Like Byers, Pennsylvania, Martin City, Missouri was never exactly a town, and is no longer anything. Martin City was about where 135th street in Kansas City is now, and right next to the Kansas state line. The Bernhardt family lived on a farm within walking distance of Martin City, but on the Kansas side of the line, in Johnson County, in an area that was then 15 miles south of Kansas City, but which has since been swallowed up by urban sprawl. A rail line ran through Johnson County (and still does), coming within a half-mile of the Bernhardt farm, then jogging east a little distance and going past Martin City on the east side.
On December 10, 1910, a rural mail carrier noticed that the Bernhardt family had not picked up their mail in several days. He alerted some neighbors, and the neighbors organized a search of the property. Searchers found the bodies of three men in the barn. The three men were George Bernhardt, 40, who lived on the property, Tom Morgan, a 17-year-old who was visiting the family from his home about ten miles to the north, and a man initially identified as Glenn Cotner, a hired hand. Glenn Cotner turned out to be alive and well on a farm some distance away, but for some reason he knew who the hired man was. It was James Graves, a native of Oregon. The victims had been hit in the head with a pick axe. Their bodies had been covered with hay, and they had been dead for several days. In the house the searchers found the fourth body, that of 75-year-old Emeline Bernhardt. She was found in a closet on the second floor. Her skull had been crushed by a clock weight, and she had died on the floor of the closet.
The neighbors ran for the police. Someone in Martin City (Missouri) called the Johnson County (Kansas) sheriff. Sheriff Steed arrived at the farm late in the day along with Johnson County prosecutor C. B. Little. Little drove to Martin City to use a telephone, and called the Kansas City police officials, asking for their help in investigating the murders.
The Bernhardts were well off; they had a nice farmhouse, and "according to neighbors, Mrs. Bernhardt always kept a large amount of money in the house." They were suspicious, distrustful people who did not associate with their neighbors. When they needed a hired hand on the farm they would contact an employment agency. The normal practice would have been to hire a neighbor, or, even more common, to trade work with the neighbors. The Bernhardts would drive up to Kansas City to an employment agency, hire a complete stranger, and then they would warn the hired man not to associate with the neighbors. Mrs. Bernhardt did not trust banks, choosing to hide her money in the pan drawer at the bottom of her kitchen range, or so at least the neighbors said. Later on it would be learned that she had more than three thousand dollars in banks, which was a great deal of money at that time.
The house had been ransacked, and the pockets of the victims had been turned inside out. The police thought immediately that they had an idea who had committed the crime. The Bernhardts had had trouble with a hired man, serious enough trouble that it had reached the point of police reports. In addition to that there were bloody fingerprints on the outside of the closet where Mrs. Bernhardt had died, large prints that appeared to have been made by a man’s hand. But the neighbors also told the newspapers—and presumably the police—that they had seen a strange man hanging around the Bernhardt farm for two or three days.
Edward P. Boyle, chief of detectives in Kansas City, took charge of the investigation. He was a veteran detective and a very savvy guy. Within hours, Boyle had changed the direction of the investigation. Inside the closet, which had been whitewashed, Boyle found the bloody prints from four fingers and a thumb of a man’s left hand. A section of the wall was cut out and taken to Kansas City. Inspector Boyle developed a list of all of the hired men who had worked at the Bernhardt house in recent months, so that their fingerprints could be compared to those found at the scene.
The pick axe was found in the barn, its handle covered in blood, and a button was found near two of the victims, a button probably from a man’s shirt, while none of the dead men was missing any shirt buttons. The head of the pick axe had apparently flown off during the last murder in the barn. A clock weight was found in the barn like the one used in the house to murder Mrs. Bernhardt. But the search of the house revealed a strong box in which the family’s money and their valuable papers had been kept. The box was undisturbed. Boyle studied the victims. The hired man and the 17-year-old visitor, he discovered, had been killed by a single blow to the head—but the Bernhardts had been savagely beaten, as if by someone who hated them.
This, by the way, is by far the earliest I have ever heard of this investigative insight, and I was entirely shocked to see this. In a modern police investigation, if one victim of a multiple homicide bore the main brunt of the attack, the police would immediately focus on this, since this would indicate anger directed at that victim. However, I had always believed that this insight came about in the age of the profiler, mid-1970s on. Here it is in a 1910 newspaper. Inspector Boyle states quite clearly that he now believes that revenge was the motive for the crime, not robbery, and that the reason for his belief is the level of violence directed at the two victims who lived on the farm, as opposed to those who were more transient.
A newspaper reports that "it was learned that on Wednesday, the day on which the murdered persons were last seen alive, a mysterious wagon was seen at the Bernhardt farm. This wagon contained three men. That afternoon neighbors heard screaming coming from the vicinity of the farm house. A short time after this the wagon containing the three men was driven rapidly away from the vicinity."
