Minnie Cummings: The Black Widow of Missouri

 

Minnie Cummings

Minnie Cummings shot her husband, Dennis, in the back of the head and killed him on Saturday, April 18, 1903. 

They had been living apart for three weeks, ever since Minnie filed charges against him for stealing her jewelry. Minnie couldn’t understand. Judge Moore dismissed the case, ruling that a husband couldn’t be found guilty of stealing from his wife, nor a wife guilty of stealing from her husband. Not in Missouri, anyway. 

Eleanor Duff, Minnie’s landlady, let Mr. Cummings in the house around 5 p.m. on Saturday. A half-hour later, Minnie knocked on her door.

“I have just shot my husband. He drew a knife, and I had to shoot him or be killed myself.”

They sent for Dr. J. B. Rule. The body lay on its back with a pocketknife and a pair of scissors nearby. When he finished examining the body, Dr. Rule advised Minnie to surrender herself to the Four Courts. But strangely, she stopped at Mrs. Harris’ diner on Locust Street for a bite to eat before going to the police station.

The couple had been married for just under a year. Minnie’s first husband, Edward Harris, died under mysterious circumstances. Eventually, the police ruled it a homicide, but here was dead husband number two with a bullet hole in his head, in the same spot as husband number one.

Minnie said Dennis was drunk and abusive. He tore the place apart, looking for money. When he didn’t find any, he began to curse and threaten her. 

She left and went to Dunn’s Pawn Shop at 912 Franklin Avenue and bought a pistol. When she got back home, Dennis demanded money. When she didn’t give him any, he tried to stab her with a pair of scissors. After a few minutes, her husband tossed the scissors aside. He yanked a knife out of his pocket, threatening to kill her.

“The back of his head was toward me, and I fired,” said Minnie, “feeling that it was his life or mine.”

The other elephant in the room was Dennis Cummings’s conversation with the police three days before he died. He told Detective Harrington that he was afraid his wife would kill him. She was jealous because of his affairs with other women. The police had letters from her to her husband, confirming the threat. 

Things got worse after Cummings broke into her house at 2734 Lucas Avenue and stole her jewelry and $26 in cash. One time she chased him down an alley waving a revolver, said Dennis. When she didn’t get her property back, she filed charges against him on March 31.

During his time in prison for robbing Minnie, Cummings told Detective Harrington, “That woman is going to kill me. I know it.” Then he made a mysterious comment to Detective Keely, “She’s a devil when she is started. One of these days, I’ll tell you something about that woman that will open your eyes.”

The first thing detectives did after the killing of Dennis Cummings was to revisit Edward Harris’ suicide.

Minnine Cummings behind bars

Minnie boasted she killed Edward Harris and robbed him, said Norah Behler. On the day he died, Harris withdrew $175 from the bank. When the detectives searched the body, he only had $10. What happened to the rest of the money?

Minnie told Mrs. Ridgely that Edward had tried to kill himself. When she took the gun away, it accidentally went off. 

Two other women—Menta Murray and Kate Stage — said Minnie told them she accidentally shot him. Harris “was cleaning a revolver to go hunting the next day. I asked him for it. In jest, I pointed it at him, and it went off and hit him in the head.”

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch identified Minnie Cummings as Marie Gebo. She was born in St. Antoine, Canada, and had four husbands. Her first husband, James Durkee, divorced her after a year and was living in Mooers, New York. Her second husband, William Brown, died in an explosion at his employer’s place of business. Her last two husbands, Edgar (Edward), Harris and Dennis Cummings, met a violent end, most likely from the hand of Minnie Cummings.  

Clementine Barnabet: The Voodoo Killer

 

Clementine Barnabet (enhanced picture from the
New Orleans Item. April 2, 1912)

The Midwest ax murderer wasn’t the only fiend causing havoc in the early 1900s. Detectives in Louisiana and Texas found themselves pitted against a repeat murderer closely following the Southern Pacific Railroad tracks. Thirteen black families had been slaughtered in their sleep in less than two years.

Several people were questioned but quickly released. Then, in November 1911, Detectives in Lafayette, Louisiana, arrested Clementine Barnabet.

Six months later, the nineteen-year-old housekeeper confessed to killing seventeen of the forty-plus Negroes murdered in and around Lafayette, and for a moment, it seemed as if the case was solved. But unfortunately, the killings continued for nearly a year after her arrest.

For her part, Clementine enjoyed the spotlight. She smoked cigars with the reporters crowded around her cell, cracked jokes, and made light of the killings, blaming her capture on the loss of the “cunjah bag” Joe Thibodaux, a “Voodoo Doctor,” sold her.

The papers described Thibodaux as an old Voodoo priest who sold charms and conjure bags, which he “guaranteed would make the wearers immune from arrest, no matter how atrocious the crime.”

The New Orlean Axe Man, Or The Jazz Killer

 

The Axe Man breaking into a house, axe in hand

The New Orleans Axe Man was a serial killer or repeat murderer active in New Orleans and Gretna, Louisiana, from May 1918 to October 1919, although some sources suspect he started as early as 1911 and continued his murder spree into the 1920s.

“These murders and woundings,” said Sheriff Frank T. Mooney, “are undoubtedly the work of some brutal, murderous degenerate.” And while he admitted small sums of money were taken at some of the crime scenes, the sheriff believed it was to throw detectives off. He assured citizens that a “petty housebreaker” did not commit the crimes.

