FILTHY MURDERS OF YE OLDE ROCHESTER-Michael Benson

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a transient. The husband was released in favor of a preferable suspect, a damaged young tramp who had been floating around the neighborhood looking for food. In the second story, a woman's husband's head was almost severed, and she was told that he had borrowed from her former husband a very sharp razor and cut his own throat in a suicide. In another story, the resort town of Charlotte where the rich went to play along the crystal clear waters of

Lake Ontario at night. It was where the pickpockets and the thugs went to fleece drunks who still had money in their pockets. After our victim checks into a hotel for the night, complaining he'd been mugged, he dies overnight from brain swelling. But who bunked him on the head. The answer seems to come the next day, when a man is going around trying to sell the victims watch. In another story, Brother Kills Brother. The book spans the last years of the gallows in Monroe County and the

first of the new fangled electric chair. The book that we're featuring this evening is Filthy Murders of Ye Old Rochester, Monroe County Homicide in the Era of Jack the Ripper, with my special guest historian and author Michael Benson. Good evening and welcome back to the program. Michael Benson, how you doing Dan.

behind my house and never came back. It was the first day of summer vacation, the night of graduation at the high school, and they were missing for a month and their bodies were found in a field to the west of my dad's property and they disappeared from the swimming hole which was almost directly behind my house. So then they were found horribly butchered. It was a Jack the Ripper type prime with sexual mutilation and parts removed, implied cannibalism, all of the Jack the Ripper trademarks, and

it changed my life horribly. And when I grew up I became a true crime writer. Not a coincidence, Yes, I wrote a couple of books that took place in Rochester, Betrayal and Blood and Killer and Killer Twins, and then went back and teamed up with a private detective in the mom of one of the victims who was still alive at the time, and we, as they say in podcast land, we propelled the investigation into a startling new direction.

So it's good as good I sort of. I put a band aid at least on a wound from my childhood with that book, and it became very popular in Rochester. They wanted to know what I was going to do for an encore, so I wrote Nightmare in Rochester about the double initial murders that took place there between nineteen seventy one and seventy three, still one of my most popular books. And then after that we took on cold

cases and those turned into mosquito. Point wrote in Rochester's Most Startling Crimes, And during my stint as a cold case investigator, I was very unhappy and wore me down emotionally because I was dealing with brieving loved ones and

some seriously bad people that I was investigating. So in order to get myself an emotional break and to still please by Rochester audience, I decided to write about nineteenth century Rochester murders, which are every bit is juicy, but I don't have to feel bad about it and have trouble getting to sleep, and I went to write about them absolutely.

assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He knew John Wilkes booth I was in London and frequented the dirty streets of Whitechapel for unsavory purposes at the time of the Ripper murders, and he was arrested as a suspect before being released for lack of evidence and then fleeing back to America. And what's always pointed out is that the murder started

soon after he arrived and stopped when he left. Now December eighteen eighty eight, word got back to Rochester that Tumbley was a jack the Ripper suspect and a fellow named Edward Haywood of the Bureau of Accounts in the State Department in Washington, DC. He's our primary source on all things Tumbley. He had an uncanny ability to run into this guy in different contexts throughout his life, so

I remember him very well. Used to run about the canal in Rochester, dirty, awkward, ignorant, uncared for good for nothing boy about eighteen fifty five, he encountered Tumbley in Detroit, where Tumbley was pretending to be a doctor. To say that Tumbley had no medical training wasn't quite true. He worked briefly with an abortion in venereal disease doctor named Lis Bernard in a downtown rocket office in the Reynolds Arcade, but the only known responsibility he had in the doctor's

office was sweeping the floors. We know because a patient undergoing an abortion died and Tumbley was arrested, but he was quickly released and it was said that he wasn't really involved. In eighteen sixty four, he's in Brooklyn, New York. He's charged with fraud for selling snake oil, selling twenty dollars bottle of booze that's supposed to cure people's asthma, seven years before the Whitechapel murders. In eighteen eighty one, he's in New Orleans, gets arrested for picking of pockets.

