Murder Plus: True Crime Stories From The Masters Of Detective Fiction

To call Robert Faherty “a master of detective fiction” might be stretching things just a bit. He left behind only one novel, Swamp Babe. In 1958, Crest Books, a Fawcett imprint, published this backwoods crime adventure about “a teenage temptress wild and beautiful as the untamed swamp that spawned her.” It is enjoyable, and eminently readable, yet it would be hard to make a case that it rises above scores of other paperbacks that clamored for attention on bookstore shelves during the 1950s. Faherty’s true crime output was considerably more substantial and, for my money, more satisfying. He had a knack for spotting odd crimes with outrageous characters and bizarre motives. He knew how to plot, and he had an eye for the incongruous detail, just the right detail to capture time and place. Such is the case with the story you are about to read, one of my favorites, about a turn-of-the-century dance fan who paid the ultimate price because he was “unable to resist the lure of the fascinating rhythm of the seductive tango.”

The Dancing Beauty and the Fatal Trap

The diffused glare of the locomotive’s headlight illumined vaguely the clumps of small trees and the shadowy forms of bushes in the lowland.

Engineer Robert Rohel, guiding the Elgin, Joliet & Eastern freight train west from Chicago, saw the two straight-line gleams of the rails as he peered out from the cab. Then — one of the lines was broken. Too late to stop, the horrified engineer saw a dark object on one rail.

As Rohel set the brakes and threw over the throttle, the great wheels of the engine passed over the object. The train jolted to a stop and he rushed back.

“A woman on the tracks!” he exclaimed to his fireman as they held their lanterns over a crumpled form beside the rail. “I couldn’t save her. This is awful... the first time it’s happened to me.”

Rohel gently touched the body, turned it over. There was nothing he could do.

Stars shone in a clear sky. The lonely area was dark except for the distant glow of the train’s lamp, and, farther ahead, little points of light marking a station in the town of Wayne, Illinois. It was a warm night — September 26th.

In the morning, Coroner William A. Hopf examined the body in a morgue in West Chicago.

“Might have been an accident,” he said. “She may have fainted or fallen there and struck her head. Although it is strange that she should be walking in that lonely spot. Then,” he continued, “there’s a possibility she committed suicide. Might have picked that spot purposely.”

The coroner saw a face of considerable attractiveness, framed by rich, abundant brown hair. Though the body was broken, the facial features were virtually unmarred. The woman’s dark dress was of fine quality silk. A small gold watch, probably of little value, was pinned to the dress and intact despite the violence of the train’s impact.

“I guess there’s little I can do except write a report and hold a routine inquest,” he said. “The trainman cannot be blamed, of course.”

But Coroner Hopf was thorough. He touched the face and found the skin broken near the mouth. There seemed to be a round hole in the left cheek. He studied the head. There was a hole in the posterior skull.

“A bullet wound!” he exclaimed. “This woman was shot!”

A bullet — probably of .32 caliber — had passed through the mouth, the palate, and then gone out through the back of the head.

“I don’t believe the wound in the cheek was caused by a gun placed very near it. There’re no powder burns,” the coroner reasoned. “Most likely the gun was held a few feet away. Probably the killer expected that at the moment the train struck the body his crime would be concealed forever — and, certainly, it nearly worked out that way.”

Since it was established that the woman had been murdered, Sheriff A. A. Kuhn hurried with deputies to the railroad tracks.

There was not a trace of the gun near the scene. Determined not to overlook any clues, however, Kuhn got down on hands and knees and searched the grass. Before long he found a broken bracelet of gold. It was inscribed: “From W.H.A. to M.A.” As he was examining it closely, a deputy came running with a woman’s purse, turned inside out, which he had found thirty feet away.

“She must have been robbed,” he said. “There’s nothing in or on the purse to tell who she was.”