The story of the three men and the wagon and the screaming never comes back up after this first telling. It appears that Inspector Boyle simply ignored this story, treating it as a part of the excited gossip that frequently occurs after an event of this kind. The central puzzle of the crime, however, is how one murderer was able to overcome three adult men, given that those men were presumably awake, alert, and in possession of their faculties (presumably so, since they were found in the barn, rather than in their beds.) Even had the murderer had a gun, he couldn’t have done that. He would have had to put down the gun to hit somebody in the head with an axe, and this certainly would have provoked the other two men to fight or flee. If there were three people involved in the murder, that would explain how that could happen.
John Feagle had the next farm over from the Bernhardts. They didn’t get along. Feagle had caught the 17-year-old Tom Morgan setting traps on his property, and had run him off. Morgan said that George Bernhardt had told him it would be OK. Feagle went over to the Bernhardts and demanded to know why Bernhardt had given Morgan permission to set traps on his (Feagle’s) property. Bernhardt said that he hadn’t. Emeline Bernhardt came out, joined in the quarrel, and called Feagle a liar. That was the last time the Bernhardts had been seen alive.
Feagle was interviewed at length by Inspector Boyle and Kansas City Chief of Police H. T. Zimmer. Feagle told inconsistent stories, or anyway they said that he did. Feagle said that he had heard cries of distress from the Bernhardt home later that night, and had seen two hunters leaving the property. He recognized the men. On December 12, two days after the bodies were discovered, Feagle was arrested. After his arrest bloody overalls and bloody clothes were found, said the police, hidden in a closet on the second floor of his home.
If I could digress for a minute—alerting you in advance that Feagle will be cleared of the crime—note the use of this term, "hidden" or "concealed" in a closet in his home (both terms were frequently used in reporting the discovery of the clothes.) Do you remember the lantern that was found "hidden" in Howard Little’s barn? Feagle and his wife and his father said that wasn’t blood, that was paint; he had painted the barn red. As to the clothes being "hidden" in a second-floor closet, well.. . where would you expect to find them? Hanging in the entry way? Laid out on the kitchen table? Draped over the bannister? Isn’t a box in a second-floor closet about where you would expect to find soiled and useless clothing?
I am not anti-police; I am pro-police. I am all in favor of the police catching the bad guys and stringing them up by their murderous little thumbs, but I want to point out how easy it is for the police, once they decide that you committed a crime, to start shading the facts to make you look guilty. If the dirty clothes are found in the laundry basket, then the accused is in the process of cleaning up the evidence—just as Howard Little, scraping aimlessly at a lantern, is presumed by his accusers to have been trying to scrape blood off of it. The accused "gave contradictory stories"; the same was said about Howard Little—as it can always be said; the police can always say that you gave contradictory accounts of what happened or of where you were. Learning to filter that stuff out is essential to thinking clearly about the evidence in crime stories. These claims are meaningless shadings of the truth much more often than they are valid characterizations.
Police interviewed Feagle’s father. Feagle’s father acknowledged that Feagle had a temper, saying "He just gets crazy sometimes, he gets so mad," or something very close to that phrase. You might have said that about your own son or your own brother. Police reported to the newspapers that Feagle’s father had acknowledged that he was prone to periods of insanity. Several newspapers categorically identified Feagle in their stories as the man who had committed the murders.
Feagle was in custody for five days, which were very colorful and, were it not for the extreme gravity of the situation, almost comic. Feagle implicated a former hired hand, Sam Dailey, in the crime. Dailey was also arrested. A coroner’s jury was empaneled in Olathe, Kansas, county seat of Johnson County, on Tuesday, December 13. The coroner’s jury put Inspector Boyle in charge of the investigation—a legal formality, since he already was. Feagle testified in front of the panel, as did Dailey, some of the other former hired hands and the two men Feagle claimed to have seen hunting on Bernhardt’s property. Somehow they started talking about chicken-stealing. The Bernhardts had been troubled by somebody stealing their chickens, which was probably part of the reason they didn’t trust their neighbors. Feagle and the hired men started going back and forth, all of them claiming to have some reason to believe that it was the other guy who had been stealing chickens. It was sort of presumed that whoever had been stealing the chickens might also have been involved in the murders. This went on for two or three days, back and forth, until the jury panel announced that they’d heard as much about the chicken-stealing as they needed to hear. When you live that close to the Missouri state line, you should probably expect somebody to steal your chickens.
A third man, Walter Button, was arrested 150 miles away, and brought back to testify. The Bernhardts paid their hired men 70 cents a day, and they were difficult to work for. This led to rapid turnover at the hired man position. The police were trying to play the suspects off against one another, figuring that one of them or the other must have done it and if they could get them all talking the truth would come out. Dailey claimed that he had heard Feagle threaten to kill the Bernhardts. Button told stories about a woman who claimed to be Dailey’s wife. Gradually it became apparent that these guys were more blowhards than they were axe murderers.
