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This latest collection from true crime master Michael Benson looks at some of the ghastliest murders in Rochester, New York's history. One of them takes place in Genesee County, but it's
a good one. Stories include the Davis Street Fiend, the murder of Tesse Keating Shallow Grave at Holy Sepulcher, the murder of Anna Schumacher, the Lyndon Lunatic, the murders of Ruth Francis Kimball, George and Hattie Walley, and Benjamin Phillips, of Bondage and Bullets, the murder of Gertrude Smith, Trail of Blood, the murder of George Hickey and the j Street Axe Man, The murders of Millie Marcucci and Francesca Kotogno, plus updates on three cases. Benson has written about in
the past cold cases that are cold no More. Kathleen Krauzneck, Wendy Jerome, and Victoria Johnson. The book that we're featuring this evening is Shallow Graves, Ghastly Murders, Rochester, New York, with my special guest, best selling author Michael Benson. Welcome back to the program, and thank you very much for this interview. Michael Benson.
Thank you, Dan, thanks for having me.
Thank you so much, and congratulations on this latest book, Shallow Graves, Ghastly Murders, Rochester, New York.
Well.
Thanks, it's a good one. It'll keep you awake in the middle of the night.
Tell us about just a little bit about the origins of this book and the stories that you chose for this Well, sure.
I think one of the sad things about this book is that it takes place some of the stories at least take place at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the naivete of Rochester citizens was such that they didn't really know that danger was out there. We have one of the first murders of a young woman ever
in the city of Rochester. She walks alone into a dark area in the inner city after you know there are no street lights, has no sense that she's walking to a dangerous situation because nothing bad had ever happened to a woman walking alone at night before. Another story takes place in a cemetery during broad daylight on a Sunday. You know, bad things could happen anywhere at any time. And these were all hard, hard lessons for citizens, for civilized people to learn. Today. Of course we take it
off for granted. Back then you had to learn one murder at a time, what not to do.
We spoke earlier, and we're going to discuss three particular stories in this book and then also talk about something you call the updates. Let's talk about the first story that we want to discuss, the David Street fiend, the murder of Tessie Keating, and also your connection to Davis Street in Rochester. Tell us about that fascinating connection.
Yeah, Well, when I was a kid, my paternal grandmother, Naomi Lopez, owned a bar in the inner city of Rochester with her then husband, Gregory Lopez, and it was on a seedy little street called Davis Street, which had no major outlets on either end. It dead ended at one end and at the other end it ran into another side street, so it was a back back street, and to have a bar that functioned there meant that
you were going to get some sketchy clientele. And when I visited as a little kid, there was always the worry that I would see or hear something I shouldn't. I remember that feeling, although I don't remember seeing and hearing anything I shouldn't, just the worry that that would happen,
and the clientele worked kind of bummy. So when I was doing research for this book and I found out that really the first spectacular murder in Rochester history took place on Davis Street, I said, you know that kind of figures. It didn't prize me at all. It had never been a nice section of town, and back at the turn of the century it was known as a place where gangs hung out.
Tell us about this huge billboard at the corner of Smith Street and Union Street and what that board was conveying at that time.
Well, if you go there today, there's a building there, so it confuses the issue. And plus the railroad tracks that run alongside Davis Street now are on a bridge that goes over Union Street. But at the time there was a railroad crossing there. They didn't have electronic railroad gates. They would clang klang, klang, klang. So there was a guy there with a flag. And at the corner of Smith and Union Union was a main drag. There was a huge billboard that advertised whatever it was advertising at
the time. But there was an area behind the billboard, away from the main street, where it was pitch black, dark and possibly the most secluded and dangerous spot in the entire city.
What was this little vacant lot known for a haven for who?
I mean? There were ruffians I guess that that was the word for teenage gangs. There was a gang called the Goat Hill Gang that was in charge there. They weren't serial killers or anything like that, but they would rob you and beat people up and have fights with other gangs. And it was certainly if it had been even nineteen fifty, a young lady would have known not to go there after dark. But our heroine here, Theresa
tesse Keating, she's twenty six years old. She's not a kid, but she has no clue that she's running an errand for her sister, has no sense that this is probably something they would best wait till morning.
You described a stretch of Dava Street as especially dark for some reason.
Well, they had just started putting in electric street lights and they had not gotten around to Dava Street. In fact, I would wager that Dava Street would want to It would have been one of the last streets to get street lights. I'm guessing that that was moved up after the murder. Generally that you know, these things are done
one life too late. They were switching from kerosene to electric and the guys who lit the kerosene lamps were being laid off because there were electric lights coming in and the electric lights hadn't got to Dava Street yet, So Dava Street was completely dark.
What was the reason for Tessie Teresa venturing into this area in the first place.
