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| Louise Lawson |
Louise Lawson came to New York from Walnut
Springs, Texas, in 1918. She planned to make it big on the stage or to
star in a Broadway musical. Instead, she wound up dead in her luxurious Wall
Street apartment.
The Buffalo Times said Louise had two
personalities as widely divergent as the “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of
Robert Louis Stevenson’s immortal story.”
Back home in her Texas hometown, the folks saw Louise as an innocent, high-minded girl who met an unfortunate death while pursuing her life’s dream. However, her friends on Broadway knew her as “a sophisticated young woman. A girl who had chosen the easiest way and was living in idle, diamond-studded luxury by matching her smiles and kisses against the desires of men willing to pay high for them.”
The New York stage was not good to Louise.
She played one or two-bit parts, but nothing that would bring her the wealth
and fame she wanted. New York City had too many girls competing for the same
dream.
D. W. Griffith paid her $20 to work as an
extra in Way Down East, a film that starred Lillian Gish. But she had no
more luck in the movies than on the stage, and music was no more promising.
Back home in Walnut Springs, Louise had been a twelve-year-old piano prodigy
who sang in the church choir. In Flo Ziegfeld’s Follies on Broadway, she was
just another chorus girl who made fifty bucks a week.
Louise faced the same dilemma many girls like her encountered. Give up your dreams and go home with your head hung down or take a “sugar papa” (the 1920s term for sugar-daddy). Then sit back and enjoy life in the big city.
Louise found a sugar poppa—several of them.
Detectives found scores of men listed in her notebook—many prominent New York
millionaires.
Louise’s closest man friend was Gerhard M.
Dahl, a leading New York financier, millionaire, and chairman of the
Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation. He had a private yacht and a
half-million-dollar estate in Smithtown, Long Island.
Frank McCutcheon, the former building
manager of the Monastery Apartments, said Dahl visited Lawson two or three
times a week. He usually arrived at 6 p.m. and left by 1 a.m.
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| Louise Lawson |
Shortly after the murder, detectives questioned Dahl about his relationship with the girl. Dahl said he was a friend of the family and took an interest in the girl’s musical career, but stopped short of admitting a romantic relationship with her. Detectives never considered him a serious suspect in the murder.
Louise had several other gentlemen-friends
who called on her at the Monastery, including a tall, handsome, blonde man whom
she called Jack, but none of them were singled out by the papers.
In mid-June, the Daily News told
readers a fantastical story about a band of robbers who preyed on fashionable
young women. In “recent robberies of Broadway Butterflies—not all of them
fatal, as with Louise Lawson—point to the existence of such a band. Subtle
evidence suggests the mastermind of this band is a woman, young and beautiful,
a habitue of the city’s nightlife.”
They named the band—the Wolves of
Broadway.
The first hint that such a band existed came
soon after Louise Lawson’s death. A young woman told detectives, “To look for
the gang that has formed itself into a secret company to prey upon just such
girls and women as Miss Lawson. You will find them any night cruising Thirty-ninth
Street to Fifty-seventh. You will find them at the tea dances in the smart
hotels in the afternoon.”
Anywhere the Broadway Butterflies went, the
wolves were sure to follow. It was a vicious cycle. The girls charmed their
jewels and furs from wealthy society admirers, and the wolves relieved the
girls of their prizes. And the interesting thing was that most of the girls
never reported the crime—even if they lost $10,000 or $20,000 in jewelry. The
shame of having friends and family learn how they made their living outweighed
the possessions they lost.
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| Louise Lawson, Dot King, and Harry Lesser |
Detectives believed the woman who led the gang steered the bandits toward their victims. She would cozy up to the Butterflies at tea parties—get to know them and their lifestyles. She may even have applied to rent apartments in the same buildings as her intended victims to learn more about the building’s layout.
Of course, it was all speculation.
No one knew if the Wolves of Broadway
existed or were just figments of some reporter’s imagination. That was yet to
be proven.
Louise Lawson lived at the stylish Monastery
Apartments at 22 West Seventieth Street, close to the Museum of Natural History
in Manhattan. The rent was $175 a month—nearly $2700 in 2020 money. Reports
said she spent another $150 monthly on liquor to stock her apartment and
regularly deposited $500 weekly in her bank account. Not bad for a woman the
police said only earned $250 in her six years in New York City.
At about 8 a.m. on the day Louise was
murdered, two men asked elevator operator Thomas Kane for a lift to the fifth
floor. Despite prohibition, they had a case of liquor for Miss Lawson. Kane
gave the man a ride back down fifteen minutes later. The other took the stairs.
Louise’s maid, Lillian Harvey, found the
body when she reported for work that morning. Grace Thompkins called the police
when she heard the maid’s screams.
