USA > New York > Monroe County > Rochester > History of Rochester and Monroe county, New York, from the earliest historic times to the beginning of 1907 > Part 22
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THE POLICE COMMISSIONERS.
There was a new law in 1865, by which the con- trol of the department was placed in the hands of three commissioners, two of whom, Henry S. Hebard and Jacob Howe, sr., were named in the bill, though their sucessors were to be chosen by the common coun- cil, the third member being, ex officio, the mayor, who at that time was D. D. T. Moore. The board had almost unlimited authority within its sphere, except that the number of policemen to be ap- pointed was regulated by the council, and they themselves, with the exception of the mayor, could be removed from office only by a three-fourths vote of the aldermen. The office was not at first a salaried one, but it became so in 1877, when nine hundred dollars was paid, which, after being lowered and raised several times, stood at that point when the board went out of existence at the end of 1899. Commissioner Hebard acted as clerk of the board till 1871, when the commissioners, authorized by the legislature, appointed a police clerk, who should act, not only as clerk of the board, but also as clerk of the police court, in which double capacity he was to keep a full ac- count of all proceedings in both branches of the service. The change was a most important one, fo: it secured not only the making but the preserva- tion of records which, up to that time, had never existed, the lack of which has been very annoying to all historical investigators in that line. B. Frank Enos was appointed to the office in April of that year and held it till his death in 1898; he was succeeded by Richard Curran, who continued for a short time after the close of the board, a+ clerk of the police court; Roy P'. Chadsey now fills that position. The board started ont by appoint- ing thirty patrolmen, strong material, for eleven of them were still in service at the time of the semi-centennial celebration, twenty-nine years lat- er. By 1872 the number had been increased to sixty-five, twenty-five of them day policemen; the next year six of those were appointed detectives; in 1874 there were eighty on the force, two of them being made roundsmen, to look after the others; a steady increase after that caused the number of policemen to reach nearly two hundred when the board retired from the field. The work
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of the commissioners was, on the whole, well done and they put the force on a much better basis than it had been before. Their worst blunder was made when they ran up against the civil service commis- sion and undertook to disregard the law, but they repented of their error afterward, as has been de- scribed in a previous chapter.
THE MURDER RECORD.
Turn we now, again, to the seamy side of life and confront those crimes for the past forty years which , by reason of their enormity or the pecul- iarity of the circumstances attending them, may be worthy of record. A hackman named Jonathan T. Orton was found on the floor of his barn on the evening of March 8th, 1866, with his skull crushed to pieces, evidently by a cart stake that lay near by ; there were suspicions as to the perpetrators, but they were not thought sufficient to warrant an ar- rest.
A DEPRAVED WRETCH.
In the village of Penfield Franz Joseph Mess- ner heat his wife to death on April 13th, 1868; his case furnishes an illustration of what a glaring travesty upon justice the administration of law may be, for after a fair trial he was convicted and sen- teneed to be hanged June 4th, 1869; just before that time Governor Hoffinan gave him a reprieve of two weeks, then a writ of error was granted and after argument at the general term he was again sentenced to die on December 10th; on the very day before that date Judge Martin Grover granted a stay of proceedings ; after more than a year's delay the case was argued before the Court of Appeals and a new trial was ordered, which again resulted in conviction ; his lawyers got tired of carrying the matter any further. so he was hanged on August 11th, 1871. The utter depravity of the wretch was shown by his solemn affirmation on the scaffold while looking into the face of death, that he was innocent of the crime, when he knew that therc stood before him a reporter who had in his pocket the written confession of Messner, signed by him efter his first trial, when he thought his end war at hand; the paper was, of course, kept a secret till after the execution and was published on the following day.
A case presenting somewhat similar features was that of David Montgomery, a cartman, living on Monroe avenne, who brained his wife with an ax while she was sleeping, on November 13th, 1870; the defense was insanity, it being claimed that he was an epileptic, but the jury convicted him and the general term affirmed the action of the lower court; the judges, however, delayed passing sentence, and Governor Hoffinan appointed a medi- can commission to determine the question of san- ity; they took their time about it and it was more than two years after the commission of the crime that Montgomery, who had lain in jail all the time, was adjudged insane and sent to the insane asylum attached to the state prison at Auburn on December 30th, 1872.
