The Last Days of Cleveland: and More True Tales of Crime and Disaster from Cleveland's Past - Softcover

John Stark Bellamy II

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1598510673 ISBN 13: 9781598510676

Publisher: Gray & Company, Publishers, 2010

Synopsis

“Heroes and rogues fill the pages of this book. The stories will hold your attention and chill you to the bone.” ― Crime Shadow News

Cleveland's master of historical crime and disaster returns with 15 more true tales in this sixth volume of his popular series, including . . .

· West Park sisters Helen, 11, and Marguerite, 10, who died after eating Rough-on-Rats brand poison in their grandmother’s basement― victims of a genetic “suicide mania,” or driven to death by the cruelest caretaker since Hansel and Gretel’s stepmom?

· Joseph “Specs” Russell, who vaulted to fame in the summer of 1927 by staging as many as 52 stick-ups and making fools of Cleveland lawmen with his “impossible” escapes from their dragnets;

· Jeanette McAdams―just unlucky, or the Lucretia Borgia of Ashtabula County? After the suspiciously similar deaths of her five siblings, neighbors began to take note of the crowded family graveyard;

· Salty and ageless George Wallace, who served the city as a fireman for 62 years, 30 of them as chief, and endured to become the oldest fire chief in the world―with a mastery of incessant profanity that could be heard for four city blocks and made mule skinners blush;

And more true stories of courage, fear, deception, and villainy―including a disaster caused by the author himself!

Sometimes gruesome, often surprising, John Stark Bellamy’s tales are meticulously researched and delivered in a literate and entertaining style.

About this title

About the Author:

John Stark Bellamy II is the author of six books and two anthologies about Cleveland crime and disaster. The former history specialist for the Cuyahoga County Public Library, he comes by his taste for the sensational honestly, having grown up reading stories about Cleveland crime and disaster written by his grandfather, Paul, who was editor of the Plain Dealer, and his father, Peter, who wrote for the Cleveland News and the Plain Dealer.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter 1

Suffer the Children

The 1907 Curtis Horror

Seventeen years. That’s how long I’ve been mining the inexhaustible vein of Forest City dismalia. Seventeen years, nearly 150 tales of crime and calamity―and I have yet to discover a more heartbreaking story than the awful fate of the Curtis girls. Take it from me: there is simply no more poignant tale in the annals of Cleveland woe.

It’s difficult to have any sane perspective on the Curtis suicides―if suicides they were. The Cleveland of 1907 was a different place and a different time. Now-alien notions and values prevailed, and no chapter of human life was viewed more differently than childhood. What today would be considered child abuse was more often than not adjudged “good discipline,” and what was even then viewed as intolerable cruelty most often went unpunished. Diligent readers of these melancholy chronicles may remember the childhood of Tremont’s Otto Lueth, the teenaged killer of little Maggie Thompson in 1889. A grim feature of his murder trial was abundant and unchallenged testimony that his mother had habitually, indeed enthusiastically, abused him throughout the duration of his young life, kicking and beating him, tearing his hair, and even repeatedly slamming his head in a door to underscore her admonitions. Perhaps the most startling aspect of such testimony―at least to modern ears―was the fact that none of its auditors seemed to think her cruelty remarkably unusual, many of them simply discounting it as “good German discipline.” And on a personal note, let me relate a family story told by my maternal grandfather, who grew up in a similarly rigorous German home in 1890s Iowa. One Christmas morn in the early years of that gay decade, he and his brother Leo crept downstairs to peek at the family Christmas tree in the parlor, a transgression expressly forbidden by Frank Dessel, their stern Prussian father. Indeed, he was secretly waiting for them―and he hit Leo so hard with an iron poker that he broke his leg. And perhaps the most interesting aspect of the incident was that Leo’s brother, recalling the incident 70 years later, still considered their father’s brutal act a perfectly just act of paternal discipline. Frank was well matched with my mother’s other Prussian grandfather, Frederick Radkey. Fred was so enraged when his daughter Margaret (the author’s grandmother) sneaked off to a high school dance that he shaved her head when she returned home in the wee hours. So, bearing Otto, Leo, and Margaret in mind, let us journey back to the harsh world of 1907, more specifically, the Helen Curtis household in the Village of West Park. (West Park, now a neighborhood of Cleveland’s far West Side, existed as a separate village of Rockport Township until it was annexed by Cleveland in 1922.)

It is the month of June and things are not going well in the Curtis family. Other residents of Greater Cleveland may be concerned with recent public events, such as the Memorial Day interurban train crash in Elyria (six dead and many frightfully injured) or Cleveland mayor Tom Johnson’s controversial plan to eliminate the Erie Street Cemetery on East Ninth Street. But in the modest Curtis house at 40 Lakota Street in the newest “Lennox Park” allotment, a mile west of Cleveland proper, all concerns are domestic and chiefly focused on two of the four children there. They are Helen, 11 years old, and Marguerite (usually called Margaret), 10. Surviving photographs of the two girls subtly suggest their impending grim fate. Nicely dressed with beribboned hair, they stare at the camera, frowning forlornly, as if seeing something invisible to the viewer―something inescapable, something inhuman, something terrible. They probably do―for both Helen and Marguerite have been trying to kill themselves for some time. And despite family efforts to stop them, they will both get their death wish granted on June 7, 1907.

