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The second unidentified Iroquois Theater victim
Beneath a
memorial in Montrose Cemetery in Chicago
lies the remains of a female victim of the Iroquois
Theater fire who was not claimed or identified by
any of the thousands of people who looked at her. Not
known until a decade later, there were actually two
unidentified Iroquois Theater fire victims.
Somewhere else in Chicago is a second woman, buried with an alias given to her by
a man who a decade later boasted of having stolen her body. After the fire there should have
been two sets of families or friends saying, "My
mother/sister/wife has disappeared."
Instead there were none.
Did their theater companions
also die in the disaster? Who were these two
women who had no one surviving to note their
absence?
Nellie Skarupa probably never went to the Iroquois Theater and the identity of the woman buried with her name remains unknown
There are so many aliases in this story that to avoid
confusion I have referred to them here as Spencer (alias of the con man,
Andrew Skarupa) and Nellie (the unknown
victim).
In 1913, a decade after the Iroquois Theater fire, a
man using the alias Henry Spencer was arrested for
murder (see panel below for story).
While in custody he told police that he had helped police carry
bodies from the Iroquois theater on Dec 30, 1903. One
fatality with a badly disfigured face caught his attention
because she wore fine clothing and
jewelry. He found an unidentified female
accomplice to accompany him that night during a search through
morgues to find the rich victim's corpse. He
claimed then to be Henry Eads and introduced his
accomplice as being the sister of an Iroquois victim named
Nellie Skarupa, a twenty-six-year-old married seamstress
from the Bronx, in Chicago on a visit. (Other
reports said Spencer claimed the body was his
sister and still others that both Spencer and his
accomplice claimed the body as their sister.) The
search would have meant traveling by carriage in sub
zero temperatures, waiting in lines outside up to
sixteen morgues that closed at midnight that night.
He must have found the corpse in one of the first
morgues visited else the search might have extended
over to the next day.
Or the entire story could be false. Everything
you just read comes from a man from whom lies fell
like water from a fountain.
Once the wealthy lady's corpse was found, they went to the coroner's office
to take possession of her valuables,
consisting of $1,500 in cash
and a ring he later sold for $1,000. He arranged
for the body to be transported to his rooming house. A
day or two later he held a funeral there.
Since Eads ostensibly did not know Nellie, his decision
to have a funeral is curious. See questions
about that at right.
Iroquois victim body theft revealed among dozens of confessions following a murder
Ten years after the Iroquois fire, on Oct 5, 1913,
Spencer was arrested for the Sept 26 murder
of tango teacher, Mildred Semrow Allison Rexroat
(see panel below). Spencer said
he killed her because she was pregnant and urging
him to marry her. He was by then using the alias Henry Spencer.†
A self-confessed opium addict, Spencer may have been in the throes of
withdrawal‡ when he began confessing to a seventeen-year crime
spree leading up to Rexroat's murder. In
total he confessed to twenty-nine murders and dozens
of robberies, including the
theft of an Iroquois victim's body.
Spencer's connection to Iroquois victim verified by his former landlady
The Chicago coroner's office initially stated that
Spencer's story about the Iroquois victim was not true because
their records showed there had been no cash or jewelry on the body
identified as Nellie Skarupa. Then on October
16, 1913 Ida F. Mount Booth Starz, § wife of George H. Starz, came forward.
Ida reported that in 1903 William Eads had been one of her
boarders at a home on Loomis street in Chicago. She told police that
Eads brought the body of a woman he said was an
Iroquois Theater victim named Nellie Skarupa to her boarding
house and held a funeral there a few days
after the Iroquois Theater fire. Mrs. Starz
identified the man in custody, Spencer, as
that man. He had signed the death certificate
as Henry Eads, another of Spencer's aliases, but she knew him as William Eads.‖
Questions
One of several unknowns: who paid the funeral and burial expenses?
If Spencer, why have a funeral for a stranger?
If to continue the con with his landlady, why? Could
Ida Starz have been his companion on the morgue tour?
Ida Starz had two toddlers at the time. Did Spencer exhibit such bereavement for his sister that Ida left her children with others to search morgues with one of her boarders? My reading-between-the-lines-take on Ida is that she was a straight shooter and unlikely to get involved with a suspicious scheme but I'm pulling that conclusion from my ear and Could Spencer-Eads have actually known the victim?
