Chapter V: A Murder Mystery

One day I entered the _Tribune_ office just as a tip came in of a tragedy in the little village of Winnetka, in the northern suburbs. Henry Lloyd, an editorial writer, lived there, and his wife had telephoned that old Mr. Willson and his invalid wife had been found horribly murdered in their home. The city editor directed me to go after the story and I was the first one from the city to reach the scene of the crime.

I found a crowd of excited villagers gathered at the home of the murdered couple, but not one among them could tell much more than that Mr. Willson was president of Winnetka, and its richest citizen and that Mrs. Willson was so eccentric that servants would not remain with them. For years they had lived alone, Mr. Willson caring for his crazed wife and doing the housework. He was rated a millionaire and had the reputation among his neighbors of being stingy, and a hard man in business dealings. The murder was a mystery. No clues had been discovered; no one was suspected.

Neal McKeague, who kept a butcher shop nearby, had been the last to see the old man alive. He had told how Mr. Willson came into his shop the night before and selected a larger steak than customary because he was expecting company from Chicago. I inquired for the butcher and was told that he had taken an early train to the city, leaving immediately after the tragedy was discovered. He wouldn’t be back until night. His shop was closed.

The Willson homestead was an attractive place, occupying an entire block, the large, old-fashioned house standing in the middle, almost concealed from the street by the great elm trees with which it was surrounded. The village constable let me into the house through a window. On the floor of the living-room was the body of the murdered millionaire, a bullet wound in his breast. He had been shot through the heart. There were signs of a violent struggle. The old man had evidently made a hard fight for his life. Furniture was overturned and near the body was an empty metal box, in which money and valuable papers had probably been kept. Some of the papers, deeds and mortgages among them, were scattered about the room, tossed hurriedly aside by the murderer while searching for whatever he was after. There was no money. If there had been it had been taken.

The constable showed me a vest button he found on the floor of the living-room. There were broken threads in the eye to which bits of shoddy were clinging. We compared it with the buttons of Mr. Willson’s vest and found it distinctly different. Evidently it had been wrenched from the vest of the murderer during the struggle. I cautioned the constable to take good care of the button, as it might prove important in identifying the murderer. It was the only clue.

When the constable led me to the floor above I was confronted with the most gruesome sight I ever beheld. On a bed was the brutally mutilated body of old Mrs. Willson the face horribly crushed. Everything near it was bespattered with blood. What struck me as peculiar was that she had not been shot to death, like her husband. There was no sign of a bullet wound. The implements with which she was slain were on the floor. She had first been beaten with a pair of heavy tongs the murderer had snatched from the fireplace, and when they had come apart he had used the saber of her dead soldier son that had hung in a scabbard on the wall. The scabbard was dented by the savage blows that had been dealt on the poor woman’s head.

Assuming that both Mr. Willson and Mrs. Willson had been killed by the same person, why wasn’t the revolver used for both murders?

What prompted the murderer to discard the easier weapon after shooting his first victim?

Why was Mrs. Willson so cruelly butchered?

These were the confusing thoughts that raced through my brain as I gazed on the sickening tragedy. Descending the staircase, I noticed a blood smear on the wallpaper, the entire length of the stairs, as if made by a bloody raincoat. It had rained all of the night before.

We went into the kitchen to look for indications of company having been there for supper, but the dishes from the evening meal had been washed and put away. Everything was in order. We looked in the refrigerator and searched the garbage can for traces of the steak the village butcher said had been bought in anticipation of visitors coming to supper from Chicago. There was not a scrap of meat to be found. If company had come from Chicago, they couldn’t have remained long, else how could the dishes have been put away and no remaining signs of the evening meal be apparent, between their departure and the coming of the murderer. Surely, if the visitors from Chicago had committed the crime, they wouldn’t have remained to clear away the supper table and wash and put away the dishes and silverware. The more I thought about this the more desirous I became for the butcher to return from the city and tell me what he could.