Now amazingly, Heywood cross paths with Tumbledy on a third time, this time in Washington, d C. Where Tumbley was dressed in a bogus military fatigue uniform and claiming to be on a general staff now. He was arrested in Whitechapel at the time of the murders. They're charged with gross indecency after an incident involving a male sex worker. Records show that he was not in jail at the times any of the jactor for murders, and when he fled

England the murders stopped. He was later found to have in his possession a collection of women's uteruses fascination with parts. As they say, he fits the Ripper profile in some ways. His wife worked as a sex worker, so he may have had a grudge against people practicing prostitution. He was a hater of women, with some medical knowledge sold pornography. I'm an Aaron Kasminsky fan. I think he was the best suspect of the time of the murders. But Tumbley's

a good one. No evidence that he was a killer by nature, but he was certainly weird and a horrible man, and he was there in Whitechapel when everything happened. He died in nineteen oh three and is buried in Rochester, New York, in Holy Spical Cemetery.

I felt like I was peeling back changes in time and looking at the way things used to be. You know,

no radio, no TV. When there's a murder, the way people find out is because little kids would run up and down the street shouting murder on Hayward Avenue like town criers and crowds would gather at crime scenes because that was the major form of entertainment on that particular roads are not the major thoroughfares railroads and the Eerie Canal, or the major thoroughface of the Canal goes right through

downtown Rochester at that time. Today and for many years even before I was born, they diverted it so it now goes around the southern border of the city of Rochester, not through downtown. But at the time they needed the canal to deliver goods and to take goods out. In terms of crime fighting, well, the first thing I noticed was that once a bullet went into a body, it

tended to stay there. I mean, we're used to having X ray machines handy in hospitals and they can take a picture, locate the bullet, and then take the bullet out. Doctors had no clue where the bullet was, and sometimes trying to find the bullet would hurt the patient more than leaving it there. In one case, in filthy murders,

the victims injuries are not thought serious at first. The guy's take it to the police station rather than to the hospital, and he has to moan and slump before somebody thinks to pull up his shirt and there's a gaping wound. There very little consideration given to the rights of the accused. System in which authorities can railroad someone whenever they want to, not that that always happened, but they always could if they wanted to. There was no

obviously no miranda rights. In the book's featured story, the prisoners kept isolated in the women's jail, which is otherwise empty, which because this set's a sign of the times as well, no women prisoners at the time. And he's refused a lawyer, and what he's asked. He asked to talk to somebody with legal knowledge. They tell him to talk to the district attorney, and the district attorney tells him, if you don't confess now, you're going to be executed. So what

do you think he does now? In the courtroom, I was pleased to find that things are not that different from there the way they are today. The key difference was there's no recording equipment in the courtroom, so every newspaper plus the court itself had multiple stenographers taking shorthand during testimony, and those squiggles were later transcribed and published, which made research ridiculously simple in some cases for me.

Now in the world without TV or radio or movies even hadn't been invented yet, the murder cases became the primary sources of entertainment for the residents of the city and everything that has to do with the crime, the funerals, the court hearings, everything. Crowd control is always an issue because a lot of people in Rochester in eighteen eighty eight had nothing better to do than to want to be the first to find out the news when it came to the most recent horrible thing that had happened.

couple moved, the other did two the relationships. If you ask them about the relationship of the foursome, they always used the word intimate, which maybe wasn't intentional, but it's a word that's filled with dynamite, and it just implies, and dirty minded people applies all sorts of things. The story came out that Isabella Jones had once visited the Stone House, which she did most days, and when she left, she left behind a shoe, and that forgotten shoe became

Rochester symbol. But they were certain was a pit of depravity in the Stone House.

