Bacon On The Table

not take it well. She had only been married to Charles Victor Sherman for just over a year, but she knew that he was a jealous man and did not want her to work. They'd been going around and around about it, and she'd been trying to find a good way to break the news to him. When the iceman, William Brock came around about ten am to make his daily delivery, Mamie was not at home. He found her a few doors down talking to a neighbor, and they

walked back to her house together. She seemed angry about something and remarked, there will be hell here again tonight. What do you mean The Iceman asked, and she told him about the job offer. He told her, you should just stay at home. Then Charlie makes money enough. I don't care what he thinks, she said. Brock noticed that the hatchet the Shermans normally kept near the ice box was not in its usual spot. He didn't see it anywhere. Mamie did not have to worry about how to break

the news to Charlie. You already knew Sherman was a Sherman was a switchman at the ch and d Yard in Hamilton, Ohio, a few blocks from where they lived at four to one seven Sycamore Street, just around the corner from where Alfred Knapp had strangled his wife Hannah

in her sleep two years earlier. About two pm on the afternoon of August twenty fourth, nineteen oh four, two days after Maymie's thirty first birthday, and a week after Napp had paid the price for his crime in the electric chair at the Ohio State Penitentiary, Sherman was working in the yard when he received a message from the chief dispatcher in Dayton, Joe Hoffman, asking if Mamie would consider taking a job as the second operator at the

Hamilton station instead of going to Glendale. He knew from the message that Mamie had gone behind his back looking for work, and he didn't like that. For one thing, her ex husband, Charles Steddding, was a telegraph operator at the Glendale station, and he didn't want her being around him. He didn't want her to be around any other man. She was his wife now, and he insisted that she would keep his house. He made a good seventy five dollars a month, sometimes more. There was no need for

her to work. Sherman would later say, I walked up to the telegraph office and told the operator that I could answer that message myself and say no, she couldn't work. He then walked the block to their house and found Mamie standing at the back fence talking to a neighbor, Mabel Bunning. He asked her, why do you persist in wanting to work when you know I don't want you to. She said, we need the money, and the twenty five dollars would be as good for me as for anybody.

He shouted at her, I can't keep you from working. If you go over there, you will be working for yourself. He wanted to fuss some more, but he heard his train coming from the south. They would talk about this later. He told her, Yeah, work to do. He ran to catch the trae and rode across the belt line to the Champion Coated paper Mill. There will be trouble here tonight, Mamie told missus Bunting. So she decided to cook a nice dinner of his favorite foods, fried bacon and stewed corn.

She had the table nicely set and placed a cloth over the dishes on the table to await his arrival. Mamie was a pretty brunette, but a big girl, a muscular five feet nine inches one hundred and seventy pounds. Her neighbors knew or as a good housekeeper who kept their home neatly furnished and immaculately clean, always in the best of order. Born Eva May Connery and Buyer's Junction, Jackson County, Ohio, her father was the postmaster and station agent.

She picked up the nickname Mamie at age twelve and started using it as her proper name. She was married briefly to a boy named Dobbs at sixteen, but returned home a month later, and before she turned seventeen. Her father trained her in the telegraphy trade. When she was twenty four, she came to Cincinnati to work. She married Charles Stettings, a coworker at the Eighth Street Telegraph Office.

They were happy for a few years. Then she took a job at the Hamilton Depot and found a room in a boarding house on Fourth Street, between Sycamore and Ludlow. There she met Charles Sherman. Stettings agreed to an amical divorce. He and Mami got along well, but he could see that she was infatuated with this other man and he did not want to impede her happiness. Mami and Charles Sherman married on June seventeenth, nineteen o three. They were

both thirty years old. Steadings helped her pack and moved to Hamilton in a house at East Avenue in Chestnut Street. The Shermans moved to the Sycamore Street house on January twenty first, nineteen oh four, and that's when their troubles started. As neat and tidy as Mamie was, Sherman demanded more. While changing clothes one night after work, he berated her about the sloppy way she made the bed. If you don't like it, find yourself someplace else to sleep, she said.