Well, she was She worked at a camera works manufacturer for Rochesterians. The place was at the current side of the Kodak Tower. Everybody knows where that is. And she lived in a quiet residential neighborhood. And she lived with her widowed father and two sisters, and a third sister had recently moved to Rochester and was looking for a housekeeper. TESSI read an ad in the paper on her own and to do her sister a favor, she went to visit the prospective servant of missus Alice Herbert at her
home in her rooming house on Davia Street. It was drizzling. She put on her rubbers and grabbed an umbrella on her way out the door. She left the house at seven ten or seven fifteen, somewhere in that neighborhood. It's November twentieth, nineteen hundred, technically nineteenth century, I guess, and unaware that her destination was dangerous. The walk should have taken seven to ten minutes, but at first everybody thought that that witnesses were lying because they said she arrived
at eight thirty, which left a missing hour. And we never get a good answer for why there's an hour missing in the story. I was talking to my cousin over the weekend, and she had read the book, and she said she thinks that she just stood on Union Street and looked down Davis Street and spent a good forty five minutes saying do I really want to go down there? Do I really want to go down there? And eventually decided that she shouldn't be scared of the dark.
She was an adult and decided to go down there, and that's that would explain that the missing time.
This missing time. One of the people that says that the time that she sees Tessie was eight thirty and that's the owner of this, oh, the landlady at this at one twenty seven Davis Street, and that's a Missus Norah Crowe. So tell us about this landlady and the house that she controls.
Well, Missus Crow as a rooming house, she doesn't she has new background checks on her clients, and there are a lot of ne'er do wells living there, and I think the idea was to protect them from a police interrogation because who knows what they'd done recently or what the police were looking for. As it turned out, nobody who lived in her house had anything to do with
the murder. But the instinct to not talk to the police and to maybe lie to help her tenants was automatic, and I think she got herself in a little bit of trouble for that. But it was the house where the prospective housekeeper lived, and Tessy did make it there. She was told that Missus Herbert was not in, so she turned around and started walking home. And she never made it back to Union Street.
So who was first alerted to her disappearance and what do they do and who do they speak to?
Well, at ten thirty the next morning, seven year old Philip Spuck of Union Street. He's looking for scrap metal in the abandoned yard behind the billboard. Tends to be a little bit of a dumping ground, so he's scavenging around there. He ran across a woman's hat, and then
an umbrella, and then a woman's rubber overshoe. She picked up the He picked up the items and took them home and showed him to his mom, and she was most impressed by the rubber, so she sent him back to see if he could find the other one and instructed him to take his older brother, Edward with him. Now, they waited out a brief downpour, which which turns out to be a little bit important. There's a huge downpour. They wait for the rain to stop, and then they
returned to the spot behind the billboard. And once they get there, Edward, the older brother, who's nineteen, I think something like that, he sees something in the weeds and he immediately sends his brother home, you know, go home to mom. Now he could tell it's a young woman, and he's hoping, against hope that she's only so it goes over there to see if she's okay. He sees blood in white froth coming from her nose and mouth.
Her tongue's protruding, so he knows her. Her face is bruised, her thighs are open, there's finger marks on her throat. She's dressed in a brown bicycle skirt, a pink shirtwaist, and a brown fedora hat. Registering the horror, he starts to scream and runs down Smith Street, runs until he finds a cop walking the beat. It turns out its detective William Maguire from nearby Hartford Street, and together they returned to the body. Police combed the area. Body's taken
to the Morgan autopsy. She had been raped, a word that didn't appear in the newspapers back then. They said she was outraged. Cause of death with strangulation, and it was the twenty ninth murder in Monroe County history, but the first to be a woman killed by a stranger. Most of your murders were guys working on the Erie Canal who got drunk and somebody hit somebody, they fell in the water, that kind of thing. So the previous twenty eight murders are less newsworthy. This one's shocking. This
one just shocks the city, the surrounding area. That probably it made the news around the country because this was just too awful to even think about Chris today. I mean, it's still considered really awful, but it's not it's not mind boggling anymore. Police rapidly identified the body. Tessie's family had reported her missing at one am. Police wanted to know what type of girl tests he was, and they said she was never the kind to cause any worry, which meant she was a good girl. Police went to
the roaming house and they talked to Missus Crowe. Missus Crow told some resemblance of the truth. She said that that tess He'd arrived and been sent away. Missus Crow could not answer the questions without seeming like she was hinky as the as the cops like to say now. It took police many man hours to sort it out, but they eventually figured out that all of the people Missus Crow was lying to protect had nothing to do
with the murder. Their whereabouts, once pieced together, was just a mad jumble of I went to one bar, had a couple of drinks, went to another bar, had a couple of drinks. I got to fight with this guy and that I want to do another bar, had a couple of drinks and it was like and that. Came home and I fell asleep. Nobody was in any condition to rape and murder a woman down by Union Street. Now, the case was sensational, and it brought out the loonies,
oddballs confessed to things they didn't do. And that was another thing I think we take for granted today that a if a murder is horrible enough, people will confess to it even though they had nothing to do with it. For reasons that escape me. It's a form of mental illness. It was very, very frustrating. And to give you an idea of how sensational, I guess is the word. The murder was the first attempt at a requiem mass for Tessie at Corpus Christi Church on East Main Street, still there,
big church in downtown Rochester. It had to be canceled because of an inability to control the crowds, so Tessie's remains were buried in Holy Sepachal Cemetery, which we're going to be talking more about later, without a ceremony, and the mass was not offered until December fourth. Enough time had passed that the funeral was peaceful, but there were still one hundred strangers there quietly paying their respects to a young woman they only knew because of her notorious death.