THE HOWARD RIOT.
We come now to the most serious riot, in fact the only real riot, that ever broke the peace of thi: city. A young negro named Howard had com- mitted an aggravated assault upon a little girl and had fled, but was followed, caught a few miles out of town, brought back and lodged in jail, with great difficulty, as the crowd at the railway sta- tion was in a dangerous temper. During the after- noon of that day, the 2d of January, 1872, the signs of coming trouble were so pronounced that the Fifty-fourth regiment was ordered ont to pro- tect the juil, two companies being posted at the west end of the bridge over the raceway. As dark- ness came on, a large crowd gathered on Exchange street, which, after taunting and insulting the military, began to throw stones at them. After enduring that as long as possible a charge was made by the soldiers, but the mob continued to hurl missiles and a volley was fired by both com- panies. Several persons fell to the ground at once and the crowd then dispersed. Two of the wounded, John Elter and Henry Merlau, both re- putable citizens who had probably been attracted to the spot by curiosity, died in a few minutes, but the others, five in number, eventually recovered The next morning the situation was worse than ever, for the indignation of the populace had turned against the militia, none of whom dared to appear upon the streets. Perplexed by the absence of any armed force to protect the city, the commis- sioners accepted the services of the three veteran
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organizations-the Ohl Thirteenth, the One Hun- dred and Eighth and the One Hundred and For- tieth (or Ryan Zonaves) -who had tendered their services, and all the members were sworn in at once as special policemen. Their assistance, for- tunately, was not needed. for the regular police force, headed by Captain Patrick HI. Sullivan, himself a veteran and as brave a man as ever lived, drove bek the angry mob that assembled on Exchange street during the afternoon and pre- vented them from getting at the jail. Some days later the grand jury censured the members of the militia companies for firing withont orders, but nothing further was done in that matter.
But the cause of the trouble was unt removed, and it was felt that as long as Howard remained in the city the disturbance might recur at any moment. Judge K. Darwin Smith consented tc hold an extra session of the court and to have it sit at night, so the windows of the court-room were darkened and Howard, with his face chalked to disguise him, was taken thither by a back street. Ile was arraigned at once, pleaded guilty, through his counsel. C. C. Davison, a former district-nt- torney, who was assigned to defend him, and was sentenced to state prison for twenty years: hr was immediately put in a carriage with three trusty officers, and driven to loncoye Falls, where the party took the train for Auburn. There was match severe criticism of this proceeding at the time, as being a base surrender to the spirit of mob violence, Init, after all, there was only one alter- native to that course, an orderly trial with the cus- tomary forms and the certainty of disturbance with the not remote possibility of further blood- shed. The prison doors sheltered Howard for a time, but he met his fate a few years later when, yielding to his vicious temper, he got into quarrel with a fellow conviet, who threw him from an up- rer corridor to the floor below, whereby he was in stantly killed, his neck being broken.
THE CASE OF JOHN CLARK.
Several burglaries were committed here dur- ing the early summer of 1875, and in one case. where the house was not entered, the thief climbed a tree in the yard, und with a fishing pole, line und hook canght a watch from the bedside of 9 sleeping man. This ingenious performance was
traced to John Clark, a well-known criminal, who was seen to hide the timepiece in a lumber yard on Atkinson street. When he returned there the next day, July 3d, officer Kavanagh was on band to arrest bim, but Clark resisted, shot the police- man, wounding him badly though not fatally, ran over the canal bridge and turned into Waverley place. There John Trevor, a bank watchman, came out of his house and stopped the fugitive, who, seeing no other way of escape, shot Trevor, who died of the wound two days luter; in spite of lis desperate hurt he held his captive till other officers came up and secured him. After Clark's conviction his counsel, William F. Huwe, the cele- brated criminal lawyer of New York, made stren- nons efforts to secure n new trial, going to Fix Supreme court judges in different parts of the state to obtain a stay of proceedings, but in vain ; after a reprieve of two weeks Clark was hanged on the 5th of November, having never lost his nerac for a moment and disdaining all religious consola- tion, showing that bravery is not inconsistent with wickedness.