That there wasn't in this case. It wasn't announce of evidence to support any of it, but the community's beliefs always was there, and it didn't helped that these Stones were showbiz types Missus Stone was a singer with the Rochester Opera Company that appeared in the Musketeers, and her husband was in the course, and that was how they met. And do show people had a reputation for not being the most Christian and moral.

there's a pond in a woods. The Alonzo is an industrious young mechanic, the wife's good looking, and they've only been living in that house since May. And of course the Joneses moved so they could be nearby. The police

noticed that the cottage was somewhat isolated. The nearest building was one hundred and fifty feet away rather and there was a house nearby where the construction crew had been working, and that was where mister Stone had been working that day, so he was never very far away from the house. The body of Missus Stone was found on the dirt cellar floor. She'd been interrupted while doing the laundry. A bag had been tied very tightly around her neck with

a single knot. Under the right ear was a flower sack blood stained. Detectives assumed the sack must have been one of the items eight had washed that day, because there was not a trace of flour found inside it. The body was dressed in ordinary working clothes, which were soiled with sand, coal and charcoal, mostly things you would find on the floor of the cellar, and the soiling significantly was on both the victim's inner and outer clothing on.

Her hair had been pulled out of its dew or loose hair pins in it, and her clothes were all still on, but her dress and skirt had been pulled up somewhat. Her head was lying on its right side facing left, and body was on its back. Right arm was stretched out towards the west, over her head hand clenched. This will give you an idea of the euphemistic manner which newspapers reported the facts back then. It's a quote

the left leg. The left leg was flexed slightly at the knee, and the right leg was flexed nearly at a right angle, so in other words, her legs were open. Face was discolored as dirty yellow color, eaches were swollen, tongue protruded slightly bloody froth exuding from the mouth. There was a puddle of blood under her head, mostly coming from a large gash down to the bone on the

right side of her forehead at the hairline. There was no blood on the victim's hands, but there was bruising around the forehead wound, which the detectives asked made it to be about three inches from her eye. The wound appeared to have been made by a roundish blunt instrument. Mister Stone was promptly jailed. Alonzo was taken and put in a cage. Their son, Raymond, was whisked away by relatives and he was arrested basically because police figured the

husband always did it. Nobody else cared enough to kill the woman.

indictment package. What happens after Alonzo Stone is arrested is that there is there's a meeting held in the town, an indignation meeting they called it, and it was led by a fellow named Professor Coates, the learned Professor co It's a theological scholar, and he holds this meeting in a church, and they decide that it's ridiculous that Alonso has been put in jail for this shocking and horrible crime. Could not possibly have been committed by any by a Rochesterian.

That's out of the question. Rochester was too Christian and moral for anything like this to have occurred one of them. And they kind of stormed the police station and the next morning the crowd into the courtroom chant and the judge says, well, there's really no evidence that Alonzo did it, so they let him go. Now Coats had the year

of the Press by that time. The voice from the press all standing around scribbling notes, and he reminded them and all Rochesterians that the gross cornfields and nurseries on the outskirts of the city were infested by scores of tramps, whose only visible means of support is theft. Authorties heard that, and a light bulb went on over their head. Now there's an idea, a tramp, a no good, dirty tramp

that fit the bill. But they went looking for tramps and arrested the woman who was too slow to run away.

as an infant. He had a caved in ribcage, had trouble breathing, had one side of his face was badly battered, nearly one eye no longer faced in the right direction, gave people the creeps, and he was scrawny, and he looked like a fellow who mostly crept around here, a funny way of shuffling when he walked, probably also due to childhood injuries. And he looked like he was trying

to avoid confrontations rather than start them. The thing that he had going against him was that he was a tramp, He was an outsider, and he admitted being in the area at the time of the murder. The primary piece of evidence against him at the trial was his confession, when he repeated a few times because he was told that he would be executed if he didn't confess, during which time he said he entered the stone house seeking food, ran into an angry aid of Stone who called him

names and tried to push him out. He angered and hit her over the head with his stick. He choked her until she was unconscious, and maintained through all of his confessions that he never intended to kill her and never never planned to sexually attack her. He admitted to

dumping her in the basement. He later claimed that the confession was false and that he'd been told that confessing was the only way to save his life, and that he'd been put in solitary finement for weeks, denied a lawyer, and pretty much brainwashed into believing that this was the best thing he could do was to admit to the crime.