On December 15, Kansas Governor Stubbs returned from an out-of-state trip, got off the train and announced to the reporters who greeted him a $250 reward for the arrest of the men responsible for "one of the most horrible crimes Kansas has ever had." Dailey was released on December 16. At that time it was also announced that the police were looking for "a tramp hired hand" who had been seen in the vicinity, a man with a "bull-dog face", reportedly wearing corduroy clothes.
Feagle was formally charged with the murders on December 15 and then, on December 17, exonerated and set free. Two theories about this: 1) the authorities may finally have tested the paint on those overalls and found that it was, in fact, paint, and 2) the filing of charges may have been a last-ditch effort to sweat a confession out of him. Nothing more was ever said about the overalls; one has to assume that if it was blood, Feagle would not have been released. The fingerprints didn’t fit anybody that the police could find.
"I didn’t kill them," Feagle told reporters after his release. "Only my gabby, foolish talk got me into this trouble. I’m not very bright. I don’t know how to look after myself and keep out of trouble." Asked if he was angry about his arrest, Feagle expressed his appreciation to the police for keeping him in safe custody during the time when it would not have been safe for him to be in the community.
The man in the corduroy suit was now considered the chief suspect in the murders. A railroad drifter named Harry Ryan—claiming to be named Harry Ryan--was arrested in Iola, Kansas, on December 17, after walking into a pool room and asking if they had any newspaper stories about the murders. He admitted to being in Olathe about ten days earlier, although he had no idea when exactly that was. Sherriff Steed went to Iola to question him about the case, and decided that he could not have committed the crime. The man with the corduroy suit and the bull-dog face was identified and arrested; he was named Albert Allen, arrested December 19 in Liberty, Missouri. He acknowledged being in the vicinity of the crime on the day before the murders, acknowledged that he had been a friend of the Bernhardts, and was arrested in possession of a watch inscribed with a "B" or an "R". He was released later in the same day, when he provided a solid alibi for the day of the crime.
After the release of Allen the crime essentially disappeared from the newspapers. On December 29, 1910, the Bernhardt farm and all of the property on it—the livestock, furnishings, farm equipment—was sold at a public auction attended by more than a thousand people. John Feagle was one of the first to arrive, and bought several items.
"With the sale," reported a wire service story, "probably what is the last chapter in the murder mystery was written, for the officers have no clew to the criminal." ("Clew" was the standard spelling of "clue" at that time.) Eighteen days after the murders were discovered, the property was disposed of, and the press declared the investigation at a standstill and the story finished.
They were not quite correct; even years later, it would occasionally come to light that Inspector Boyle or some other officer had travelled to Illinois or California to see whether a person in custody could be connected to the Bernhardt murders. In late December, 1911 (a year after the murders), a 22-year-old man named Charles K. Bowman was arrested in Indiana in connection with the crimes, and returned to Kansas City to face prosecution.
He was arrested with some fanfare. He was an unstable youth, had talked too much about the murders and seemed to have revealed knowledge of the murders, which he said he had been given by another person, the "real" murderer. Again, the newspapers all but pronounced him guilty. He was released on February 1, 1912, when it was established that he was in Louisiana on the day of the crime.
To a modern reader the speed at which the investigation was essentially abandoned is quite astonishing. As 21st century readers of crime stories we are accustomed to narratives of detectives who stick with an investigation through years and even decades of failure and frustration before ultimately unlocking the mystery. The idea of giving up on the investigation of a spectacular crime eighteen days in seems quite bizarre.
We tend to think of the modern world as fast-moving, things happen at the speed of electrons. In many ways this is true; in many ways it is untrue. I believe the owner of the Chicago Whales made the decision to build what is now Wrigley Field in January, 1914 (perhaps in December, 1913) and had it built by opening day. Many things happened a hundred years ago with what now seems like incredible speed.
Into the early 1950s, it was common for murder trials to be concluded within 120 days of the crime. There are numerous instances, into the early 1950s, of people who were executed within 120 days of a crime. The constitution guarantees the right to a speedy trial. The Warren Court, as an unintended consequence of well-intentioned decisions, reduced the speed of the process of justice from 80 MPH to 15. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, nor was it necessarily a good thing. Some thought might be given to the consequences of having a slow-moving justice system in a fast-moving world.
The newspaper story that I quoted about the end of the investigation said that "All persons who were held in connection with the case have now been released." This was not an absolute truth. Harry Ryan, the drifter arrested in Iola, remained in custody, although no longer connected to the case. Ryan remained in custody because nothing he said about his past could be checked out. He claimed to have worked several months the previous year in Marshalltown, Iowa, but no one in Marshalltown had ever heard of him. Police suspected that he was a career criminal, and held him for several weeks trying to figure out who he was and where he came from.