ESCAPES FROM THE HALTER.
Three bad murders in 1876, but no death sen- tences, as there ought to have been. A case in 1883 shows the untrustworthiness of solitary testimony. An old man named Jacob Lutz, living on the River road, was found in his house on the morning of October 20th, with his skull crushed. evidently by one of his own boots that was found on the Hoor, the heel covered with clotted blood and hair. The only other occupant of the house was his son, who lay in the woodshed bleeding from wounds in the head, and the boy told the story, both then and on the trial, that the deed was committed by John Kelly, a neighbor. The accused was convicted of murder, his previous had record operating against him in the minds of the jury, but on a new trial it was shown that he was elsewhere at the time and that the net was the work of two men, neither of whom was ever discovered. It was evidently a case of mistaken identity on the part of the boy. Kelly was killed in a railroad accident a few years Inter.
There was a curious case in the last week of 1884. Two burglaries had been committed in Brockport and a full description of three sus- picions looking men was sent to this city, in con-
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sequence of which three persons were arrested in a they were both engaged in the robbery of a freight car at Honeoye Falls. That being satisfactorily proven, Bowman was, on the evidence of Squires, sent to Anburn for five years.
hotel on West avenue. They went to the police station willingly enough, where one of them gave his name as George Clark, the others saying that they were brothers, Albert J. aud Frank Browa. The first of them, remarking that he would take some congh mixture, put his hand in his pocket, drew a pistol, shot himself and fell to the floor, the blood streaming from a wound in his fore head. At the City hospital, where he died a few hours later, he made a sworn statement before Corouer Sharpe that his name was George Clars and that he and his companions had committed the Brockport burglary, the details of which he narrated with mitch minuteness, besides which he gave somte partienlars of his life, saying that he had a wife and three children living at Weedspor :. Two days later a trustworthy officer went to that village and found, first, that no such family was living there; second, that the three men had slept at the hotel there on the night before the Brockport burglary; had stayed through the morning and had taken the train late in the afternoon, so that they could not possibly have committed the robbery. The affair bring telegraphed over the state, police officials from West Troy and from Clinton prison came on here and positively identified the body of the so-called Clark as that of William Herrick, known by them as a desperate criminal who had served twenty years at Dannemora. Why he should have taken his life and then have told that sairy tale in the very hour of death has always remainel a mystery, the only possible solution of it lying in the supposition that he had committed a mar- der somewhere, had then, upon his arrest, shot himself in desperation, and then, taking the remote chance of his recovery, hudl manufactured a story that he hoped might land him within the walls of a state prison, as the safest place in which to hide.
Here is another ease presenting some similarity to the foregoing, only that the voluntary confes- sion of another crime was a true one. Emory Thayer, a farmer living at Avon, was aroused from sleep on the night of October 28th, by two burg- lars, one of whom shot him dead. Edward Bow- man and Frank Squires were arrested for the crime, and the circumstances were so conclusive against them that, as the only means of escape, Squires confessed that on the night in question
THE LAST EXECUTION HERE.
The first person to suffer death in the new jail was Edward Alonzo Deacons-who was hanged July 10th, 1888, for the murder of Mis. Alonzo .1. Stone on August 16th, 1887-and he was also the last. for, before the turn of the next one came. electricity had been substituted for the rope, and all executions since then have taken place in a state prison.
Arthur H. Day, a worthless criminal of this city, took his wife, Desire, to Niagara Falls on Sunday, July 27th, 1890, and pushed her over the precipice on the Canadian side. Ilis sister, Mra. Quigley, who hud accompanied him, and had prob- ably been his uecomplice, on being arrested here some two weeks afterward consented, with unich reluctance, to accompany the officers to the place and show them where the deed was committed. Ar- riving at the exnet spot she said : "Over there lies the body of Arthur Day's wife," and immediately fninted away, accounting afterward for her swoon by saying that a mist rose before her eyes, in the midst of which she saw the form of the murdered woman. The corpse was found at the foot of the bank, badly disfigured by the fall and partially de- composed. Day was then arrested here, taken to Canada, indicted, tried. convicted and hanged at Welland on December 18th.