The trouble was that his confession had details in it that only the police and the killer could know, and when he eventually went to trial and denied that the confession was real, they asked him, how did you know the details, and he said, well, it's easy to fake a confession. They would ask me a question like did you move the baby carriage off the trap door before pulling the ring and opening it? That was a typical

question on future statements. Deacons always used the ring in the trap door and the baby carriage and his detailed descriptions, and eventually he got it to the point where he could pretty much describe in a vague way the inside of the stones house. One thing he got wrong in which they never called him on because that was the last thing they wanted to do, was the stick. He hit missus Stone with the stick. That the murder weapon was a squared off steak was designed to be pounded

into the ground. And Deacons and all of his confessions said that it was just a branch that he'd found lying on the ground, so and he didn't know what he did with it afterwards, when the actual killer had put the had put the stake behind the stove right there in the stone house. If you take if you take out the confession, and in today's court, that confession would not be allowed into evidence in a million years. He did it without legal representation, without knowing his rights,

misknowing his rights, and you've taken away the confession. The evidence against him was flimsy. Prosecution maintained that Deacon's put in knowledge of the crime. The murderer could know and therefore he had to have done it. And women claiming to be Deacon's mother and sister arrived at the trial. Of course, the trial's a circus, the only entertainment in town. These two women show up saying that they're the tramp's

mom and sister. They are angrily greeted by the people of Rochester because this was a boy whose life was ruined before he was one years old. He'd been horribly beaten, and nobody knew exactly what mom and sis had to do with that, but they weren't greeted warmly, and to show up at well the kids on trial murder while leaving him to tramp around from age ten to sixteen. This struck everybody as despicable.

and never again is publicly mentioned. In any context. But part of the story that didn't make it into the book was an article ran in the Rochester Sunday Herald Tember eighteenth, eighteen eighty seven. The Sunday Herald was not associated with the Weekday Herald. It it was kind of a scandal sheet that came out on Sunday sensationalists, and the paper included publication of something purporting to be the

Autobiography of Edward Deakins. Was a weird poem in which the writer confessed to killing Missus Stone, and though no one had seen the original, the copy read like a dime novel, pulpy and purple and not nothing like one would expect a sixteen year old boy to right. The so called autobiography contained many adventures, a harrowing accident at sea, a visit to the South complete with conversation in dialogue, a dialect like in Huckleberry Finn. There were rapes as perpetrator,

attempted rapes as victim, and two murders. The other transient characters in the story had nicknames like four Track, Whitey, Albany Read Syracuse Charlie, and Troy Shorty. Well, there was no way you could believe at all, and some of it was clearly obviously fiction. But that particular Sunday paper sold out, and the next Sunday they reprinted it and sold out a second time. But it contained details of sex crimes men and women of Rochester had never heard before.

Reminded me of the Arthur Shawcross trial, which was on live TV in Rochester, and a lot of Rochesterians got certain concepts in their mind for the very first time listening to that trial.

to that. Specifically, deacons saw a man with a strange walk and oddly an odd eye, a good eye and a bad eye. That would have been evidence that you say, okay, well it's him. But he's pretty specific in his appearance, and yet all of the descriptions by the eyewitnesses pretty vague.

never occurred to him. So he went rather quietly into that good night.

can't stop laughing. And the laughter is heard throughout the throughout the jail and the adjacent police station, and it's given people, you know, really weirding people out. And finally he stops, and you know, one of the guys from the press is what's so funny. He says, well, I never did it, And some people thought that was, you know,

one of his final denials of hitting the crime. But E and others thought that he was confessing to being a virgin and that the attempted attack on missus Stone had been unsuccessful and that was what he was really feeling bad about. But I don't know, I don't know about that.

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your insides. Get twenty percent off your first month for a limited time at ritual dot com slash murder Start Ritual or adds Symbolic Plus for your subscription today. That's ritual dot com slash murder for twenty percent off. Now, Michael, let's talk about the next chapter. The Murder of Charles Demico December twenty third, eighteen ninety one.

always smoky, and there was especially at night. Everything was was smoky and dark. Anyway, it's December twenty thirty, eighteen ninety one, and Charles Demico and his wife Mary, they're a poor couple. They have three kids, all from Mary's previous circumstances back when she was named Mary Culin, and they lived downtown on Pinnacle Avenue, which is now known as South Clinton Avenue. Both worked different shifts, so missus Demico would leave the house in the morning when Charles

was getting home from the graveyard shift. Now on this morning, Charles twice sends out two of the girls to the corner saloon, once with a diamond, once with a nickel, and they returned with jars of four and then two fingers of whiskey. So Dimko's habit is to drink after he gets home from work, which coincides with the girls getting ready to go to school. Now, he was just

at the smack and the kids around stage. He did drink all of his whiskey and was flapping him upside the head tell him to hurry up to get to school, when he complained of a headache and he laid down in the master bedroom. Now, while Mary and the kids were away, Charles was almost beheaded by a razor sharp blade.