The crime had been discovered by a school-teacher, the only person in the village who was privileged to come to the Willson home. The constable summoned her from the crowd to tell me her story. It wasn’t much. Mr. Willson had sent her a note the previous evening, asking her to come in the morning and look after his wife, as he had to go into the city on business. He would go by an early train, but she would find the key to the front door under the mat. When she got to the house she was surprised to find that the blinds had not been opened. The key was not under the mat. As all of the doors were locked, she lifted a window sash and crawled into the living-room. Mr. Willson lay dead on the floor. There was a pool of blood near the body and the overturned furniture and scattered papers told of a tragedy. She went no farther and hurried from the house.

The first person she met as she ran excitedly up the street was butcher McKeague. She told him what she had discovered, but he directed her to tell others as he was on his way to the depot to catch a train for Chicago.

She hurried on and spread the news as she went. This was about all she could tell me. The only relative she ever heard of was James Appleton Willson, a nephew. He was a Chicago real estate man, not on good terms with his uncle and never visited at his home. Nor were there ever any visitors. The school-teacher was the only villager who had been permitted to enter the house since Mrs. Willson lost her mind. It was a touching story of a husband’s devotion that she told me. He never left her if he could avoid it, shutting his home against his neighbors that her demented condition might not attract curious attention. For years he had cared for her as tenderly as if she had been a sick child.

The next train from Chicago brought a squad of reporters and a half-dozen Pinkerton detectives, with Superintendent Robertson of the Pinkerton agency personally to direct the men. They began searching for clues in the usual way. When Neal McKeague returned from the city he was asked to tell about Mr. Willson coming to his place for a steak the evening before and what was said about expecting visitors. Robertson seemed to attach considerable importance to the statement, although I told him that I had learned from the station agent that no strangers arrived on any of the evening trains. The detectives suggested that they might have driven out from Chicago. It was before the days of motor cars. Drive twenty miles in a rainstorm when there were numerous trains! I couldn’t reconcile it with my way of reasoning.

I learned from some of the villagers that Mr. Willson had befriended McKeague, selling him the property where his shop stood on the easy-payment plan and loaning him the money with which to establish himself in business. There had been some ill feeling when McKeague discovered that the lot where his shop stood had once belonged to the village and that Mr. Willson couldn’t give clear title to it. The day before the tragedy they had words about the title in the village post office and Mr. Willson had angrily demanded the money that was due him.

McKeague was a good-looking young Canadian who had been employed in a shop where Mr. Willson formerly traded. The close-fisted old millionaire fell out with his butcher over prices and partly out of spite and to establish a competitive shop, he set the butcher’s helper up in business.

What impressed me strongly was that when McKeague was told of the murder by the school-teacher he hurried off to Chicago without stopping to investigate. I called his attention to this and he attempted to explain by saying that he had promised to pay an overdue bill that morning at a wholesale market and he was afraid if he delayed doing so his meat supply would be shut off. He gave me the name of the wholesaler with whom he traded and the names and addresses of persons he had called on during the day. He appeared to have perfect control and to answer without show of irritation any questions that were asked him.

I couldn’t help thinking that McKeague knew more about the tragedy than he professed to. That night I wrote a story that pointed a finger of suspicion at McKeague.

I followed up the story the next day by visiting all of the addresses the butcher had furnished, and one that he didn’t mention. At a wholesale market on North Clark Street, where he was being pressed for payment of a bill, I learned that in settling his account he tendered a bank note of large denomination that had never been creased. This further excited my suspicion, for a village butcher was not likely to have so large a bank note come to him in his trade and the added fact that it had never been creased by frequent handling, inspired a thought that it had recently been in Mr. Willson’s treasure box that I had seen on the floor near his dead body.

Inquiry revealed that at none of the places where he visited did McKeague once mention the shocking tragedy that had been uncovered a few minutes before he came to the city. I reasoned that an innocent man would have talked of little else, particularly when the victim was the most important man in his home town and his benefactor.

The place that he visited and didn’t tell me about, I found by accident. After making the round of the addresses furnished by McKeague I started for Winnetka to learn what the detectives had discovered during the day. While crossing Wells Street bridge to reach the Northwestern railroad station, a tugboat darted from under the bridge, belching sooty smoke over me and soiling my linen.

I stepped into a small shop for a clean collar. The clerk said my collar wasn’t so badly soiled as one a customer wore in the previous morning. His was stained with blood. I don’t know why I asked, news instinct, perhaps, but I did ask what time it was the customer called and the time the clerk gave me corresponded with the arrival of the train that brought the butcher from Winnetka. His description of the customer tallied with McKeague.

