The Newmarket Murder.

Around 1:00 am, the morning of February 26, 1867, Israel Coriell, of Newmarket, New Jersey,  was awakened by frantic knocking on his front door. It was Bridget Durgan, servant girl of his cousin, Dr. Lester Wallace Coriell, carrying the doctor’s two-year-old daughter. Nearly hysterical, Bridget told him that burglars were ransacking the house, the doctor was out on a call, and she feared that his wife, Mary Ellen, was being murdered. Coriell sent her to awaken his neighbor, Rev. William Little, while he went to Main Street and rang a large bell as a signal of general alarm. Reverend Little and two other men followed Bridget back to Dr. Coriell’s house.

They found the house filled with smoke and traced the source to a smoldering fire in one of the bedrooms. When they doused the fire and brought some light into the room, the men were shocked by what they found. There were signs of a fearful struggle; clothing was strewn in ragged heaps, and feathers torn from the pillows lay on the floor, all stained and matted with blood and gore. A broken chair was splintered and covered with blood. The body of Mary Ellen Coriell lay in the middle of the floor covered from forehead to breast with hideous gashes, her jugular vein had been torn out, and the deep imprint of four teeth was visible on her neck. It was later determined that she had been stabbed twenty-three times.

Augusta Schmidt.

Little Murders

   

J. Oscar Walton, a tenant farmer in Walton, Indiana, had an argument with his landlady, Mrs. Augusta Schmidt, the morning of October 21, 1893. They shared a house on the rented property, Mrs. Schmidt and her family in one half, Walton and his family in the other. They stood in the doorway between the two halves as they argued. Walton was upset that geese and hogs owned by Mrs. Schmidt had been let loose in his cornfields and were scattering the corn all around. As the argument became more heated, Walton threatened to take his gun and shoot the livestock. Mrs. Schmidt went into her side of the house and returned with a revolver, and while Oscar Walton’s mother and ten-year-old son watched, Augusta Schmidt shot him in the head and killed him.

The Murder and the Ghouls.

Little Murders

(From Cincinnati Daily Gazette, March 24, 1879)

The Murder and the Ghouls

The course of several of the city papers on the terrible tragedy of the murder of Harry Baldwin is an example of the way in which a mere mercenary desire for a sensation scandal, to sell a few more papers, can overcame all principle, all conscience, all the instincts of decency, all sense of justice toward the dead, and all regard for the feelings of the living relatives. Harry Baldwin was found on the street, after his arrival in the night by railway from Indiana, shot through the head and dying, and with signs of having been robbed. Men have been murdered on our streets for the purpose of robbery before now. And even if the police did not at the moment know who did it, this was no reason for throwing themselves into wild inventions. He was found in this dying slate leaning against the wall of a house nearly opposite the public house of which Kate Bennett is mistress. With no other ground than this, the theories of the police and of these newspapers have centered upon and circulated round Kate Bennett's house, and have persisted in connecting Baldwin’s death with that.

From the first, and up to this time not a particle of evidence has been produced to show that Harry Baldwin ever had any illicit relations with any girl, or was ever in that house, yet the police and these papers have insisted that the solution of the mystery was in that house, and have invented and given currency to a mass of wild fancies of his relations with a woman who had become desperate because of his marriage. No such girl has yet been found nor heard of.

The police arrested the Bennett and all persons in her house—boarders and servants. This was accepted and published as positive proof that Baldwin went from the cars to that house and there met his death at the hands of a desperate woman. Then a woman of the lowest degree of prostitution, living in that vicinity, was arrested with her two daughters, one of them described as having had her face partly eaten up with disease. This conveyed the idea that Harry Baldwin was a companion of all sorts of degraded women. A paper remarked that it did not know which of these Dalton girls was his paramour.

The Confession of a Wife Murderer.

Charles Herman

Charles Herman and his wife Eva lived in the upper part of a house on Blossom Alley in the German section of Buffalo, New York. He was an unemployed butcher, and she was worked for a man named Christopher Ziegler, running a small fruit stand in a public market. What little money Eva made went primarily to Charles’s worsening alcohol problem. When he drank, he turned violently jealous, irrationally believing that Mr. Ziegler was too intimate with his wife.        

Their marriage had been on the rocks for several years, and nearly every night Charles and Eva engaged in loud, sometimes violent fights, so neighbor took little notice when they heard the couple shouting on the night of Sunday, November 1, 1885. But the days following that Sunday were quiet, and although Charles Herman left in the morning and returned at night, there was no sign of Eva. On Wednesday, November 4, one of the neighbors became concerned, and after Charles had left in the morning, she went to call on Eva. Finding the door locked, she forced it open and found Eva lying on the floor with her throat cut from ear to ear. Her fingers had been cut as well, and the room showed signs of a terrible struggle. A post mortem examination determined that Mrs. Herman had been dead since Sunday.