There was so much blood that it hit so the bed dripped to the bedroom floor formed a river that ran into the hall, down to the end of the hall, to the stairs, and then down the stairs, and a pool of blood was forming on the main floor at the base of the stairs. It's amazing how much blood is inside one human body. And the force of the blade had been so strong that it cut all the way through the neck and sliced into the pillow under

Domiko's head. Victims windpipe and jugular were severed. Now, when the people downstairs saw the river of blood, they ran screaming to the nearby home of the homeowner of Pella named William Cargus, and the landlord went into the house found the body. He ran out to fetch a doctor and then halfway changed his mind and instead went to Bender and Shaman's undertaking rooms to find a corner. Now, hands down the funniest killer in the book is Jacob Wolfschlager.

He was Mary's previous husband from him she'd never divorced. She told police that he'd gone away and she thought he was dead, but that turned out to be on Tree's true. She'd been married to Domiko and to wolf Schlager by the same preacher who had been told that wolf Schlager was dead. Wolf Schlager had said he was going to go out west, which in eighteen eighty eight

meant Minnesota. He got a job there, and he was still sending Mary money because she was his wife, And although he seemed to take it well, he was none too pleased to hear that she'd married Damika, telling people that she was a widow, and she replaced him in her bed with a younger man. Now, the funny part is wolf Schlager spoke a torture German that even German speaking translators didn't get, and his English was so bad

they didn't communicate well that way either. Now, as the corner arrived on the scene, wolf Schlager was dancing around screaming he killed himself. He killed himself now the guy's actually practically beheaded. But little by little Barty's figured out that Mary was a big a mist, but she said it was okay because wolf Schlager had a previous wife he'd never divorced, so he was a big a miss too,

and fair, it's fair. Early in the investigation, a cop asked Mary how old wolf Schlager was and she said sixty three years old, much older than me. But I dare say he has a vigor appearance of a younger man.

interview with the twelve year old. She says that our areas in the house that have been taped off, and they're only allowed to go to the places that aren't. So she gives him an interview and gives him a little background and more facts that don't jive at all with Mary was saying when she first talked to police.

So the anecdote understand though, when we learned that years later, two of Mary's daughters, and we don't know if one of them was marry or not the twelve year old, but two of Mary's daughters were arrested for vagrancy and immorality. So yeah, I guess the notion of constantly looking for the next husband who will pay the bills even increased in the next generation of girls and Mary's daughters.

accidentally cut his head off. Yeah, that was the story police, even eighteen eighty eight, they knew that wasn't right, But eventually I think they figured it out that that Wold Schlager, although seemingly a genial guy who was getting along with everybody, there was a time before he went west when he and Mary and Charles all lived in the same apartment while he and Mary were man and wife, and Charles

was the border. And of course he suspects that when he went away to work, you know, they were doing the deed back to the apartment and all of it under his nose without him knowing it until he can't marry the guy before he realized that she was cheating on him.

out what the guy was saying half the term. But he was guilty and everybody knew that.

blooded crime, and those are usually second degree murder or manslaughter. Yeah, it's it's cold blooded means that you did it for fun, that you're a cool as a cucumber when you did it, you did it for money. If you did it because you're really really steamed and you're just so angry you can't stand it, it's harder to show premeditation because that moment of snapping usually occurs just before the act.

