Midwest Murders

Midwest newspapers last week splashed through such an orgy of Sex and Murder as rarely falls to the lot of a headline-writer. One was in Peoria, Ill.; two were in Chicago; the last was in Cleveland.

Peoria. The Trial of the Obscene Picture Man was straight Good & Evil. Good was Mildred Hallmark, 19, pretty, self-respecting hostess in a cafeteria who had been found stripped, raped and murdered in a Peoria cemetery ditch last June. During last week's trial Midwest newspapers temporarily promoted her from a cafeteria hostess to a night club hostess, reconsidered, returned her to the cafeteria. Her last night she had seen Public Hero No. 1 with a friend who had left her to go home alone in the rain.

Unconditional Evil was Gerald Thompson, 26, machinist, who noted in his diary some 83 women he had tried to seduce. To Peoria's pride, 67 of his attempts were unsuccessful. He had come along in his car in the rain, given Miss Hallmark a lift, liked her so well he choked her unconscious, hit her on the jaw and threw her into the ditch. The Press at first rated him "handsome, curly-haired, muscular." Then it came out that on his night-prowlings he carried scissors to snip women's underclothes, had made a New Year's resolution to get a new girl every week for a year and sometimes posed for obscene pictures. Thereupon Gerald Thompson became "pasty-faced."

While all Peoria scuffled and scratched to get into the courtroom, suspense hung on whether the defense could make the State produce Thompson's diary listing the 83 women. Headline: RIOT TO HEAR SEX SLAYER'S LOVE DIARY. Peorians tore down the courthouse doors. Headline: NAMES OF 83 GIRL VICTIMS WITHHELD.

Peoria and the Press frowned on defense attempts to show that Thompson was insane. His younger brother happened last week to be in jail on a charge of taking "indecent liberties" with a small boy. Briskly Gerald Thompson was found guilty of murder, sentenced to the electric chair.

Chicago No. 1. Day of the Thompson conviction in Peoria, Chicago produced for indictment two remarkable women. One was Mrs. Blanche Dunkel, 42, plain, heavy-jawed washwoman, a four-time widow. The other was her washwoman friend, Mrs. Evelyn Smith, 46, onetime burlesque dancer, prostitute and wife of a Chinese laundryman. Somehow, between them, they had murdered Mrs. Dunkel's son-in-law, a grocer's clerk named Ervin Lang, who after his wife's death last December was planning to remarry. Mrs. Dunkel promptly confessed that she had offered Mrs. Smith $500 for the job, paid $100 on account.

Comparatively stodgy was Chicago newspapers' first theory that Mrs. Dunkel had resented her onetime son-in-law's plan to marry so soon after her daughter's death. Better was the one that she had suspected him of killing her daughter. Best of all was the discovery that Mrs. Dunkel had been jealously in love with her son-in-law, might herself have killed her daughter.

Ervin Lang's torso, wrapped in a blanket, was found in a swamp across the Indiana line. Headlines: TORSO MURDER; SWAMP MURDER. The legs, neatly sawed with the trousers, socks and shoes still on, were presently found seven miles away in a trunk. Evelyn Smith and her Chinese husband, Harry Jung, had vanished. For a week yellow men traveling with white women were detained all through the Midwest. The Press billed the crime as an endpoint of miscegenation. Fears were expressed that the "sinister Oriental," Harry Jung, had killed his white wife to make his getaway. This billing got a sorry jolt when prim-looking, thin-lipped, bespectacled Mrs. Smith was caught in a Manhattan rooming house. Mrs. Dunkel made more headlines by expressing a fear that her friend had already killed Harry Jung, who could not be found.

Misjudging Mrs. Smith's appeal at first, reporters described her "throaty voice," her "sinuous and startling attitudes," her "eye-rolling behind her tortoise-shell glasses." Mrs. Smith told nothing in Manhattan. Impressed, newshawks soon got on the right track: "the woman without nerves . . . the enigma woman."