And as it turns out, it was two and a half years before police figured out what had happened to Tessie.
But there were arrests along the way, and there was a suspect named Fuller, and they believed that one of the crucial principal clues that was found in among the body and other items was this silver Bengal. As you explained later, it was not such an important clue.
No, No, As it turns out, it was one of the first responders to the scene had dropped it there and it didn't have anything to do with the crime whatsoever. Yeah, for two and a half years, it's nothing but frustration. But on June ninth, nineteen oh three, a fellow named August Russell, forty year old guy lived on Henrietta Street in the city, was arrested on a tip from his wife. And this is another quote. It strikes me as something
that you wouldn't find today. She said he was beating me one day, and I said, you must be the man who killed the Keating girl. And he stopped hitting me, and he thought him at it, and he said, yes I am. After that, I wormed the whole story out of him, bit by bit. Missus Russell said, this is casual. He was beating me one day. There's a certain amount of wife beating was socially acceptable back then. Killing your wife that was crossing the line. But they were supposed
to obey like dogs. It said so right in the ceremony, so it was okay to whack him every once in a while. Anyway. Russell was arrested at the corner Broadway in Monroe Avenue, and as one policeman engaged Russell on conversation, pretending he could get him work on a farm mountain in the country, the other sneaked up behind Russell and clapped a heavy hand on his shoulder. I arrest you for the murder of Teresa Heating, and Russell bowed his head and said I didn't mean to kill her. As
it turned out, Russell was a physically peculiar man. The upper portion of his skull was perfectly round, a fact later confirmed by a doctor's calipers, and he loved to adorn that billiard ball head with ladies hats. He was five to five slight, with deep creases in his forehead, a nervous, fidgety disposition, and freakishly long arms that hung to with an inch of his knees. He had one light blue eye and white dark brown eye, one dark brown eye, and walked through life with a perpetual squint.
Of course, they suspected this guy is another false confessor. This guy's he even looks like a screwball. So Chief Hayden of the Rochester Police introduced erroneous details about the crime, but Russell always corrected him. Russell led the policeman to the billboard on Davis Street, pointed out the different spots with unfailing accuracy, and he showed them the place on the sidewalk where he confronted the victim. He made the young woman he said an indecent proposal, and according to Russell,
she replied, go away, you dirty loafer. That's a strong language from a young lady.
Back then, Absolutely, he.
Lost his temper, hit her on the temple and choked her, and when she was unconscious, he dragged her off the sidewalking into the vacant lot, and he said he remained in the lot with Tessi for three hours and left her around midnight. He was indicted day before Halloween nineteen oh three, pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. A commission was appointed to doctors and a lawyer to inquire about whether or not he understood the quality and the
wrongness of his crime. The hearings involved calling witnesses. Some men who knew Russell thought he was demented. Others, especially when discussing Russell's handling of money, thought him as sane. As the day was long, all agreed that Russell was at his weirdest, went around women. On New Year's Eve
nineteen oh three, the insanity panel declared Russell insane. He was taken to Madijuan State Insane Asylum, then new Facility, where he was confined until he would be confined until declared, saying, of course, there was no guarantee that that would ever happen. He said, Well, in Madiwan, he said, I am the magic man. I hear music when you do not some guy screamed in terror all night or yelled angrily in
that place. But Russell was a laugher. He would laugh all night, and he did eventually get out, and some say he relocated to the Catskills and died in Ulster County.
That Jesus has an opportunity to stop to hear these messages. Now, the next story we were going to discuss is shallow grave at Holy Sepulture. If that's the right pronounciation, A sepulchercur yes for me. This is August nineteen oh nine, Anna Catherine Shoemaker, sixteen years old, found in a crudely constructed graview right at the Holy Sulfitture Cemetery. And tell us the reason why she went to the cemetery in the first place, and how she was found eventually there.
You know this case as the most the richest and yet most horrible ironies. Here's a story of a young woman who is murdered in a cemetery. She's buried in the cemetery by her killer in a shallow grave, and then she's dug up from her shallow grave, and when she's finally buried for real, she's buried in the same cemetery, not only hundreds of yards from the scene of her murder. And I cannot think of another case like that. I'm
sure that there are may be others out there. I can't even think of another case of the murder in a cemetery at the moment, but certainly not in a murder in a c in which the victim was then buried at the same spot. It's Saturday, August seventh, nineteen oh nine. It's one o'clock in the afternoon. The temperature is ninety two degrees. Humidity is uncomfortable and as preps. Everybody knows by now ninety two degrees is the temperature
at which most murders are committed. Ninety one degrees, everybody's a little bit calmer. Ninety three degrees, everybody gets a little bit too hot to do anything physical. Sixteen year old Anna Catherine Schumacher she leaves her home on Katie Street. Her mission is to groom and place sweet peas and asterniums from the flower garden behind her family home upon the graves of her father and sister. Her father recently passed away. She had a sister who died as a baby.
