Richard O. Jones - The Sleepwalking Slasher: The True Crime of Samuel J. Keelor

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Contents:

At 10:30 p.m. Feb. 12, 1903, Cincinnati manFred Geiger rushed to the house of his Linn Street neighbor GeorgeMurray, frantically crying out that his wife had been murdered.

Murray grabbed a coat and went back to hisneighbors house with him, noting that Geiger was only wearing alight sweater despite the chilly weather.

As they went in through the front door,Geiger said, Look at the condition of the house, as if to callparticular attention to its ransacked state. Murray went into thekitchen and saw the naked body of Ada Geiger, 25, her head andtorso crammed into a sink, her hips and legs on the drying board.Her skull was crushed and her body bruised in several places.

Murray sounded the alarm for the police andwent back to find Geiger, now in his overcoat and hat, sitting onhis side steps holding his 4-year-old son Stephen. Freds handswere covered with blood, which he said came from the body of hiswife when he came home to find her body in the sink.

Police took little stock in Freds storyabout burglars entering the house and committing the foul deedbecause nothing was missing. Even Adas jewelry and gold watch wereleft intact. So they arrested Fred Geiger and sent the boy to hisgrandmothers house on Elm Street.

Safely in the arms of his grandmother, theboy told police that his father had struck his mother with his fistand with scissors, and later told the same story from the lap of apolice inspector while his father sat across from them. Ada Geigerhad not only been hit with scissors, however, but had been stabbednumerous times with a pair from her sewing kit.

The following Saturday, the CincinnatiEnquirer ran a sensational story on the incident, taking up nearlya page and describing in lurid detail the finding of the body andthe dramatic confrontation in the police chiefs office between theaccusing child and the denying father, who claimed that someone putthe boy up to telling the story. The newspaper interviewed manypeople, however, who told about Fred Geigers bad temper andjealous nature.

With the lurid story on everyones lips, itwould be easy to imagine jealous, bad-tempered husbands all overGreater Cincinnati threatening to go Geiger on their haplesswives, waving the newspaper in her face as an example of what couldhappen to a devilish and disrespectful woman.

At least one of those jealous, bad-temperedhusbands, Hamiltons Samuel J. Keelor, not only referenced Geigerin an argument with his wife, but carried through on the threat inthe middle of that same Saturday night.

Around the Cincinnati Brewing Company, whichwas actually located in Hamilton, a smaller city in the next countynorth, most people knew Sam Keelor as Hornpipe because hecontinually whistled the jaunty tune The Sailors Hornpipe.

The sprightly tune, now familiar fromquotations of the melody in the Popeye and Gilligans Islandtheme songs, announced Keelors path throughout the day as he andhis horse went back and forth with the coal cart, providing thefuel that cooked the wort to make 400 barrels of Pure Gold beer aday, a regional brew with the slogan The Beer That Made MilwaukeeJealous. [It is now the site of Hamilton Police Headquarters.]

In every respect, Keelor, just two weeks awayfrom his 34th birthday, was considered an upright, straight-lacedand cheerful fellow by the men who worked in the brewery. Althoughhis job was in beer manufacturing, he never touched a drop ofalcohol himself and eschewed tobacco in all of its forms, exceptfor the occasional cigar.

Keelor and his wife, the former BerthaCaldwell, 29, were married in Liberty, Ind., his native town, in1891, and had two bright and talkative little girls, Edith, 11, andEthel, 9. The couple moved a lot early in their marriage, livingfor a time in Somerville in rural Butler County, then to theCincinnati suburbs of Norwood Heights and Madisonville beforecoming to Hamilton shortly after Sam got the job at the CincinnatiBrewing Company in July, 1902, not far from the Chestnut Streethouse where Bertha grew up, and where her mother still lived.Previously, Sam had worked on the railroad and for a short time ina brick yard.

Keelor was a stoutly built man of mediumstature, sandy blonde hair, a red mustache and was not abad-looking man, the papers said. Keelor had always kept a carefuldiary in which he wrote the dates he commenced or quit work atvarious places and other matters of interest to himself. He wasabove average intellectually, a hardworking, temperate man, butalso with a fearful temper. He was unreasonably jealous of hiswife, Bertha, who was five-foot-four-inches tall and 130 pounds,with dark hair and eyes. She was pretty, the papers said, thoughher features were irregular.

She was very young-looking and always seemedto be fond of her home and children. Sam loved her todistraction, his mother would later say, and never wanted anyoneto be very familiar with her. This, along with Sams tenserelationship with his mother-in-law, had caused some troublebetween the couple, which came to a crisis while they were livingin Norwood Heights. They seemed to have reconciled, however, whenthey first moved to Hamilton.

The young family occupied six rooms on thefirst floor of a large brick house at 331 South Water Street, justbehind the Cincinnati Brewery, and right next to the railroadtracks coming off the CH&D viaduct over the Great Miami Riverjust a couple dozen yards away. The house was known as the Hahnproperty, on the site of a former slaughterhouse and was itself abutcher shop, ironically enough. Though the Keelors were poorworking people living in one of the poorest parts of town, Berthakept the house clean and tidy. The main front room in the center ofthe house was a parlor, and the couples bedroom was just off that,closest to the railroad tracks. On the other side of the parlor wasa spare bedroom where Berthas younger half-brothers, Jesse andWalter Joseph boarded. The girls room was at the back of the housewith the kitchen. August Rosmarin, a sausage maker, lived abovethem with his wife, Flora.

Just before the holidays, however, somethingodd seemed to come over Sam, and in the last week of January, hemissed three days of work, his first absences since he startedworking there near the end of July, 1902.

His happy disposition seemed to vanish almostovernight and his face took on a blank, far-away look, unaware ofhis surroundings as he stared off into space. His last two lettersto his mother in New Paris, a town about 40 miles north of Hamiltonin Preble County, near Richmond, Ind., had a tone of discontentabout the marriage.

Saturday was always Sams busiest day as hehad to move enough coal to get the large brewing company throughSunday so that he could have a day off. He worked hard that day,and no one noticed anything out of the ordinary in his behavior ordemeanor. If anything, he may even have been a little more jollythan usual of late, joking around a little with some of the otherfellows as he put his horse away before going home.

He read the story of Ada Geigers murder inthe newspaper while he ate his supper, and in the course of theevening, Berthas mother Mary and her other half-brother Clarence,who lived on Chestnut Street a few blocks away, dropped by. WhenMary asked Bertha if she wanted to accompany her to Pleasant Ridgeon the following Wednesday to visit her other daughter, Elizabeth,and her husband, William Hill.