As she stormed down the stairs. She snapped, I'm getting tired of you anyhow. If you don't leave, I might. Sherman finished changing his clothes and followed her to find she had locked herself in the kitchen. He went out the front door and walked around the house to come in through the back door. As he walked in, she brandished a poker at him. What are you going to do with that, he demanded. I'm going to kill you if you lay hands on me. She yelled. What have

I done that you treat me like this? He asked. I'm tired of the way you treat me, she said, putting down the poker and sitting in a chair, exasperated, You're always finding fault with me. Sherman went to her, got on his knees and asked her not to leave him. He told her that they got along together and he would do more to help her out, sweet talking until he got her in a better mood. Then they went upstairs for sex, but she was still distant and didn't

speak to him for the rest of the night. Along about May and June, Sherman's mother, Mary, came for a long visit, but she and Mamie didn't get along. They eventually came to blows. Sherman was walking home after work, and as he turned the corner onto Sycamore Street, Mami came running out of the house. She cried, vic, either me or your mother's got to leave for good. She hit me over the head with the club we're at, Sherman asked suspiciously. She pulled the hair back off her forehead. Well,

I don't see anything. Well, either she goes or I do, Mamie said. In recounting the story later, at his trial for his wife's murder, Sherman said that he reassured her that if anyone would go, it would be his mother. As much as he loved his mother, he said his loyalty would always be to his wife. When they got back in the house, Sherman asked his mother about the trouble. Mother laid it all on Mamie, saying that they got

into a fuss about how to beat a carpet. She said Mamie pushed her down and hit her with the club, breaking her arm. He examined it. The arm was bruised, so Sherman took her to see a doctor, and then called his brother ed in Indiana to come and get

their mother take her back home. While Mami busied herself making some of her husband's favorite foods in the hope of mending the rift between them and getting his permission to take the job, Sherman got the engine back in his house and got back to the yard about five thirty pm. He confronted the telegraph operator, Campbell. What did my wife telegraph to Hoffman, he asked. Campbell said he did not know that he was in the baggage room.

When she answered, Sherman gave Campbell a tearing out for helping his wife look for work, told him to mind his own business. When his shift ended at six pm, he went straight home, eager to put an end to this nonsense. Mamy did not come out to meet him as she usually did, and that just made him matter. He walked around back and entered through the kitchen door, took off his coat and shoes, and put on his

house slippers. He started across the kitchen to wash up at the sink and heard his wife call out from the parlor asking if he was ready for supper. Not yet, he shouted back. He dried his hands and walked into the dining room just as Mamie walked in the other door. Are you ready for supper? She asked again? Not yet, he said again, well, hurry up, she said she wanted to go to the Eagles picnic at Lindenwall Park. He

wanted to finish the fuss he had started earlier. Why do you persist in wanting to work when you know I don't want you to, he asked her again, exactly as he had that afternoon. Did you give him an answer? Yes, she said, I'm taking the job and it's none of your business. I told you not to work, he said, now,

I will show you. During his confession in the hospital later that night, perhaps before he had time to think about illegal defense, Sherman told Least Chief Sip that she didn't say anything, but gave him a look that he took as a sneer, and that was all he could take. He hit her in the face with his fist as hard as he could. Mami fell to the dining room floor, and he went after her, striking her again and again in the face until he felt it in his knuckles.

Then he started to choke her. She kicked and sputtered, and after a long, painful moment, he let her go while he paced the floor fuming. She struggled to her feet. Before she could get all the way up, Sherman picked up one of the oak dining room chairs and struck her with it. She went back down, and he hit her with the chair until it broke into pieces. In this version of his story, Sherman was still boiling and stormed out of the house and to the coal shed

out back. He grabbed a hatchet and came back into the dining room. Mamie was leaning back in a corner between the dish closet and the clothes closet. He struck her on top of the head. When she fell forward, he hit her again at the base of her skull. The corner would later say that either of the blows would have been sufficient, but Sherman was still in a rage.

He said he did not remember taking a pocket knife from his work pants, nor stabbing his wife several times in the back, nor rolling her over to slash each side of her throat. He said he did not remember taking the knife to himself. The battle in the Sherman's dining room had caused enough of a ruckus to attract the neighbors, and missus Eee ran to the home of Mayor Charles Bosch on South fourth Street to block away, just next door to the house where Alfred Knapp strangled

his wife. The mayor and his wife were sitting on the porch and watched missus Eee run past the house, coming to a sudden stop when she realized she had passed her destination and turned around excitedly telling the mayor that her neighbor was either killing or had killed his wife. Bosh grabbed his coat and hat and ran ahead of

missus Eely. He knocked at the front door of the Sherman home, but the house was dark and no one answered, so he went to the side door and then tried the windows, all the time trying to get the attention of someone inside. He went all the way around to the kitchen door, who was unlocked, but just as Boss turned the knob and started to push it open, Jack Walsh, one of the neighbors in the crowd that had gathered around the yard, said don't go in there, Mayor, you

don't know what might happen. I'd stay out. It sounded like good advice, so Bosh asked where he could find a telephone. Next door, said someone else, and without looking for a gate, Boss jumped the fence, went directly inside and called up police headquarters and ordered a wagon with as many officers as were available, without giving any details. But the alarm had already been raised, and when Bosh returned to the Sherman House, patrolman Joe Kramer and John

