Here is the story of one of the most complex crimes that has ever been brought to light in this country
In considering a criminal case, we usually have the one chief figure or the two chief figures, and such difficulty with the case as exists is concerned with them.
In the case of Milton Bowers, afterward to be known as “Dr.” J. Milton Bowers, there are a lot of things which have never been explained, and which do not seem to “fit,” although we know that they do, somehow and some way.
Bowers was born in Baltimore, and had every advantage as a youth. He was one of these precocious youngsters whose brains never seem to have to go through the slow processes of the average child student. At sixteen he went to Berlin, and although he was not a matriculated student, he had already decided that he wanted to be a physician, and therefore made medicine his chief study.
He seems to have been considered peculiar by his teachers, who thought that he had promise, but that he was too easily led into the pursuit of pleasure. How long he stayed there is doubtful. About 1859 he returned to America and was caught in the vortex of the Civil War. He did not achieve distinction and made few friends.
In 1865, just after the war was over, Bowers went to Chicago, settled, and seems to have had something to do with a patent medicine firm.
He married Miss Fannie Hammet, who had some money of her own and carried a life insurance policy.
Mrs. Bowers seems to have dropped hints to several people that her husband was a fiend in human shape, and that she was mortally afraid of him, but he was one of those men whose good manners, thoughtfulness for their wives and social graces made a favorable impression on many people.
Women were apt to think that the pale, furtive and sour looking Mrs. Bowers was enough to try the spirit of any man. Her friends told a different story, and when she died, very suddenly, and without any attendant save her husband, there were a good many murmurs.
However, no investigation of the death was made, despite the amount of talk that there was about it.
Soon after the death of his first wife, Bowers happened to be in Brooklyn on a visit, and there he met again a very clever actress who had been his patient in Chicago. She was Thresa Shirk, beautiful, talented, and good.
His fine manners had always attracted her, and she listened sympathetically to his account of a marriage “entered into too young for true congeniality,” a legend which his “patients” in the windy city had believed.
“Dr.” Bowers and Thresa Shirk were married in Brooklyn, and they then went to San Francisco, as Bowers was really not very well, and it was thought that the climate of the Pacific coast would do him good. His new wife was also very fond of California, and glad to go there. This was in 1874.
As in Chicago, the doctor soon had a good many patients who thought that his wife did not appreciate him; they found her quiet and dull of appearance, and, though different from his first wife, she showed no fear of him, but she did show resentment.
She was a high spirited, proud woman, who disdained to discuss her domestic affairs with any one, but there was the shadow of a tragedy on her beautiful face.
She carried a life insurance policy, though not for a very large sum; a fact on which her husband sometimes laughingly joked with her, or, rather, at her, for on such occasions she turned and looked him in the eye as though defying him.
All this did not escape the attention of friends of Thresa Shirk Bowers, and when she died at the Palace Hotel, on January 29, 1881, the clamor was a good deal worse than it had been about the unfortunate Fannie Hammet.
By that time, however, Bowers had important friends, people who knew him as one of the few men in the western metropolis of the time who had cosmopolitan culture and the easy, graceful manners of an assured social position. They knew him to be extremely clever and popular.
It is easy to construct the scene and to see that the few who actively suspected him of having a hand in his second wife’s mysterious death were unable to do anything about it.
Among the patients who had become part of the doctor’s clientele was a divorced woman named Cecelia Benhayon Levy, a very beautiful woman, who had the reputation of being “gay,” if not worse, although she contrived to keep a certain social standing. She had a brother Henry Benhayon, who was a traveling salesman, and a child by her divorced husband, named Tillie.
The popular doctor had been seen at a good many Bohemian resorts for months before Thresa Shirk died, and less than six months after he had buried her he married Cecelia Benhayon Levy, against the vehement protests of her mother, who had heard stories about the doctor’s other waves’ lives and deaths, which did not soothe her.
Mrs. Levy, however, was as infatuated with her husband — for a time — as his other wives had been, and she cheerfully forsook the company of her relatives, making it clear that she did not care what their opinion of her husband was.