That question seemed to be answered a few minutes later. A white card was found in the grass. It bore a printed name, “Mildred Allison.” Kuhn turned it over. On the back, faintly penciled, was: “Felecita Club.” Another deputy found scraps of torn paper, which the sheriff held carefully and took to the office.

The scraps were pieced together and revealed the embossed name of a downtown Chicago hotel. Some fragments were missing, but the others formed words. A cryptic message!

“Dear... gang... girls... Dunham farm... money... $14... $500... you can have what you want.”

Like the other words, a signature was written in ink: “A. Harron.”

Dunham farm was near the intersection of the tracks of the Elgin, Joliet & Eastern and the Chicago, Aurora & Elgin Railroads, near the place where the train had struck the body. Kuhn hurried there with the pasted fragments of the note.

The manager’s wife said she had never seen the note and had no idea of the meaning of the message. Told about the girl on the tracks, she recalled an incident confirming the murder theory:

“After I left the Aurora & Elgin electric train at 8 o’clock last night, I noticed a man and a woman who apparently had come from Chicago on the same train. They walked near me, together, and talked in a friendly way. The woman joked about being ‘out in the country’ at night.

“Then they walked, arm-in-arm, along the Wayne road. That would have led them near the point at which the two railroads meet, close to the place where the train hit the woman.”

Thanking the woman, the sheriff mapped three immediate moves: a check to learn positively whether the described couple had come from Chicago, a hunt for the mysterious “Harron” of the note, and an inquiry at the Felecita Club to establish the identification of the victim if possible.

He telephoned a complete report of the case to Captain John J. Halpin, in charge of Chicago detectives. Halpin promised complete and prompt cooperation to solve the crime.

Kuhn questioned the guards of the electric train which had reached Wayne at 8 o’clock. One remembered a couple answering to the description as having boarded the train at the Chicago terminal at Fifth Avenue. He said the woman had had a small suitcase and the man, no baggage. They had seemed on the best of terms, and had chatted and joked.

To Kuhn, this meant that the crime had not been the result of a chance encounter ending in a holdup!

Halpin’s first move was to send detectives to the downtown hotel on Michigan Avenue in search of Harron. They found that a man of that name had registered there but had left, saying he expected to return there in a few days.

Then the captain hurried with his men to the Felecita Club, a dance academy on Thirty-third Street near Cottage Grove Avenue.

The manager, Frank Oleson, said he knew Mildred Allison. His description of her was the same as that of the girl in the West Chicago morgue.

“Miss Allison was a beautiful girl and one of the best tango dancers in Chicago,” he said. “She has been at my club many times, and has been a great favorite since the popularity of the tango developed. I don’t know why anyone would want to harm her!”

Oleson went to West Chicago and definitely established the victim’s identity.

Kuhn and Halpin went to Chicago with Oleson and questioned him at length about every known detail of the girl’s life.

She had been married twice, he knew, and her first husband lived in Chicago. Her full name was Mildred Allison Rexroat, but she used only “Allison.” She was the mother of two young children by her first husband, Allison. Mildred had had many admirers at the dancing academy and some had been very attentive. But Oleson said he did not know of anyone who might have had a motive to kill her.

The officers showed him the fragments of the mystery note.

Oleson could offer no help on that.

“I want to talk to both the men who have been married to her,” Halpin said. “First, I want to search her living quarters. We may have to dig deeply into a woman’s life to find the point at which the killer entered it.”

Oleson directed the police to a home on Eggleston Avenue where the dancer had had a room.

There among a miscellany of clothing and toilet articles, Halpin found papers, letters and pictures. There were letters from both husbands, some in tender vein, others hinting of quarrels. Addresses were given: Allison, the first husband, lived on the South Side. Rexroat, the second, lived at Macomb, Illinois.

Halpin made telephone calls until he located both men, and received assurance that they would undergo questioning. He decided the best place for the conference would be in the morgue, with Mildred Allison Rexroat, a silent, lifeless witness.

