll write
Speaker 5: it down for you. And so that the mayor gave
Speaker 5: him a pencil and a piece of paper and he
Speaker 5: wrote down a confession that said, not only did he
Speaker 5: kill Hannah Nap. Now the first day he just said
Speaker 5: that he had killed Hannah Nap and that he was
Speaker 5: very coy about it and kind of hinted that he
Speaker 5: had other things on his mind. And so after he
Speaker 5: made the confession, they took him out in a police
Speaker 5: buggy with all the press falling along, and took him
Speaker 5: down to the river. So he showed him where the
Speaker 5: bot where he put the box in the river. It
Speaker 5: was a fishing hole that everybody liked to go to.
Speaker 5: He took him down there, and he was being very
Speaker 5: coy the whole way there and all the way back.
Speaker 5: You know, it's like, I got something else on my mind,
Speaker 5: but I don't want to tell you about it. And
Speaker 5: so the next day they decided to put into the
Speaker 5: sweat again because they suspect that he had also killed
Speaker 5: his wife Jenny, even though it was a rule of
Speaker 5: suicide officially by the coroner. They had the inquest and everything,
Speaker 5: so they thought that maybe he'd killed his wife Jenny too,
Speaker 5: And so the next day they gave him the sweat
Speaker 5: and kind of the same thing happened all over again.
Speaker 5: They would somebody would leave the room to go check
Speaker 5: out something that Alfred was telling them and left him
Speaker 5: alone eventually with the mayor, and the mayor did the
Speaker 5: same thing. Charlie Alfred, I know that you got something
Speaker 5: on your mind. And Alfred said, well, I can't tell
Speaker 5: you that. I'll write it down, And so he gave
Speaker 5: him another pencil and piece of paper, and he wrote
Speaker 5: out the famous confession that not only did he kill Hannah,
Speaker 5: but he also killed his previous wife, Jenny, and he
Speaker 5: also killed two other three other young ladies, two or
Speaker 5: three other young ladies in Cincinnati and Indianapolis. And so
Speaker 5: Hamilton was about twenty thousand people then, so it wasn't
Speaker 5: a real big city. And my take on this is
Speaker 5: that they really didn't know what to do with me,
Speaker 5: you know. And so when the word came out that
Speaker 5: he had confessed to these these murders, that the press
Speaker 5: from Cincinnati and Indianapolis, and there was even some reporters
Speaker 5: from Chicago. I found some reports in the Chicago papers.
Speaker 5: They all descended on Hamilton, you know, like maybe one
Speaker 5: hundred newspaper guys or so. And they didn't know what
Speaker 5: to do with him, so they gave him. They gave
Speaker 5: the newspaper men pretty much full access to talk with
Speaker 5: Alfred and to get the stories of these murders that
Speaker 5: he says he committed.
Speaker 4: Right, let's use this as an opportunity to stop for
Speaker 4: a second talk about our sponsor, which is Ritual. We
Speaker 4: deserve to know what we're putting in our bodies and why.
Speaker 4: That's why Ritual's founder is on a mission to reinvent
Speaker 4: the vitamin industry. Cat Schneider and her team of scientists
Speaker 4: at Ritual or Making clinically tested a new normal. Ritual
Speaker 4: left out mystery additives, synthetic fillers, and shady extras that
Speaker 4: can be found in some traditional multivitamins. My wife Lisa
Speaker 4: decided to take Ritual after reading all about their specific
Speaker 4: ingredients and the advantages of those as compared to other multivitamins,
Speaker 4: and decided to take Ritual Essential for Women. She's incorporated
Speaker 4: for about six months now Ritual in her daily routine
Speaker 4: of exercise and healthy eating, and she continues to feel
Speaker 4: it really is making a difference in her health every day.
Speaker 4: Ritual's clinical study of Essential for Women showed an increase
Speaker 4: in vitamin D levels and Omega three DHA levels for
Speaker 4: obsessive label readers. Ritual uses vegan certified, non GMO, gluten free,
Speaker 4: and allergen free ingredients, and their sources are out there
Speaker 4: for the whole world to see, because they believe you
Speaker 4: deserve to know what you're putting in your body and
Speaker 4: why daily changes can lead to big results. So start
Speaker 4: small today. Ritual is offering my listeners ten percent off
Speaker 4: your first three months try it out, satisfaction guaranteed. Go
Speaker 4: to ritual dot com slash murder to start your ritual today.
Speaker 4: That's ten percent off during your first three months at
Speaker 4: ritual dot com slash murder. Now, we're talking about an
Speaker 4: incredible time in American history of media when the newspapers
Speaker 4: were the only game in town, and they were a
Speaker 4: huge game, to say the least. And you talk about
Speaker 4: the incredible it's amazing reading this the access that these journalists,
Speaker 4: these media people had and the kind of stories that
Speaker 4: they weaved in the headlines that they used in their newspapers.
Speaker 4: Tell us more about his dalliance with the media and
Speaker 4: the results in terms of head lines and newspaper articles.
Speaker 5: Right. Well, as I said, I don't think they knew
Speaker 5: what to do with them. And this was before we
Speaker 5: add hippo laws and all this other stuff, and so
Speaker 5: they just gave him access. Now, they one of my
Speaker 5: favorite scenes in the in the book, I think is
Speaker 5: they take the reporters to his jail cell, and they
Speaker 5: was they were going to let him talk to him
Speaker 5: through the bars, but there were so many of them
Speaker 5: that they had to retire to the Sheriff's dining room. Now,
Speaker 5: you know, back in those days, the sheriff typically, and
Speaker 5: this was everywhere, but especially in Hamilton, the sheriff had
Speaker 5: the house like right next door to the jail, and
Speaker 5: a lot of times they were attached to it. So
Speaker 5: they took him out of the jail cell and took
Speaker 5: him into the Sheriff's dining room. And some reports even
Speaker 5: said that Sheriff Bis Dwarf gave him a cigar. And
Speaker 5: so they painted this picture of him sitting in this
Speaker 5: dining room, kicked back with his feet up on the table,
Speaker 5: regaling these this cadre of reporters with these stories of
Speaker 5: murder and mayhem, as calmly and as was enthusiastically, as
Speaker 5: if as if he were talking about, you know, a
Speaker 5: sporting event or something of that sort. Uh. And so
Speaker 5: he just started weaving these tales about these young women
Speaker 5: that he had assaulted and murdered and uh and would
Speaker 5: do lengthy interviews with the Cincinnati in Chuir that because
Speaker 5: the two of the murders had taken place, and since
Speaker 5: well three of them had taken place in Cincinnati, so
Speaker 5: they were particularly interested because all these murders had been
Speaker 5: unsolved and here was Alfred Knapp, this crazy little guy
Speaker 5: in Hamilton, Ohio, saying that he killed all these women.