As babies often did back then. And its Holy Sepago's Sepulcher Cemetery. They've got me doing it. Anna walked to a streetcar stop from her house. She caught a car downtown at the four Corners. She transferred to a shalot car that took her to the cemetery. And we know that she did this because a family friend and Missus Graham, saw Anna get off at the cemetery. And after that we don't know when she didn't return. On Saturday night, her mother called police reported or missing, but very little
attention was paid to the report. And his mother and sister went to the sixth Precinct and told the officer Anna's missing, but they didn't take her seriously. They said, a lot of sixteen year old girls are out that late time was ten forty pm and Anna had been gone for less than ten hours. Cop wanted to know if Anna was in the habit of staying out late. Now. The question greatly upset the women. He was questioning the reputation the chastity of their baby. Anna. Sure, so they
storm out. They get lanterns, get a carriage to drive them to the cemetery and they go looking for Anna. They found fresh flowers at her father and sister's graves, tufts of unsightly grass trimmed with the scissors she brought along. Another unsuccessful scouring in the cemetery occurred and they split up. They canvassed the neighborhood, and then they got a lucky break. One man, a stranger, answered the door, said he hadn't
seen Anna, but he offered a word of advice. If I were in your place, I'd get Constable stall Hand Baker of the Greece Police town of Greece next to Rochester. Today, the cemetery's in the city that back then it was in the town. He won't give up the search if he dies in the attempt. If you can't find her, you might as well give up. If he can't find her, you might as well give up. The advice turned out to be very good, and Baker's first question was how
many times had Anna gone to that cemetery alone. It's considering the possibility that she might have been using flowers on the grave as an excuse to meet a boy. This was the third time, and his brother John replied, Now first Monday morning, Baker grabbed his colleague Otto Friedman and and his brother John, and the three spoke to a groundskeeper who remembered seeing the girl at first in the section where she was decorating graves, and later all the way to the east along the edge of the
river gorge, perhaps picking wildflowers in the bushes. Along the gorge's edge, Baker saw drag marks on the ground, and then a patch of loose earth only feet from the cliff the river two hundred feet below. The men had no shovels that began digging with their with their hands, and after a few minutes they found a ribbon, and then the corner of a woman's garment. So they stopped and notified the sheriff and the coroner, and within the
hour the body of Anna Shoemaker had been recovered. It lay face down with the feet doubled back so that it fit in a four foot long excavation. The left cheek was bruised, and there was a fresh cut over the left eye. She was covered with bruises, most severely on her chest. One breast was black and discolored. She'd been raped and murdered. The condition of the body indicated
that she'd put up quite a battle. One of the key things they realized immediately was whoever buried in in that spot had a shovel, which would seem to rule out people who just passing through unless you're walking along the edge of the river carrying a shovel, which seems unlikely. Last spring, I went to Rochester and I visited the spot, and it was not hard to figure out where it had the murder and the burying of Anna had taken place.
You go down down the side of a little hill and you're on a flat spot right next to the river gorge. There's no fence or anything. Take one wrong step and you're gonna fall to your death. And there's no fence between that spot and the cemetery. You're supposed to know not to go there. But once you're down that little level, you can't be seen from anywhere else. You can't be seen from the cemetery certainly can't be seen by anybody down in the river, So you have
complete privacy. And you know, once I got there, I said, well, this is this is clearly the spot.
Now, when she's found, what do they find in terms of signs of struggle and just the state of her body when found, she.
Had put up a tremendous fight. Her body was covered with bruises. Her hyoid bone was broken, which indicated she had been manually strangulated. She had been strangled with a man's hands. Her body was taken to the morgue where an autopsy was performed. She died from suffocation, and particles were found under the victim's fingernails, which might have been the key to the case now, but back then it
just meant that she had scratched her attacker. So they were looking for a man with visible scratches, obviously no inkling that anything like DNA would ever be used to solve crimes. Three cemetery employer saw a man along the eastern edge where they found the girl, dressed in a blue suit and a straw hat, and when he saw that he was being observed, he ran away to the north. I walked fast at first, but then broke into a trot and a full fledged run. The suspicious man vanished,
never to be found if he ever existed. Another the reason that police were skeptical is that these stories came from cemetery employees who have shovels and would be suspects, and if one of them was the killer. They may be covering up for him telling stories that weren't true. If they were telling the truth, I would have to think that the man who broke into a trot and then a full run once he was observed in the area of the murder is your guy. It's got to
be your guy. The search for the shovel turned out to be successful. A deputy found a blood spattered shovel in the cemetery's boiler room, another indication this is an inside job. Shovel, as it turned out, had been left out by a worker that Saturday morning after he developed blood poisoning from poison ivy and had to go home. People died from poison ivy in nineteen oh nine, so in theory, anyone could have grabbed the shovel, and as
the boiler room wasn't locked, anyone could have stashed it. Still, you would need to know it was there and where it was stored, so it's unlikely that anyone unfamiliar with the cemetery could have disposed of the shovel in that particular fashion. On Wednesday, August eleventh, and his funeral Mass was held at Saint Peter and Paul's Church, on West Maine, near Bull's Head against Center Town. The church was raised three years later and replaced with the church that still
stands there. The pall bearers, heartbreakingly were sixteenage boys and his former classmates. After Mass, the young Paul black bearers carried the white casket to a horse drawn hearse for the trip to Holy Sepulcher, which meant that the the scene of her death and her final resting spot were to be the same. And during the weeks and months that followed, many suspicious men were arrested, grilled and cut loose. False confessor is always a problem in high profile cases
needed to be debunked. Any poor soul with a scratched face or arm was dragged in and made to explain himself. Hobo's were yanked off freight trains. And then there was the epic pursuit of a man came to be known as swale Man.
