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If the Old West is your thing, you may enjoy these books...

Shot All To Hell

Shot All To Pieces

Stop Faking Murder Stories: The Death of Celebrity Whist Player Joseph Elwell

Roy Harris (The Buffalo Times. April 7, 1921)

Someone murdered Joseph Elwell, “the whist wizard” of Manhattan, overnight on June 11, 1920.

Elwell’s maid, Marie Larsen, found him in his home at 324 East Fifty-second Street with a bullet in his head. An ambulance took Elwell to Bellevue Hospital, where he died at 11 a.m.

 

Detectives fixed the time of the shooting between 7:35 a.m. and 8:15 a.m. They knew that because he was reading mail; the postman delivered at 7:35, and his maid found him when she arrived for work at 8:15 a.m.

 

Oddly enough, the house was sealed tight. All the doors and windows were locked when the maid found him. Detectives found thousands of dollars in jewelry and $300 or $400 in cash in Elwell’s upstairs bedroom, which ruled out robbery as a motive.

 

The papers reported Elwell was a high-stakes gambler and often won or lost as much as $30,000 in a single night playing auction bridge. He made another $25,000 a year teaching and writing books on bridge-whist.

Murder At The Grand Hotel In New York

 

Dolly Reynolds. (The Sun. March 24, 1899)

The Grand Hotel was your typical New York meeting place, “in that part of New York where people go and come as they please and where no one seems to care about his neighbor’s affairs. The clerk of the hotel finds no time to ask many questions of his guests, and he would not think it strange if any of them passed in or out at 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning.” 

 

The clerk didn’t ask Dolly Reynolds (real name Emmeline Reynolds) any questions when she checked in on the afternoon of August 15, 1898. She signed in as “E. Maxwell and wife” and was shown to room 84 on the fourth floor. “The good appearance she made was a sufficient guarantee that he would get all that was coming to him in the shape of pay for board or lodging.”

 

Dolly ate lunch by herself in the dining room at 2 p.m. She left the hotel and returned at 6 p.m., accompanied by a man later identified as Dr. Samuel J. Kennedy. They left the hotel and returned just before midnight. Not long after that, John Day, a negro bellboy, brought them a bottle of champagne. Day told the court he remembered Kennedy because of his generous tip—25 cents on a $1.75 bottle of champagne.

 

Dr. Kennedy slipped out of the hotel in the middle of the night. Elevator boy Patrick Lenehan said he took Kennedy to the first floor at 2:30 a.m. Desk clerk, Joseph Gregory, watched him leave the hotel by the Broadway door.

 

The next morning, chambermaid Mary Higgins opened the unlocked door and found Dolly Reynolds dead on the floor of her room with her head bashed open. After getting over the shock, she made some mental notes to herself. There were two glasses of champagne on the table, one full and the other half full. The pillowcases were still pinned in place, so no one had slept in the bed, and a fifteen-inch section of lead pipe was lying next to the body. 

The Cambridge Curse - Coincidence Or Murder

 

Street festival in Cambridge, Illinois, circa 1907 (colorized postcard)

On January 13, 1907, the Sunday Record-Herald devoted its entire front page to the mystery everyone was talking about—the Cambridge Curse. They said, “Henry County, Illinois, suffers from an epidemic of murder and suicide unequaled in any rural community in this country.”

 

The paper reported that the city had become so accustomed to the “carnival of crime” that “a murder now is not more than a two-day wonder in Cambridge. We constantly wonder what will happen next.”

 

Things had gotten so bad that people were overheard asking each other...

 

“Who next?” “What next?”

 

And history was on their side. Over the past three years, Henry County had experienced ten murders, five suicides, two attempted suicides, and a bank robbery—statistics totally out of whack for a community of 1500. 

 

What surprised the reporter even more was that the authorities could find no connection between the murders and suicides. They just happened. Finally, the paper concluded that it was nothing more than a “gruesome and unfortunate coincidence.”

 

Still, the reports were alarming...