Under the vigilant eyes of Halpin and Kuhn, the two men walked into the dimly lighted chamber of death and looked upon the face of the woman they had loved. State’s Attorney C. W. Hadley of DuPage County followed them in.

“I haven’t the slightest idea of who killed her or why she was killed,” Rexroat said quickly, as he turned away and faced Hadley.

Allison seemed deeply moved and continued to gaze at the still form.

“Mildred—” he said. “I loved her, and, I wanted to keep her. But she drifted away from me, found new companions. Then she divorced me.”

“Where were you on the night of September 26th?” Hadley asked.

“At home, on the South Side. I can prove that by a number of people. I was in the house and in the neighborhood all evening.”

Rexroat spoke.

“I was in my father’s farmhouse at Macomb.”

The officers made an immediate checkup of their alibis and found that both were true.

Everett Rexroat then told a story tinged with sadness and bitterness:

“I met Mildred at a dance club on the South Side and I fell in love at first sight. I couldn’t stay away from her. I went to see her every night. Within a few weeks I asked her to marry me. She didn’t believe I meant it at first, but I convinced her I loved her, and she consented.

“We were married and I brought my bride home to the farm at Macomb. We were happy as ever any married couple had been — at least, I was happy. Then Mildred began to grow tired of country life, and talked about the city and the bright lights. I told her I must stay on the farm, but she became more dissatisfied every day. One night when I came into the house after a hard day’s work I learned she had packed her bag and had gone away.

“That broke me up for a long time, but I knew it was useless to try to follow her and persuade her to come back. I never saw her again — until now!”

After establishing that Rexroat and his father and two neighbors had spent the evening of September 26th in the farm house, Halpin sent detectives to search Allison’s home. They found a trunk marked with Mildred’s name and containing her personal effects. Apparently it had been brought there very recently.

Halpin was interested in that peculiar circumstance and searched the trunk thoroughly. He found many letters, some in German, some voicing vague threats against the dancer. But the captain vainly sought a name and address that would give him a lead.

Other loose ends of the investigation had to be picked up. He sent a squad to the Michigan Avenue hotel in a new quest for the writer of the mysterious note found near the railroad tracks.

The detectives found Harron.

“Mildred Allison?” the man said. “I know nothing about her, except what I have read in newspapers.”

The pasted note was shown to him.

“I can explain that easily. I wrote that note to a friend of mine who lives at Wayne, alluding to an attempt of some swindlers to get me in on a scheme which, I am sure, would have defrauded both of us. It just happens that he tore the note up out there.”

The statement was verified quickly by the police. Another promising lead had failed, and the killer, still unnamed, remained at large.

While Captain Halpin went to the Eggleston Avenue house to locate and question the woman from whom Mildred Allison had rented her room, a strange physical clue was discovered.

A hair switch, of the type used in that day to give woman’s crowning glory a more abundant appearance, was found in the freight yards of the Burlington Railroad, south of downtown Chicago.

The switch was taken to Captain Halpin as he was questioning the victim’s landlady. “That is Mildred’s. I’m sure,” the woman said. “It is made of her hair! That is exactly the shade of hers.”

She stared at the grim reminder of the dead dancer.

“Mildred put that into her rattan suitcase when she left here that evening. She said she was going to Wheaton to arrange about forming a tango class there.” Wheaton was only a few miles away from Wayne, the scene of the crime.

“She had talked with a man, often, about the class,” the landlady continued. “I think she was to meet him that night. Did you find her diamond ring? She had a valuable one.”

“That was not either of her husbands?”

“No, he was a young fellow she met recently when dancing, probably at Felecita. I think it was Mr. Spencer.”

“Tell me all you know about this Spencer,” Halpin asked.

“I saw him one evening when he came to call for Mildred. I think he may have been the man who telephoned to her the afternoon before she started for Wheaton. The voice was like Mr. Spencer’s, a low drawl.”

“Do you think that was his real name?”