Let's Jesus as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages. What is the theory behind the swale Man? What is exactly where is this man supposedly hiding?
Well, the first sighting is of nothing more outrageous than a man acting wild do you know what that means. If he was drunk, he was having some sort of episode. We're maybe a mile away from the cemetery and he's last seen running into a thickly foliaged swal I had to look up the word swell We don't use it much anymore. It's just a large area covered with swampy weeds.
So a mob, a combination of law enforcement and self deputized neighbors, tried to surround the swale so then starve him out like a siege, even though there was no
known connection between the murder and Swaleman. Again, if swell Man was real, he was never captured, but he remained a phantom seen for years, lurking in the shadows of frightened residences, of imagination, a boogeyman that haunted that area for generations, and sadly, the unsolved murder of Anna Schumacher became part of Rochester's criminal history, the moment when Rochesterian women learned that they were never safe when alone, even on a Saturday morning with the sun shining, and not
even on hollowed ground.
Another story that we're going to discuss from this book is the attacks of the Linden lunatic search for a serial killer. And this occurs in Linden, New York. You write, a tiny village of about one hundred farmers and apple orchards, and November fifteenth, nineteen seventeen, a body of an unknown woman is found in the woods outside of town, her head bashed in some sort of large blunt object used, you say, likely a large rock. She's been dead about
three days. So what happens You write that an eyewitness comes forward almost immediately tell us about.
That a man is seen walking into the woods with a woman and coming out by himself. Again, it's from a distance, and nobody has any idea who The woman's eventually buried under the name Ruth, which the coroner gave her. She's a Jane Doe, as we'd refer to her today. They believe she was a sex worker, either from Buffalo or Rochester. This is little village of Linden is it's in western New York, ten miles south of Batavia, which
is between Rochester and Buffalo. And don't look for it on the map today because, as we'll find out, it doesn't exist. Five years after Ruth is murdered, and we're in nineteen twenty two. Now October nineteen twenty two, about a mile and a half from town. Justice of the Piece, Morris Neelan, is passing his next door neighbors home when he notices something odd. Miss Francis Kimball, seventy two years old, is nowhere to be seen, and her cow had not
been milked. Now you can you could keep time by people milking their cows back you didn't miss a day, you didn't milk late. The cow would get uncomfortable if it wasn't milked. So there's a search for Miss Kimball, who was a staunch teetotaler known to scold men who wreaked a hard cider, and she was found dead in her basement, stuffed under an apple bin, head bashed to a pulp with a big rock, same way Ruth died,
which was found nearby, covered with blood and hair. The killer struck her first with his fist, breaking her jaw, knocking her cold, and sending her false teeth flying. He then walked to the cellar window, reached from the inside and cut the telephone wires. Returned to the unconscious woman, picked up a large rock and pounded her skull to
fragments at some point he'd discharged seamen upon her. The killer had little to fear from the woman, yet exhibited tremendous anger overkills the modern term, and police thought that perhaps he wasn't terribly bright, because cutting the telephone wires seemed completely unnecessary. If she lives alone, who who's going to call anybody? And if somebody does call in and they find out that the wires have been cut, that's going to alert somebody that's a problem, rather than to
do the opposite. Anyway, a number of suspects are question again, all denied have anything to do with the murder, and the village was quiet until September twenty third, nineteen twenty three, when someone tried to burn down the house of Judge Neelon, the man who lived next door to Miss Kimball and realized that there was something wrong in her house. Then
on March eleventh, nineteen twenty four. The following spring, there are three more murders in Linden, done in such a way that comparisons to Miss Kimball's murder and the arson at Justice Neelan's house were inevitable. The crime scene was about one hundred yards from the Linden Railroad station. The victims were Thomas and Hattie Whaley, both fifty five years old, and missus Mabel Morse was fifty whose husband ran the
Linden Village store. The Whaleys were shot to death with a thirty two and Missus Morse was fatally struck over the head repeatedly with a pickhandle. The bodies were placed on top of one another and set on fire. Whaley's lived alone, about a five minute walk from the center of the village. Mister Whaley worked as a section foreman
on the Erie Railroad. As a side income, Whaley kept two cows and sold the milk to the village grocer, George Morse, that was Mabel's husband, and on the evening of the murders, shortly after six o'clock, Missus Morse took her empty milk pail from the store and started for the Whaley home, and time passed and she didn't return back At the village store, Myron Smith, her employee, was
concerned when she didn't come back. There was a radio radio was brand new in nineteen twenty before and the only radio station in Rochester was w h A m still on the air by the way, and they used to in the afternoons they would they would run a program at the Eastman School of Music, wonderful music being played by the students there, and Missus Morse had a son who was going to that school, so she never
missed that show. And yet the show's on and she hasn't returned, so that raises a red flag, and he goes looking for her. He gets to the he gets to the Whaley home, raises a kitchen window and it's hit by a billow of smoke. So he and two passers by broke down the Whaley's rear door, put out the fire and found the bodies. The killer had placed hooked rag rugs over the bodies, poured kerosene on them, and set them out of fire, creating a smoldering lazy fire.
