Annie Bock.

(New York Journal, August 5, 1896)

Annie Bock and her husband Jacob were spending the summer at Rockaway Beach. On Sunday, August 1, 1896, Annie went back to their flat at 207 E. 21st Street in New York City’s Tenderloin district to pay their monthly rent. She had $300 in the Dry Dock Savings Bank and on Monday morning, she withdrew $50 from the bank and paid the rent with $20. The plan was to return to Rockaway that afternoon, instead she went to Coney Island, possibly accompanied by a man. Around 9:00 that night she went to 14th Street, “the pavements of which she knew well.” 

Her movements were observed by others who knew the pavements well. Rosa Schwartz saw Annie stop and converse with a man, 5’ 6”, slender, graying hair, wearing a black frock coat and a straw hat. They walked to 3rd Avenue and took a cable car uptown. Hattie Stein and Lillie Field saw them alight from the car on 21st Street and enter No. 207 together. Mamie Freidman saw them leave the house about 20 minutes later. At about 12:30, Mrs. Feltner, who had a view of the entrance to 207 from her window, saw Annie return to the house with another man, medium build, with a swarthy complexion and a black mustache. This was the last time Annie Bock was seen alive by anyone but her killer.

Rosa Reichman, the Bocks' servant, heard them moving about, but she was nearly deaf and after they closed the bedroom door she heard nothing. The next morning, Rosa opened the door and the first thing she noticed was that the canary usually singing in the bedroom, was lying dead in the cage, its wing torn off. Then she saw her mistress, lying half on the bed, her head in a pool of blood. She ran from the room and through the hallway until she found a janitor, who notified the police.

(New York Journal, August 5, 1896)

The police investigated the room and had the body removed to the morgue, where the coroner’s physician performed an autopsy. He found bruises on her neck, but death was caused by hemorrhaging from four cuts on her neck, the deepest of which severed an artery.

Annie had been wearing diamond earrings, which the killer had pulled from her ears, tearing the flesh, but the police did not believe that robbery was the motive. The murder had been done in a moment of frenzy. There were marks on the sheet where his heels had twisted the fabric in the struggle. A pillow had bloody finger marks, indicating that she was smothered, so her cries could not be heard.

Jacob Bock was notified of his wife’s death by telegraph. He arrived around 5:00, took a look at the bloody sheets, and broke down crying. He later told police that he could not think of anyone who would want to murder his wife. He claimed that he never knew her to be unfaithful and did not know she had an account at the Dry Dock Savings Bank.

Jacob Bock and Annie Brafman were both Polish immigrants who had known each other as children in Warsaw. They were married by a rabbi in New York, four years before the murder. Jacob was a cigar maker who was often unemployed. Annie was the money maker, working as a waitress in cafes on the East Side. She was petite and, at one time, was considered one of the prettiest in that profession. By 1896, she was frail and dissipated, weighing less than 100 pounds.

On Wednesday, the police arrested Mortimer Golden, a pawnbroker who resembled the description of the last man she was with. Rosa Schwartz, a close friend of Annie’s, told the police Golden had once threatened Annie. Golden admitted he knew Annie Bock but said he was in Atlantic City on Monday night. He had two Empire Theatre tickets to prove he had attended an opera there. The alibi was solid, and after spending a night in jail, Mort Golden was released.

(New York World, August 7, 1896)

The next suspect was Jacob Levy, a white man known as “Nigger Jake” because of his dark complexion. Levy boarded a streetcar and stood with Patrolman Patrick J. Dinan on the front platform. Dinan knew him because Levy often ran errands for the police. Levy told Dinan he had met a fine-looking woman on the Coney Island ferry Sunday night and, at her request, accompanied her to her flat at 207 E. 21st Street, where he remained until 8 AM Monday.

When Dinan learned of the murder at the same address, he told the story to his captain, who detailed two detectives to question Levy. They found that Levy had shaved his mustache and could not adequately explain why. In his pocket was a pearl-handled knife with a stained blade. They brought him to the station and scraped his fingernails carefully for traces of blood. Levy told the police that he made up the story. He had not been on E. 21st Street, Sunday night, and he did not know Annie Bock. He had been there four weeks earlier to see a woman named Dora Gilbert.

