45 murderers, p.13
45 Murderers, page 13
Just pretend you’re the officer in charge of this case, and ask yourself: What would you do in a spot like this?
Well for one thing, you’d track down the rumor that Milton Michaelis had been seen in the alley, on the chance that someone, perhaps the murderer, had been deliberately trying to throw suspicion on him.
The police did just that. And believe me, tracking down a rumor isn’t easy. But the Chicago police managed it in less than a day. The janitor of a nearby building had mentioned to a woman tenant that he had seen Michaelis at about 9:30 that night. The woman had mistaken the time, and the false report had spread like wildfire.
Naturally the janitor was investigated. (I knew you’d ask that!) But, he could account for every minute of his time from mid-afternoon until late evening.
Another thing you’d do, if you were investigating the case—you’d follow up on the theory of a speeding driver in the alley.
The police visited every garage for blocks around, and suddenly turned up what appeared to be a very hot clue.
In a private garage only two blocks from the Michaelis home, they found a car, its front end covered with a heavy blanket. Under the blanket was a caved-in radiator and a twisted bumper. From the radiator grille police technicians extracted human hair.
The owner had a very simple story to tell. Several days before he’d been in a minor traffic accident. The hairs? After the accident he looked under the car to inspect the amount of damage and he hadn’t been wearing a hat. He’d left the car in his garage until an insurance adjuster could come out and settle his claim against the driver of the other car.
The story was checked. The hairs found on the damaged car were checked, by police technicians, with hairs from the owner’s head. They matched perfectly. And the minor traffic accident—several days before Rose Michaelis’s disappearance—was verified not only by the other driver, but by the insurance company.
You’d search for the body, wouldn’t you. That’s what the police did, tirelessly, and thoroughly. There was even an order to drag the Jackson Park lagoon near the Michaelis home. Because—you can’t hide, or dispose of a body.
Or can’t you?
You’d probably also hope for a break—or a lucky hunch. Well, the police got one. More than that, they got a confession.
The break was a telephone call indicating that Joe Nischt had not been in his basement from seven o’clock on, that fatal night. The hunch came to a smart policeman who remembered that Joe Nischt had so nervous a temperament that he could not be given a lie detector test successfully.
This smart policeman called on Joe Nischt sometime just past midnight. He didn’t talk about murder. He talked about the fact that Rose Michaelis’s body was missing. Until it was found, she couldn’t be given a decent burial. And until then, she would haunt the apartment building, looking for a place to rest.
That did it.
“I killed her—yes, I killed her—”
Joe Nischt told the whole story at headquarters.
“I got home about six o’clock. I saw her coming up the alley and suddenly a kind of a fit got me. I grabbed her and she yelled for me to let her go. Then I hit her with my fist and she fell against the telephone pole. I dragged her into the basement.
“I shoved her into the furnace and close the doors and turned up the heat. Then I washed the basement floor.”
He went on to tell how the next day he’d cleaned out the ashes, and gave the name and address of the ash hauler who had taken them away.
Most apartment and apartment hotel buildings have too many ashes for the city hauling service to carry, and therefore employ a private hauling company. These services usually cover a regular route, like milkmen and postmen. Unlike the postman, the ash hauler doesn’t even ring once. His truck picks up the ashes and he doesn’t ask any questions. He doesn’t have time.
The ash hauler in this case led the police to a dump heap at Indianapolis Avenue and 108th Street. For more than three days, a squad of men sifted over twenty-five tons of ashes, under the personal supervision of Dr. Wilton Crogman, professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago.
They found nothing.
Let’s get back to you, playing cop. What would you do at this point?
You have a person reported missing, apparently murdered. You have a confession. But, you don’t have the corpus delicti—“body of the crime.” What do you do next?
The experts who sifted the ashes in the dump heap found no trace of a human body. Not one charred fragment of clothing, not a melted piece of jewelry, not so much as a half burned button or a tooth filling.