Speaker 5: So the headlines were, you know, all over Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Chicago,
Speaker 5: all over the Midwest. They were telling these stories, and
Speaker 5: it got to the point where they felt like he
Speaker 5: was kind of stretching the truth little bit. And in fact,
Speaker 5: they caught him at at one time after he'd been
Speaker 5: in there for a while, he started telling him about
Speaker 5: this time in Missouri when he was being chased by
Speaker 5: a posse and all this stuff, and one of the
Speaker 5: one of the reporters said, hey, wait a minute, wasn't
Speaker 5: that just in this magazine? And Alfred was, okay, well
Speaker 5: you caught me on that one. And but telling these
Speaker 5: stories just kind of made the headlines across the Midwest
Speaker 5: were just sensational. When I wrote the scene in the book,
Speaker 5: what I kind of took because some newspapers would highlight,
Speaker 5: you know, the things that were of interest to their readers,
Speaker 5: and other newspapers would highlight different things, so you kind
Speaker 5: of put them all together and got a really good
Speaker 5: scene of what had happened that afternoon in the in
Speaker 5: the sheriff's dining room there in Hamilton.
Speaker 4: When he first was speaking to to Krueger and the
Speaker 4: police chief and sheriff. He was talking about it seemed
Speaker 4: odd for the time, for nineteen oh four. It sounded
Speaker 4: like present day where he talked about if you can't.
Speaker 1: Find he is Ryan here and I have a question
Speaker 1: for you. What do you do when you win?
Speaker 5: Like?
Speaker 1: Are you a fist pumper, a woo, a hand clapper,
Speaker 1: a high fiver? I kind of like the high five.
Speaker 1: But if you want to hone in on those winning moves,
Speaker 1: check out Chumbuck Casino At chumbacasino dot com, choose some
Speaker 1: hundreds of social casino style games for your chance to
Speaker 1: redeem serious cash prizes. There are new game releases weekly,
Speaker 1: plus free daily bonuses, so don't wait start having the
Speaker 1: most fun ever at chumbacasino dot com.
Speaker 2: Noiberg's Necessary Day wherever I lost the terms conditions eighteen plus.
Speaker 4: Kind a body. I thought this was very fascinating. What
Speaker 4: did he have to say about the prospect of being
Speaker 4: convicted there was no finding of the body.
Speaker 5: He didn't think he would get russ He didn't think
Speaker 5: he would get convicted.
Speaker 4: Is that.
Speaker 5: I'm sorry. It's been five years since I wrote this book, so,
Speaker 5: uh well.
Speaker 4: He just thought that, he said. He said to them
Speaker 4: initially when they were questioning, he said, if you won't
Speaker 4: be able to convict unless you find that body, And
Speaker 4: I just again, I just thought that sounds like a
Speaker 4: modern day thing for a criminal to say, not something
Speaker 4: that was.
Speaker 5: The prosecutor was saying that too, though, that unless they
Speaker 5: got a body, he didn't know what they could do
Speaker 5: with it.
Speaker 4: Well, of course, right, And the prosecutor.
Speaker 5: Was a it was a very well respected man in Hamilton.
Speaker 5: He would his father, his brother that is, uh well,
Speaker 5: his father too. They they were newspaper men. They but
Speaker 5: his brother at the time was the the publisher of
Speaker 5: the Democratic newspaper in Hamilton and and warrant guard the
Speaker 5: uh was was the prosecutor on the cage. Yeah, and
Speaker 5: he also went on to become a judge later and
Speaker 5: he also became a congressman later on too. But yeah,
Speaker 5: it was his contention that unless they had a body,
Speaker 5: he didn't think that they would be able to convict
Speaker 5: him of this, partly because his stories were kind of outlandish,
Speaker 5: and so I guess. Fortunately a few days, a couple
Speaker 5: of weeks into his incarceration, the body of Hannah turned
Speaker 5: up in New Albany, Indiana, some one hundred and fifty
Speaker 5: or one hundred and sixty miles from Hamilton. Was found.
Speaker 5: There was a ferry there and as they were crossing
Speaker 5: the river they found her floating in the Ohio River.
Speaker 5: At this time she had flowed that far she was
Speaker 5: no longer in the box. They never did find the box,
Speaker 5: but they did turn up her body, and so then
Speaker 5: they had a case against Alfred Knapp for the murder
Speaker 5: of Hannah Napp.
Speaker 4: Something also very interesting there was a case of of
Speaker 4: two girls that were accosted and they had a man
Speaker 4: named Roth, Joe Roth I believe in custody. Yeah, And
Speaker 4: yet Nap had been questioned about this as well. But
Speaker 4: fortunately one of the girls that identified Wroth. So this
Speaker 4: is a very interesting, again side story, but very fascinating
Speaker 4: about the resemblance between Nap and Roth and how they
Speaker 4: became involved, even at the trial and then later near
Speaker 4: the end of the book or at the very end
Speaker 4: of the book. So let's talk about Joe Roth and
Speaker 4: these two girls, these two young girls that were accosted
Speaker 4: and Joe Roth was in custody when they now have
Speaker 4: in custody this strangler, Alfred Knapp.
Speaker 5: Right. Yeah, the two little girls, I think they were
Speaker 5: like four and seven years old or something like, very
Speaker 5: young little girls. And they had last been seen their
Speaker 5: father owned a butcher shop and they and they had
Speaker 5: seen them looking at a store window there and then
Speaker 5: they kind of disappeared until they heard the screens and
Speaker 5: the two girls came run. One of them was knocked
Speaker 5: unconscious and the other one got away. And uh, they
Speaker 5: brought in bloodhounds from Dayton to come down and and
Speaker 5: they ran around a part of town that was called
Speaker 5: Pex's Edition, which was a very poor part of Hamilton. Uh,
Speaker 5: it was a part of the city that was often
Speaker 5: flooded from the river. It was a low lying area
Speaker 5: often flooded, so you know, half half of the years
Speaker 5: they would lose their crop. But nevertheless, you know, those
Speaker 5: very poor part of town, they grew melons and corn
Speaker 5: down there. And the bloodhounds led them around and it
Speaker 5: kind of circuld as route around Pex's Edition and finally
Speaker 5: came upon the house of Joe Roth, and so they
Speaker 5: arrested him, and the older of the girls actually identified
Speaker 5: Roth as the man who accosted them, and so he
Speaker 5: was in jail at the time that they brought Nap
Speaker 5: in from Indianapolis. And they remarked at the time what
Speaker 5: a what a strange and curious resemblance the two had together.