Dooley had just derived. Bosh told Dooley to cover the back door while he and Kramer went in the front. The parlor was empty, the dining room, curtains drawn, was empty and in total darkness. Dooley came in from the kitchen, paused his eyes adjusting. Bosch spied a pair of legs lying alongside the dining room table. Here it is boys, strike a match, he said, as he fished one out of his pocket. He and Cramer both lit matches, enough light for them to see a man lying in a

pool of blood, apparently dead. In the opposite corner, a woman was sitting on the floor, leaning back against the wall, definitely dead. Her hair disheveled and matted with gore partly covered her face, but he could see her mouth hanging open. Dripping blood, her hands folded in her lap, her clothes were soaked, her dress drawn up to her knees, and the walls surrounding her streaked and splattered with blood nearly

to the ceiling. Maimie Sherman's injuries were frightful. Her face was a battered mass of bone and bruised tissue, her nose mashed in even with the blackened eye sockets, and her right eye dangling on her cheek. Long gashes marred the top and back of her head. The post mortem would reveal she had four fractures of the skull, any one of which could have caused death, along with seven knife wounds in her back under the right shoulder blade

and a slash on each side of her throat. Her arms were blue from the elbow down, probably from trying to deflect blows. Her hands slashed and stabbed through as if she had grabbed the blade. As Mayor Bosh took in the horror, he heard the rumble of the police ambulance coming up in front of the house. He also heard the voice of Charles Sherman saying, isn't this a nice thing to walk into? Just then, Police Chief Jacob's Sip and police surgeon doctor William C. Houston entered the

room with lanterns. The doctor took charge of the scene, putting pressure on Sherman's profusely bleeding wounds. See what jealousy will do. The bleeding man said, this happened because I didn't want her to take a job she was well provided for, but she just wouldn't listen to me. Coroner Thomas D. Shark He soon arrived, pronounced Mamy Sherman dead and instructed the drivers to take her remains to Albert

Wagner's morgue on Ludlow Street. Before they carried his body out, Charles Sherman told Chief Sip, I hit her with my fist, I hit her with a chair, and then I hit her with a hatchet. The chief asked, did you use a knife? Sherman replied, I think I did. Doctor Houston accompanied Sherman on the ride to Mercy Hospital, keeping his hands on the dead man's throat wounds. Is my wife, he asked? Yes. Houston said she's dead, then there's no sewing me up. He said, I might as well be

dead too, Yes, you might as well be dead. The doctor said, they'll get you Anyhow, Sherman looked down at his hands covered with blood and clumps of his wife's hair matted with gore. When the ambulance arrived at the hospital, he handed the clump over to an attendant. In the good light of the hospital, Doctor Houston took inventory of Sherman's wounds, finding them not as serious as they first appeared. Five stabs in the left breast over the heart, and

a puncture wound on each side of the throat. Although there was a lot of blood, the cuts were all shallow and none of them serious. After his wounds were dressed, Coroner shark He ordered that he'd be placed in a strait jacket to keep from from doing more damage to himself. At ten pm, Chief SIPs summoned police clerk Frank Clements to take down Charles Victor Sherman's confession. Sherman's attorneys, Bickley and Bickley made the unusual decision to claim the brutal

murder was an act of self defense. Attorney U. F. Bickley always referred to the victim by her birth name, Eva May Connery, and called witnesses, some from her hometown of Buyers Station and some former co workers, who said that she was a woman of high temper, of a violent quarrelsome disagreeable disposition, and of questionable moral character. According to the Hamilton Daily Republican, there were animations that she drank to excess, but objections to that sort of testimony

were consistently sustained. No one testified to the contrary. Other witnesses testified as to the upright character and even temperament of Charles Victor Sherman, that he was a perfect gentleman, known as a peaceable, quiet and law abiding citizen, though most of them admitted under cross examination that they did not know anything about the defendant's home life nor his relationship with the victim. During his testimony, Sherman told a story that matched his earlier confession until he got to