“I don’t know that he ever used another. He was rather short and stocky. He had strong, thick shoulders. I would say he was between twenty-eight and thirty-two years old. His hair was brown and he had blue eyes, and his face was ruddy. He wore gold eyeglasses. His clothes were like a minister’s — black suit and high collar.”

“His weight and height?”

“About five feet, six inches tall, I think, and he must have weighed about a hundred and forty-five pounds.”

The description fitted a man who Oleson said had danced the tango with Mildred at the Felecita!

Sheriff Kuhn received the report at Wheaton and sought sponsors of a tango class there. Hours of inquiry resulted only in word that no one had heard of plans for such a class.

But there were two men named Spencer in Wheaton!

Kuhn hurried to one, a merchant. He did not answer the description of the mystery man, and he promptly accounted for all his movements on the night of September 26th.

The second, a younger man, denied he had ever been interested in the tango or in any dancer. Mildred’s landlady looked at him and said he was not the admirer of Mildred.

The merchant then recalled that a salesman named Spencer often came to Wheaton on business. Detectives rushed eagerly to the salesman’s employers in Chicago.

That young man, records and correspondence proved, had been in southern Illinois the night of the crime. While the detectives were in the office the salesman came in. He did not fit the description of the hunted man given by the victim’s landlady.

“Three Spencers!” Halpin groaned, “and not the man we want. I hope we don’t have to sift out all the Spencers in Illinois.”

Halpin rechecked the descriptions given of the man who had been seen on the train.

The train attendants and the farm manager’s wife agreed that he had been stocky, short and brown-haired, and had worn a dark suit.

Sheriff Kuhn telephoned his report to Halpin then. He had ordered with results, a wide search of the area along the Elgin, Joliet & Eastern tracks. A deputy had found, hidden in a marshy spot near the tracks, a heavy hammer wrapped in a towel, and a newspaper dated September 23rd. The hammer bore the imprint of a Chicago hardware dealer. It weighed three pounds.

Halpin dispatched detectives to the store. It was hard to figure out what part the hammer had played in the case. The dancer had been shot and, apparently, had not been struck on the head. Had the killer planned the murder long in advance, planned to kill with the hammer — and secreted it there on September 23rd?

Halpin was eager for the report from the store. But the new clue failed. The store had sold many such hammers to mechanics, and there were no records kept of such sales.

“This murderer has all Chicago to hide in,” Halpin told his men. “But we’ve got to dig him out, quick. It’s an even chance he thinks that he is safe and that the city is the best place for him to keep under cover. Maybe he has used the name of Spencer only in his contacts with the girl he killed. He may think he’s perfectly safe under another name.

“But I have a hunch this fellow will show up again around the dance halls. I don’t believe he will stay away from girls very long. We’re going to cover such places, and we’re going to get a lead on him, or find him, in one of them.”

Halpin mapped an amazing campaign of vigilance over dance halls, schools and clubs, concentrating on those of the South Side. District captains were instructed to have plainclothes on the watch for the mysterious Spencer, described fully in communications to the captains. And Halpin sent his best men to the halls to mingle with the dancers, to be attentive to the girls, and to talk about the tango murder case with them, while watching always for the appearance of a short, thick-shouldered man wearing gold eyeglasses.

Surely, Halpin reasoned, the slayer would come forth from wherever he had been hiding, harassed mentally by his guilt to find a measure of relief in the satisfaction of his craving for companionship with women. The tango, newly imported from the Latin countries, had won many to its seductive grace. Perhaps the man of gun and hammer was an addict and would be unable to resist the lure of the Spanish music and the exhilaration of embraces of young girls to its fascinating rhythm.

Three nights passed without result. Halpin sent new instructions to his captains, to insure that police on post would watch every report carefully.

“The fellow has got to come out into the open,” Halpin said. “He’s got to try to forget that scene on the railroad tracks. He’ll go looking for girls — and he may betray himself in doing it.”

The next night a detective phoned Halpin.