The robbers bound and gagged Louise with
tape and towels taken from her bathroom, then threw her on the
bed. Reports vary whether she choked to death from the towel stuffed in
her mouth to gag her or the bandits intentionally smothered her. Whatever
happened, police reports show that Louise put up a good fight. Furniture was
tipped over, and plants and vases were knocked to the floor.
Lawson’s $1600 coat and nearly $15,000 in
jewelry were missing, so detectives naturally assumed robbery was the motive.
Besides the expensive fur, Louise had several gold and platinum rings, and a
platinum bracelet valued at $8,000—(nearly $120,000 today).
Soon, the newspapers asked: “Is there a band
of sleek young men who rob rich men’s pets along Broadway of their jewels?”
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| Dot King |
Just months after the Lawson murder, the gang followed Mrs. Howard Johnson, the wife of the playwright, to a tea party at the Hotel Almanac. Once inside, they drugged her and stole her jewelry.
Avonne Taylor, a former showgirl with the
Ziegfeld Follies, got robbed under similar circumstances the previous August.
Two men knocked on her door and said they had flowers for her. When she
answered, the man held a revolver to her head and threatened to kill her unless
she gave them all her jewelry—all $15,000 of it. They bound and gagged her
before they left.
The murder of Dorothy King on March 16,
1923, is often linked to that of Louise Lawson, even though the circumstances
are entirely different.
Dot King (real name Anna Keenan) was born in
a Brooklyn tenement in 1894. She lived a checkered life before becoming a
Manhattan model.
Dot was arrested for disorderly conduct in
Atlantic City in 1919 and jumped bail, escaping with only the clothes she was
wearing. Before that, she fell in love with a Broadway waiter who abused her
repeatedly and got her started smoking opium. After leaving him, she fell in
with some gamblers who used her to meet men and women they could cheat using
marked cards and crooked dice.
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| The Monastery Apartments |
Back in New York, she became a cloak model, wearing fancy outfits to cabarets and tea rooms so potential customers could see what they looked like on a live person. From there, she jumped to a spot dancing with Flo Ziegfeld’s Follies.
Then she found a “heavy sugar guy” or sugar
daddy who put her up in a small luxury apartment in Manhattan and showered her
with money, fur, and jewelry.
Dot’s main squeeze was a mysterious man
known only as Mr. Marshall—a tall, distinguished, sixty-year-old gentleman.
Reporters quickly identified him as Philadelphia millionaire J. Kearsley
Mitchell. Detectives said Mitchell “supplied the money which provided the furs
and jewels and slinky, silken undergarments which Dorothy King’s frothy nature
craved.”
It was rumored that someone tried to entice
Dot to join a plot to blackmail Mitchell for $100,000, and when she refused to
aid them—they killed her.
Dot was murdered in her bed on the top floor
of her apartment building at 144 West Fifty-seventh Street.
Her maid, Billie (Ella) Bradford, discovered
the body when she arrived for work at about noon on March 15. At first, doctors
believed Dot died of natural causes. Then, someone noticed her arm was bent in
an unnatural position behind her. Further investigation found a bottle of
chloroform hidden in her bed covers.
Elevator operator John Thomas said he took
Mr. Marshall (J. Kearsley Mitchell) and his secretary Mr. Wilson (aka John H.
Jackson, a New York attorney), to Dot’s apartment on the night of the
murder.
Jackson always accompanied Mitchell when he
visited Dot. Thomas said they checked the lobby and surroundings before going
to Dot’s room. Jackson would stick around for ten or fifteen minutes and then
leave. Mitchell would stay for the rest of the night.
When he learned about Dot’s murder, Mitchell
contacted the police. Detectives questioned him and quickly decided he had no
part in the killing.
The day after Dot’s murder, police held
Albert E. Guimares, a wealthy Porto Rican steel magnate, in jail, without bail
for violating the Sullivan Law. Dot showered him with gifts, including a $750
fur coat, a $400 set of jeweled cufflinks, and a watch and chain valued at
$1200. And yet, the gift-giving seemed out of place after Dot’s mother told the
police that Guimares frequently beat her.
Guimares had an air-tight alibi for the
night of the murder, so the police eventually ruled him out as a suspect.
What made it hard to pinpoint suspects was
Dorothy’s taste in men. The Daily News said, “Dorothy’s love
changed with the winds, but she was most constant to Guimares.”
Dot was also tied to Draper M. Daugherty,
the son of Harry M. Daugherty, the United States Attorney General. Supposedly,
the blackmailers wanted her to blackmail him as well.
The Daily News supposed that she was
“not pliable enough, or she failed to obey orders. So, Dorothy was murdered.”
Almost 100 years later, both cases remain
unsolved.
The Taxi Party Murder in Des Moines
Murder at Lone Grave Bluff in Clinton
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