If so, it would explain why no one came looking
for a missing victim's body. If his real name
was Skarupa, as some claimed in 1913, Nellie may have
been been a relative and buried with her real name.
If an alias, which seems more likely, was she an acquaintance or a
strange wealthy lady as he claimed in 1913?
Was the story about cash and jewelry just another
example of him inflating his image as a bad hombre? A discrepancy in
coroner's office records about her jewelry is quite possible; there were incidents of jewelry
not recovered. Did he obtain it at the morgue?
And to further complicate, four days after the fire
a suspicious stranger showed up in Detroit claiming
to represent a Chicago funeral home that wanted
to reclaim caskets on route with the bodies of two
Iroquois victims - and the body of a third victim in
that family, Bertha Fellman, was never found.
Something about the man didn't seem right to the
Fellmans in Detroit so they took him to a friend in
the funeral home business who thought no better of
him and gave him the brush off. The man
disappeared and didn't return. Like Spencer-Eads,
he was short of stature. Part of what made the Fellman's suspicious was that he said three rather
than two bodies were coming in from Chicago.
Mildred met her killer while employed as a tango teacher at a dance hall in
the San Souci Amusement Park. Despite large
expenditures hoped to woo traffic, too much competition from other amusement
parks resulted in the park closing within weeks of Mildred's death.
Its employees and concessionaires would have all been scrambling to find new
jobs. Mildred's answer was to found a small dance hall of her own in
the city's western suburbs. The September, 1913 trek to Wayne,
Illinois was likely in pursuit of that plan. According to Spencer-Eads he had told her his father was well to do. Did he lead her to believe he was
a potential investor in her dance hall?
The evening of Friday, Sept 26, 1913, using the alias
Henry Spencer, Spencer-Eads lured Mildred Rexroat to
Wayne, IL,
about an hour west of Chicago, saying they were
going to teach dance to children.
Mildred was a passionate participant of
the tango dance craze and Spencer-Eads had
taken lessons at her classes at a dance
hall known as the Felecita Club in the
San Souci Amusement Park on Chicago's
South side. That autumn
evening as they talked of marrying, he led her down
the railroad tracks a short distance
away from the depot (a
depot that was moved in 2007), claiming it was a
shortcut to their destination, and shot her
in the head with a 38. (See
map of area.) Had the gun failed he
had a backup weapon, a hammer he'd
hidden at the scene earlier. In a failed effort to
conceal the gunshot wound he placed
Mildred's body on train rails. Elgin, Joliet &
Eastern train no. 9 came along soon
thereafter and ran over the body. The
conductor and engineer stopped the
train because the wheels were slipping.
Though badly mangled and severed at the waist, the coroner recognized the
bullet hole in Mildred's cheek and the police
began investigating the accident as a homicide.
Reportedly over one hundred police officers were involved in the nine-day,
two-county hunt for Mildred's killer.
Mildred had been a troubled lady
A German immigrant, thirty-seven-year-old
Mildred Semrow Allison Rexroat (1876–1913) left behind three sons age four
to seventeen, an ex husband, a husband from whom she had separated after only a
few months of marriage and an unhappy history of marital difficulties, children lost
during childbirth, miscarriages and multiple suicide attempts. She divorced her
first husband, a Chicago barber named William H. Allison (1867–1931), father
of her boys. Spencer-Eads said she accused Allison of being abusive but
after her death Allison claimed she wanted to reconcile. He took care
of her burial and in 1910 opened their home to two of her siblings. Fifteen days later
she side-stepped Illinois state waiting-period laws by remarrying in a city about an
hour southeast of Chicago that had become the "marrying mill" of the era,
Crown Point,
Indiana. Her new husband was a young farmer from Macomb, IL, Everette A. Rexroat
(1883–1966). Three months later, having failed to persuade
her new father-in-law to loan money to Everette, she fled back to the city,
ostensibly to spend time with her sons, claiming she would return. Instead
she told her first husband, Allison, that she wanted to return
to him, though she'd already become involved in an intimate romance with
Henry Spencer-Eads who led her to believe
he'd inherited money from a wealthy
father. They were two cons, each
running a gambit on the other, but
Spencer-Eads added mental illness to the mix
and Mildred ended up dead.