YOUNG AND DORTHY.
Charles Young, un Englishman, made himself conspienous during 1893 by his habit of buying out saloons and their fixtures, then selling thein. partly for cash and partly on time, taking the property when the purchasers failed to pay up. which they generally did, and shooting at them when they came back to get what belonged to them. Being indicted he fled to England. where he was imprisoned for swiudling; when he got through with that he was brought back here and convicted of assault, but had to be released on the decision of the general term that his conviction was il-
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legal, as it was for a crime different from that for which he was extradited, so he returned to Eng- land again and got into more trouble, which sent him to Portland prison, from which he tried to es- cape but was shot dead by the guard in February, 1895.
Another vicious creature was John F. Dorthy, 3 lawyer of more ability than many of his brethren at the bar; he had a good practice but he could not keep from going wrong, so he used to appro- priate to himself the money that was entrusted to him by his clients and also to cheat various people, including his mother-in-law, by means of forged mortgages. This course carried him so far that he was disbarred from practice in June of 1896 and expelled from the Baptist church three months later. Indictments followed and piled up at a frightful rate, many convictions ensued and state prison sentences, but his ingenuity enabled him to keep free for more than four years, during which he became a public nuisance from the constant repetition of his name in the newspapers in cou- nection with his appeals and stays and injunetions and motions for new trials, so that everybody felt relieved when he was sent to Auburn in January 1901, for one of the least of his offenses.
SIX YEARS IN THE DEATH CELL.
A noteworthy case, remarkable only for the un- precedented length of time during which the cul- prit lay under sentence of death, was that of George A. Smith, aged seventy years at the time when the story begins, who was found on the morn- ing of September 9th, 1897, lying on the floor in his house in Churchville, bound and gagged, with his legs tied to the dining-room table. His state- ment to the neighbors who came in was that two burglars had entered the house during the night, shot his wife while she was sleeping, dragged him from bed, tied him as he was discovered and eg- caped through the window. None of his hearers believed the tale, and the fact that Mrs. Smith, who was found upstairs in her bedroom, with a bullet wound in her head, affirmed to the very hour of her death, which took place two days Ister, that she did not know who shot her, did not convince them of the husband's innocence. The trial did not take place till nine months later and then, after it had continued four weeks, one of
the jurors fell sick and it was called a mistrial. Starting all over in the following September, it took six weeks to obtain a conviction and a sen- tence of death. Execution was stayed by carrying the ense to the Court of Appeals, which ordered a new trial on the ground that it was an error to ad- mit Mrs. Sinith's statements, though they had all bren favorable to her husband. An unaccount- able delay took place in fixing the time for the re- trial, which did not come off till more than four years after the previous one, in February, 1903; in the meantime, eleven of the witnesses had died. eight of them for the prosecution, and others were missing, but in spite of that Smith was again con- victed and again sentenced to the electric chair; of course another appeal was taken and there was more delay, till finally Governor Higgins, on Feb- ruary 1st, 1905, commuted the sentence to life im- prisonment, not because there was any doubt of the guilt of the accused, but because he had then suffered the awful punishment of spending more than six years in the death cell at Auburn.
Four prisoners at the jail escaped on the 10th of January, 1900; two were recaptured, one of whom, Clarence Egnor, was sent to Auburn for five years; he had not been there long before his ugly disposition prompted him to assault one of the keepers, Archie W. Benedict, stunning him by a blow on the head with an iron bar, then to take a pistol from the officer's pocket and deliberately shoot him dead : Egnor was executed for this Sep- tember 14th, 1903.
THE KEATING MURDERL.