Bowers sanctimoniously pretended to be sorry to “have been the innocent cause of this dissension,” but among his cronies he blatantly preened himself on his ability to “make my wives slaves.”
It was in 1881 that Mrs. Levy married Bowers, and it was only two years until she, also, began to have the sullen look of those other women who had borne the name of Mrs. Bowers.
Shortly after this she was beginning to fight against her husband taking out a life insurance policy on her, but in the end she capitulated, and secured various policies, one of which was for five thousand dollars from the American Legion of Honor, others bringing the sum total up to seventeen thousand.
The doctor, about 1884, again became an habitué of Bohemian resorts, and was just a little bit “tougher” than he had ever seemed before. In July, 1885, Mrs. Bowers began to suffer from a strange malady. Her face, head and body began to swell.
Her mother, alarmed at the reports about her daughter, went to see her, and could hardly believe that the bloated creature who could hardly move for her unnatural bulk, was her beautiful Cecelia, who had been a heart breaker among men.
Bowers attended his wife, and announced that she was suffering from an abscess on the liver. She certainly suffered. Convulsions frequently shook her. She complained bitterly, in her lucid moments, though of what no one exactly knew.
The conduct of the “doctor” was criticized, for he often left his dying wife alone, while he was seen in cafés and other places of recreation and amusement.
In October of 1885 a stranger went to the offices of the American Legion of Honor and hinted that an insurance policy which had been taken out in that fraternity was held by a certain person, and that the person whom it concerned would die shortly, “very strangely.”
This man left the office of the Legion before his name could be secured, and he was never identified. Another mysterious stranger entered the coroner’s office on November the 2nd, and announced that Mrs. J. Milton Bowers had just died at the Arcade House, 930 Market Street, and that it would be well to look into the matter.
This man was never identified, either, and the descriptions of himself and his insinuating partner were found not to fit anybody who was known in the town at all. This part of the case was never cleared.
It was surmised that these men were enemies of the doctor, who had a great many queer “friends,” but that is all it is, a surmise.
Dr. O’Donnell, the coroner, went at once to the Arcade House and found Bowers alone with the dead woman. When the coroner told the doctor of the strange visit of the man who had made the insinuations, the doctor did not even seem to be listening.
He merely said that he had decided to have the funeral on the following afternoon, and that if there was to be any investigation, Dr. O’Donnell had better hurry up and attend to it so that the services would not be interfered with — and the coroner, being human, was angry.
He saw to it that six physicians should make the autopsy, and that Bowers should be made as uncomfortable as possible.
The six investigators of Mrs. Bowers’s death gave it as their united opinion that she had not died from an abscess of the liver.
Other physicians were called in, who thought that the symptoms of the illness which had carried off the unfortunate woman were those of phosphorous poisoning.
The funeral was postponed, greatly to the “doctor’s” annoyance, and the dead woman’s stomach was taken out and subjected to further tests, which disclosed some evidences of phosphorous poison.
The examining physicians and police contended that Bowers had received many samples of this poison from manufacturing chemists, but when his office was searched, no trace of these samples was found. He claimed that, having no use for them, he threw them out.
On November 4th, a coroner’s jury found that Cecelia Benhayon Levy Bowers had come to her death through phosphorous poison, and her husband, J. Milton Bowers, was arrested, charged with administering it to her.
This charge was largely brought about through the testimony of Mrs. Bowers’s mother, Mrs. Benhayon, who stated that when she first saw her daughter after the long estrangement it was her opinion that the young woman was dying, but that Rowers stated that she was, on the contrary, getting better, and that he would soon take her for “a nice, long trip in the country.”
Thus reassured, the mother waited for the evidences of better health in her daughter, but as the days went by, and there was no improvement, she had insisted that another physician be called in, but Bowers had strenuously opposed this, until forced to call Dr. W. H. Bruner.
A month going by, with Mrs. Bowers getting worse and not better, Mrs. Benhayon had called in Dr. Martin, of Oakland, who had not succeeded in easing the suffering woman any.