Levy told Captain O’Brian that on Monday night he was on the corner of Broadway and Chambers Street where he met Policeman Corrigan and was with him until Midnight. Corrigan corroborated his story, but Levy’s mother and brother said he was home with them both Sunday and Monday nights.

The stains on Levy’s knife turned out to be tobacco juice, not blood. There was no blood under his fingernails, and the police concluded he had not shaved his mustache to hide his identity. Levy was not a murderer, just a lying braggart.

Concerning the story told by his family, Levy said, “They were trying to help me, but they came very near to sending me to the electric chair.”

(New York World, August 11, 1896)

Alice Cohen, a frequenter of the district, approached Detectives Stephan and Cronin and told them that the man last seen in Annie Bock’s company was probably Victor Roundtree, whom the women who haunt the thoroughfare near 14th Street very much feared. The detectives hunted for Roundtree with no success. Finally, they told Alice that if she saw him again, she should immediately notify a patrolman. 

On August 9, Alice Cohen pointed out a young man to Patrolman Gleason and said, “I know that man, and I knew Annie Bock. That man was in her company at 11:30 o’clock on the night of the murder.”

Gleason placed the young man under arrest, and the police began a thorough investigation. But there was a mix-up from the start. The man was not Victor Roundtree, but Emil Drangenstein, a hotel waiter. Another witness, Minnie Fisher, also said the man was with Annie the night of the murder, but when she saw him face-to-face in Yorkville Court, she said Drangenstein was not the man. Witnesses at Drangenstein's house said he was home that night. The police accepted his alibi and concluded they had no evidence linking Drangenstein to the murder—another dead end.

After several more false leads, the investigation seemed hopeless. Captain Elbert O. Smith of the Eighteenth Precinct told the New York Journal:

This is a strange case—a remarkable case. I may say that there have been 113 men at work upon it constantly, for each officer of this command had been instructed to keep a sharp lookout for persons resembling the “swarthy man” seen with Annie Bock by Rosa Schwartz. The most astute detectives in the department have been indefatigable. There are certain features in this mystery which make it difficult of solution. She knew many men, and this fact made it a matter of no particular notice when she was seen walking with a man or even taking one to her home.

This is one theory, the maniac theory is only borne out by the savage attack made upon the canary bird, and yet this theory loses force because there was no mutilation of the body, as it seems not unlikely would have been the case were she slain by a victim of homicidal mania. As to the theory of an enemy of long standing, I prefer not to discuss that.

(Pontiac Daily Leader, September 19, 1896)

The captain may have been referring to rumors surrounding Jacob Frankenstein, who reportedly threatened Annie after she jilted him several years earlier. On the steamer that brought her to America, 16-year-old Annie Brafman met 18-year-old Jacob Frankenstein, who had escaped military service in Russia. They fell in love on the voyage, and after they landed, Frankenstein sought her out. 

They became engaged to marry, but before the ceremony, Frankenstein’s business took him out of town.  When he returned, Annie had left. He tracked her down and found she had begun a life of shame. He begged her to fulfill her promise of marriage, but she laughed at him, saying she preferred the life she was leading. 

Frankenstein’s mind became unbalanced. He threatened to kill her and attacked her with a carving knife, leaving a scar on her forehead. He was arrested and sent to the insane asylum on Blackwell’s Island. In September 1896, the police learned that Frankenstein had recently been released, but they never arrested him. Though the story was featured in newspapers throughout the country, his connection to the murder was never more than rumor.

On September 2, another violent murder shocked the Tenderloin. Hannah Altman, a friend of Annie Bock was strangled and slashed in her home. Three young women were violently murdered in the Tenderloin district between May and September 1896—Mamie Cunningham, Annie Bock, and Hannah Altman. In spite of Captain Smith’s doubts, the press and the people of New York began to fear that a maniacal killer was loose in the city.  Annie Bock died from a severed artery, but bruises on her throat revealed that the killer had strangled her first. As the death count rose, Annie Bock was listed among the victims of New York’s Jack the Strangler.