Speaker 5: They were both, you know, smallish men with a swarthy complexion,
Speaker 5: and and apparently they looked a whole lot alike. And
Speaker 5: Alfred had been questioned about this because of his I
Speaker 5: guess because of his criminal record. But uh, they they
Speaker 5: he ended up testifying in the trial, and but they
Speaker 5: could never they could never actually pinted on Alfred. So
Speaker 5: they went ahead and prosecuted Joe Raw for the attempted
Speaker 5: deduction of these little girls.
Speaker 4: You take us right, sorry, you take us right into
Speaker 4: the courtroom with this case. And what's interesting is the
Speaker 4: one girl, I'm not sure it was Hattie or the
Speaker 4: other girl, but she's, like you say, six years old.
Speaker 4: She is forced at that trial to go and identify
Speaker 4: him by walking up to him and putting her hand
Speaker 4: on his shoulder. Was incredible And at the same time,
Speaker 4: you also have the moony where the media believes and
Speaker 4: maybe even the defense believes or the prosecution believes, that
Speaker 4: they'll be worthwhile testimony from Napp, but Napp doesn't give
Speaker 4: them anything conclusive to help Ross's case whatsoever. And that's
Speaker 4: what you're write. But I wanted to say is that
Speaker 4: his behavior though, however, if I thought from reading, was
Speaker 4: that because he had that demeanor at court, uncoord operative,
Speaker 4: took the fifth equivalent where he didn't want to answer
Speaker 4: any questions. In fact, because Roth was quickly determined to
Speaker 4: be not guilty anditted, I thought that in fact, Alfred's presence,
Speaker 4: Alfred NAP's presence at that trial actually helped Joe Roth inadvertently.
Speaker 5: Yeah, probably did. Yeah, it probably did. But you know,
Speaker 5: they couldn't actually pinned on him, like you said, he
Speaker 5: wasn't being very cooperative and so they just kind of
Speaker 5: let that, kind of let that go. Now.
Speaker 4: I wanted to mention too, just for the readers as well,
Speaker 4: is that what you provide is a lot of source
Speaker 4: material like letters that Alfred later writes correspondence the confession.
Speaker 4: But also what I thought was worth noting is the
Speaker 4: illustration of the murder in nineteen thirty four by the
Speaker 4: Evening Sun, and you provide a great, great reproduction of that.
Speaker 4: So I wanted to mention that that's parked in the
Speaker 4: book as well. This incredible the media, how they act
Speaker 4: in nineteen thirty four heart to believe. But anyway, I
Speaker 4: just wanted to mention that, Yeah.
Speaker 5: Well one of the one of the craziest things along
Speaker 5: that line is that the UH Cincinnati Inquire they published
Speaker 5: pictures of his hand so that yeah, So that so
Speaker 5: that Palmers could take a look at that, yeah, and
Speaker 5: determine whether he was guilty or not. So that's and
Speaker 5: I think that that goes along with how they were
Speaker 5: so desperate, you know, to outdo each other, you know,
Speaker 5: to one up each other, uh, and trying to cover
Speaker 5: this case. You know, they not only did they go
Speaker 5: into his family history in so much detail, but they
Speaker 5: would do crazy things like that, like printing his palm
Speaker 5: so that you could read his palm and tell and
Speaker 5: you know, the hands of a sprangler, I think was
Speaker 5: the headline. It was great.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you also have the the UH I guess you
Speaker 4: chronicle the phenomena basically of having Alfred Knapp depicted in
Speaker 4: the media the way he did as well. So, so
Speaker 4: in terms of what happens with this trial, tell our
Speaker 4: audience who he eventually is he retains an attorney, and
Speaker 4: who's representing him in this well.
Speaker 5: His attorney is a young fellow by the name of
Speaker 5: Thomas Darby. And again this is one of the subplots
Speaker 5: that I thought totally fascinating about it that Thomas Darby,
Speaker 5: it was a young, up and coming Cincinnati attorney and
Speaker 5: he worked so hard on this case that he almost
Speaker 5: literally worked himself to death. And in fact, when they
Speaker 5: delivered the verdict, he wasn't present because he was so sick.
Speaker 5: And he would later go on to become a Hamilton
Speaker 5: County prosecutor, so he was a This was like his
Speaker 5: his big foray into uh, you know, big law stuff.
Speaker 4: So, so tell us a little bit more about this
Speaker 4: trial and and what is uh and part of the
Speaker 4: before this trial, there's always the investigation into the claims
Speaker 4: that he's made in this confession. He's made various confessions
Speaker 4: or as spoken to the media several times and said
Speaker 4: certain things. Were there inconsistencies that were given in the
Speaker 4: confession as opposed to what he said to the media,
Speaker 4: and officially, what were the records to support what Napp
Speaker 4: had said concerning those four murders.
Speaker 5: Well, you know, frankly, there there wasn't a lot to
Speaker 5: actually connect him to these murders. Now one of them,
Speaker 5: you know, we talked about Jenny Napp and how it
Speaker 5: had already been ruled a suicide, but then he confessed
Speaker 5: that he, yeah, he killed her. But another one was
Speaker 5: the case of a young lady by the name of
Speaker 5: Mary Eckert in Cincinnati, and she was a dating girl
Speaker 5: who came to Cincinnati to get work. She had some
Speaker 5: connections there, but they weren't real strong ones. So she
Speaker 5: took a room in a boarding house next to the
Speaker 5: y m c. A. I think was on Eighth Street
Speaker 5: in Cincinnati, and was looking for work. And one morning
Speaker 5: a milkman was coming around, and I got I didn't
Speaker 5: know they did this, but apparently she just bought a
Speaker 5: ladle full of milk, and she didn't have a money,
Speaker 5: and so he just let her have it. But the
Speaker 5: milkman saw a kind of strange character hanging around the
Speaker 5: fence at the time, and he took note of it.