Spencer-Eads' arrest
Spencer-Eads was arrested in Chicago nine days later, on
Oct 5, 1913, after several other men, including Mildred's
past and current husbands, had been ruled
out as suspects. Spencer-Eads had $260 on his
person at the time of his arrest. (Nearly $7,000
today.) He had dumped Mildred's
clothing on the ground near the crime
scene and taken her suitcase (why?), a diamond ring valued at $300–$350
($8,400 today) and her $200 savings
($5,000 today) that she planned to use
to open a small dance hall of her own.
Reportedly he deposited her savings in
his bank (1913 con men used banks?) and
set about trying to sell the ring.
Given his claimed experience, that
should have been easy but one of the
jewelers he approached contacted police.
Sorting truth from fiction
Spencer-Eads's confessed murders had taken place in various cities in the
Midwest. Anxious to close old cases, police
officers scurried to verify or disprove. All
but four of the murders were soon discounted.
Spencer-Eads had spent seventeen of his thirty-three years in prison for
larceny and parole violations and was in prison
when several of the murders had taken place.
Police could not find evidence that others had happened. But not all
his stories were bogus. He provided sufficient details
about four cases to convince Chicago police he
was a killer of multiple people but they concluded
the murder of the tango teacher in DuPage County was the strongest case.
When many of Spencer-Eads's confessed murders were found to be
made up, he claimed he knew the real
killers in some of the cases and thought
to do them a favor since he was going to
be hung for the Rexroat killing anyway.
The Inter Ocean newspaper in
Chicago proclaimed the Rexroat murder
was as fabricated as Spencer-Eads's other
false confessions but was forced to
concede he was Mildred's killer when
Mildred's blood-stained suitcase turned
up in his rented room, a jeweler
identified him as the man who tried to
sell Mildred's ring and multiple witnesses identified him as the
man seen with Mildred the day and
evening before she was killed. Cook
County, IL reluctantly turned over their
celebrity criminal to Dupage County, IL
on Oct 12, 1913. Dupage swore to fast
track his prosecution.
Spencer-Eads continued to create headlines. In court he
slugged his defense attorney and shouted accusations at the
judge.
He discussed selling his body to an inventor
named G. M. Campbell of New Orleans who planned
to use it to promote an embalming fluid he claimed
could turn cadavers to granite. (Two years later Campbell was
trying to have some of his test corpses exhumed so
as to prove his claim. It is not known if
Spencer-Eads' body was one of them.
The idea was not unique. Boydston
Bros funeral home in Chicago was working
on a similar idea in 1896.)
Spencer-Eads was found guilty on Nov 20, 1913 by the Dupage
county circuit court in Wheaton, IL and sentenced to
hang on Dec 19, 1913.
Judge Mazinni Slusser (1853–1922), 16th district circuit judge in Wheaton,
twice refused to vacate the verdict so Spencer-Eads' three attorneys petitioned
Illinois governor Dunne ¶ for time to prepare a
new trial appeal on Dec 15, 1913. He granted a four-week reprieve so
attorneys could prepare a bill of exceptions to present to the state
supreme court in hopes of getting a new trial based on an insanity
defense. A new date was set for the hanging, Jan 16, 1914, but
the execution was stayed at midnight the night before to give the
state supreme court time to rule on whether to grant a
new trial.
On June 16, 1914 the trial court refused to overturn the
conviction.
Alienists
The only remaining option was for Spencer-Eads's
attorneys to petition the governor for a
pardon. It was governor Dunne's first
pardon request in a death penalty case.
Before it was over, Dunne refused a
pardon for Spencer-Eads three times. He sent
three
alienists to talk with and observe
Spencer-Eads and by June 24, 1913 had their
verdict that he was sane. One alienist
who weighed in for the press was Edward H. Higley of Glen
Ellyn, IL who declared Spencer-Eads was crazy. Higley was present at Spencer-Eads' hanging but was not among the
governor's alienist consultants, all of
whom were associated with Illinois asylums.