---

Sources: 

“"Murder Will Out" Their Only Hope,” New York Journal, August 10, 1896.
“"Nigger Jake" Discharged,” Sun., August 8, 1896.
“An Arrest in the Bock Case,” New-York Tribune, August 7, 1896.
“An Outcast Woman Murdered,” The New York Times, August 5, 1896.
“Another Annie Bock Suspect,” The World, August 11, 1896.
“Another Block Murder Suspect,” Evening Post, August 10, 1896.
“Another Bock Suspect arrested,” New-York Tribune, August 9, 1896.
“Arrest in the Bock Case,” New York Herald, August 7, 1896.
“Dangenstein Discharged, Too,” New-York Tribune, August 12, 1896.
“Levy's Wagging tongue,” The World, August 7, 1896.
“Mrs. Bock buried,” New York Herald, August 6, 1896.
“Murder a Mystery Yet,” The World, August 6, 1896.
“The Murdered Woman Buried,” New-York Tribune, August 6, 1896.
“Mysterious Murder,” Evening Journal, August 4, 1896.
“New York City Police Have Solved the Bock Mystery,” Pontiac Daily Leader, September 19, 1896.
“Not an Assassin, but a Lying Braggart,” New York Journal, August 8, 1896.
“Police Views in Recent Crimes,” New-York Tribune, September 5, 1896.
“Slain in Her Bed by an Unknown,” New York Journal, August 5, 1896.
“Strange Trio of Criminal Mysteries,” New York Journal, August 11, 1896.
“The Strangler's Victims - All Women.,” New York Journal and Advertiser, May 14, 1897.
“Telegraphic Brevities,” Alexandria Gazette, August 4, 1896.
“Who Killed Mrs. Bock?,” Sun., August 5, 1896.
“With Her Throat Cut,” Evening Bulletin, August 4, 1896.
“With Her Throat Cut,” The World, August 5, 1896.

Mamie Cunningham.

(New York Journal, May 31, 1896.)

On the morning of Memorial Day, May 30, 1896, Mrs. Annie Cunningham had to go to work, while her 13-year-old daughter, Mary (known as Mamie), was home from school for the holiday. Mrs. Cunningham asked Mamie if she planned to go to the parade. Mamie said no, she wasn’t interested, and she planned to do housework and study. At 8:30, she said goodbye to her daughter; it was the last time she saw Mamie alive.

Minnie Weldt.

(New York Evening Journal, March 18, 1898.)

Helen Kahlert, a washerwoman, came home from work at 8:00 on the evening of Wednesday, May 30, 1894. After working all day at a home on Park Avenue in New York City, she climbed the stairs to the humble, second-floor apartment on East 61st Street that she shared with Minnie Weldt. To her surprise, the door was unlocked, and the apartment was dark. Minnie should have been home, but there was no response when Helen called out to her. Helen went into the bedroom and struck a match. She saw Minnie lying on the bed with a handkerchief tied tightly around her throat. Her face was badly discolored, and her eyes were bulging from their sockets. Helen screamed in horror, then rushed from the room down to the street, crying for help.

Jack the Strangler.

(New York Journal, March 18, 1898.)

When the news of London’s 1888 Whitechapel Murders, attributed to “Jack the Ripper,” crossed the Atlantic, Americans were instantly fascinated. The vision of a dark, elusive killer, mutilating women without motive, was morbidly titillating, and the name Jack the Ripper fired the popular imagination. In the nascent age of yellow journalism, no one was more fascinated by Jack the Ripper than newspaper reporters who began seeing Ripper-like murders everywhere they looked.

Sensational murder reporting had been a staple of American newspapers since the 1830s, and multiple murderers (serial killers) were active in America throughout the 19^th-century. But the fear of deranged killers roaming the streets and killing at random was something new. Journalists instinctively saw the value of linking murders to a single killer, and they invariably attributed groups of unsolved murders to some local version of Jack. 

Butchered and Burned.

National Police Gazette, January 28, 1882

Mrs. J.W. Gibbons was away from her home in Ashland, Kentucky, on December 23, 1881. She left behind her 18-year-old son Robert, her 14-year-old daughter Fannie, and 17-year-old Emma Thomas (aka Carico), who was staying with them. Mrs. Gibbons returned the following day to find her home burned to the ground and all three inhabitants dead.

Read the full story here: The Ashland Outrage.

Maggie Crowley, Found Strangled.