On May 23, 1918, Joseph Maggio (39) and his wife were “hacked to death” in their store at Upperline and Magnolia. The prosperous Italian couple lived in the back of their grocery store.

Detectives said the killer entered the home before dawn. He knocked out a panel in the rear door and crawled inside. Ironically, the murder was committed in a tiny room decorated with pictures of the crucifixion and other religious artifacts.

The killer whacked each victim on the head with an ax, then slit their throats with a razor. Catharine Maggio lay on the floor, a bloody mess. Joseph was sprawled across the bed, half on and half off. And the murder weapons, a razor and ax, rested on the floor in a puddle of blood.

Joseph’s brothers, Jacob and Andrew, discovered the bodies and notified the police of the attack. A few hours later, detectives arrested them because Andrew was seen coming home early in the morning. However, the investigation went nowhere, and Jacob and Andrew were released a few days later.

How John Wilkes Booth Assassinated Abraham Lincoln

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Baltimore Riots - April 1861

 

Federal Hill in Baltimore, 1861

Baltimore Mayor George William Brown recalled waiting on the platform to shake President-elect Abraham Lincoln’s hand to welcome him to the city during his inaugural journey. Little did he know Lincoln had abandoned the car in Harrisburg and secretly made his way to the capital city under cover of darkness.

He took it as a personal insult, as did the citizens of Baltimore. The implication that there was a plot to kill Lincoln in their city made the townspeople feel like criminals put under a magnifying glass.

Because Lincoln snuck into the town after dark, it left a bitter taste in their mouths, similar to his sending troops through the heart of the city without alerting them.

If “Old Abe” had just come into town and shaken hands as planned, Brown was sure everything would have worked out okay. If the army had informed city officials about the troop movements, proper precautions could have been taken to ensure their safety.

The “real problem” was the government’s lack of communication.

The day before the Pratt Street Riot, on April 18, two companies of United States Artillery commanded by Major Pemberton and four militia companies arrived on the North Central Railroad. They disembarked from their cars at Bolton Station in North Baltimore shortly after 2 p.m.

Washington Peace Conference: A Last Ditch Chance To Prevent Civil War

 

Jefferson Davis and his wife

War was in the air.

Everyone sensed it was coming. Oh, yeah! It was coming just like a plague of locusts or grasshoppers eating their way across the prairies. It was inevitable, just as it was inevitable that some damn fool would propose a plan to prevent it.

Prominent politicians authored two of the schemes that circulated early in 1861. The first, the Crittenden Compromise, was the brainchild of Kentucky Congressman John T. Crittenden. Former President John Tyler promoted the second one, known today as the Washington Peace Conference.

The Crittenden Compromise was a little too much for most Northerners. It guaranteed the rights of the slave states to continue to own slaves in perpetuity, to extend slavery into the territories north of latitude 36° 30’, and it ensured the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Laws. If the states thwarted slave owners in restoring their property, the federal government could reimburse them. Union men could not stomach the Crittenden Compromise.

It contradicted the entire Chicago platform of the Republican Party. If adopted, it would reverse the election’s course and the people’s will. At least, that was the way Abraham Lincoln and his supporters viewed the Crittenden Compromise.

The House and Senate quickly rejected it.

An Original Account Of The Baltimore Plot

 

(This account of the Baltimore Plot was originally published in The Century Magazine in Dcember 1887 as part of an article by John Hay and John Nicolet, presidential secretaries to Abraham Lincoln.)

On the morning of February 23d the whole country was surprised at the telegraphic announcement, coupled with diverse and generally very foggy explanations, that the President-elect, after his long and almost triumphal journey in the utmost publicity and with well-nigh universal greetings of good-will, had suddenly abandoned his announced programme and made a quick and secret night journey through Baltimore to the Federal capital. Public opinion, and for years afterward, was puzzled by the event, and the utmost contrariety of comment, ranging from the highest praise to the severest detraction which caricature, ridicule, and denunciation could express, was long current. In the course of time, the narratives of the principal actors in the affair have been written down and published, and a sufficient statement of the facts and motives involved may at length be made. The newspapers stated (without any prompting or suggestion from Mr. Lincoln) that an extensive plot to assassinate him on his expected trip through Baltimore about midday of Saturday had been discovered, which plot the earlier and unknown passage on Friday night disconcerted and prevented. This theory has neither been proved nor disproved by the lapse of time; Mr. Lincoln did not entertain it in this form nor base his course upon it. But subsequent events did clearly demonstrate the possibility and probability of attempted personal violence from the fanatical impulse of individuals, or the sudden anger of a mob, and justified the propriety of his decision.

 

The threats of secession, revolution, plots to seize Washington, to burn the public buildings, to prevent the count of electoral votes and the inauguration of the new President, which had for six weeks filled the newspapers of the country, caused much uneasiness about the personal safety of Mr. Lincoln, particularly among the railroad officials over whose lines he was making his journey; and to no one of them so much as to Mr. S. M. Felton, the President of the Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore Railway, whose line formed the connecting link from the North to the South, from a free to a slave State, from the region of absolute loyalty to the territory of quasi-rebellion. Independently of politics, the city of Baltimore at that time bore a somewhat unenviable reputation as containing a dangerous and disorderly element; her “roughs” had a degree of newspaper notoriety by no means agreeable to quiet and non-combative strangers.