The real truth of the Curtis family tragedy will never be discovered. Aside from a limited amount of the testimony at the inquest into their deaths, most of what is known about Helen and Marguerite’s life consists of mere neighborhood gossip, mostly malicious, and the stark medical details of their self-destruction. A century later, we know only that they were unhappy, but we will never know just how much they were pushed―or pulled―into committing the final act that took their young lives.

For us, the Curtis family story begins in Liverpool Village, Medina County, not long after the Civil War. There, William Curtis, sometime sawmill proprietor and tavern keeper, lived and reared his family, including his wife, Helen, and sons Leland, Frank, and Freeman. Sometime in the early 1900s, William succumbed to stomach cancer, but his death only accelerated the ongoing exodus of his family from Liverpool. His son Leland had long since settled in Kansas with his wife, Louise, and four children, and by 1906 Leland’s two brothers were living with their widowed mother Helen in the newish, two-story frame house on Lakota Street. The dynamics of their household changed dramatically on March 12 of that year, when Leland’s four children―Helen, 10, Marguerite, 9, Frank, 7, and Claribel (“Clara”), 3―came to live with their grandmother Helen.

The simple explanation for the children’s arrival was that their mother was dead. Beyond that fact, her story gets morbid and murky. After the tragedy of Helen and Marguerite’s suicides, Leland’s mother, Helen, would insist that a mania for self-slaughter ran like a red streak in Louise’s family. Louise’s German-born mother, Helen claimed to reporters, was obsessed with suicide and had often tried to kill herself. And the unfortunate Louise had inherited her mother’s suicidal bent, continually threatening to kill herself. And Louise didn’t stop at threats, according to her mother-in-law:

She was accustomed [to] awaken [her husband] at midnight and tell him that she was going to take her life . . . Upon awakening, he often found his wife gone. He said searching parties then were formed to hunt through the woods and river banks, where it was her custom to go when resigned to melancholia.

Ultimately and inevitably, Louise made good on her repeated threats. One winter night in 1905 while Leland was sleeping, she fled from their farmhouse in her nightgown. He tracked her down the next morning, but she contracted pneumonia from her exposure and died a few days later. Living on a rough rural farm with four young children age 10 and under, Leland naturally did what was usual in such family situations in that age. He sent the four children to his mother, Helen, in Cleveland, believing that they needed a woman’s care. Such arrangements were common, virtually automatic in that age of extended families; my own mother and her brother were duly shipped to their aunt’s home when their mother died suddenly in 1924.

If Leland’s mother was telling the truth in the aftermath of her granddaughters’ suicides, she must have understood the risks of her new family commitment. Leland, she later stated, had tried to keep his children with him after their mother died but soon found himself unable cope with their own suicidal tendencies. The two eldest, Helen and Marguerite, often talked of doing away with themselves, and Helen made at least one attempt, drinking most of a bottle of whiskey. Doctors saved her life by using a stomach pump, but it proved the decisive incident in their transfer to Cleveland.

Life in their new Cleveland home would have been difficult for the children under any circumstances. The arrangement was for the children to live there and attend West Park schools while Leland continued his work at a Waukee, Kansas, grain elevator and sent his mother remittances for their support. But Mrs. Curtis was now 59 and, although not quite an invalid, suffered from both a heart condition and a painful lameness, which limited her agility and movement. But there may have been other circumstances specifically inimical to the mental health of the Curtis grandchildren. Although Freeman Curtis, when questioned at his nieces’ inquest, painted a portrait of his mother as a loving, tender parent, other voices were heard during that public investigation. Mrs. Angeline Worth, the proprietor of the Miller Hotel in Liverpool, had known Helen Curtis for many years, and she remembered some things Freeman may have forgotten:

Well, I know that she tied Freeman to his chair when he was a little fellow and left him. He fell off the chair and against a hot stove. He would have been roasted to death if neighbors had not heard his screams and saved him. He carries the scar to this day. I know that Leland was driven away from home by his mother and went to Kansas to shift for himself when he was a real young boy.

Mrs. Worth also recalled Helen Curtis, who was given to jealousy, chasing her husband, William, with a butcher knife after deciding he had been too accommodating to flirtatious females. And another inquest commentary on Helen Curtis’s parenting style came from John Wolf Sr., likewise a longtime Curtis neighbor in their Liverpool years. He recalled that she had so starved her own children that they used to come begging to his house for even a crust of bread.