However, about this time her skin had taken on a beautiful, pearly appearance, and Mrs. Benhayon, now greatly disturbed, asked Dr. Martin if it could be that Bowers was poisoning his wife with arsenic.
Mrs. Benhayon then went on to say that Mrs. Bowers’s aunt and cousin, calling to see their sick relative, had been forcibly ejected from the sickroom by Bowers, who was very much excited when he found them there.
“Although Bowers had seventeen thousand dollars’ insurance on my daughter’s life,” she said, “he has always refused to have any policy made out for Tillie Levy, the daughter of the first marriage.
“When doctors left medicines for Cecelia, he would never allow any one to give them to her, but took them off, examined them, and then gave her what he said were the medicines, himself.”
On the 8th of March, 1886, began the trial of J. Milton Bowers for the murder of his wife, Cecelia.
Eugene Duprey, who was afterward to defend Durrant long supposed to be the murderer of two girls in a church, and who was hanged on that charge, was, in this case, the special prosecutor. In his opening speech he stated that he expected to prove that a Mrs. Zeissing, who was Mrs. Bowers’s nurse, and Thresa Farrell — who afterward married a John Dimmig — had attempted to shield the doctor.
He claimed that he could prove that before the death of his wife, Bowers had made arrangements to marry a woman in San Jose, and that she actually had her trousseau ready while her predecessor was alive; and that this courting of one wife before the death of the other was habitual with the man — that it could be proved that he had done it before.
It was also charged by Duprey that the practice on which Bowers had subsisted for many years was that of illegal operations. The prosecutor tried to have the police of Chicago bring forward much damaging testimony which had been unearthed in that city, but to this Bowers’s lawyers made a successful protest.
The case was carried through rapidly, and the verdict brought in was that of murder in the first degree. This was on April 23, 1886.
In June of that year Bowers was sentenced to be hanged, but he appealed, and while the decision was still pending, the truly remarkable feature of this case came to light.
Henry Benhayon, the brother of Cecelia, had always been a sort of ne’er-do-well, trying now this and now that, sometimes being a salesman, but more often living on his mother’s bounty, and frequently being helped by his sister, after she married again.
He and Bowers were sometimes friendly, but frequently were not, so that there were times when he would sneak into the Bowers’s menage and get money from his sister, unknown to the doctor.
This man had attracted little attention during the progress of the trial of his brother-in-law, and had seemed to continue his usual, shiftless life.
On Sunday, October 23, 1887 — while the decision as to the new trial of Bowers was still pending — some one called up the coroner’s office and said that the body of an unknown man had been found in a rooming house at 22 Geary Street.
The officials proceeded at once to this address and found the landlady, Mrs. Higgson, very much upset over the extraordinary circumstance of finding a dead man, whom she had never seen before, in a room which she had rented to another person, who had seemingly never arrived. How the man came to be in the room she had not the slightest idea.
On the 18th of the month, a young man, not the one now dead, had called and asked if room number twenty-one in her house was for rent. She told him that it was not, but offered other rooms, which he refused.
He called the next day to see if the room was still occupied, and she then told him that it would be vacant Saturday. He offered five dollars’ deposit on the understanding that he was to have the room on Saturday, and Mrs. Higgson, agreeing to this, accepted the money and gave him keys, both to the front door and the door of room twenty-one.
On Sunday, hearing nothing in the room, she opened the door with her pass-key and found a strange young man dead.
This dead man was laid out very carefully, as though in his coffin, so that it was obvious that he could not have composed himself in that way, no matter how peaceful his manner of death.
The next hour the body was identified as that of Henry Benhayon.
Three bottles were found in the room, one containing liniment, one cyanide, and one whisky.
Three letters were found, too. One to the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. It said:
To the Editor of the Chronicle:
Sir — Inclosed find one dollar to pay for this advertisement and the balance as a reward. I will call in a few days.
Yours truly,
Henry Benhayon.
October 31, 1887.
The copy for the advertisement was as follows:
LOST — October 20, near the City Hall, a memorandum book with a letter. A liberal reward will be paid if left at this office.