Speaker 5: But and so later that day when when she turned
Speaker 5: up dead, you know, this suspicion fell on this unknown
Speaker 5: stranger who was hanging around the gate. But the milkman
Speaker 5: went to the Butler County Jail to visit Nap and
Speaker 5: said that he wasn't the guy. And so this, this
Speaker 5: mystery stranger remained a mystery. And in the case of
Speaker 5: I believe it was Emma Littleman. She was found in
Speaker 5: a lumberyard. She was a younger girl, she was only
Speaker 5: like thirteen, and her father had seen her around the
Speaker 5: lumberyard that day, and he too had seen a stranger,
Speaker 5: and so he came in to look at her, and
Speaker 5: he too said, no, I don't know this man. So
Speaker 5: there wasn't a whole lot to connect him to all
Speaker 5: these other murders. So when he went to trial, it
Speaker 5: was it was purely for the murder of his third wife,
Speaker 5: Hannah Nap.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And he talked about they finally found somebody who
Speaker 4: had helped him carry the box downstairs, so they had
Speaker 4: that to confirm that he had certainly murdered Hannah, didn't
Speaker 4: They yes.
Speaker 5: For her, and it was pretty clear that, you know, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4: Also, I was going to say, is the phenomena that
Speaker 4: I was mentioning there that before I lost my train
Speaker 4: of thought was that it was interesting. It was the
Speaker 4: reasoning people thought that Alfred Knapp might not want to
Speaker 4: admit to the Matzer girls being accosted since Joe Roth
Speaker 4: has been arrested. I guess around that same time, what
Speaker 4: was the phenomena that we don't know of today but
Speaker 4: is interesting to hear that they said was the reason
Speaker 4: why Alfred Napp might not want to admit that he
Speaker 4: attacked those Matster girls.
Speaker 5: Can you give me a little bit more from that?
Speaker 4: It was lynching. It was the phenomena of lynching.
Speaker 5: Oh the lindsay okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, the people
Speaker 5: were outside the jail that people were very upset when
Speaker 5: when the Monster girls were were you know, not abducted,
Speaker 5: but assaulted. And yeah, he was afraid that that they
Speaker 5: were going to lynching for that. So that was one
Speaker 5: of the reasons why he didn't He didn't say anything
Speaker 5: about that, and and was kind of a contrarian at
Speaker 5: at at Roth's trial, even though they had him testify
Speaker 5: against it. And that was you know, that was a
Speaker 5: real concern back in those days. You know, I do
Speaker 5: a lot of stories now about about you know, vigilante
Speaker 5: justice and people people In fact, the same year that
Speaker 5: uh that uh. This took place in Oxford, Ohio, which
Speaker 5: is near Hamilton. There was a case where uh two
Speaker 5: guys from UH came in during a festival and were
Speaker 5: shooting the place up and they killed the town constable.
Speaker 5: And so the father of the constable led a crowd
Speaker 5: down to the jail in Oxford and with sledgehammers they
Speaker 5: busted them out and they were going to hang them
Speaker 5: in the public square, but a sheriff, deputy sheriff came
Speaker 5: along and saved them in the nick of time. So
Speaker 5: this was probably fresh on Alfred's mind too, you know
Speaker 5: the case of the Spivey brothers and how they were lynched,
Speaker 5: attempted to lynch them. So yeah, this was a very
Speaker 5: very real threat in those days.
Speaker 4: Now, what we haven't talked about is that, of course
Speaker 4: with this trial, the defense tries to pick or has
Speaker 4: to pick probable defense that might work, that may work
Speaker 4: with this and so I'll ask you what route did
Speaker 4: they go in terms of their defense. But also that
Speaker 4: we skipped the skip this fact was that when he
Speaker 4: went went to testify for the Joe Ronth's trial and
Speaker 4: in this trial as well, tell us what his demeanor was.
Speaker 4: But also, how was he dressed. I'll just say that
Speaker 4: he was well dressed. You said that, yeah, he was
Speaker 4: very well the most he was the best well dressed
Speaker 4: guy in the courtroom. And he was really uh and
Speaker 4: he was concerned about that. So he was important to
Speaker 4: him and he's in the media responded as well, you.
Speaker 5: Say, right right, yeah he was. He was seemed to
Speaker 5: be very well at ease, you know, in the in
Speaker 5: in the trial, their their defense was basically an insanity defense.
Speaker 5: As I mentioned earlier, Darby had him cut his hair
Speaker 5: very close so that they could uh see that the
Speaker 5: horseshoe shaped scar on his head from where he was
Speaker 5: kicked in the head by a horse, and they they
Speaker 5: came out with all these stories about you know him, uh,
Speaker 5: you know, costing the young ladies in Uh. I guess
Speaker 5: he got a chisel or something on a group of
Speaker 5: people at one point, and so they brought out all
Speaker 5: these little things that he had done through the years
Speaker 5: to try and get this insanity defense, but didn't work.
Speaker 4: It did come down to getting prestigious doctors at that time.
Speaker 4: You write that one of them was somebody in the courtroom.
Speaker 4: He was a prestigious and important author and he couldn't.
Speaker 4: He wasn't involved with the trial, but he was commenting
Speaker 4: and making his comments known to the media, so he
Speaker 4: was like he was reporting. You talk about that they
Speaker 4: brought everybody in his family, mother, sister, everybody to weave
Speaker 4: a story to concoct to say that he was normal.
Speaker 4: He was had a great disposition, and then he got
Speaker 4: kicked in the head at a young age, and then
Speaker 4: he fell off the porch, and then other things that
Speaker 4: they noticed that his nickname was looney. And then also
Speaker 4: Pepper threw this whole book is that he tells people
Speaker 4: stories like I'm a detective and shows him a crappy
Speaker 4: little badge and tells him he's an acrobat. So he's
Speaker 4: not taken seriously by some people with his stories. In
Speaker 4: this as well, you have the it seems a battle
Speaker 4: of the psychiatrists and those people trying to save Alfred
Speaker 4: Knapp's life. But as you say to no Avail, is.
Speaker 5: It no, no, it's it's to no Avail, he's he's
Speaker 5: pretty pretty readily convicted a first degree murder and they
Speaker 5: send him off to Columbus. He did momentarily get a retrial,
Speaker 5: but then that decision was overturned, so the retrial never happened.