Monticello Home of Thomas Jefferson

 

Monticello (Harper's New Monthly Magazine. July 1853)

Thomas Jefferson spent most of his adult life building Monticello, and for much of that time the place was a construction site.

The first Monticello wasn’t the one on the nickel. It was smaller, taller, and fairly plain. Jefferson moved in, married Martha Wayles Skelton, started a family, and kept building.

Then life changed.

Martha died in 1782. Jefferson went to France, where he spent five years surrounded by buildings that made his Virginia house look old-fashioned. He wandered through Paris, traveled around Europe, studied architecture, filled notebooks, and came home wanting to start over.

Monticello was pulled apart and rebuilt around him. Rooms disappeared. Others grew. The house stretched sideways. Terraces reached across the mountain. The second floor was tucked away behind windows that made the building look smaller than it was.

Then came the dome. It was one of the first domes on an American house, and it turned Monticello into something people remembered.

Jefferson kept at it.

He built his bed into a wall between his bedroom and study, and installed dumbwaiters for wine. The clock in the entrance hall had weights that dropped through holes in the floor because the wall wasn’t tall enough for them.

Avis Linnell: Murdered At The Y.W.C.A In Boston

 

Avis Linnell (Tacoma Times. December 29, 1911)

Avis Linnell was nineteen when she died at the Young Women’s Christian Association building on Warrenton Street in Boston.

She was engaged to the Reverend Clarence V. T. Richeson. After they married, the couple planned on doing missionary work in the Orient, maybe in China or India.

Clarence Virgil Thompson Richeson came from a well-to-do Virginia family. His father ran a profitable farm near Lynchburg, and his brother, Dr. Walter A. Richeson, had a thriving medical practice.

Richeson was born in 1876. When he was fourteen, he traveled to Amherst and attended high school there. After that, he moved to Carrollton, Missouri, and attended the Carrollton Academy.

A friend described him as handsome, courteous, and proud, with black hair. The Boston Globe said Richeson was a “tall, handsome, smooth-faced, and smooth-voiced man.” His voice was “soft” and “musical,” almost too much for a pretty young girl to resist.

Richeson entered William Jewell College at Liberty, Missouri, developed his oratorical skills, then cheated on an exam. A smart man would have walked away. Richeson sued the school for slander and was forced to confess. The school agreed to hush everything up if he dropped the suit, so Richeson walked away scot-free.

He moved to Louisville, Kentucky, to attend the Southern Baptist Seminary. Along the way, he did some preaching at back-country churches. 

More Than A Sportscard, Baseball Legend Honus Wagner

 

Honus Wagner. (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. December 17, 1916)

Honus Wagner and the Pittsburgh Pirates faced Ty Cobb and the Detroit Tigers in the 1909 World Series. Cobb was young, fast, aggressive, and already becoming a legend. Wagner was 35 and had been terrorizing National League pitchers for more than a decade.

Wagner hit .333 in the Series, drove in six runs, and stole six bases. Cobb hit just .231. Pittsburgh won in seven games, giving Wagner the championship that capped an already remarkable career.

By then, everybody in baseball knew what Wagner could do. He’d joined the Pirates in 1900 and quickly became their biggest star, even though he didn’t look like one. Wagner was stocky and bowlegged, with huge hands and an awkward running style. But he could hit, run, field, and throw with the best of them.

He won eight National League batting titles and routinely finished above .300 during an era when runs were scarce. He could steal a base, stretch a hit, and drive the ball when the Pirates needed it. Most of his career was spent at shortstop, though he could handle almost any position.

Wagner played his final major-league game in 1917. He finished with a .328 career average, over 3,400 hits, over 1,700 RBIs, and 723 stolen bases. Nearly all of it in a Pittsburgh uniform.

When the Baseball Hall of Fame chose its first class in 1936, Wagner went in with Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, and Christy Mathewson.

Today people know Wagner mainly because of his famous T206 baseball card. In his own time, though, nobody needed a card to tell them who Honus Wagner was.