McQueen - Murder & Mayhem in Indiana

Published by The History Press

Charleston, SC 29403

www.historypress.net

Copyright 2014 by Keven McQueen

All rights reserved

First published 2014

e-book edition 2014

ISBN 978.1.62584.861.1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McQueen, Keven.

Murder and mayhem in Indiana / Keven McQueen.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references.

print edition ISBN 978-1-62619-368-0 (paperback)

1. Murder--Indiana--Case studies 2. Crime--Indiana--Case studies. I. Title.

HV6533.I6M367 2014

364.15230977209041--dc23

2013047421

Notice: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. It is offered without guarantee on the part of the author or The History Press. The author and The History Press disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever without prior written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

To Amy and Quentin.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Geneta Chumley; Thomas Clark; Drema Colangelo; Greg Dumais and everyone at The History Press; Gaile Sheppard Dempsey; Eastern Kentucky University Department of English and Theatre; Eastern Kentucky University Interlibrary Loan Department (Stefanie Brooks; Heather Frith; Pat New; Shelby Wills); Amy and Quentin Hawkins; Darrell and Swecia McQueen; Darren, Alison and Elizabeth McQueen; Kyle and Bonnie McQueen; Michael, Lori and Blaine McQueen and Evan Holbrook; Lee Mitchum; Jerica Nanik; Mia Temple. Also: the Provider.

This book was edited by Lee Mitchum.

The Mystery of Dr. Knabe

The slaying of Helen Knabe in Indianapolis contains the elements that make true crime stories fascinating: the puzzling, pointless and grisly homicide of a prominent individual; a bungled investigation; legitimate clues and red herrings; a cast of bizarre characters; absurd theories; and, most of all, a genuine sense of mystery.

The tragedy of Knabes premature demise is all the more striking because she must have been a truly remarkable person. She succeeded despite obstacles that would have made many people surrender out of sheer despair. Born a German peasant around 1876, as a young girl she denied herself the necessities of life, including food, in order to save enough money to travel to the United States. Once there, she was handicapped in that she could not speak a word of English. She went to work for an Indianapolis physician as a house girl of all workthat is, she was a maid, a cook, a manual laborer and an all-purpose drudge. But she was intelligent and had a keen interest in medicine and science. Through perseverance and hard work, she learned English, saved her money and entered the Medical College of Indiana, an institution that readers of my book Forgotten Tales of Indiana will recognize as one of the patrons of professional ghoul Rufus Cantrells peculiar services.

Knabe proved such a brilliant student that she became an instructor in bacteriology and pathology even before she graduated in 1904. For a year after graduation, she was in charge of the schools laboratory. She rose to the position of assistant pathologist in the state board of healths lab and became Indianas first official state bacteriologist. In 1906, she was named assistant in physical diagnosis at the Medical College of Indiana. On November 1, 1908, she resigned and started her own private practice. In January 1909, she was elected a member of the faculty at the Indiana Veterinary College, where she served as chair of parasitology and hematology. By the time of her death at age thirty-five, she had a roster of upper-class patients in Indianapolis.

Dr. Helen Knabe. From the Indianapolis Sun, October 26, 1911.

Female doctors were relatively rare in Knabes time; according to the book The Sum of Feminine Achievement, in 1910, there were precisely 13,687 in the United States. On the night of October 23, 1911, their number decreased by one. At 8:00 a.m. on October 24, Dr. Knabes assistant, Katherine McPherson, unlocked the door to the physicians ground-floor rooms at the Delaware, a swanky apartment house where Knabe lived and kept her office. The doctor did not answer McPhersons calls, so McPherson commenced a room-to-room search. McPherson found her employers body on a blood-soaked bed in the sleeping quarters. Then, she did something that has caused many an open-and-shut murder case to go unsolved forever: rather than call the police right away, the rattled woman called some of the doctors friends and relatives, many of whom showed up to see the remains for themselves. Despite their good intentions, they contaminated the crime scene. More than an hour after discovering the body, McPherson finally notified the authorities.

When detectives arrived, they noticed that the doctors nightdress was in disarray. Her throat was cut so deeply from ear to ear that she had nearly been decapitated. The furniture in the rest of the apartment was in order, so whatever had happened to Dr. Knabe occurred in her bedroom with great swiftness. But one item was known to be missing: a surgical instrument called a microtome, loaned to Knabe by Dr. C.E. Ferguson. The theory quickly gained ground that it was the murder weapon.

In some respects, Dr. Knabes death is reminiscent of the baffling 1929 murder of Isidor Fink in New York Citys Harlem. As in the Fink case, all of the apartments doors were locked from the inside. The windows were closed and locked in all rooms but the doctors bedroom. There, the windows were up but the screens were intact. The sills were coated with thick dust from street traffic, proving that no one had entered or exited through the windows. The only access into the apartment seemed to be via a dumbwaiter that was too small to hold a man. The front door was secured with a spring mechanism that would automatically lock the door when it was closed; therefore, it was entirely possible for a keyless intruder to lock the door behind him while leaving. The mystery was how Knabes assailant got into the apartment in the first place.

Coroner C.O. Durham and detectives questioned janitor Jefferson Haynes, who also happened to be an elder at Shiloh Baptist Church; Hayness daughter, Eva; and a housekeeper named Fannie Winston, all of whom lived in basement rooms under Knabes apartment. Haynes claimed he had heard the sound of someone falling in the night, followed by a scream and a groan. He assumed the noises were being made by one of the doctors patients and went back to sleep. He told the story to detectives several times but contradicted himself as to exactly when he heard the sounds. The coroner opined that it was impossible for Dr. Knabe to have groaned, so deep was the cut in her throat. Neither Hayness daughter nor Mrs. Winston had heard any noises in the night. The police were suspicious of Haynes and detained him.

By the day after the body was discovered, the police were divided into two camps. Coroner Durham embraced what we might call the Obvious Theory: he felt that Knabe had been murdered, as evidenced by a defensive wound on her left forearm and her throat wound, which was so deep the blade had grazed the spinal cord. By contrast, Captain William Holtz, chief of detectives, adhered to the Barely Plausible Theory: he thought that Dr. Knabe had committed suicide. As a doctor, he argued, she would have known how to do maximum damage to her own throat with a knife slash. As a trained gymnast, she could have put up a fight against an assailant, yet the furniture was undisturbed. There was no discernible motive for murder; she had been neither robbed nor raped. On the other hand, she had gone into considerable debt after opening her private practice and had worried about her financial predicament. Even her furniture and medical instruments were not her own, but the property of her cousin Augusta Knabe.