And about that time, Joe Nischt repudiated his confession, after a long consultation with his lawyer.
At this point you, as a cop, would be stuck!
Or would you?
As a prosecuting attorney, you’d find yourself faced with what was bound to be a long legal battle. But you wouldn’t give up.
You have no witnesses, remember. No one was in the alley at the approximate time of the attack. You have no body and no evidence from a medical examiner. You have nothing but a confession which has been denied. Now what do you do?
You’d probably do exactly what the Chicago authorities did. You’d call in experts. You’d find out if it were possible for a human body to be so completely destroyed in an apartment house furnace that not even the slightest trace of it could ever be found.
It was learned that the heat in that furnace, at top peak, was many degrees higher than that of the standard crematorium.
But that fact wasn’t enough for the Chicago authorities.
Sorry to have to go into so many gruesome details. But murder, even under the best of circumstances, is no picnic—for the police in charge. Or for the murderer. Or—especially—for the victim.
The prosecutor’s office obtained a corpse from a local medical school. It was stuffed into the now famous furnace, to determine if a human body could be completely destroyed by the fiercely blazing fire.
The answer was, yes.
And at last the trial opened. In spite of the experiments, in spite of the evidence, in spite of the repudiated confession, frankly, the prosecution was worried. They had forgotten one thing. Joe Nischt’s nerves.
The trial opened with a loud and brilliant legal battle. The prosecution argued that it was determined to make legal history by seeking a conviction without a corpus delicti. The defense argued that it couldn’t be done. The prosecution based its case on the confession. The defense stuck to the undeniable fact that the confession had been denied.
While the lawyers argued, Joe Nischt sat and thought. Suddenly, to everyone’s surprise, he interrupted the trial to demand a conference with the Assistant States Attorney.
He screamed, “I can’t stand it! My conscience won’t permit it! I killed her, and I want to stick to my original confession!”
Joe Nischt changed his plea to Guilty. He was immediately sentenced to life imprisonment and the handsome young janitor is now in Joliet Prison.
All of which goes to prove—you may be able to commit murder and dispose of the body so that it will never be found. You may be able to fool the best, most brilliant and most experienced police officers. In short,—you may get away with murder. But don’t try it.
Because, sooner or later, you’ll be tripped up by exactly what caught Joe Nischt in the end. You may get away from the police—but you’ll never get away from yourself.
SIXTY CENTS WORTH OF MURDER
The pleasant university town of Columbia, Missouri, was in the grip of a death scare. Beautiful young Marylou Jenkins, a recently graduated alumna of Stephens College, had died, the victim of an attack-killer, and the police were admittedly without a single clue to the identity of the murderer. It was obviously the crime of a merciless sex-maniac, and any unaccompanied woman might be his next victim. University of Missouri co-eds were warned not to go out alone after dark. At Stephens College no student was permitted to leave the campus. The police were under heavy pressure to run down the killer before his lust claimed another innocent victim. Mass meetings were being held, and citizens had raised a fund of $2,500 as reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the slayer.
Marylou Jenkins was only twenty, just graduated from college, pretty as a picture, and without an enemy in the world. Yet, on the morning of February 6, 1946, this lovely girl lay dead on the floor in her home, an electric-light cord twisted around her neck, the victim of a horrible criminal attack.
From the appearance of things police had no difficulty reconstructing the crime. Marylou was alone in the house the night before. She had slipped a robe over her pajamas and gone to the door to let in a caller. A bruise on her face told the first part of the story. The caller, whoever he was, had struck her a blow with his fist, undoubtedly knocking the girl unconscious, since there was no sign of a struggle. The rest of the story was only too plainly apparent, and an autopsy soon made it conclusive. As the Doctor expressed it, “This kind of a man is in a frenzy when he kills. He will do it again. I don’t like to say this, but quite likely another woman must die if we’re ever to solve this girl’s killing.”