Speaker 5: So he did come back to Hamilton at one point,
Speaker 5: but he felt like he had a he had a
Speaker 5: way that he was going to beat the electric chair.
Speaker 5: He told one reporter that that if he held his
Speaker 5: arms and just the right man her, that the electricity
Speaker 5: would just roll right through him and wouldn't kill him.
Speaker 5: So he was gonna he was gonna beat it that way.
Speaker 4: Right all along the media, he cooperated with the media.
Speaker 4: What was his disposition with the media. Was he brave
Speaker 4: or fearful? Oh?
Speaker 5: He wasn't. He was loving the attention. I think that's
Speaker 5: why he kept coming up with these these great stories,
Speaker 5: you know. And and he had a pretty good memory
Speaker 5: because he got most of the dates and a lot
Speaker 5: of the details right on all these murders that he
Speaker 5: said he committed, and so so he had that going
Speaker 5: for him. But but everything was so outlandish, and they
Speaker 5: tied the insanity defense, and they had the family pitted
Speaker 5: against each other, you know, Mayi, Mamie King and her
Speaker 5: husband Ed were the ones who you know, got the
Speaker 5: ball in motion too to to have him arrested for
Speaker 5: forgetting read of Hannah. But yet he had another sister, Sadie,
Speaker 5: who was very much his champion, and she went out
Speaker 5: of her way to try and you know, tell these
Speaker 5: stories about him getting hit in the head and about
Speaker 5: the strange things he did to try and get him
Speaker 5: that insanity defense. And she was quite a striking character,
Speaker 5: and I spent quite a bit of time in the book,
Speaker 5: I think, describing her appearances. She first comes into the
Speaker 5: story when he's having his preliminary hearing, and the newspapers
Speaker 5: were just taken aback by this. She looked lik him,
Speaker 5: but she was beautiful, you know. But and she was
Speaker 5: very elegant and just dressed to the nines, and she
Speaker 5: was she was his champion. She really went to bat
Speaker 5: for him, and then when they gave him the death penalty,
Speaker 5: she tried really hard to She wanted to be there
Speaker 5: for him, she wanted to be in the room, and
Speaker 5: eventually they just they just wouldn't let her do that.
Speaker 4: Let's we're going to pause for a moment for these commercials.
Speaker 4: You talked about Sadie and her unwavering it seemed support.
Speaker 4: And we'll talk more about Sadie because she is such
Speaker 4: an important character in his story. But also Sadie blamed
Speaker 4: her sister, Mamie and Edward right from the very beginning
Speaker 4: for turning him in. What was her what was her sense?
Speaker 4: Why why would she attack her sister for just doing
Speaker 4: something that was morally right? What was her idea about that?
Speaker 5: But it was I think it was mostly just her
Speaker 5: loyalty to Alfred. She knew that he was, you know,
Speaker 5: a simple minded fella, and that if he did kill Hannah,
Speaker 5: he didn't mean to, and if he did these other things,
Speaker 5: he didn't mean to. You know, that that's just his
Speaker 5: nature and that he should be given some latitude for that,
Speaker 5: you know, And so she she tried really hard to
Speaker 5: to kind of smooth things over for him, very little, Avail.
Speaker 4: You're right too. It's interesting is the the trial had
Speaker 4: huge crowds. Interest in the summation especially had overflowing crowds.
Speaker 4: Both the attorneys, the defense uh Darby and the prosecutor
Speaker 4: both did masterful, as you write, masterful summations and closing arguments.
Speaker 4: Tell us a little bit about just those closing arrogants
Speaker 4: what basically they had to say on behalf of and
Speaker 4: against Alfred knapp.
Speaker 5: Well guard said that that that they shouldn't be swayed
Speaker 5: by cinniment to save him from the electric chair. You know,
Speaker 5: he's his his take was that almighty demands that he'd
Speaker 5: be put out of the way, and that the electric chair,
Speaker 5: which was rather new at the time, was a humane
Speaker 5: way of doing it. And Thomas Darby is as we mentioned,
Speaker 5: he he literally worked himself sick and as he was
Speaker 5: given his final plea in front of the judge and
Speaker 5: the jury, he pretty much collapsed and and Warren Guard,
Speaker 5: the prosecutor, kind of caught him and you know and
Speaker 5: helped him to the judge's chamber where he could recover.
Speaker 5: And so that was just, you know, one of the
Speaker 5: many dramatic moments in the trial. There was also a
Speaker 5: dramatic reconciliation between the two sisters outside the courtroom, so
Speaker 5: there was a lot of drama in there too. It
Speaker 5: was you know, and so the crowds, yeah, they were thick.
Speaker 5: People were hanging from the windows and all that crazy
Speaker 5: stuff that they that they were doing back in the
Speaker 5: day to try and get into the courtroom. And it
Speaker 5: was very that summer too, so it was a kind
Speaker 5: of a trying time for everybody.
Speaker 4: Let's we haven't mentioned which is important too, And another
Speaker 4: side part of this story. Very important is his fourth wife, Anime. Initially,
Speaker 4: What was her, what was she like with the media,
Speaker 4: what she had to say to the media initially, and
Speaker 4: then as this trial was going on, where was Anime?
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, I think she's one of my favorite. She's
Speaker 5: another one of my there's so many great characters in
Speaker 5: this book. As we talked earlier, she was kind of
Speaker 5: a simple minded girl. And the first story where we
Speaker 5: get introduced to her, an Indianapolis newspaperman goes to their
Speaker 5: little dingy apartment to ask her if she had ever
Speaker 5: woken up in the middle of the night with Alfred
Speaker 5: Knapp's hands around her throat. That was a big question
Speaker 5: for and she was she was just infuriated with it,
Speaker 5: you know. She basically kicked him out, you know. And
Speaker 5: and they described her her shrill voice rising out of
Speaker 5: the little basement apartment and and going out into the street,
Speaker 5: and her her decrepit old uh foster father, Uh, the
Speaker 5: Civil War veteran. They were living in this little dingy
Speaker 5: apartment on his pension, and uh, and and how he
Speaker 5: how much he loved her, and and they were they
Speaker 5: both loved Alfred, and she she even went to Hamilton
Speaker 5: at one point, and and there was a very big
Speaker 5: show of that she took tooking some clothes and a
Speaker 5: cock a cock, and they they, uh, they were afraid
Speaker 5: that that she was going to try slipping in a
Speaker 5: weapon or a poison or something, so they kind of
Speaker 5: held back on some of the stuff.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 5: But she made quite a splash in Hamilton too, and
Speaker 5: she pretty much uh stood beside him as much as
Speaker 5: she could. But she didn't not come to the trial,
Speaker 5: and she kind of disappeared a little bit. I think
Speaker 5: she got remarried later and but she died very young.