Missus Morris's son Clyde, said that on the evening of May eleventh, perhaps minutes after the murders took place, he received a phone call at his home in Rochester from a man who refused to identify himself. You'll never see your mother again, he said, before hanging up. Now. Clyde told his neighbors about the call and traveled to Batavia, where he learned that the call wasn't a prank and may have been a taunt from his mom's killer.
Incredible. How do they police proceed with this information?
Well, everyone in Linden and the surrounding area had a theory as to who the killer was. Linda became a pressure cooker of tension and anxiety. Police could talk to everybody in town, and they did. One family moved away, then another and another. Apparently the killer must have moved away as well, because eventually Linden was no more. It was a ghost town which had been wiped out by a serial killer. But the way this is not like
Anna in the cemetery. Police never did figure out who did it, but I think we have so we can get to that.
Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages. Let's talk about this suspect, Andrew Michelle and why he became a suspect. What was his connection? Police felt to all of these victims, Well.
Before they get hip to Andrew Michelle, and Michelle had been spoken to after each of the murders. So far, Yes, but he moves away with everybody else, you know, trying
to get away from the killer. And in May nineteen thirty four, a man named Benjamin Phillips, seventy six year old farmer on Buffalo Road in the town of Alexander on the other side of Genesee County, fights a home invader before succumbing to a horrible beating, and after the murder, his body is set on fire on his bed again with kerosene and the rugs, and death is caused by
a badly fractured skull. Horrible scenes discovered by Missus Phillips and her son Joseph, were surprised to find that the house is completely dark when they arrived, and the house are the fires contained to the first floor bedroom where the body lay. At this point a name of a suspect becomes fairly obvious, although again the ability to prove someone as a murderer in nineteen thirty is very different
from now. But the man was named Andrew Michelle, as you mentioned, and he had a grudge against all of the Linden victims. Miss Kimball had once had him arrested for drinking. He was a drinking man. This was prohibition. She was the teetotaler that always got into the faces of drunks. She even testified against him in court. Thomas Whaley he earned Michelle's ire when he told people that he suspected Michelle was the arson at Judge Neilvillain's house
and possibly the Kimball killer as well. He also reportedly refused to lend Michelle money. George Morse and by implication, his wife got onto Michelle's alleged list by cutting off his credit at the village store. Michelle was into the morses for one hundred and sixty dollars and was told in writing no more groceries until he paid that down. So at one time or another, Michelle made threats against all four of the Linden victims. Now he came close
to being arrested after the Trim triple homicide. He was grilled for hours, but was eventually released for a very unusual reason. He had suffered a horrible accident in a sawmill when he was a boy and had sawt off four fingers on his right hand and to pick up the slack, and this is I don't know if it's a physical, physical thing that happens, but apparently it happened in this case to pick up the slack, his remaining forefinger grew in girth until it was twice the size
of a normal finger. Wow, And we have a photo in the book which tends to suggest this is true. And that finger, it was argued, was too thick to have pulled the trigger on the thirty two revolver used to kill the Wales. Couldn't he just put the gun in his other hand? Nobody asked, and Michelle remained free. Shortly after the triple homicide, he moved to the town of Attica, not the prison, in the town three miles
from the Benjamin Phillips crime scene in Alexander. His beef, if any, with the final victim, is unknown, But if he's the guy who's pouring kerosene on rag rugs at one, he's probably the guy pouring kerosene on ragrugs at the other. Yes. Was he the type of man who could kill humans by bashing in their heads? Indication is that he was, once having been arrested for beating a horse with a two by four so severely that the horse lost an eye.
