The First Celebrity Serial Killer in Southwest Ohio: Confessions of the Strangler Alfred Knapp
144
The First Celebrity Serial Killer in Southwest Ohio: Confessions of the Strangler Alfred Knapp
144Paperback
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781467117500 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Arcadia Publishing SC |
| Publication date: | 05/04/2015 |
| Series: | True Crime |
| Pages: | 144 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d) |
About the Author
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CHAPTER 1
THE CINCINNATI, HAMILTON AND INDIANAPOLIS LINE
The Hamilton Evening Sun put out its first early edition five hours ahead of normal press time on Wednesday, February 25, 1903, ready for travelers at the local train stations by 10:00 a.m. The blazing headline read "Knapp Arrested for Wife Murder," and below it, "Startling Affair Brought to Light."
The most lurid of the Southwestern Ohio city's three daily newspapers at the time, the Sun bragged that it beat even the Cincinnati press with that four-page EXTRA detailing the arrest of former Hamilton man Alfred Knapp in connection with the disappearance of his third wife, Hannah Goddard Knapp, who had been missing since before the holidays. Word reached Hamilton that Knapp had gotten married again, an act that confirmed the belief among some of his family that he had murdered Hannah.
The Sun received some copy for the story by telegraph from Indianapolis, where Hamilton police captain Thomas Lenehan rode through the night to enlist the aid of local law enforcement to find and arrest forty-year-old Alfred Andrew Knapp for bigamy, as there was no proof of murder yet. The headline was not quite accurate as the confession and a formal charge of homicide were still hours away.
Hannah had been reared in Hamilton by her uncle, Charles Goddard, after the death of her father, his brother William, when she was just a baby. Uncle Charley, a widower, lived alone in two rooms of a little cottage behind the Hamilton Depot on Central Avenue, a station shared by the Cincinnati, Hamilton and Dayton (CH&D) and the Cincinnati, Hamilton and Indianapolis (CH&I) lines. Hannah had two half sisters in Hamilton, Bertha Hoagland of Sixth Street and Linda Sterritt of Front Street.
In 1894, twenty-one-year-old Hannah went to Cincinnati to work as a waitress and became acquainted with Mary "Mamie" King, a hostess at Rockwell's Restaurant, who took the girl under her wing and into her home. Mamie was married to Edward King, a heating and ventilation man for the Pennsylvania Railroad, and they lived in the northern suburb of Cumminsville.
"She asked me to take her and another girl to board and said I could keep house for them," said Mamie, the eldest of Alfred Knapp's three younger sisters.
In August of that year, Hannah was working as a nurse for the superintendent of the Cincinnati Cab Company when she married Alfred Knapp, an ex-convict from various parts of Indiana and Ohio. Knapp's second wife, Jennie Connors, had committed suicide just weeks earlier by jumping in Cincinnati's canal so his marriage to Hannah caused "a great deal of indignation" in the neighborhood where he lived, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported. The Kings had advised Hannah against the union and were not happy about it, so the couple settled in a room on Bremen Street, near Twelfth, in the German neighborhood of Over the Rhine.
Alfred did not have a good history with women. He was at times charming and sweet, doting on the women he wooed, but he had fits and a mean streak. He had served at least six prison terms, most of them for larceny. Three terms were for assault, all cases having sexual overtones not specified in the charges.
First Wives
In 1883, twenty-year-old Alfred Knapp finished serving a two-year term in Joliet Prison and joined his nomadic parents and siblings in Terre Haute, Indiana. Next door lived sixteen-year-old Emma Stubbs, who would often come around the house to see the Knapp daughters: Mamie, sixteen at the time, and Sadie, thirteen.
"Alfred always had a fascinating way of talking to his sweethearts, and every one of them had the utmost faith in him," Mamie said. "Our family and the Stubbs family were very intimate, and Allie married Emma."
In Terre Haute, the Reverend H.O. Breeden, a Baptist pastor, took Knapp under his wing and tried to reform him. He helped him get a job with a coal hauler and arranged for Alfred and Emma's wedding. There was no reforming the young man, however, and Knapp soon went back to his thieving ways, losing his job after he stole an overcoat from an employee of the coal office. Reverend Breeden helped keep him out of trouble and then gave him a job in the parsonage. Before long, some "lost" money and jewelry owned by the housekeeper turned up in Knapp's possession. Breeden's Christian charity ended, and he pressed charges. Knapp earned another trip to the penitentiary, this one in Jeffersonville, Indiana, and Emma Stubbs divorced him after three months of marriage.
After the twenty-three-year-old Knapp got out of Jeffersonville in 1885, he moved to Marion, Indiana. He quickly wore out his welcome there and moved to Lawrenceburg, where he married Jennie Connors. No one in the family knew how he met her, just that they were married after knowing each other for only three days.