Speaker 5: But yes, she's quite a character. In fact, one of
Speaker 5: my presentations that I do with at the libraries and
Speaker 5: stuff is I take these the sections where we talk
Speaker 5: about anime gamble nap and kind of make a story
Speaker 5: out of them just by it by itself. You know.
Speaker 5: It's it's very entertaining.
Speaker 4: M h. You say that defense attorney Darby and this
Speaker 4: is unusual. He cried when the verdict was read, didn't
Speaker 4: he Yeah?
Speaker 5: Yeah, well you know again what they called it brain congestion.
Speaker 5: I really don't know what that means. But he was sick,
Speaker 5: and so yeah, he was he was very upset. He
Speaker 5: took it very personally. I think that's what made him
Speaker 5: a great lawyer and what he went on to to
Speaker 5: do good things that that he really took this case
Speaker 5: to heart and he and he worked his butt off
Speaker 5: for Alfred Nap.
Speaker 4: Interesting rate too, that eighty women brought flowers to jail
Speaker 4: for the strangler.
Speaker 5: Yeah, he was popular with the ladies, which kind of
Speaker 5: you know, I mean, yeah, serial killers are very popular
Speaker 5: with people. And that's why I caught him the first
Speaker 5: celebrity serial killer because you know, up to that point,
Speaker 5: there really wasn't you know, such a thing, you know,
Speaker 5: the term as serial killer. Now this is after HH
Speaker 5: Holmes and and and uh uh of course Jack the
Speaker 5: Ripper and and some other some other things. But but
Speaker 5: Alfred Knapp I think was the first one who really
Speaker 5: caught uh the public eye, you know, and got this
Speaker 5: adulation and adoration, uh, especially from from the women, you know, uh,
Speaker 5: from the women in town. And and they would come out,
Speaker 5: you know, dressed to the nines to come to see
Speaker 5: the trial, and and uh they would just swoon if
Speaker 5: he looked in their direction, and and those kinds of things.
Speaker 5: And yeah, they brought him flowers and and so he
Speaker 5: you know, he really made quite an impression on people,
Speaker 5: in spite of him being a simple you know, and
Speaker 5: and to my mind, a rather stupid fella. Apparently he
Speaker 5: had a dynamic, a dynamy, a charisma about him that
Speaker 5: that really captured people's attention and made people want to
Speaker 5: talk to him, whether it be the reporters or the women.
Speaker 5: You know, they they were they were kind of taken
Speaker 5: with Alfred, you know, they were kind of in love
Speaker 5: with him. And uh, yeah, I guess he's not a
Speaker 5: bad looking fella. I don't know. I look at his
Speaker 5: picture and he looks very sad to me.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you write that the reporters finally tracked down Anna
Speaker 4: Gamble and at her new house. And meanwhile, with the reporters,
Speaker 4: there was ten women were there and they were taunting
Speaker 4: Anna and so, and she vowed and she was real defiant.
Speaker 4: Right from the very first time she speaks to the media.
Speaker 4: I thought, geez, wow, feisty. And she vowed to go
Speaker 4: see her husband.
Speaker 5: But she said she would go to Hamilton for the trial,
Speaker 5: even if she had to walk. Of course she didn't.
Speaker 4: But yeah, now he heads off to Columbus, Ohio, and
Speaker 4: so right away they don't fool around that he's the
Speaker 4: guy at the county jail. The warden says, we've had
Speaker 4: enough of this circus for six months, and so he
Speaker 4: shifts him off to Columbus, Ohio State penitent Ohio State Penitentiary.
Speaker 4: He's still talking to reporters there, isn't he what's his
Speaker 4: demeanor by the time he gets there.
Speaker 5: Well, he's still you know, he's still the same old,
Speaker 5: same old jolly Alfred. You know, he he doesn't seem
Speaker 5: to get upset or depressed about his situation. And in fact, uh,
Speaker 5: somebody gave him a I guess an accordion, and so
Speaker 5: he was playing the accordion while he was waiting on
Speaker 5: death row.
Speaker 4: Yeah, crazy.
Speaker 5: I think the song was There's a Hot Time in
Speaker 5: the Old Town tonight was the song that he played
Speaker 5: over and over again.
Speaker 4: Well you you said too that the inmates, the fellow inmates,
Speaker 4: the prisoners were horrified by his lack of remorse and
Speaker 4: the jokes he did about his crimes and his upcoming execution.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, he he didn't seem to have a bit
Speaker 5: of conscience about it at all. You know, he never never,
Speaker 5: never really showed any remorse.
Speaker 4: Something that might have upset him greatly. Was happened in
Speaker 4: September and he finally heard from his fourth wife, who
Speaker 4: he called Annie or pardon me Anna, and anime what
Speaker 4: did she say to him? Essentially in that when she
Speaker 4: finally did get to speak.
Speaker 5: To him, she was not she was not happy. I
Speaker 5: think she finally came around to realize that that, you know,
Speaker 5: he had done some some bad things. And uh. The
Speaker 5: letter she wrote was was rife with misspellings. But she
Speaker 5: said that she uh, she had received his letters and
Speaker 5: and was glad to hear from him. But but but
Speaker 5: she was sorry that the way that he talked to her,
Speaker 5: and she she expressed shame of herself and kind of
Speaker 5: took the blame herself for for his being unhappy to
Speaker 5: have to you know, to do the things that he did.
Speaker 5: And he he uh, she wasn't going to get a
Speaker 5: divorce and uh, and she encouraged him to cheer up
Speaker 5: and uh and uh. But she never did come to
Speaker 5: see him in the in the jail except for that
Speaker 5: one time in Hamilton. Never came to see him in Columbus,
Speaker 5: and and did not attend his his execution.
Speaker 4: Now when he said a new execution date finally is
Speaker 4: Alfred Knapp. WA's his demeanor now and it looks like
Speaker 4: there's no more there's nothing left in terms of appeals
Speaker 4: and he's going to die in the electric chair. What's
Speaker 4: his demeanor then.