part of what we now consider Rochester. You would go up the finger of Rochester along the river up to the up to the lake, and there were all sorts of hotels and nightclubs and bars and saloons, things like that. And it was a place where people with money went to play and a place where people without money went to steal. There's quite a prime problem in Chillott at that time. And in August second, eighteen ninety four, the dead body of Howard Abbot was discovered in a bed

at the Cottage Hotel Ontario Beach salat New York. We analyzed the moments during the story of both sets of people, both the people without money who are there to steal and the people with money who are there to play, and they interweit weave. On the night of Abbot's death, one nefarious team works the same scam. Every night. There's a they tell a stranger that there's a corpse over on the beach. I want to go over and see it again. This is a world without radio and television badly,

I need have entertainment. Yeah, let's go see the dead body. And then this works and the cours he get up, They get the guy out on the beach, and then they rob them. And that was naturally what everybody thought had happened to Abbot. He'd been robbed and cunked over the head. Now. The hotel saloon where he was found was on the west side of what was then known as Broadway, today it's Lake Avenuet. The main dining room had a high ceiling with a balcony, tables and chairs

covering the floor. And Abbott was a fairly well known guy around Rochester. Rochester was a smaller town then, and he was a rich kid parents reputation as a man around town, ladies man, well known because well, mostly on Rochesterian men, because he had been for years the young and charismatic proprietor of a downtown cigar store on East Main Street. Now, as he lay dead in the hotel room,

literally the victim of violence. His watch and chain are missing, and his friends and family thought he'd been the victim of highwaymen mugged and robbed. So the next day a Neir Duell named Patrick Gavin is arrested after he goes into a series of bars trying to sell Abboit's watch and chain. So the fact that this near dwell had the dead man's watch and chain and the man was dead, this was circumstantial evidence enough to warrant and his arrest.

Now the trouble was Gavin said he found the watch on the ground and had never seen habit in his life.

So it's very difficult to get any eyewitness testimony to corroborate that Gavin was Abbit's killer, but they try, and they find that the Abbot has some more than one fight during the night. He's very drunk early. He's seen at one point with two women on his arms, and those women are gone, and he seems to be unconscious on the ground very close to a streetcar line that he is seen in the what they called the closet would be the men's room at the hotel, which would

be a small building and outhouse just outside. He seen it on the ground just outside the outhouse with a man on top of him, and were to assume that they're fighting and he is being robbed, although there are explanations for that that didn't occur to anybody back in the nineteenth century. And eventually they do come up with a man who claims to have seen a guy who looked like Gavin hitting a guy who looked like Gabbott

over the head. He had a girlfriend who didn't corroborate that she saw it as well, but corroborated that the guy saw what he saw at the time and told her about it. But that's what they had. It was not a great case, and there ended up being two trials.

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in my room. And Abbott used to being out. The rich kid who's in charge caught asked for a wake up call, but the wake up Paul turns out to be unnecessary because he never wakes up. He dies in his sleep overnight, and when the guy comes to wake him up, he finds him dead. And that's pretty much where the story starts. And then we have to go back in time, retrace his movements and find out what

happened to him. How did he get clunked on the head, And of course, one theory was that the clump had not come from an attack at all, but when he was unconscious on the ground near the streetcar line, that he might have been hit on the head by the streetcar and unconscious, But I don't know about that. It could have been that he just had too much to drink and laid down to take a nap, and he

was kind of close to the railroad tracks. At one point, the conductor of the street car does get off the car and you know, slaps his face a little bit and says, you okay, mister, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm just taken arrest, at which point he gets back on the streetcar and leaves. So I think we're not sure where in Abbott's inebriate night the fatal blow is struck, because he's already grobby in and out out of it when it happened. It reminds me of the thing that happened

to me at Yankee Stadium warts. I came out of the men's room and going back to my seat, and there's a guy sitting in the next section who is unconscious, and there's a trickle of blood coming down his forehead, and I quickly get the gist that a follow ball. It's just struck him on the head. Sure, and it met and the attendants are coming and his drunk friends are all gathered around, and one of the drum friends says,

you probably think he was conscious when the ball hit him. Huh, Well, I mean it could have been that the blow may have been fatal because it was administered on top of a brain that was already bleeding from an earlier incident that night.

man killing Italian man crimes with distaste. Who cares if they kill each other? Kind of an attitude, and then it's carried on into the mafia times of the twentieth century with a Italian men started. Apparently even before that. Cops must have responded to the gunshots in the bar quickly, because as they arrive at the saloon there is still a fight going on, and the man who's been shot is still speaking in complete sentences, a lot of moaning and groaning mixed in because I know who shot me.