A frightening prospect! No wonder the citizens of this quiet university town were alarmed. It was as if a wild beast was at large in the streets.
Clues? Not a thing that even the most painstaking search could disclose. No fingerprints. The doors were locked when the body was found. A running man had left footprints of a size ten shoe, but that could fit any one of a thousand men. Neighbors told of hearing screams around ten-thirty in the evening, but no one had looked out the window to investigate, and the autopsy placed the time of death between eleven and twelve o’clock. The body itself offered one piece of puzzling evidence. A fingernail had been torn from the forefinger of the left hand. Since there were no signs of a struggle, police were at a loss to account for it.
Marylou’s death was a mystery, but her life soon proved to be as much of a mystery as her death. Checking on the girl’s background, questioning her mother, the neighbors, and boys and girls who knew her at school, police were struck by the fact that while Marylou apparently had no enemies, she had no intimate friends either. Neither boys nor girls. Nobody who could be suspected of a motive. Obviously the girl had led a quiet life at home, protected from the world. Her mother gave some indications of the care with which she surrounded her daughter when she told police about the night of the murder.
Mrs. Jenkins was a nurse. “Last night,” she said, “I was on duty … in the next block. I left here about ten o’clock and Marylou was getting ready for bed…. If anyone came Marylou was to raise the south shade near her bed, and put on the lights and call me by phone. I looked over here about midnight. The lights were on, but since there had been no phone call I didn’t worry. The shade wasn’t up, and that’s another reason I didn’t worry.”
When Mrs. Jenkins returned in the morning the lights were still on, she told police, “and that made me nervous. I tried the door to the living room. It was locked from the inside. I tried the other doors. They were all locked. Then I looked in the window and—and I saw Marylou lying there on the floor. I broke the window and crawled inside…. I loosened the electric-light cord…. I tried to revive her … then—then I called you.”
Further details of the girl’s habits confirmed the police in their imagined reconstruction of the crime, but Mrs. Jenkins insisted, in spite of every indication to the contrary, that Marylou had not known the identity of her assailant and had not willingly let him into the house. “She couldn’t have!” said Mrs. Jenkins. “She didn’t have any friends.” Jack Jenkins, the girl’s father, on returning from Kansas City where he had gone on a business trip, was equally emphatic on that point. “It doesn’t make sense,” he told the police. “Marylou had no men friends. Who would she get up out of bed to let in the house?”
Just the same, when a neighbor came forward with a story that one of the Simmons boys had been around the Jenkins home every night at ten o’clock for some time, the police decided to look into the “friend” angle. Questioned, young Dale Simmons admitted being in the vicinity on some evenings, but he stoutly denied that he was calling on Marylou, said he didn’t even know Marylou, and offered an alibi for the time of the murder. When police were unable to find support for his alibi, and discovered that he knew Marylou and had asked her to go out with him several times, they held Dale pending further developments. The young man admitted, now, that he knew Marylou, but he denied he had been seeing her, and refused to say whom he had been visiting in the vicinity so often.
With feeling running so high all over town, the “tips” and suggestions from citizens were pouring into police headquarters by the dozen every day. It was with little more than a shrug of the shoulders and perhaps a weary sigh, that the Chief listened to Mrs. Jenkins when she called up to tell him that she had just discovered that sixty cents was missing from Marylou’s pocketbook, which had just been turned over to her. Robbery had been ruled out as a motive from the first, especially when it was found that Marylou’s purse had no money in it, and nothing else in the house had been touched. Now Mrs. Jenkins was calling up to report that she distinctly remembered there was $5.40 in the girl’s purse when she left Marylou on the night of the murder, and now there was only $4.80. “We didn’t owe sixty cents to anybody,” explained Mrs. Jenkins, “and that’s what puzzles me.”