Speaker 5: Well, he does show a little bit of remorse for
Speaker 5: something and he wants uh. He specifically asked Mayor Charlie
Speaker 5: Boss to come to the execution and he gave him
Speaker 5: a note that he finally confessed to the tempted abduction
Speaker 5: or the assault on the on the Monster girls and
Speaker 5: and finally cleared Joe Roth of the suspicion of that.
Speaker 5: So so he finally he did clear that that that
Speaker 5: one up. I think that's what you're getting at, right, Yeah, well.
Speaker 4: He he also hinted that there was less or more
Speaker 4: to his confessions and still didn't believe he was going
Speaker 4: to get the electric chair. He thought that the governor
Speaker 4: was still going to make sure that he didn't he
Speaker 4: wasn't killed. But all that was left and this is
Speaker 4: where Sadie comes in again. Sadie is still trying as
Speaker 4: hard as she can to save her brother's life and
Speaker 4: there was only one more option, and that's the State
Speaker 4: Board of Pardons. They can send they can commute the
Speaker 4: sentence to life, and there's no US Supreme Court federal issues.
Speaker 4: His attorneys agree there's nothing to appeal in terms of
Speaker 4: there's no issues there to appeal. So this is his
Speaker 4: only chance as a state board of pardons and they're
Speaker 4: going to decide fairly quickly.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Well, they decided that they would go through at
Speaker 5: the execution. They even got Charlie Goddard, Hannah's uncle who
Speaker 5: raised her. They even got him to talk to the
Speaker 5: Board of Pardons, but nothing came of that, and so
Speaker 5: they finally set a final execution date in August of
Speaker 5: that year.
Speaker 4: Sadie even approached the former jurors to try to ask
Speaker 4: them for if they would help, and they declined, didn't
Speaker 4: they right?
Speaker 5: Yeah, she she really did. She really worked. She really
Speaker 5: went above and beyond to try and get Alfred out
Speaker 5: of this this pickle that he found himself in, but
Speaker 5: to no avail, to no avail.
Speaker 4: Now it's four days before his execution. What does he
Speaker 4: what does he try to do with another inmate while
Speaker 4: he sleeps August fifteenth.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they accused him of making an attack on another
Speaker 5: prisoner that again he in the in the middle of
Speaker 5: the night comes at him in his sleep trangling, and
Speaker 5: so they're kind of making a plea that you know,
Speaker 5: he wasn't you know, in charge of his faculties. This
Speaker 5: was a part of his insanity again that he would
Speaker 5: attack a prisoner and pretty much the same manner he
Speaker 5: attacked his wife.
Speaker 4: And and he said too when he was confronted with
Speaker 4: the idea that he choked this guy said, oh, I
Speaker 4: never touched the guy. So again, not knowing what he
Speaker 4: was doing was sort of his last ditch effort to
Speaker 4: prove that he could strangle someone in the middle of
Speaker 4: the night. That did come up in the court trial
Speaker 4: as well. That's somehow that he didn't know what he
Speaker 4: was doing, and someone testified to that that they woke
Speaker 4: up and it wasn't him and his eyes changed, so
Speaker 4: they they attempted to do that that he was some
Speaker 4: automan and didn't wasn't aware of his his behavior, right,
Speaker 4: But you know, as.
Speaker 5: It turns out, there was another case in Hamilton about
Speaker 5: the same time of a fellow who had slid his
Speaker 5: wife's throat in the middle of the night, and he
Speaker 5: had the sleepwalker defense, you know, which is what Altitible's
Speaker 5: right is. But I think, uh, but I think the
Speaker 5: other guy kind of spoiled that for him, so that
Speaker 5: didn't quite fly. You know, that he was sleepwalking and
Speaker 5: not in control of himself. So yeah, that's that came
Speaker 5: up again.
Speaker 4: It's fascinating to when you're reading you forget the times,
Speaker 4: you know, when you read about the media's behavior. It's
Speaker 4: been dispelled people thinking that the media are now so sensationalistic. No,
Speaker 4: it's not new. But also just the idea that, yeah,
Speaker 4: just just that that idea that he could that the
Speaker 4: same things would would would be prevalent in today's society,
Speaker 4: and that being that in nineteen oh four they had
Speaker 4: the same kinds of ideas for novel defenses like sleepwalking defense.
Speaker 4: You would think that that would have been something in
Speaker 4: the seventies, eighties, nineties, No, nineteen oh four.
Speaker 5: Yeah, no, Now, you know one of the things that
Speaker 5: stark You know, we talk about the twenty four hour
Speaker 5: news cycle here, but I think you know how how
Speaker 5: I begin the book with him coming off of the
Speaker 5: train and meeting that that crowd at the Hamilton station,
Speaker 5: because you know, it had only been you know, his
Speaker 5: brother King and the detective. It was just the day
Speaker 5: before that they were in town, and enough people got
Speaker 5: wind of it then that they had it out by
Speaker 5: the next morning, and all that crowd showed up. And
Speaker 5: that's kind of what you know. I think inspired Alfred
Speaker 5: to confess to all these murders was just the celebrity,
Speaker 5: the instant, the instant notoriety that he got and people
Speaker 5: were taken with him, and he I think he loved that.
Speaker 5: I think he just enjoyed the attention. That he would
Speaker 5: kick back and tell him these stories, and he had
Speaker 5: a good memory for him and apparently it was a
Speaker 5: really good storyteller.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but it's always what is the actual truth? And
Speaker 4: so near the end of the book, at the very
Speaker 4: end of the book, his sister Sadie comes to visit
Speaker 4: and she he says, tell me the truth, Alfred, was
Speaker 4: your confession true? And then I thought this was incredibly poetic.
Speaker 4: And in the shadow of the gallows, will you tell
Speaker 4: me the truth? And what does he say in terms
Speaker 4: of was it truth?
Speaker 5: He tells her that the only murder that he committed
Speaker 5: was that of Hannah.
Speaker 4: And what does she say? What? She almost she almost
Speaker 4: collapses when she hears that. When he says, I am
Speaker 4: only guilty of Hannah.
Speaker 5: Right, Yeah, he was still thinking that he wasn't going
Speaker 5: to go to the chair though, But yeah, she showed
Speaker 5: up and and and she was I think she was
Speaker 5: quite relieved actually that he didn't do all those things.
Speaker 5: But even as if going Hannah wasn't bad enough, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, but she had such she had such faith
Speaker 4: in him that if he did do it, he was insane.