Those were superintendent Ralph T. Hinton from the
Northern Illinois Hospital and Asylum for the Insane
in Elgin, IL, Howard Singer of Kankakee Insane
Asylum and John Salyers of Springfield. The verdict
of all three was that Spencer-Eads was sane.
On July 20, 1914, four Illinois state supreme court
justices sitting in East St. Louis, Illinois denied
a petition for a new trial.
Hanging and retraction of all confessions
Spencer-Eads was hung July 31, 1914 before a crowd of over one hundred
witnesses, some personally invited to the event by
Spencer-Eads. Among the newspapermen present were
eventual notables such as
Ben Hecht, Hal O'Flaherty of the Chicago Daily News,
Web Miller and
Wallace Smith.
Spencer-Eads was often described as speaking with a drawl and
dancing with a drag. He was about 5' 7"
tall and weighed around 165 lbs. He wore
gold-rimmed glasses and often had a
fixed stare. To his hanging, he wore all white
with a red carnation in his lapel.
His final words lasted eleven minutes and included Bible verses and a claim that he was
innocent. He said he'd never had a fair shake
in life and that society had forced him into a life of crime. His
last-minute religious conversion was a bit of a habit. In 1902 he
confessed to stealing $500 worth of silverware from his employer, a
restaurant where he worked as a waiter, as a condition of police
agreeing not to
reveal his theft to a missionary
from China whose approval he sought.
Spencer-Eads was hung behind the Wheaton courthouse using
scaffolding built several years earlier
for an accused man who had received a
last-minute pardon from a prior
governor. Spencer-Eads could watch the
scaffolding assembly from his cell
window. He became so obnoxious heckling
the workers that the warden had his
window boarded up. His request to help
assemble the scaffolding and was denied.
His excessive talking and arguing became
such a problem that he was segregated
from other prisoners.
Had there not been a noose at the end of the party,
his new found fame and attention may
have made his months on death row the
best time of his life. Spencer-Eads might
today be labeled a sociopath. He
was primarily a thief but killed when
that was the most expedient way to rob
someone or, as in the case of Mildred
Allison Rexroat, when overcome by
resentment of perceived insult. In
reading his remarks, allowing for self
aggrandizement and manipulation, it
seemed he didn't care enough about most
people to bother killing them and killed
when they got in the way of other
objectives. Though he seemed to enjoy
the drama and emotion of religion, and trafficked in religious
transformation, I did not read about
evidence of lasting remorse. Years of
incarceration had given him the
value system of a hardened criminal. He
was proud of his crimes and enjoyed
the attention brought by exaggerating
his heartlessness and financial gain.
Reportedly he blamed his adoptive mother for forcing him to sell
newspapers on the street at a young
age but that was the only reported
indication of his harboring anger about
growing up poor and abandoned or as a
basis for misogyny. It is
interesting to note that the newspaper
job that so angered him came about after
his adoptive father's death when his
adoptive mother was left with five
children. Though not yet an adult,
at fifteen he was an age when many boys
of the era went to work.
He was skillful at duping people, seemingly could with
ease present an image of an honest and
forthright person, but sometimes resented others
who engaged in the same sort of
duplicitous behavior. Mildred Rexraut
was an unhappy opportunist who died
primarily because Spencer-Eads was furious
that she mistook him for being as
gullible as men he considered his
inferiors, such as her husband and
his own marks. His
expectations were at once higher and
lower for women than for men. He
respected religiously devout females but
saw other women as weak and helpless,
viewing himself as graciously granting
them a reprieve from the harm he could
inflict were he more willing to take
advantage of their weakness.
Discrepancies and addendum
* There were also two stolen female
Iroquois victim bodies, the one discussed in this
story and
Lulu Greenwald.
† Spencer-Eads's common aliases
included Henry Skarupa, James Burke, Jindrich Skarupa,
Jindred Shortna, Henry Spencer, William Spencer and Henry Scarfe.
Numerous authors and bloggers have written about the
person I'm calling Spencer, some identifying him as
Jindred Shortna born in 1877, but I've not been able
to verify that information with genealogy
information. According to Ancestry.com, no one
by that name lived in the United States. Ever.