Jennie stuck by him while he went to prison for three more sentences, although it's not clear where she stayed or how she earned a living. Alfred's first sentence while married to Jennie, for stealing a pool table from a saloon in Lawrenceburg, lasted from December 1886 to November 1887. When he got out, he worked odd jobs in Cincinnati. He was laying carpet in a boardinghouse on East Fifth Street when $459 went missing from the proprietress's bureau drawer and some jewelry from a border. It was his second such arrest since arriving in Cincinnati, so he spent most of 1888 in the Cincinnati Workhouse.
His third term was for quite a different crime: assaulting a woman in broad daylight in Burnet Woods in Cincinnati. For that, he went to the Ohio State Penitentiary in Columbus from July 1890 to November 1893.
When he got out of the Ohio Pen, Knapp — now thirty-one years old — sought to fulfill a lifelong fascination and went to work for the circus, the Frank C. Bostock Street Fair Company, joining the show as a general utility man in one of the Kentucky towns across the river from Cincinnati. The job didn't last long; the performers soon started missing trinkets and articles of clothing from their dressing rooms. Nothing seemed too small or cheap for the taking, let alone purses or jewelry and even brass costume rings. The circus included a beauty show, and the women there began to complain of Knapp's persistent attentions. He came to every performance and on many occasions attempted "undue liberties." When the women turned him away, he would peep into their dressing room between performances. Once the complaints reached the manager, he took one look at Knapp, pegged him as the thief and fired him on the spot.
Knapp went back to Jennie and convinced her to take a job with him in Popcorn George Hand's Circus, she as a cook and he as a general hustler. She didn't like the work, so they quit and went back to Cincinnati, where his father worked as a streetcar conductor on the Mount Adams inclined trolley.
On August 7, 1894, Alfred and Jennie Knapp walked from their Central Avenue home to the offices of the Cincinnati Enquirer. He later said he was inquiring about an advertisement for work. She waited outside, he told police and the press, but when he came back, she was gone. The next day, police recovered her body, marred by bruises on her head, lacerations on her face and finger marks on her throat. Police failed to find evidence to support a murder investigation, attributing the abrasions to the body's contact with broken glass on the bottom of the canal and declaring the fractured skull the result of contact with a canal boat. Also, Jennie had a history of being melancholy and in ill health, compounded of late by her husband's inability to work steadily.
"I always thought that Jennie committed suicide," Mamie King testified at the coroner's inquest. "The day before she died she came to my house. I was living in Cincinnati then. I remember that morning well. Hannah Goddard, who boarded with me, and I were having a cup of coffee when Jennie came in."
"I've never been so downhearted in all my life," Jennie said, which is saying a lot considering her husband was already a convict five times over. She told the women that she was about to become a mother and began to cry. "Allie is out of work. What will I do? I have got nothing to take care of my baby with when it is born."
Mamie urged her to not be downhearted and promised to help. Her husband, Ed King, already harbored an inkling that there was something dangerous about his moody brother-in-law. Before Jennie's body was found, he had casually asked Alfred what he thought had happened.
"They'll probably find her near the Wade Street Bridge," Knapp said, which they did. When the patrol wagon later passed by the King house with her remains, Knapp said coolly, "There goes Jennie."
Ruled a Suicide
On August 8, 1894, twenty-three-year-old Joseph Graff sat on the canal bank near the Wade Street Bridge, fishing. His line became snagged, so he gently tugged and pulled on it. It slowly began to give, and he realized he had something with some weight to it. Suddenly, a large object bobbed to the surface: the body of a young woman. Graff tied off his line and ran to sound the alarm.
Coroner Lewis A. Querner arrived on the scene. He noted many marks and scratches on the face, which could be attributed to the body rubbing against the debris at the bottom of the canal.
The remains were identified at the morgue by Alfred A. Knapp as those of his wife, Jennie Connors Knapp, twenty-five, born in Indiana. The husband said that the last time he saw her was 9:00 p.m. the Tuesday previous when he went to the office of the Cincinnati Enquirer. He said he stepped into the counting room and left her outside on the sidewalk. When he returned a moment later, she was gone. He told police that Jennie was pregnant and not happy about it because he was unemployed. She had frequently threatened to kill herself unless he got a job.
Martha A. "Mattie" Rice, Knapp's oldest sister, confirmed that Jennie had detested the thought of motherhood and had threatened suicide. She thought her sister-in-law was mentally unbalanced and believed she took her own life.
Mamie, who lived at 133 Twelfth Street at the time, said the same, adding that Jennie was once specific enough to have said "for two pins" she would jump into the canal. Hannah Goddard was living with Mrs. King at the time, and she told the coroner the same thing.
After all that testimony, it was obvious to Coroner Querner that it was a suicide by drowning, and his ruling deemed a postmortem examination unnecessary.
Although Mamie warned her boarder Hannah not to do it, Hannah and Alfred married six weeks after Jennie's death. Mamie and Hannah remained close even as the newlyweds moved around Cincinnati, struggling to earn a living and escape the stigma created by their hasty marriage. Alfred and Hannah moved to Hamilton for a brief time and then finally ended up in West Indianapolis in the summer of 1895.