Maggie Crowley
(New York American, March 16, 1898)

Robert Hoey, coming home from work in the early hours of March 15, 1898, literally tripped over the body of a dead woman in the courtyard of his New York City tenement. The woman had been strangled to death and dragged to the courtyard known in the neighborhood as “Hogan’s Alley.” Four days later, she was identified as Maggie Crowley, a young woman with a drinking problem. Four men were suspected, two were indicted, but no one was convicted.

Read the full story here: Murder Told in Pictures.

Frederick F. Streeter.

About half past three, the morning of July 2, 1863, a young man on his way to work in Medina, Ohio, saw the home of Shubal Coy in flames. He alerted the neighbors, who came out to douse the flames with water. When the fire was under control, they went inside to look for the Coy family. They found Shubal lying in bed with nine stab wounds in his throat and breast, any one of them capable of producing death. His wife lay on the floor, with her throat cut. She had fought with her attacker and had twenty-four cuts on her head and body. Their seven-year-old son Ferdinand lay in bed with his throat cut. Mercifully, it appeared he was murdered in his sleep.

Medford's Murder Mystery.

(Boston Post, March 29, 1897,)

Walter R. Debbins was shot twice in the back, in broad daylight, on Highland Street in Medford, Massachusetts, on the afternoon of Saturday, March 27, 1897. Though no one saw the murder or heard the gunshots, there was enough traffic on Highland Street that afternoon for the police to precisely pinpoint the time of the shooting to between 1:00 and 1:05. But that was all they could pinpoint; everything else about the crime was shrouded in mystery that grew more dense with each new revelation.

 

Read the full story here: The Medford Mystery.

Sororcide.

The Murder of Lizzie Anderson

Josie Fay was standing at the corner of Bowker and Sudbury Streets in Boston’s West End, on the evening of January 19, 1880. Stella Vannell approached her and asked if she had seen Ida King. Josie pointed down Bowker Street, where Ida stood talking with a young man named Michael Tolan. Stella walked up to the couple, called out to Ida, and began making disparaging remarks about Tolan. The women exchanged angry words, and the argument escalated until, in a flash, Stella drew a large clasp-knife and plunged it into Ida’s breast. Both women were drunk at the time of the incident, and both were using assumed names. In fact, they were sisters, Maggie and Lizzie Anderson.

Harry and Catherine.

 

Harry and Catherine.
(Harry Hayward: Life, crimes, dying confession and execution of the Celebrated Minneapolis Criminal.)

Harry Hayward was a handsome young conman from a wealthy Minneapolis family. He persuaded Catherine Ging to make him beneficiary on a life insurance policy, then, on December 3, 1894, he lured her to her death. 

Read the full story here: The Minneapolis Svengali.

A Murder on Ice.

A group of young boys from Lambertville, New Jersey, went skating on Island Creek on December 15, 1880. They brought their lunches and, when they sat down to eat, they built a fire on the ice to keep warm. John Pierman, an older boy (age reported variously as 15, 16, or 18) with another group, came upon them and started kicking the burning wood around the ice. Theodore Parker, aged 13 or 14, told Pierman to stop. An argument ensued and words led to blows. When Parker struck Pierman in the face, breaking his pipe, Pierman pulled out a knife and plunged it into Parker’s left breast, piercing his heart.

Clara and Daniel.

 

("On Trial for Murder," Daily Inter Ocean, November 27, 1895.)

During a time of conflict between the Shanks family and the Keller family in rural Indiana, the body of 18-year-old Clara Shanks was found floating in Wolf Creek. Circumstantial evidence pointed to Daniel Keller, who had a clandestine romance with Clara.

Read the full story here: The Wolf Creek Tragedy.

So far From Home: The Pearl Bryan Murder.

 So far From Home: The Pearl Bryan Murder - Amazon, Audible.

Who Killed Carrie Farrel?

Mrs. Carrie Farrel left her home in Sibley, Iowa, at 7:00 a.m. on May 6, 1889. She went on horseback to visit her parents, who lived about two miles away. When she didn’t return that night, her husband thought nothing strange of her absence. It was not unusual for Carrie to spend the night with her parents. But when her horse returned home riderless the following morning, her husband became alarmed and began searching for her.

James and Sarah Jane.