Newspapers.com also reports nothing. It may be
a spelling error but hours of searching did not
reveal an answer.During the eight months of heavy newspaper publicity
in 1913-4, several people came forward to say they
knew Spencer's origins with certainty. All
conflicted. Some said his
birth name was James Burke and that he was from
Pennsylvania, others that he was from Pennsylvania
but his birth name was James Good. A prison guard at the state
prison in Joliet, IL,
Paul G. Baxter, said Spencer never knew his parents
and was left at an orphanage as a young child and
was adopted. His criminal
behavior as a boy caused his adoptive parents to
send him to a home for incorrigible boys where he
lived when arrested the first time. It was
asserted by others that Skarupa, not Burke, was
Spencer's birth name, that
he was raised in Chicago's Bunker
Street with his alcoholic adoptive father, a Polish
immigrant, who committed suicide, as did his brother and
one of his sisters. That account is backed
up by Census and death records. There was a man living on
Bunker St. in Chicago, named Martin Skarupa, married
to Marie Skarupa. Provided his adoption was
legal and that his parents provided accurate
information to the U.S. Census enumerator in 1800, his legal name was probably Andrew Skarupa.
‡ Though newspapers and officials of 1913 were quick to blame
opium for Spencer's elaborate confessions, had they
checked his record they would have found he had also
gone into
confession mode in 1906 when
arrested for embezzling. He then confessed to
robbing seven homes and retail outlets, and to killing six Chinamen. For
Spencer, confessions and religious transformation
were currency. Personality disorder was the more likely
explanation. That said, Spencer claimed to have become
addicted to opium while in Joliet prison and spoke
of having smoked up to twenty opium pills per day. Newspapers
reported he had ample money to afford afford cigars and better food than
offered as standard prison fare.
Seems probable he had the funds and knowledge too to
again acquire opium while in jail.
§
Spencer's 1903 landlady Ida Starz may have been lucky to have come along early
in his criminal career. His landlady in 1912,
Dora Schramm, was beaten with his favorite weapon, a
hammer. She still bore the scars and fainted at sight of him in 1913.
(He had become adept with a hammer while working in the
prison chair factory in Joliet. See right. It was his job to
disassemble chairs for shipping. As a result
of the labor his shoulders and right arm
became disproportionately muscular and strong.)
In custody he told police that he had planned to
kill his 1913 landlady as well.
Ida Starz may have been a tough lady. She had buried two husbands and bore at
least seven children, two of whom she had to put up
for adoption when her first husband died in a brutal
accident while working in a railroad yard, leaving
her penniless. She would see two of her children
die before her, one a police officer shot in the
line of duty. Three years before she identified
Spencer as the man who had claimed an Iroquois
Victim's body, Ida finally found one of her
daughters that had been put up for
adoption in 1891. She sent the sixteen year
old to Dayton, Ohio to find her sister but the girl
instead found a husband. The union didn't last and
she remarried six years later. Nothing was
reported as to whether Ida ever found the other
daughter.
‖ Ida Starz's identification is important because it
is the only evidence that Spencer's story about the
Iroquois victim is not as false as his many murder
confessions. Additionally, it controverts a
list published in 1913 of his
imprisonment history 1896-1912 that put
him in the penitentiary in 1903 when the Iroquois fire took
place. The data about his imprisonments was described
as having come from "old books" at Joliet
Prison, suggesting the list of his incarcerations
was compiled by going through entries in sixteen
years of records.
¶ Governor Edward Dunne had
followed Carter Harrison into the mayoral seat in
Chicago. He remains as the last person to
serve as both the mayor of Chicago and the governor
of Illinois.
Harry
Didn't Do It
Three Oshkosh survivors
Made up heroics in 1957
story
Other discussions you might find interesting
irqcriminals
Story 2957
A note about sourcing. When this
project began, I failed to anticipate the day might come when a
more scholarly approach would be called for. When my
mistake was recognized I faced a decision: go back and spend years creating source lists for every page, or go
forward and try to cover more of the people and circumstances
involved in the disaster. Were I twenty years younger, I'd
have gone back, but in recognition that this project will end when I do, I chose to go forward.
These pages will provide enough information, it is hoped, to
provide subsequent researchers with additional information.
I would like to
hear from you if you have additional info about an Iroquois victim, or find an error,
and you're invited to visit the
comments page to share stories and observations about the Iroquois Theater fire.