It puzzled the Chief, too, but for the moment he couldn’t make any sense out of it. If theft was the motive, why didn’t the thief take all the money in the purse? Why only sixty cents? Mrs. Jenkins, he reasoned, could easily be mistaken about the exact amount. He decided to let the mystery of the missing sixty cents go for the moment, while his men continued to question every friend of the Jenkins family and round up everybody with a police record in Columbia and vicinity.
The result: nothing—and less than nothing, because precious time was passing and the killer’s trail was growing colder by the hour. At best, the maniacal murderer might have left town; at worst—and that was what everybody feared—he was still prowling the streets, stalking another victim. The medical examiner’s words still haunted the mind of every officer engaged in the man-hunt: “A man like this will do it again…. quite likely another woman must die if we’re ever to solve the Jenkins girl’s killing.”
That was how things stood more than two weeks after the murder when, on February 23rd, police headquarters received a report that a man had tried to commit suicide down near the city dump. Police hurrying to the scene found a crowd gathered around a man who, the attending physician said, had swallowed lye water in an effort to kill himself. He was pretty sick, but he wasn’t going to die. The man gave his name as Floyd Cochrane and his talk was rambling and incoherent. It looked like a mental case, and police got in touch with the man’s sister, suggesting that she sign papers to have him committed to an institution. “That,” said the sister, “is for his wife to do. Floyd has been acting funny, but his wife will have to sign the papers.”
If there had been any slight flutter of hope that this incident would throw any light on the Jenkins case, it promptly subsided. Fifteen minutes later, however, the phone rang at police headquarters. It was Cochrane’s sister, calling from Floyd Cochrane’s home.
“We came here to get his wife to sign the papers,” she said, “but she’s dead!”
On the floor of her living-room Mrs. Floyd Cochrane lay dead, the right side of her chest blown away with a shotgun.
Cochrane protested his innocence. “I didn’t kill her,” he cried. “I tried to scare her by taking lye water. I didn’t kill her.” But an autopsy performed on the body of Mrs. Cochrane revealed two interesting details. A fingernail was missing from the dead woman’s right fore-finger—just as in the case of Marylou. And—the dead body had been criminally violated!
So—now there were two. Just as the medical examiner had feared there would be. One had been strangled and the other had been shot, but in other details both homicides were obviously the fiendish crime of the same man. There was good reason to suspect that the man was Floyd Cochrane—good reason, but no evidence, not the kind you can take into court and get a conviction on. Besides, the suspect was either insane or playing crazy. To the police it looked like an act, and not a very good one at that. They felt that if they could get enough evidence to convict they could make it stick. But, in lieu of sufficient evidence, there was only one way—to make him hang himself, by a confession. Perhaps a clever line of questioning could trap him into admitting his guilt.
To lay the basis for such a line of questioning, the police dug into Cochrane’s background and discovered that he and his folks were engaged in hauling trash to the city dump. His folks lived near the Jenkins home, and there was a possibility that they had done some hauling for the Jenkins. With that thought in mind, the little matter of the missing sixty cents suddenly loomed large. Since Floyd’s folks did not in the least suspect him of being implicated in the Jenkins murder, they readily admitted they had done some hauling for the Jenkins’—and now the police were ready to question Floyd Cochrane.
What followed was one of the cleverest bits of grilling in the records of police technique. The police pretended to believe Floyd’s story that he didn’t kill his wife. “Your folks seem to believe in you,” they told him. “They said the only thing you’ve ever done wrong was to keep sixty cents you owed them. Your folks said that they had done some hauling for the Jenkins family. They asked me to find out about that sixty cents. They seem to think you collected it.” Once that was straightened out, they told Floyd, they could let him go.
“Tell them I got it,” Floyd replied quickly, “and then let me go.”
That fatal admission was the foot on the fly-paper. He made a full confession of both murders. Of the murder of Marylou Jenkins he said:
“I went there to collect the money I knew the folks had coming. She gave it to me, and then—well, I lost my head. She was so pretty—”
