A Maniac's Deed.

For several weeks in November 1892, Herman Siegler had been depressed and melancholy. Siegler was a wood carver employed by Wolf Bros. of West Erie Street, Chicago and was known as a man of good disposition who had, to all appearances, a happy domestic life. He and his wife Emilia had been married for eleven years and had three children, the oldest was 10-years-old and the youngest just a few months old. None of his family or friends could explain his recent depression.

Chicago Tragedy.

Little Murders

Oscar Grundman and his wife Annie were living unhappily in a Chicago tenement in 1891. Annie’s excessive drinking had been a continual source of trouble for her husband. He complained that she spent all of his hard-earned wages and neglected her domestic duties; he was running out of patience.

That September Oscar Grundman had Annie arrested and wanted to have her sent to the Washingtonian Home, an institution for the treatment of alcoholism. The judge dismissed her case, however, and sent her back home. After that, Annie lived in fear of her husband and locked him out of the house.



On September 15, Oscar persuaded a neighbor boy to knock on Annie’s door and tell her the police wanted to see her. When she came to the door he struck her on the head with a hatchet. Oscar ran away, escaping arrest, leaving Annie with a serious scalp wound. At the hospital, she was told that her thick hair had probably saved her life.



A week later, Oscar called on Annie again. This time, believing he had come to reconcile, she let him in. “Annie,” he said to her, loud enough for the other tenants to hear, “I have determined that we must part. We can’t live together happily. I have put our children in good hands. Now we must say goodbye.



Annie protested, pleading with him not to leave her. But leaving her was not what Oscar had in mind. The neighbors heard him say, “It’s no use Annie, we must die. Don’t scream. It will soon be over, Annie, and we will be happier than now.”



Oscar pulled out his revolver then and shot Annie once in the head, then turning the pistol on himself, fired a second shot. The neighbors heard the gunshots and heard two bodies fall to the ground. They forced their way into the room and found the unhappy couple lying dead, their blood mingling in pools around their bodies.

---

Sources:
"Chicago Tragedy." Elkhart Daily Review 23 Sep 1891.
"Double Tragedy in Chicago." National Police Gazette 17 Oct 1891.
"Murder and Suicide." Daily Inter Ocean 23 Sep 1891.
"Struck with a Hatchet." Daily Inter Ocean 16 Sep 1891.

Murderous Chicago.

Referring to an 1889 book entitled The Crime of the Century or, The Assassination of Dr. Patrick Henry Cronin, noted crime writer Edmund Pearson remarked, “…anyone with the faintest knowledge of Chicago will remember that that city has a Crime of the Century every four or five years.” With that in mind, this small list of big Chicago crimes is presented in full awareness that it merely scratches the surface.

	A Shrewd Rascal. Samuel Smith and his wife Emma appeared happy and affectionate, but they hid a turmoil, not revealed until Emma was found dead in their apartment, her head blown apart by a shotgun blast.
	Clan-na-Gael and the Murder of Dr. Cronin. When Dr. Patrick Henry Cronin accused the leaders of Clan-na-Gael, of embezzling funds, he was denounced as a traitor and a British spy, and ultimately assassinated.
	H. H. Holmes - "I was born with the devil in me." Dr. Henry Howard Holmes was probably America’s most prodigious serial killer. He perfected his skills in his self-styled “murder castle” during Chicago’s Columbian Exposition.
	Louise Luetgert - The Sausage Vat Murder. Adolph Luetgert, “Sausage King” of Chicago, was constantly fighting with his wife Louise. Did he solve his domestic problems by dissolving her in body in one of his sausage vats?

Joseph Crawford.

Little Murders:

From Defenders and Offenders:

Joseph Crawford.

Joseph Crawford is serving a term of seventeen years in Joliet State Prison, for a most cold blooded murder. He was a typical Chicago hoodlum, ready for any deviltry or crime. He, with two other companions were carousing in the streets, making night hideous with their ruffianly revelry, noticed a poor laboring man approaching, when they proceeded to hold him up. The poor man showed he did not have a cent, when the ruffian Crawford out of spite and disappointment, shot the poor man dead.

---

Defenders and offenders. New York: D. Buchner & Co., 1888.