Not long after the arrival of the Curtis children, disquieting stories about life at 40 Lakota Street began circulating in the Lennox Park neighborhood. Mrs. Curtis’s son Freeman would later state that it was the worst community he had ever known for vicious tale-bearing―and the Curtis neighbors certainly had many tales to bear. Marie Bodenlos, who kept a grocery and school supplies store a block away from the Curtis home, often saw Helen and Marguerite as they stopped by on the way to and from school. When they first started begging her for something to eat, she assumed they were simply eating between meals. But one day she teasingly asked them if they didn’t get anything to eat at home―and was shocked when they told her that Mrs. Curtis only gave them stale bread to eat. When she probed further, they told her that Mrs. Curtis bought 10 loaves every Tuesday and Thursday from a man who came by with his bread wagon. The bread would then be left in the basement to soften before being doled out to the hungry children. Helen told much the same story of nutritional abuse to Miss Jennie Albers, her teacher at the West Park school, adding that it was sometimes topped with jelly. Alice McClennan, who spent two weeks at the Curtis house while the children were there, would later testify that she saw no meat served to them during her sojourn. Mrs. Curtis would unequivocally deny such stories at the inquest, angrily insisting that her usual daily menu included potatoes, bread and butter, and gravy for breakfast, with the same at lunch, plus “bread and jell.” She added that they sometimes had chicken but maintained a coy indefiniteness as to how often. And whatever the deficiencies of her cuisine, she excused them with the plea that Leland Curtis did not send enough money to subsidize a more generous diet for his children. Considering that Leland regularly sent his mother $25 a month, not to mention the presence of two able-bodied Curtis sons in residence, Mrs. Curtis’s defense of her table was a remarkable statement. It was also noted by Lakota Street neighbors that while at home the Curtis children were habitually dressed in burlap bags, although their school garb was relatively normal, if drab and unchanging. Jennie Albers would later remember that Helen was so ashamed of her clothing that she ran away from school the day the class photograph was taken. Another neighbor commenting on the girls’ clothing, Mrs. George Heine, expressed the opinion that Helen and Marguerite’s grooming and garb made them resemble “gypsies more than white children.”

Far worse tales than those of Mrs. Curtis’s alleged short rations and clothing allowance circulated amongst her West Park neighbors. Mrs. Marie Prior, janitress of the West Park school and wife of school board member Frank Prior, would later recall that she saw the children tied to their chairs with their hands behind their back. She also remembered that they were often locked in the cellar for hours after they returned from school and then sent to bed without supper. During her fortnight’s stay in the Curtis home, Alice McClennan likewise witnessed the rituals of chair binding and cellar imprisonment. Truly, “good German discipline” was well in force at 40 Lakota Street.

Was Mrs. Curtis’s abuse even worse than that? During the last months of Helen and Marguerite’s lives the chief confidant of their childish sorrows was their teacher, Jennie Albers. Helen told her frequently of the unstinting beatings and whippings administered by Mrs. Curtis to her grandchildren. She eventually admitted, though, that there was no “whip” involved: Helen Curtis’s favorite instrument of chastisement was a piece of fence rail, which she laid on without restraint. Sometime in the spring of 1907, Helen came to school janitress Marie Prior and teacher Jennie Albers with bruised and bleeding wrists and hands. She allowed Mrs. Prior to bandage her up, but she refused to admit how she had been injured, saying only that her grandmother would not allow her to tell.

After the girls’ spectacular death, Mrs. Curtis, of course, had her own contrasting version of events. It was equally, if not more gothic than the child abuse narrative generated by the girls and the Curtis neighbors. According to Mrs. Curtis, the presence of Marguerite and Helen in her home had been a disaster from the beginning. Although she agreed with Jennie Albers’s assessment that the two girls were “bright,” she also insisted that they were “light-headed” and, worse, hell-bent on suicide from the moment they crossed her threshold in March 1906. Shortly after she arrived in Cleveland, Helen disappeared, after telling Mrs. Curtis that she was going to lie down on some railroad tracks until a train put her out of her misery. She was subsequently found on the tracks and rescued, but she continued her threats to thus end her life. Soon after that, Mrs. Curtis returned home to find Marguerite hanging out of a second-story window, a clumsy but frightening attempt at suicide. Soon, the girls were sharing their suicide wishes with the Curtis neighbors and, eventually, with Jennie Albers. Helen’s final threat in Albers’s presence occurred on May 29, a little more than a week before her death. She told Albers she could no longer endure the agonies of life with her grandmother and that she and Marguerite would kill themselves to escape her cruelty. To her regret, Albers never took the suicide threats very seriously. But even before Helen’s final threat she was concerned enough about such morbid words and about the apparent neglect reflected in the girls’ clothing and chronic hunger to report the situation to West Park school superintendent S. H. Pincombe. He first sent a truant officer around to the Curtis home―Helen had been absent for about six weeks at Christmastime―but the officer could not find anyone at home to answer the door. The officer than scoured the neighborhood to find someone to swear out a warrant for child abuse against Mrs. Curtis. Notwithstanding the many armchair critics of...

About this edition

• Publisher: Gray & Company, Publishers
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1598510673
• ISBN 13: 9781598510676
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256