“I’ve got something,” he said. “I’ve met a girl in a hall who says she knew a guy that looked like Spencer and was tango-crazy. A few nights ago he danced with her, and he invited her to have a drink at a party at his house. She went out with him, but found that the house was just a rooming place and that there was no party. She left him. She said he mentioned having known Mildred Allison. The fellow was nervous and excited, she said. The house is near the Felecita Club.”

Halpin rushed to the address with half-a-dozen detectives. While front and rear were guarded, the captain and two men entered and found the landlady. They described the man, and she indicated a room at the head of the stairs.

The room was dark, it seemed. Halpin tired the door. It was locked. He rapped. There was no sound within. The three men put their shoulders to it and broke the door open.

The room was empty, but the bed was rumpled as if recently occupied.

The frightened landlady said she had made it up early that afternoon.

“What was this fellow’s name?” Halpin demanded.

“He wouldn’t give a name,” she said. “He paid for a week, four days ago. But he had a suitcase, and it’s gone. It looks like he’s moved out.”

She described the tenant fully. The picture tallied exactly with that of Spencer, but she had not seen gold eyeglasses.

“He had a funny suitcase,” she said. “It was that wood stuff — rattan they call it.”

Mildred Allison’s suitcase had been of rattan!

“He’s our man,” Halpin said, “and we have had a tough break. Missed him by a couple of hours! But he’ll turn up again in this part of town. I’m betting.”

Again, while Spanish rhythms were played in the South Side dance halls and young men and girls and old men and girls swayed and pirouetted in the gyrations of the tango, detectives watched.

Halpin then got a report that a man resembling Spencer had been seen in a cheap dancing resort of unsavory reputation near Twenty-second and State streets. He sent more detectives into the area.

That night a woman told a uniformed patrolman that she had been threatened by a man who had taken a room in her house two days before.

The patrolman told one of Halpin’s detectives. The sleuth had been thinking only in terms of “Mr. Spencer,” and he considered this new development only in that light. He questioned this woman.

“Is the fellow short, brown-haired, with bulky shoulders?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“Is he in your house now?”

“No, he went out. I meant to tell him he must vacate the room, but I was afraid to, after he threatened me during an argument because there wasn’t a lock on the door of his room.”

The detective hurried to the house and into the room. A high collar was on the dresser. Under a paper in a small drawer of a dresser he found a loaded .32-caliber pistol. In a corner of the room was a pair of shoes caked with mud.

“Maybe he was a thief. He had a woman’s diamond ring. He showed it to me,” the landlady said.

The detective looked into a clothes closet, and saw a small rattan suitcase.

He rushed to telephone and told Captain Halpin:

“I’ve located Spencer, sure!”

The captain arrived in ten minutes with an automobile load of heavily armed detectives. Quickly he posted his men, one at the rear door, another in a doorway forty feet from the house, two in doorways across the street, out of sight. One took a position in a dark corner of the living room. Halpin and one sleuth stayed in the man’s room.

At midnight the front door downstairs slammed, and a man hurried up the stairs with heavy steps. Halpin heard the doorknob turn. He took one step forward quietly, with his .38 ready. The door swung open and Halpin thrust his gun forward.

There was a gasp and a scuffle. Halpin and his man hurled the newcomer to the floor, and handcuffs were snapped on his wrists.

In the light of the downstairs hall the detectives studied their prisoner. He was short, with thick neck and heavy shoulders. He wore a high collar and a black suit. Brown hair, blue eyes. Halpin fished a pair of gold eyeglasses from the prisoner’s vest pocket and put them on his nose.

“Just like a preacher,” Halpin said. “You could pass for a Madison Street evangelist.”

“Say, you dicks have the wrong man,” the prisoner whimpered. The voice was a drawl, low and soft.

“We’ve got the man who killed Mildred Allison Rexroat, and that’s the one we’ve been looking for!”

At the detective bureau that night Oleson and Mildred’s landlady identified the prisoner as the mysterious Mr. Spencer; and the suitcase was identified as the one carried by Mildred Allison Rexroat on her journey to death.