In fascination the Press watched the Enigma Woman's fixed, prim smile as she arrived by plane in Chicago, stubbornly stuck to her story of innocence, finally declared, "Oh well, I might as well get it over with. Sure, I killed him. . . . Blanche didn't pay me a cent of the $500. ... I tried to get Harry Jung to help me cut up Ervin but he got sick at the sight of the blood. He was sitting in an automobile outside, scared half to death."

Mrs. Smith's silly, prim smile made her Chicago's Mona Lisa. Headline: WHAT OF MRS. SMITH'S STRANGE SMILE? with pictures. "Am I," she asked newshawks, "still front page?"

With Mrs. Smith firmly enthroned as No. 1 villainess, Mrs. Dunkel piously whimpered: "Evelyn did it all differently than she promised. When she told me how she cut him up, it just made me sick. The way we talked it over, Evelyn was to put Erv to sleep, strangle him and throw him in the lake." Headline: PAID FOR A NEAT "LAKE JOB," IS HER PLAINT.

Chicago No, 2. The two strange women had hardly been indicted last week before they were jostled off the Midwest's front page by a second Chicago murder in a higher class of society and with a totally different arrangement.

Dr. Wralter J. Bauer, 38, able, grave-faced professor of chemistry at Kirksville College of Osteopathy & Surgery at Kirksville, Mo., was neurotic. While police were still looking for Evelyn Smith, Dr. Bauer married Miss Louise Schaffer, the frail, pretty night superintendent of nurses in Kirksville College's hospital. Three hours after their wedding he left her to resume his postgraduate work at the University of Michigan's medical school. From there he wrote Kirksville friends that he was suspicious of his wife, notified Kirksville tradesmen to cancel her charge accounts, told university friends that he was afraid he was going crazy. In turn his bride informed him that an old suitor of hers, a tall, dour carpenter named Mandeville Zenge, was jealous of him.

Early last week, a tall dour man with dark glasses appeared at Dr. Bauer's Ann Arbor hotel, asked him for a lift in his automobile, forced Dr. Bauer to drive to a lonely Chicago alley. There the stranger bound Dr. Bauer's feet & hands, deliberately castrated him with a penknife. Driving the car slowly into a Chicago garage, the tall, dour man jumped out, fled into darkness. In the car the garagemen found Dr. Bauer bleeding to death.

The Chicago Press, once over the difficulty of Bauer's dreadful injury by calling it variously "penknife mutilation," "sex-operation," "rude emasculation," straightway pointed "The Finger of Suspicion" at Mandeville Zenge.

Mandeville Zenge promptly supplied more headlines by paying off a cab at a Chicago pier and walking into the night. Behind he left a blood-stained coat and a suicide note: "I left home because I was so miserably unhappy over losing Louise ... I suppose she is better off married to that doctor ... I know what I am doing."

What Mandeville Zenge was doing was hiding out until the next night when he was caught in a garage telephone booth in Chicago's west side. He firmly refused, however, to tell anything. The baffled newspapers thereupon pounced on Mrs. Bauer, headlined her as THE PENKNIFE WIDOW.

Cleveland. A pair of simple psychotics made the week's final murder headlines in the Midwest. According to Mr. and Mrs. Waldman of Cleveland, just because Mr. Waldman had once known Mrs. Ida Rose Cooper, she sent magic fireballs into their windows at night. Mr. Waldman had been burnt. The Waldmans slept with a pair of pliers in the bed to catch the floating fireballs, a hammer and anvil to smash them with, and "even in this hot weather we had to keep the windows closed to keep the fireballs out." When Mrs. Matilda Waldman shot and killed Mrs. Cooper last week, headlines ran NO MORE FIREBALLS FOR WITCH SLAYER.

According to diligent newshawks, Mrs. Dunkel, Mrs. Evelyn Smith, Mandeville Zenge and Mr. and Mrs. Waldman all had one thing in common. After they made their respective headlines, they all declared they had enjoyed "the best night's sleep in years."

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