The clerk told me that when the customer removed the bloodstained collar he exclaimed: “I was in a hell of a fight last night.” After putting on a fresh collar the customer went to the back of the shop and had a tailor replace a missing button on his vest!

The next morning the heading over my story on the front page of the _Tribune_ was: “THOU ART THE MAN!”

Superintendent Robertson was called off the case by the Pinkertons and in his place came blue-eyed Jim Maginn, the ablest detective I ever came in contact with. He had brains and he knew how to use them. Once he struck a trail he was as tenacious as a bull dog. He had read my story that morning and he followed up the lead.

In the heap of ashes back of McKeague’s shop Maginn found some metal buttons and decided that the butcher had burned the bloodstained raincoat that smeared the wallpaper in the Willson home. Next he searched the butcher’s bedroom and in a closet found a vest from which a button had been yanked with such force that it left a hole. Another button, different from the others, had been sewed on without much effort to darn the hole. There were stains on the vest that looked like blood, but this didn’t count for much as a butcher might have blood on any of his clothing. The detective said a chemical analysis of the stains would determine if the corpuscles were of human blood.

While Maginn was finding the vest, I got possession of another important link in the chain of circumstantial evidence. It was a revolver with which I shall always believe McKeague killed the old millionaire. I had luncheon that day at the home of Mr. Lloyd, of the _Tribune_ editorial staff, and Mrs. Lloyd, who had taken an active interest in the tragedy handed me a small weapon she had found beneath the mattress in her maid’s room, the significance of which was that Belle Hagin, the maid, was McKeague’s sweetheart. On examining the weapon I found that the cylinder would not revolve. Evidently the cylinder pin had been lost and the round nail that had been put in its place prevented the cylinder from turning. One could fire a single shot, but the next time the trigger was pressed the hammer fell on the empty cartridge. This cleared up the mystery in my mind as to why the murderer discarded the revolver after shooting Mr. Willson and attacked the helpless old woman with tongs and saber.

I reasoned that after the quarrel in the post office, McKeague went to the Willson house, where the quarrel was renewed, and that when Mr. Willson brought out his box of valuables there was a struggle and he was shot. Mrs. Willson heard the shot and screamed and McKeague, realizing that she knew who killed her husband, ran up the stairs to her room. Unable to fire his weapon again, he grabbed the first implement his eyes fell upon and beat her to death.

I hurried to Maginn with the revolver and after telling him my theory, suggested that McKeague be taken into custody. He didn’t want to make an arrest without consulting Mr. Pinkerton, so he instructed his men not to lose sight of the butcher and returned to Chicago with his newly discovered evidence.

The vest was turned over to a famous microscopist and I recall how excited I got when the vest was put under a powerful glass and the threads in the eyes of the detached button matched the broken threads in the vest, for under the microscope the threads were magnified to the size of a half-inch rope. The shreds of woolly fluff clinging to the torn threads in the eyes of the button, were identical with the shade and texture of the shoddy of the vest.

The heading over my story the next morning was: “THE SHADOW OF A NOOSE.”

Before noon McKeague was brought to Chicago and placed in jail. Although the evidence against him was purely circumstantial, the general opinion was that he would be easily convicted, but Belle Hagin helped to save him by testifying that she took the revolver from him at a party one night when he had been drinking, two months before the tragedy. She swore that it was hidden ever since under her mattress and was there on the night the Willsons were murdered. Luther Laflin Mills, the then prosecuting attorney, was blamed for the acquittal by the newspapers and the criticism was not undeserved, for the prosecutor went away on a long fishing trip in Canada and did not return to Chicago in time properly to prepare the case for trial.

McKeague celebrated his acquittal by getting drunk and a few days later he returned to Canada. Within a month he was in jail for felonious assault on a woman. Some time after that Belle Hagin admitted that she didn’t tell the truth about the revolver at the trial and the Pinkertons were about to arrest him again and put him on trial for the murder of Mrs. Willson, but a cowboy spared them from further trouble by killing McKeague in a bar-room brawl out in North Dakota.