Then there was a letter to Bowers, which read:
Dr. J. Milton Bowers:
I only ask that you do not molest my mother. Tillie is not responsible for my acts, and I have made all reparation in my power. I likewise caution you against some of your friends, who knew Cecelia only as a husband should.
Among them are C. M. McLennan and others, whose names I cannot think of now, but you will find some more when the memorandum book is found. Farewell.
Yours,
The third letter was addressed to the coroner and was entitled:
The history of the tragedy began after my sister married Dr. Bowers.
I had reason to believe that he would leave her soon, as they always quarreled, and on one occasion she told me that she would poison him before she would permit him to leave her.
I said in jest: Have him insured—
She said all right, but Bowers objected for a long time, but finally said: If it will keep you out of mischief, all right, go ahead.
They both joined lodges, and I got the stuff ready to dispose of him, but my sister would not listen to the proposition and threatened to expose me.
After my sister got sick I felt an irresistible impulse to use the stuff on her and to finish him afterward. I would have been the administrator for my little niece, Tillie, and would then have the benefit of the insurance.
I think it was on Friday, November 24, 1885, that I took one capsule out of her pillbox and filled it with two kinds of poison.
I didn’t think that Bowers could get into any trouble, as the person who gave me the poison told me that it would leave no trace in the stomach. This person committed suicide before the trial, and as it might implicate others if I mention his name I will close the tragedy.
H. Benhayon.
P. S. — I took Dr. Bowers’s money out of his desk when my sister died.
These remarkable documents made a tremendous stir, as well they might. Everything that was brought to light concerning the young man only made the matter of these letters the more extraordinary.
Benhayon was last seen alive on Saturday night about eleven, on the streets of San Francisco, in a condition which was then thought to be that of rather extreme intoxication, but which might just as well have been that of being drugged.
He was accompanied by a man and a woman, but their faces were not seen distinctly and whoever they were they never came forward to tell what they were doing with the man nor where they were going, nor where, if anywhere, they left him alive.
On the Saturday afternoon Benhayon had been seen entirely sober and quite as usual. He had made an appointment with a dentist for the following Monday and had purchased tickets for himself and his little niece, Tillie, for the theater on Sunday night.
The most rigid search failed to show that he had ever bought poison anywhere or had seemed to know anything about poisons. If he did commit suicide, there seemed not a reason in the world for it, for, granting that his confession was true, not the slightest suspicion had attached to him.
If he really had a bad opinion of his sister he had kept it carefully to himself, for he had vigorously defended her before her marriage to Bowers, and after her marriage she seemed to have entirely lost her tendency toward a gay life. The accusations of the letter as to the person named and “others” was obviously not true of the woman’s life after she became Mrs. Bowers.
Just before he was found dead Benhayon expressed to friends his belief in Bowers’s guilt as to Mrs. Bowers’s death and expressed undying hate for what he called “that damned murderer.”
The lost memorandum book was never found. The “large reward” offered for it could not have been more than sixty cents, since the advertisement itself would have cost about forty.
The identity of the person who engaged the room was never learned, as Mrs. Higgson soon remembered that that person was a different one from the man who asked about the room on the eighteenth — that man being proved, without the shadow of a doubt, to have been John Dimmig, who had married Bowers’s housekeeper, Thresa Farrell.
Mrs. Dimmig and Mrs. Zeissing, who had been Mrs. Bowers’s nurse, were close friends and frequently visited Bowers during his long incarceration. Dimmig was born in Ohio, where he learned the drug business, but later drifted about a good deal and finally worked in a drug store at Eleventh and Mission Streets, San Francisco, where he left to become a book agent.
Dimmig admitted that he had inquired for room twenty-one at 22 Geary Street, although he had a home on Mina Street. He claimed that it was sheer accident, his asking for that particular room, and that was just one of the ways in which he “stalled” when he wanted to get into a house to sell books.
When Dimmig saw that the police openly scoffed at the idea that he used this for a “stall,” he then pretended to confess that he had wanted the room so that he and “a woman from San Jose” might have a “chat.”
He said that he knew this woman only by the name of “Timkins” and that she had written to him, saying that she wanted the room for Saturday night and that they could then have a talk. He claimed that he destroyed the letter.