And as for Ruth, the first victim, the Jane Doe found in the woods in nineteen seventeen, she was probably a sex worker. He was a bachelor, not particularly swift with women. And it turns out that at that time, at the time of Ruth's death, he was working near the crime scene, clearing wood from the woods there. He died at the age of seventy seven in the Rochester State Hospital, a mental institution, in nineteen sixty. He'd been committed in nineteen fifty eight. Is mentally incompetent, so he
was never punished for the murders. He did spend the last years of his life, however, in an institution, and because of the tremendous population increase since the murders, folks today do live where Linden used to be, but there is no village and their addresses say Bethany. So Linden was the town in upstate New York that was destroyed by a serial killer.
Wow, you're right that author Rob R. Thompson, a retired mental health counselor and retired a FBI agent Mark Safferik have also researched the Linden murders as a cold case as well.
Right, and I am borrowing their diagnosis of what happened. He's there suspect and it seems like an open and shut case. There aren't that many suspects. It's a very small town. You could put them all in one room. And he was the maniac who beat horses with a two by four and all of his enemies are being murdered. Why they didn't move on him earlier, the excuse of he couldn't shoot a thirty two with his fat finger.
It doesn't wash with me. I would be unhappy with that if I were a law enforcement person in nineteen thirty.
Absolutely, and the misplaced police reaction to Benjamin Phillips was initially that they thought that somehow he had burnt himself in his own bed.
So yeah, yeah, I think I made a comment earlier about how police were We're just as smart then as they are now, but not always. In the town of Alexander, near Attica, they found a man who had died of a fractured skull, lying on a bed on fire and came to the conclusion that the ceiling had fallen on his head and then he'd set himself on fire with a cigarette, which is just ridiculous.
Absolutely. Just in closing with this interview, the last chapter is called Updates, and you say it three arrests since we last chatted. And it's regarding a few years ago a private investigator, Don Tubman and you worked cold case murder cases in the Rochester area. You had success with the nineteen sixty six Chili murders, and you felt that you had pushed the double initial investigation in the correct
direction and that book was Nightmare in Rochester. Tell us about the good news regarding these three cases.
Okay, well, and this makes me very happy. Kathleen Krauzenek was killed on February nineteenth, nineteen eighty two, in her Brighton home. Twenty nine year old woman found struck once in the head with an axe. She was slain as she slept. The axe had been left embedded in her head handle sticking up. She was home alone with her three year old daughter at the time, and her husband a barely been the last to see her alive when he left for work and found the body when he
came home from work. The husband was thirty year old James. He said that he and his wife had dinner some wine together and then went to bed and they were asleep before midnight. CSI people went over the bed carefully and although there was plenty of evidence that Kathleen slept there. There was no indication of Jim, none of his hairs, no fingerprints. In fact, there are no fingerprints in the entire house, which meant that either somebody had wiped the
entire house down or the Crossnex never touched anything. Now, the daughter Sarah was home during the attack. Who knew what she saw? Nobody really wanted to think about it was so horrible. The best note of reassurance authorities could offer was that the child was unharmed physically anyway. She dressed herself and was found wearing two sweaters backwards. Broken window was found on the door between the screened in porch and the kitchen, but nothing had been stolen. Now,
after the murder, Dad acted very peculiarly. He stopped talking to his in laws entirely. He took his daughter and left town, hoping the whole thing would be forgotten, Which is not a normal way for a man to act when his wife has been murdered. It's more like the way he acts after a divorce after winning custody. So skipping ahead thirty seven years early in twenty nineteen, after the story appeared in my book Haunting, homicides which I wrote down TUBBN. I'd like to think this helped put
the case on law enforcements front burner. Several months after the book came out, Brighton Police Chief Mark Henderson teamed up with the FBI and evidence regarding the murder was presented to a grand jury. November eighth, twenty nineteen, Jim Krausinek was arraigned after an indictment was unsealed in court charging him with second degree murder. As his daughter Sarah, now all grown up, the only witness of the crime, her memory is still a mystery, stood next to him.
The now sixty seven year old Jim pleaded not guilty, posted twenty five thousand dollars cash bail, torender his passport, and was released pending trial. And the trial but very smoothly. After a day and a half of a deliberation, the jury returned with a unanimous guilty verdict and the remains of Cathy were moved from the Krousenet plot to her
own family's burial plot. Interesting, you know, we could talk forever about Sarah, who who knows what she saw on the day her mother was murdered, What she remembers she always insisted her father was innocent and stood by him right up until the moment that he was put in prison forever. Yeah, so the other updates. The second update is Wendy Jerome. I don't know if you have a specific question you want to ask about her, but.
Well tell us a particulars of her case and how it went cold and how it was solved.
Yeah. I first wrote about her in Nightmare in Rochester again with Don Tubman. And the reason I was interest in her case. First of all, she's a fourteen year old girl who's walking to her friend's house and never comes home, and she's she's found raped and murdered, so that that's one of the reasons why I caught my interest.