Speaker 4: She just didn't want to believe that he was capable
Speaker 4: of this. There is you call it. One last confession
Speaker 4: person named Jabi Simms regarding Joe Roth. They discussed Joe
Speaker 4: Roth and the guilt of Joe Roth. What did Alfred
Speaker 4: Knapp say about that and what he did he offer
Speaker 4: to do?
Speaker 5: Well? He confessed that he said that in his note
Speaker 5: that he wrote to Boss. He wrote it to Boss,
Speaker 5: but Boss never never showed up, so he gave it
Speaker 5: to mister Simms, and he said that Joe Roth is
Speaker 5: innocent of the attack on the two Motster girls. He says,
Speaker 5: I'd done that myself, but there was no intention of
Speaker 5: committing rape on them. I'm doing this to clear Joe
Speaker 5: Roth's name, as I assaulted children myself. It was the
Speaker 5: gist of his note.
Speaker 4: There, right, incredible. That's the day before so that Bosh
Speaker 4: mayor Bosh shows up at the execution August nineteenth, nineteen
Speaker 4: oh four, as you write, tell us just a little
Speaker 4: bit about I guess how well that execution went off.
Speaker 5: Well, the papers called it the most successful in the
Speaker 5: history of electrocutions. They it was the warden. It was
Speaker 5: his last execution there at the penitentiary, and there were
Speaker 5: physicians who knew him, who he had invited to be
Speaker 5: those that declared him dead. You know, they gave him
Speaker 5: the full jolt and he I don't know if he
Speaker 5: tried to hold his body in that peculiar way to
Speaker 5: let the electricity roll off of him or not. But
Speaker 5: but but it didn't work. It didn't work. And uh,
Speaker 5: you know, of course they didn't let Sadie in, but
Speaker 5: she was in Columbus, and uh she helped take care
Speaker 5: of the body. And uh, actually it was quite a
Speaker 5: quite a big funeral. It said that three thousand people
Speaker 5: showed up for his services. But but but then when
Speaker 5: they went to the funeral, it was, uh, it was
Speaker 5: just Sadie and uh, I think it says one other
Speaker 5: unnamed companion and uh so the family, you know, Uh,
Speaker 5: glad to say that the family reconciled. Mayor Bosh returned
Speaker 5: to Hamilton and and shared the confession with the monsters
Speaker 5: about the monster girls. And uh he he told him
Speaker 5: that he thought it was true. And uh so Alfred's
Speaker 5: kind of career, as you know, the greatest greatest criminals
Speaker 5: of the current era was over. And uh and they
Speaker 5: buried him and they're in Columbus, in the prison jail,
Speaker 5: in the prison graveyard.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you had one thing as well, just people had
Speaker 4: contended that Animee and Alfred Knapp had conceived a child.
Speaker 5: There were rumors of that. Yeah, there were rumors of that,
Speaker 5: but apparently it wasn't true. I mean, you know, things
Speaker 5: go that they The Indianapolis News reported that she had
Speaker 5: to give up the child to the to the Children's
Speaker 5: Guardians because the board being of the opinion that she
Speaker 5: wasn't a fit person to care for the child. But
Speaker 5: I think when you sit down and look at you know,
Speaker 5: when the child is born, he would have been safely
Speaker 5: ensconced in the Hamilton jail time the baby would have
Speaker 5: to have been conceived, so it was not possible for
Speaker 5: him to have to have fathered a child. So she
Speaker 5: did remarry later on, but she died became a widow again,
Speaker 5: and actually she married another time and then she died
Speaker 5: while she was in her thirties.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I want to thank you so much for coming
Speaker 4: on and talking about the first celebrity serial killer in
Speaker 4: Southwest Ohio, Confessions of the Strangler, Alfred Knapp. Thank you,
Speaker 4: Richard O. Jones. Is there a website that people might
Speaker 4: take a look at this book or tell us about
Speaker 4: how they might contact you or find out more about
Speaker 4: your work?
Speaker 5: Okay, Well, I also do a podcast myself. It's called
Speaker 5: True Crime Historian, and basically what I do is I
Speaker 5: pick cases. You know, I think the sweet spot is
Speaker 5: from about eighteen seventy to about nineteen thirty because as
Speaker 5: I was researching these the story and others, I really
Speaker 5: fell in love with the way that they reported on
Speaker 5: things back then. You know, they would they would write
Speaker 5: in ways that I always wanted to when I was
Speaker 5: a reporter but could never get away with. That is
Speaker 5: being very descriptive and being very narrative in their approach
Speaker 5: in their writing. And today it's all you know, it's
Speaker 5: the inverted pyramid, and you know, chunks of facts and
Speaker 5: not so much storytelling. So I fell in love with
Speaker 5: all of that, and so I started doing a podcast
Speaker 5: called True Crime Historian. When I go through the old
Speaker 5: newspapers and put pull out sections of the case, you know,
Speaker 5: when they find the body, and when they make the arrest,
Speaker 5: and when they interview the girl next door, and you know,
Speaker 5: all these other things, and pull together a sixty to
Speaker 5: ninety minute narrative that would that reads almost like a
Speaker 5: short story most of the time, when when I'm really
Speaker 5: good at when I'm really successful with it, it'll read
Speaker 5: like a short story. But it's based on all this
Speaker 5: wonderful newspaper reporting that they did back then. And so
Speaker 5: I do have a website, true Crime Hisstorian dot com,
Speaker 5: or you can find a podcast on you know, whatever
Speaker 5: podcast player you listen to, and and so I have
Speaker 5: other tales of murder and mayhem through the ages. It's
Speaker 5: kind of a wonderful thing to do. I really love
Speaker 5: enjoy doing that, And so I do a story every week,
Speaker 5: a new story every week.
Speaker 4: That sounds fantastic, and I'm sure with people the listeners
Speaker 4: will tune in as I will as well. Thank you
Speaker 4: so much. The first celebrity serial killer in Southwest Ohio
Speaker 4: Confessions of the Strangler, Alfred Napp, Richard O. Jones, thank
Speaker 4: you so much for this. It's been an absolute pleasure.
Speaker 4: You have a great evening.
Speaker 5: Thanks for having me Dan, It's great to be on
Speaker 5: your show, and I look forward to chatting with you again,
Speaker 5: maybe sometime about some of my other books.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, good night, good night,