the part about their dining room showdown. Mami was impatient because she wanted to go to the Eagle's picnic, and when he brought up the subject of the job, she struck him on the nose with her fist, then picked up a poker from the stove and came at him swinging. He caught a blow on his arm and she swung it again. This time he grabbed it and punched her in the face. They exchanged blows again and she fell to the ground. He grabbed her by the throat and told her to drop the poker. I won't drop it

until I kill you with it. She croaked, and he tightened his grip until she dropped it. When he let her go, she ran to the sideboard and grabbed a straight razor. They wrestled over that for a while, and he finally got it away from her and put it back in the drawer. While he was doing that, she grabbed the hatchet from the ice chest and came at

him again. He grabbed one of the kitchen chairs to protect himself, but then she made as if to throw the hatchet, so he swung the chair at her, but missed, and the chair shattered to pieces against the stove. Mamie swung the hatchet at him again and connected with a glancing blow to the side of his head. He succeeded in knocking it out of her hand, and when he went to retrieve it, she picked up the poker again. He testified quote, she started at me, and when I

grabbed her, shoved into the corner. Her head struck a door jam and she sank to the floor. I took out my knife, cut my throat on one side, and went out on the porch and called missus Bunning. Then I went back into the room cut my throat on the other side, and that's the last thing I remember. Sherman testified that he could not remember anything that happened after attempting to cut his own throat, neither in the

home nor in the hospital. He said that coroner's shark he came to him the next day with a typewritten piece of paper, and that he said was his statement. Sherman said he refused to sign it, and his legal counsel advised him not to say anything else until the trial, and that's why he never mentioned that his wife attacked him, and he was only defending himself. During cross examination, his most frequent answer was I don't remember, particularly in regard

to his earlier confessions. He did not remember seeing the corner that night and did not remember talking to the chief of police in the presence of a stenographer. He denied ever striking his wife over the head with the chair and denied having struck her with the hatchet. He could not account for the cuts on her back and throat.

The Daily Republican News wrote quote remarks dropped in the course of the cross examination and afterward by persons present, seemed to show that the general impression was that Sherman's story, while well adhered to, was rather thin unquote. The defense called doctor G. A. Herman to the stand to testify about tending to the broken arm of Mary Sherman, who he guessed was sixty five to sixty eight years old.

The mother only testified through deposition. Doctor Herman said that he was dressing it as he would any ordinary fracture, and overheard Maimie and Charles fussing that settles it. He heard made me say, I am not going to live with you. If anyone leaves, it will be mother, Sherman said. Sherman had the doctor make arrangements to send the old woman to the hospital in Oxford, where another of her

sons would pick her up. The jury deliberated for five hours, rendering a verdict of guilty of second degree murder, having found no proof of premeditation. Charles Victor Sherman received a life sentence for the murder of his wife, but he did not stay in jail long. He was never granted another trial, but his friends and family lobbied hard to

have him pardoned. In nineteen eleven, just six years after his conviction, Ohio Governor Harmon named Charles Victor Sherman his Thanksgiving pardon as the result of a plea submitted by his family and endorsed by several well known Indiana politicians, including the sitting lieutenant governor and a former congressman. The press release announcing his pardon was filled with factual airs and painted the man in quite a different light than

the reports of his arrest and trial. Describing the murder thus quote, one evening, he attempted to caress her, and she struck him. A quarrel ensued, during which he picked up a chair and felled her. The blow killed her unquote. The conviction, the press release said, was the consequence of the backlash over the crimes committed by the strangler, Alfred Knapp. Quote.

Sherman's trial occurred when the public mind was inflamed, and as a consequence, he was convicted of a more serious degree than he would have been at some other time, it said. The evening journal reported that local officials quote did not look upon the part Garden with much favor, Sherman did not come back to Hamilton. By the time World War I came around, Sherman was out of prison and registered for the draft. At the time, he was living with his sister in Lansing, Michigan, and working for

an autobody company. He had already served in the infantry for seven months in eighteen ninety eight during the Spanish American War. It's not clear whether he saw any action, but he did enter a home for disabled veterans in Los Angeles in nineteen twenty eight, citing asthma and poor hearing when he was fifty five years old. Two years later, during the nineteen thirty census, he was living in a

military home in Montgomery County, Ohio. Sherman died at age eighty in nineteen fifty three in Los Angeles, California, and is buried in the Veterans section of the National Cemetery there. Mm HM pull com