Bessie Draper
During the summer of 1895, thirteen-year-old Bessie Draper came to West Indianapolis from Terre Haute to live with her aunt. Bessie wanted to get a job, maybe as a "cash girl," she said, so she could send money to her struggling single mother.
In the meantime, she helped her aunt with chores. On the afternoon of August 29, she went to the washerwoman's to pick up some laundry.
On the way home, she met a friendly young fellow on South West Street pushing a wheelbarrow with a dresser tied to it. He was well dressed, except for an oddly shaped patch on the shoulder of his shirt. He struck up a conversation, telling Bessie that he was looking for a "nurse-girl" for his sister's children and asked if she would be interested in the job.
Bessie was indeed interested but wanted to get permission from her aunt. Her aunt told Bessie that she could decide for herself, so she caught up with the man and followed him to his house. She refused to go inside with him and waited at the gate while he took the dresser off of the wheelbarrow and through the front door. She thought that Knapp was an honest man, but this was shortly after the murder of little Ida Gebhard not far from there, and her uncle had just been talking about that the night before. She remained wary.
When the man emerged from the house, he took her on a circuitous route through the streets and alleys of West Indianapolis, and her wariness evolved into fear. He led her down an alley near Wisconsin Street that led into a stable. When Bessie saw that it was a dead end, she turned and ran the other way. The man ran after her, caught up and grabbed her by the throat. She managed to break loose and scream as he threw her to the ground. Another man saw what was going on and came toward them as she regained her footing and resumed running. Her assailant threw stones at her until she disappeared.
Sheriff Al Womack set up a sting with the help of Annie Buchanan, the matron at the police station. He instructed Bessie to walk past Knapp's house and if she saw the man who assaulted her, to signal Mrs. Buchanan, stationed a few houses down. As the girl walked toward the house where the man took the dresser, he came outside and approached her. As instructed, the girl looked back at Matron Buchanan, who hustled to her rescue as another officer waiting in a nearby alley placed Alfred A. Knapp under arrest for attempted rape. Knapp was identified by the girl, the family he bought the dresser from and the German man who interrupted his crime. The incriminating evidence was a peculiarly shaped patch on Knapp's shoulder that the girl described and which was found on the shirt when a deputy waiting in the alley arrested him. Hannah and Knapp's mother were there every day for the three-day trial as the prosecutor pointed out Knapp's already impressive police and prison record. Indeed, the resulting trip to the state penitentiary — a ten-year sentence — was his sixth.
Knapp was angry about the conviction, proclaiming his innocence and dramatically swearing an oath of vengeance at Sheriff Womack, his deputies, the prosecutors, the judge and all the jurors, naming twentytwo men.
He served seven years of his sentence for the assault on Bessie Draper and was released in June 1902. He was forty years old and had spent most of his adult life behind bars for petit larcenies and assaults on women and girls.
Sheriff Womack was irritated that he was not apprised of Knapp's parole, since that would have explained the fire that destroyed his barn and caused $8,000 of damage in fine horses and Hereford cattle (nearly $200,000 in today's dollars). A week later, the barn of one of the jurymen, Omar Boardman, was also set on fire, causing $3,000 in damage. Both men blamed Knapp but did not have any evidence against him.
"A Thriftless, Low-Life Loafer"
While Knapp was in prison, Hannah again lived with Edward and Mamie King in Cumminsville. She became quite popular in that Northern Cincinnati suburb, and the Kings came to love her as if she were their own daughter. When they learned Alfred was about to be released from Michigan City Prison, Mamie begged Hannah to stay and make her home with them, but she wanted to be with Knapp. Since Knapp and Ed King didn't get along well, Hannah moved in with her Uncle Charley in the summer of 1902 to prepare for her husband's release.
When Knapp got to Hamilton that June, he worked various jobs as a common laborer at a mill, for the railroad and at more than one stable. He also drove a coal wagon. None of the jobs lasted very long. He liked to tell people that he had been an acrobat and trapeze artist in the circus, where he made $100 a week as a headliner.
Shortly after Knapp arrived, the couple called on Linda Sterritt, Hannah's half sister, whom she hadn't seen in nearly four years. Sterritt was amazed at how much the girl had changed. She seemed thin and distracted. "I readily realized that she was a very unhappy woman," Sterritt said. "My sister was a woman who was easily influenced, and she was only putty in the hands of Knapp. She called at my house about every two weeks, and I saw that she was worried. I never asked her if she was abused by Knapp, and she never told me, but I knew that he worried her, as he was a man who could not be trusted with a ten-year-old girl." He was, she said, "a thriftless, low-life loafer."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The First Celebrity Serial Killer in Southwest Ohio"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Richard O Jones.
Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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Table of Contents
Foreword Rick Kennedy 7
Acknowledgements 9
The Cincinnati, Hamilton and Indianapolis Line 11
Confession Upon Confession 35
The Stranger's Tales 55
A Puzzle to His Attorneys 87
No Match for Old Sparky 117
Notes 133
Bibliography 135
Index 141
About The Author 144