Then Spencer talked.

“Sure, I killed her.”

“You planned it all long before, didn’t you?”

“Sure, I did. I used to dance with the girl, and, believe me, I sure could do the tango with her. I liked her at first and soon fell head over heels in love with her. I asked her not to dance with other fellows and go around with them. I wanted her for my own. She didn’t mind me, and I got mad about it. I figured if I couldn’t have her I would put her away, and while I was doing it I would get her money and her ring.

“You know, I heard about that place out in the country. Remember, about a year ago, a woman was killed out there with a rock by somebody and they never got a line on the guy that did it? I picked that spot, I like a hammer for that kind of work, so I got a big one and went out there and put it where I could have it handy.

“I made a date with Millie and kidded her along about some people in Wheaton wanting to learn the tango. I said we had to go to Wayne to meet one of them on a farm, and she might need some money to rent a hall and make other arrangements.

“Millie fell for it. On the train I made love to her and promised her a lot, and she believed me. Women are soft for me!

“When we got off the train I said we had to walk along a dark road near the tracks. Millie didn’t mind. She said it was a fine night for a walk in the country. I tried to lead her along to the spot where I had the hammer hidden, but she didn’t want to go there, so I decided I wouldn’t make her suspicious. I didn’t want her to yell for help. I like a hammer; it’s quiet.

“I stopped near the tracks, anyway, and decided to do the work right there. I put my arm around her and held her close while I pulled out my gun. Then I stepped back a little and gave it to her, right in the face.

“She fell right over without saying a word, and I grabbed her purse and her ring. I didn’t take the bracelet. I didn’t think I could sell it for much.

“I had this train idea all figured out. I dragged Millie onto the rail and dropped her there. I figured people would say it was just another train accident. I thought for sure the train would hit her head. It was a tough break for me that I didn’t make sure her head was on the rail.”

Halpin listened grimly to the horrifying story.

As the day for the trial at Wheaton drew near, Spencer obtained a lawyer and said he would fight the charge. Meanwhile he revealed that his real name was Henry Spencer and that he had served a ten-year term at Joliet Prison for burglary.

The trial was one of the most amazing spectacles seen in an Illinois courtroom. State’s Attorney Hadley led the state’s fight to get a swift verdict and a death sentence.

Among the spectators in the crowded courtroom were the two men who had loved and married the murdered tango dancer.

Spencer lighted a cigar as he sat at the defense table, a red ribbon in the lapel of his coat.

The judge rapped his gavel and ordered him to stop smoking.

“I won’t,” he said, and continued puffing until a bailiff took the cigar from him.

When a lawyer began a plea, talking of “irresponsibility” and “mental weakness,” Spencer stood and shouted:

“Cut out all this red tape! Get twelve men to say I killed my pal Millie and then take me out and hang me. Don’t waste all this time. Send somebody out to build a scaffold. String me up!”

He gripped his throat to illustrate the hanging.

Spencer was a prophet. Twelve men did rule that he killed Mildred Allison Rexroat, and that he was guilty of murder in the first degree.

“I’ll appeal,” his lawyer said.

“Cut out the appeals,” yelled Spencer. “Let’s get this rope party over!”

He turned to the spectators and said:

“I hope you people all enjoyed this trial, and got what you came for. I want you all to come and see me swing!”

The judge decreed that Spencer must hang on December 21st.

Defense counsel appealed to the Supreme Court, and there was a reprieve after Wheaton officials objected to a hanging during Christmas week.

Hanging was scheduled for January 22nd, but a new delay was granted for review of the evidence. Then the Supreme Court ruled that Spencer must die for his crime.

On July 31st, 1914, Spencer stood on the scaffold, a red flower pinned to his shirt. The white cap was fitted over his head and the noose adjusted.

He was dead a minute later, his body on the ground — a few miles from the place where he shot Mildred Allison Rexroat and placed her body on the railroad track.