 

James E. Eldredge and Sarah Jane Gould.
(The Trial of James E Eldredge )

James E. Eldredge left his home in Canton, New York in the spring of 1856. He returned six months later with a new name and a duplicitous personality to match. All those around him soon learned to distrust anything the young man said—all except his fiancé, Sarah Jane Gould. She remained trusting to the end, when Eldredge poisoned Sarah Jane to pursue her younger sister.

Read the full story here: James E. Eldredge.

Asked His Wife to Shoot Him.

Lourens Signourette and his wife lived near Foster’s Bar, a remote camp in the Yubas Foot Hills in California. Lourens had been ailing for quite a while, and on December 1, 1891, he decided to end his life by taking strychnine. The poison did not have the immediate effect that he wanted, so he asked his wife to get his shotgun and shoot him.

The Late Mr. Benjamin Nathan.

Harper's Weekly, August 20, 1870.

Benjamin Nathan, a wealthy stockbroker and philanthropist, was found brutally beaten to death in his Manhattan home the morning of July 29, 1870. Some jewelry and a small amount of cash were stolen, and the police were quick to rule the incident a burglary gone bad. But if so, how and when did the burglars enter? And how could four others staying in the house sleep through the violent attack? In fact, the Nathan murder looked more like a classic locked-room mystery—a mystery that remains unsolved.

Read the full story here:

Who Killed Benjamin Nathan?

The Crosby Street Murder.

At around 6:30, the morning of February 4, 1877, the residents of Crosby Street in New York City were alarmed by a woman’s shriek. Many were preparing for church that Sunday morning, and from their windows, they watched the woman, barefoot, wearing just a skirt and a thin chemise, run across the street, pursued by a man wielding what appeared to be a long iron spike. She ran to the house at 52 Crosby Street, screaming, “Open the door; for the blessed Virgin’s sake, open the door.”

Frank and Christie.

Frank Almy and Christie Warden.
(Life, Trial, and Confession of Frank C. Almy, Laconia, N.H.: J.J. Lane, 1891.)

While working as a farmhand in Hanover, New Hampshire, career criminal Frank Almy (aka George Abbott) fell in love with the farmer’s daughter, Christie Warden. When Christie did not return his love Abbot went back to his old ways and took it at gunpoint in the shady hollow known as the Vale of Tempe.

Read the full story here: Murder in the Vale of Tempe.

Murderous Christmas Celebrations.

Murder never pauses for Christmas; it is all too often an unwelcome guest at Yuletide parties.

Here are a few murderous nineteenth-century American Christmas "celebrations." 

	Two Shots, a Shriek. “A dark, mean little bedroom, a woman, half-undressed, dirty and pale, and blear-eyed from long excesses, a male companion, leaning over her with a revolver at her head, two shots, a shriek, an ugly hole under the ear, and the vice and crime of Boston had added another murder to its long score.”  - The Boston Herald’s vivid description of the murder of Josephine Brown on Christmas Eve, 1891.
	It was Santa Claus' Fault. On Christmas Eve, 1889, chaos ensued at a  Shawneetown, Illinois, Christmas party, when the tags fell off some of the presents and were replaced haphazardly.  The room erupted into a free fight with chairs, clubs, knives, and pistols. it looked as though several combatants would be killed, but none of the wounds proved fatal. A Christmas miracle.
	Mrs. Southern's Sad Case. At a Pickens County, Georgia Christmas party in 1876, Kate Southern warned her husband not to dance with his mistress, Narcissa Cowan, and she warned Narcissa to stay away from her husband. When they danced together anyway Kate borrowed her father's pocketknife and plunged it into Narcissa's chest.
	That Bad Man Stagolee. Troubadours have sung the story of Stagolee for over a hundred years. Each singer seems to know a different version and tell a different story of its origin. But the story is true. The legend was born when Stack Lee Shelton shot Billy Lyons, in a fight over a Stetson hat, in Bill Curtis's Saloon, on Christmas night 1895.
	Delia's Gone, One More Round. On Christmas Eve 1900, Cooney Houston shot and killed Delia Green. If that isn’t tragic enough, they were both 14 years old. Their sad story would have been long forgotten, even in Yamacraw – the black neighborhood in the western end of Savannah, Georgia, where the killing took place – if it hadn’t been for a song. The ballad of Delia’s murder traveled from Georgia to the Bahamas, then back to the States during the folk boom of the 1950s.