It was Frank Gallo, I unaware of the seriousness of his injuries. Bo Venz is taken to the police station and questioned he's the guy who there slumps over while giving an answer, and they pull up his shirt and they find a gaping wound. No attempts made to remove the bullet because they have no idea where it is, but there is profuse internal hemorrhaging and he eventually dies. There's a crazy scene at the hospital where many men, all speaking loudly in Italian, arrive demanding to see Bovens.

The victim because he owed them money. Wow, they want him to pay up before he dies. Among the people is a beautiful woman in a red dress who has a twelve year old girl with her, and she explains that Bovenz was a gurg, the girl's godfather, and had always been kind to them, and then they would cross themselves in unison. Up until noon on August twentieth, it was hoped that Bovenz's life could be saved, but he takes a turn for the worse. There's a last minute,

desperate they drill a hole in his skull. Still doesn't always work, but back then rarely worked, and that sort of hastened his death. The operation lasted for two hours. They cranked him full of stimulants, but he died. It's a funny one. He was still clanging on the edge of death, still barely conscious, when foreigner Kleindines went to the hospital to question him, and during the interview the

victim fell mute. Maybe we can only imagine, but getting a visit from the coroner while you're still alive, yes, feel like it's very, very discouraging. So he survived twenty three hours after being shot and then died. Now the motive, according to the official story, was that bo Vends had recently lent Gallo forty dollars and the money was to

help bring gallows sister in Italy over on the boat. Apparently, Gallo was slow to pay back the loan, but that was only one factor, because during this time, Bovenz fell in love with Gallo's sister, who was naive and brand new to the new world. He showed her the ropes, that is, he took her virginity, and one thing led to another. Gallo wanted Bovenz to keep his dirty hands off his sister, and eventually, you know, one shot the other.

So his investigators pieced together what happened. The question was was it murder, Was it an accident? Was it self defense? Because there were indication that all three of those things might have happened, but that was what the jury would have to decide.

now part of the Inner Loop as it's called. Wall's two brothers, Andrew was twenty eight and Robert Watt, who's twenty four, neither married. Both lived at home with their parents on Wilder Street, which is in the dutch Town section of the city, and they were two of a family of seven children. And the argument began between the brothers in a bar. They started to fight in the bar and were told to take it outside. They'd only gone a few blocks from the saloon door. Near the

railroad crossing on Brown Street. Robert wattah attacked his brother, pulled a knife, fell on to him, plunged the knife twice into him, and then as a final insult, rolled his brother over and slashed him savagely across the face. Robert then fled got off the street, cut across an open field and was gone. He tries to escape by hopping a freight train on the Buffalo, Rochester and Pittsburgh Railroad, but he's caught and hauled back. They had to tell

him that his brother was dead. His defense attorney prepared a temporary insanity defense. The defense may not have proven insanity, but it did vividly describe the downward slide of the defendant culminating with the murder of his brother, and acted wead a ton of guilt upon his shoulders. This is

really a story of a lifelong abuse. I suspect that one brother had bullied the other for twenty four years and finally the little brother had had enough and to floop back in one savage outburst, and had to live the rest of his life in horrible guilt because it was his brother, and you know, he cried because of the pain he caused his mother.

of his pain killing. Because he just stayed drunk all the time, he also developed depression, and the you know, I wouldn't even come close to working today that The argument by his defense was that this combination of alcoholism and depression had made him temporarily insane and that was the reason he killed his brother, and that once his insanity was cured, he should be a free man. Now you know the defense's or jury eight insanity defenses in all of their its forms. I can only think of

one ever working, Reagan's attempt at assassin. Usually it doesn't work. It didn't work here, Although I think that there was a degree of mercy on that jury because they saw a poor beaten brother who fought back once, didn't know where the limits were, and now had to pay the rest of his life for it.

he wasn't, he was insane, No, he wasn't. And they all got paid far more than your average Rochesterian which paid and that's what made it so expensive, even though it had not gone for a long time.