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Finders Keepers rule does not apply when hundreds of
bodies are being shifted from place to place, or
during
ghoul season
In the late afternoon of the Iroquois Theater fire
in 1903 Chicago, nineteen-year-old Harry Irving
Klawans (1880-1950) was leaning against the front
wall outside the front entrance at the theater,
doing some rubbernecking. It was dark, and the
temperature was near zero, but Harry was far from
alone. Many dozens of bystanders and worried
family members looked on as streams of firemen,
police, and volunteers moved bodies around, the
maybe-alive in one place, the dead in another, to be
carried away in wagons to hospitals or morgues.
Harry Klawans had not attended the theater, did not
have a friend or relative among the victims, and was
not assisting in the rescue or body removal effort.
Just an interested bystander that was allowed to
loiter near the theater entrance.
His account of what happened was that an
unidentified police officer picked up a small kit
from the sidewalk and handed it to Harry, telling
him to "look after this." 1904 newspapers described
it as a "dope kit," which could have meant anything
from a Dopp style gentleman's shaving kit to a man's
purse, wallet, or kit for doping. Yet another
unidentified police officer came along and handed
Harry a watch, reportedly saying, "Keep this for a
souvenir." An opal pin from the same Iroquois victim
also ended up in Harry's possession, but nothing was
reported as to how he got it or what he then did
with it. With hundreds of bodies carried through the
area, many after sunset, belongings would have been
dropped, sometimes noticed and retrieved by police,
sometimes not.
Unemployed, Harry and his bride of nine months lived
with his parents. They were not impoverished.
Harry's father, George Klawans, co-owned Schiller
Amusement Co., operator of bowling allies and cafes
in Chicago. Their home on fashionable Prairie Avenue
was an impressive three-story 5,500 sq. ft.
structure.
Harry inspected the dope kit and found $66 in
currency and a negotiable note for $1,000 (a check)
written by a William Hutchison to a
William
M Reid. (It would later be identified as payment for
William's work as an assessor in Lake County, IL.)
The next day, Harry took the charred $66
(inflation-adjusted to $1,700) to a Subtreasury on
the second floor in the Rand-McNally Building at 77
Madison, took the watch to William E. Clow jewelry
store on at 350 Franklin for repair, and went to the
coroner's office to get contact information for
relatives of William M. Reid — leaving a trail of at
least three people who could point him out as
possessor of items belonging to fire victims.
At some point, Harry discussed the situation with
attorney Adolph M. Schwartz — probably soon after he
told his father what he'd been up to. The upshot of
that flurry of conversations was that Schwartz took
the note to the police with a story about the
twenty-three-year-old lad having made a mistake and
Schwartz feeling compelled to come forward to do his
civic duty.
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Example Ghoul
Upon arrest, ordered by assistant police chief
Herman F. Schuettler, Harry spilled
the beans and signed a confession.
He admitted to having lied when he told Schwartz that he got the note
from a friend, to having gotten contact information about Reid's
family in hopes they would favor him with a
reward if he returned the note, to having asked
Schwartz to convert the note to cash, to having already spent the $66, and
to having taken the watch to a repair shop.
If the family expected Harry's confession to bring a
speedy end to the affair, they were disappointed.
With the police department being condemned in
newspapers around the country for laxness in ghoul
control, it is likely they were under pressure from
many quarters to change the narrative. They made an
example of Harry, and his name appeared in dozens of
newspapers around the country, with stories
appearing in Chicago newspapers each time a new
tidbit was uncovered.
Newspapers gleefully reported that the watch
belonged to a three-year-old child, Cora Rian, the
implication being that Harry the Ghoul took the
watch from the body of a little child. The truth:
1.) the child was named Ora, not Cora, 2.) her last
name was Rimes, not Rian, 3.) she had not even
attended the theater, had been left at home with
caretakers that afternoon, 4.) the watch came from
the body of her father, Iroquois victim
Dr. Mervin Rimes, and belonged to Ora only because the child was the
only surviving heir to her father's estate. So yes,
the watch belonged to a child, but Harry was not
guilty of robbing a dead child's body. Did he steal
the items from Reid's and Rimes' corpses? Possibly.
If he told the truth about a
police officer giving him the items, the officer
should not have done so but wasn't about to come
forward to confess.
George Klawans hired an attorney for Harry, Joseph
David, and the case came before judge Joseph Gary's
court in June 1904. (Six months earlier, Gary had
completed forty years on the bench, so he had enough
experience to read between, below, and above the
lines.) Assistant state attorney Frank Crowe
represented the prosecution. Sitting next to the
defendant was his father and sobbing wife.
The star witness in Harry's defense was none other
than his original attorney, Adolph Schwartz, on hand
to express his opinion that Harry had, in the end,
told the truth about how he acquired the note,
currency, pin, and watch. Not surprisingly, there
was no corroborative testimony from police officers.
George Klawans testified that his son's error was in
letting temptation keep him from turning items over
to police as quickly as he should have.
The trial outcome was not reported. Harry seemed to
disappear from Chicago for a couple of years,
reappeared in 1906 and remained there for the rest
of his life. In 1930 he was the proprietor of a
cotton mill and patented a weaving design.
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