Lights had been seen in the Bernhardt house on Wednesday night, December 7. Boyle believed that the murders had been committed late Wednesday night or early Thursday morning. My opinion is that they most likely were committed earlier in the evening. I am guessing, right? I don’t want anyone to mistake this for anything more than conjecture. In December lamps would be burning in the house by 5 o’clock. A man doing his evening chores in the barn would be carrying a lantern. My belief is that the murderer hid in the barn and found the pick axe in the barn, where it naturally would be. One of the men, most likely the hired hand, came out to the barn to do his evening chores, milking the cows and feeding the chickens. The Man From the Train jumped out of the shadows and murdered him with the axe, then covered up his body with hay so that it could not readily be seen. After an hour or less George Bernhardt probably wondered what was taking the hired man so long to do his chores, and sent the 17-year-old out to check on him. The murderer waited until he had entered the barn, jumped out of the shadows and murdered the second victim, then covered him up with hay in the same manner.
The two people in the house may have heard and seen nothing at this point, or they may have heard something and thought "what was that?" The true horror of what they were dealing with was beyond anything they could imagine. When the second man did not return from the barn, the third man—probably George Bernhardt—went out to find out what in the Sam Hill was going on out there. He probably supposed that something in the barn had broken, and they were struggling to fix it. He probably left the door to his house unlocked. It would be extremely unusual for a Kansas farmer to lock the door to his house when he went out to check on something in the barn, unless he was truly alarmed.
If the murderer had been hiding out in the barn, watching the house, he probably knew how many people were in the house. When the third man was dead he probably knew there was no one left in the house but an old woman. George Bernhardt was hacked up more than the other victims because the murderer had time to do that. He knew there was no fourth man coming. The murderer looked around the barn for another weapon, after the head of the axe flew off, and found a pair of old clock weights. Now certainly alarmed and terrified, Emeline Bernhardt looked out the door and saw a large, dark figure striding toward the house with a bludgeon in his hand—or perhaps, 20 or 30 minutes later, she peeked anxiously out the window and saw someone crouching in the shadows. She ran desperately to the second floor and hid in a closet. After she was dead he looked around the house for things to steal, something small. A woman’s gold watch was reported missing from the scene. He probably took some towels to clean up with. In the middle of the night he walked back to the train line, hopped aboard a slow-moving freight train, and was hundreds of miles away before the bodies were discovered. This is my conjecture.
Of all of the crimes that will be a part of this series, this one had by far the most professional investigation—by far. Local officials immediately sought help from experienced investigators. Boyle, Steed and Zimmer did not waste time waiting for bloodhounds to chase some phantom or waiting for some spurious out-of-town expert to arrive. They preserved the crime scene—which was quite often not done at all, and in other cases was poorly done. They developed a list of suspects; they interviewed those suspects in an orderly fashion. They developed leads and worked them out. They realized early in the case that they were not dealing with a robbery, unlike several of the other cases, in which officials asserted that they were dealing with a robbery in the first hour of the investigation, and doggedly persisted in the belief that they were dealing with a robbery despite the complete absence of any evidence to sustain that theory. The Johnson County/Kansas City investigators started looking at the case as a robbery, but then backed off of that within hours.
Boyle clearly and immediately understood the significance of the killer’s fingerprints being left at the scene of the crime. This was 1910, at the very cusp of the fingerprint era. The public in 1910 had no knowledge or understanding of fingerprints, and most police agencies had little or no understanding of the significance of fingerprints in 1910; they would by 1914, but not in 1910. Probably the killer had no knowledge that leaving his fingerprints at the scene could lead to his conviction. Boyle was not exactly ahead of his time in picking this up, but he was ahead of most of the people in his field.
They had a plan as to how they were going to solve the case. They examined the crime scene in minute detail. They studied the clock weight which was one of the murder weapons so closely that they were able to determine that this weight had been used only to murder Emeline Bernhardt, not the other victims. No one else who investigated any of these crimes studied their crime scene as meticulously. They did accuse innocent persons of the crime, but they dropped those charges when they were unable to develop suitable evidence. They were persistent and determined, relative to the standards of the time. The only thing was, they just didn’t have anything to work with, and they ultimately failed to solve the crime.
Unrelated Notice
I’m going to move the publication of the Starting Pitcher Rankings to the end of the day on Thursday, rather than Thursday AM. I’ve been staying up late into the night on Wednesday nights to update the rankings, but it just tears hell out of my schedule; it takes me the rest of the week to get back on a "day" schedule, and it’s just not worth it. The rankings won’t be here Thursday morning. Hopefully, Thursday evening.