A feeling of horror ran through the community when the body of a young woman named Theresa Keating was found, with marks of violence upon it, behind a high bill board on North Union street, on the morning of November 14th, 1900. The whole country was ransacked to find the perpetra- tor, sixty persons brought to the office being exam- ined without eliciting information, and telegrams being sent to the police departments of one hun- drei and fifty cities of the United States and Can- ada with a full description of the crime and of a mysterious stranger who was seen in the vicinity . all in vain, but nearly three years later a weak- minded fellow named August Russell, voluntarily confessed that he had committed the deed and had
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escaped from the city on a freight train; a com- mission adjudged him insane, and he was sent to Matteawan for life.
Leslie E. Hulbert, a graduate of Cornell, ad- mitted to the bar in 1895, practised his profession for the purpose of running a divorce mill by means of an elaborme system of perjury. Successful for a time, an indictment was found against him in 1901 and he fled the city. Getting to Mexico with some of his associates, he murdered, in Chihuahua. his own brother-in-law for the sake of getting his life insurance money. The sentence of dentli against him was affirmed last fall by the Mexican Supreme court, so that he has now awaiting him a blank wall, an open grave and a file of riflemen.
THE BROWN MURDER.
Another mysterious murder was that of Bela E. Brown, a highly respectable jeweler, who was found in his shop on the second floor at the corner of State and Corinthian streets on Sunday evening. January 19th, 1902. He had been beaten to death with a hammer taken from the workshop, after a vain attempt to make him open his safe, before which he sat, gagged, in a chair. Although it was close to the Four Corners, and done in the day- time, the assassin got away without the discovery of any trace of his idertity from that day to this.
Nine months after that, Leland Dorr Kent, a Buffalo medical student, came to Rochester in coin- pany with Ethel Dingle, a professional nurse, reg- istering her name at the Whitcomb House as that. of his wife, on the 11th of September. Groans were heard the next morning issuing from the room occupied by the couple, and when the door was forced open the girl was seen lying dead on the bed, while Kent, with a slight wound in his neck, lay beside the body. The grand jury, inclin- ing to believe his story that it was a case of sui- cide, indicted him for manslaughter in abetting that act; tried, convicted, hard Jahor at Auburn for twenty years.
Here was a case of jealousy. On the 18th of November, in the same year, Lulu Miller Younge aged twenty-eight, having convinced herself that the affection of her husband had been taken away from her by Florence Mc Farlane, aged twenty-two, stabbed the latter to death. Indieted for murder.
she was convicted of a lesser crime, as being tem- porarily insane, amt got off with a short imprison- ment. .
William Brasch was mean enough to push his wife into the Erie canal and drown her, on Jum 16th, 1906, just because he was in love with an- other woman and wanted to marry her. Convietel and sentenced to death, but counsel filed an appeal at the last moment and the case is still undecided at the present writing.
That closes the criminal record, bringing it down to the beginning of 1907. It is a long and ghastly one, but it has left unmentioned many cases of deliberate murder, and has passed over entirely the almost innumerable instances of homi- cide in a lower grade. These crimes of violence are very frequent, especially among the Italia. population, with whom the knife continues to be the potent weapon of revenge and of argument. Five murder trials took place last year, two of them ending with life imprisonment. Represen- tatives of the district attorney's office appeared in more than one thousand trials, and there were three hundred and sixteen indictments, with on. hundred and thirty-four convictions under them.
THE PRESENT DEPARTMENT.
With the beginning of 1900 the police depart- ment came under the control of a single person, subject to the superior authority of the mayor, the conunissioner of Public Safety. James G. Cutler was appointed to that office by Mayor Carnahan, but he resigned in the course of the summer and was followed by James D. Casey. who, at the be- ginning of 1902 was succeeded by George A. Gil- man, who had been the chief clerk of the depart- ment during the previous two years. He ap- Jointed C. Alonzo Simmons as clerk and Dr. John A. Stapleton as surgeon, both of whom, ns well as Mr. Gilman, fill their positions at the present time. In September. 1904, Major Francis Schief- fel was made deputy chief of police; he resigned seven months later and the office was abolished. On the 1st of March, 1905, the chief of police, Joseph P. Cleary, a brave soldier of the Civil war, was re- tired on his own application, having held the office for just twenty years; he died on the 24th of April. in the same year. John C Hayden was appointed in his place, which he fills at this time. Under
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