But another reason was her body was found at the entrance to School thirty three on Webster Avenue, which happened to have been the exact same door that Michelle Maenza, the third of the double initial murder victims, came out of just before she was abducted. So there was a
geographical connection that I couldn't get over. Although I knew even then that it was probably not the same killer, I still included the case in the book Now there was a four inch cut in Wendy's throat, her pink hoodie had been removed and placed over her beaten face, and between the rape and the murder, she'd been allowed to get dressed. Because of death was massive head injuries. She'd been beaten with a blunt instrument, possibly a hammer.
Twenty eight years after Wendy's murder, police revealed to the public for the first time that an empty pack of cigarettes and a lighter were found near the body. I believe I think I knew this before the public did, but keptamasha. There were also hairs belonging to an African American male found at the crime scene and usable DNA. There was no hit on Cotis case went cold, and then in twenty twenty, there was a familial hit on the DNA profile the relative of a Florida man named
Timothy Williams. Rochester police did a little research, learned that Williams had been twenty years old and lived in Wendy's neighborhood at the time of the murder, and knowing they had their man, Rochester Police Department investigators John Brennan and Gary Galletta went down to Florida to get him. Williams was all smiles until he heard that the cops were from Rochester. Then he knew it was over.
Wow, happy ending.
Yeah, if they can be.
Tell us about the third success story.
Well, this one's a little bit personal for me. I got to know the family pretty well. The third update comes from a murder I first wrote about in my book Killer Twins, which was about identical twins Stephen and Robert Spahalski, killed individually but identically, which is tremendous nature versus nurture experiment. On December seventh, nineteen ninety two, Victoria Jobson's decomposed body was found nude and filled with multiple stab wounds in a Rochester park along a row of
thick trees. In response to the discovery of the remains, the first Rochester officer on the scene was Mark Marianna, who also wrote the initial report. A medical examiner determined that Vicky had been killed much earlier, perhaps around the time she disappeared, and had recently been moved to the spot where she was discovered. Years later, Marianna was promoted to squad leader in the homicide unit, and sometime in
two thousand and five, while reading through cold cases. He discovered Vicky's case file and reread it, and he went to work. He developed a confidential informant who had some interesting facts about Vicky's disappearance and subsequent murder. There was the usual give and take between the informant and Mariano about how the snitch would benefit from helping the investigation, and after that was worked out, Mariano learned some surprising facts.
The informant said that Vicki was killed off of Emerson Street. She was picked up by a customer who brought her back to his residence, actually to a shed in the rear of his house. He was there with another mail and the three smoked crack. One of the males had sex with Vicki, and when Vicki demanded her money for the transaction, the males told her that her pay was
in crack and she had smoked it with them. This led to a verbal argument over money, which ultimately led to the older of the two males striking and stabbing Vicky to death. Vicky was buried in a very shallow grave under the floor of the shed, where she remained for over a month, and then, in a scene right out of the movies. During a family dinner, the subject of Vicky being dead in the shed comes up. The patriarch of the family said, you gotta get that thing
out of there now. So the men who put Vicky in the ground waited until dark to move the short distance to the spot where she was found, and two males walking in the area discovered the remains the next day. Years and years went by and the killers were never suspected in any way. The family kept the ghastly secret
among them. I can't even imagine the frustration of losing a loved one to murder knowing who the killers are, as then that they remained free, just out of each seemingly taunting, and that frustration lingered until November twenty twenty four, thirty two years after Vicki's murder, And that was when State Supreme Court Justice Judy Sinclair unsealed an indictment charging fifty nine year old Arthur Jason Junior of Cansis, New
York with secondary murder. Then came news that there was a second arrest, no name only, that had been taking place in Canada, and the suspect's name would not be released until the indictment was unsealed in a Monroe Court County courtroom, which has not yet happened, and justice, it would seem, was well on its way to being served better late than ever. And if any of any of Vicki's families listening to this, I'm so happy for you guys. You know, they came to me as as a last resort.
I'm so not a cop and so not a detective, but I was having success going over fact patterns and coming up with ideas regarding other murders. They begged me to do something, and as I would speaking with them, I had an inkling that Mark Marianno already knew the answer, and talked to him and he then, you know, he started talking to the family and everybody's buddies now, and that's it. The book ends on an extremely happy note, as happy as a murder case can be. Justice better late than never.
Yes, justice prevails, absolutely incredible ending. Certainly, I want to thank you very much Michael Benson for coming on and talking about your latest and greatest, Shallow Graves Ghastly Murders, Rochester, New York. Again, I ask for people that might want to find out more about this book and your other books where will people look best.
I think the key is to google at author Michael Benson, all one word, at author Michael Benson, all one word, and that'll take you to the various social media where you can find out about my books. And if that's too difficult, just go on Amazon. They're all on there. There are a couple of Michael Benson's who write books, but I don't think it would be confused. I'm the guy with the white beard that writes about psycho killers.
Absolutely, Thank you so much, Michael Benson. Thank you so much.
Dan Zepansky, It's always a pleasure.
It's always a pleasure. Thank you so much. Shallow Graves, Ghasoly Murders, Rochester, New York. Thank you so much. Michael Benson. Have a great evening, and good night, good night, good night,