Dimmig heatedly denied delegating any one to go and engage the room for him, denied that he met Timkins at all, on Saturday, and said that he had not an idea how Benhayon could have got into the room, but that, being very drunk on the day after he had been to see about the room, he might have mentioned to Benhayon, whom he had met, that he had asked for it and that that might have put it into the other’s mind. He could not explain why he had mentioned that particular room.
After all this, which took several days, Dimmig then handed to the police a letter which had been addressed to him at the Weston Perfumery Company, 26 Second Street, which read as follows:
J. A. Dimmig:
Sir — Call on me at once. I am in a devilish fix. I don’t want your money, but your advice. I think that it is all up with me. You will find me at room 21, 22 Geary Street.
Notwithstanding the astonishing fact that this letter showed that Benhayon was now occupying the room which Dimmig had been so eager to get, the latter contended that this did not occur to him as at all remarkable.
It was shown that Dimmig was not in the habit of receiving mail through the perfumery company, but that just after the letter arrived for him there he called and asked if anything had come to the company for him through the postal service and that they gave him the letter, expressing surprise that it should have been sent in the care of the company.
A Dr. Lacy, who owned a drug store, soon came forward and proved that Dimmig had procured through him twenty-five grains of cyanide.
Next, it was discovered that Mrs. Zeissing roomed at a house on Morton and Grant Avenues and that the back entrance to the house at 22 Geary Street adjoined the back entrance of Mrs. Zeissing’s rooming place. Mrs. Benhayon stated that her son Henry hated this woman greatly.
Louis Goldberg, who had known Benhayon quite well, told how he had met his friend on the street some weeks before his death and went with him to a room on Market Street where, as Benhayon stated, “he was doing some copying for a book agent.”
Goldberg knew that the others writing was very poor and very slowly made and wondered at the occupation. Of course, if Dimmig had forged all the letters and notes, then his “hiring” of the always impecunious Henry was easy enough to understand.
It was for the purpose of getting samples of his handwriting, otherwise scarce and hard to come by, for Benhayon was not a man to write anything unless necessity demanded.
Dimmig admitted that at one time he had had a room on Market Street, but claimed that he could not remember where it was. Efforts made by the police could not bring any identification of this room.
Four witnesses testified that on Friday evening preceeding the death of Benhayon, Dimmig went to Dewing’s Bush Street bookstore to buy some books for Mrs. Zeissing and that he then had with him a bottle of whisky like that found in Benhayon’s room.
With all this in hand, Captain Lees, of the San Francisco police, made the charge of murder against Dimmig on November 12. On March 14, 1888, the jury, after being out sixteen hours, disagreed.
On the second trial in December of the same year Dimmig was acquitted after the jury had been out for twenty-three hours. The verdict aroused a storm of protest.
In the meantime the Supreme Court had at last sent down a decision allowing Bowers a new trial, but as Kytka and other handwriting experts had given it as their opinion that the Benhayon letters were genuine and not forgeries, it was thought that it would be impossible to convict the doctor, and he was allowed to go free; another matter over which San Francisco was heartily indignant.
Bowers at once married “the woman of San Jose” who had been waiting for him all that time and lived with her in the town where his name had been made so notorious, until his death in 1905.
Dimmig and his wife drifted out of sight. Mrs. Zeissing also drifted out of public notice. Mrs. Benhayon went away somewhere, and was forgotten.
To the student of criminal history this is one of the most puzzling of cases, with several well defined possible motives for murder and with more than one possible murderer.
The handwriting experts undoubtedly foozled matters a good deal. We no longer believe that identity can be positively proved by handwriting. There were, it would seem, all sort of forces at work. The police continually found their efforts blocked in trying to get witnesses, find details and so on.
Whether Benhayon really did the deed — surely a crazy man, then, if ever there was one — whether he was murdered so that his “confession” might free the doctor — what part Dimmig and his wife and Mrs. Zeissing took — we can only conjecture.
What we can be sure of is that Bowers was the center of one of the most complicated cases of crime that we have had in this country.