The man in the river · Harold Shaw

MARCH 1911

The finding: In the first days of March 1911, two boys playing at the city dump found a man's body floating in the St. Marys River. He had been beaten to death — the coroner, Dr. Abraham J. Kesler, ruled out the theory that river ice had done the damage — and his body had been weighted down with fire-plug caps wired around it, the wire nipped off cleanly, as men who worked with wire would do it. He wore good clothes and gloves but no coat, and he carried no identification and no money. All the police had were the tattoos on his arms and a ring bearing the initials H.I.S. The body was laid out at the Schone and Ankenbruck funeral home, and hundreds of the curious filed past it.

The naming: The name came from a rooming house at 310 West Main Street. Ida Kirkham, who kept it, told police that a boarder — a polite, well-dressed young man she knew as Harry Sherwood — had been gone since about New Year's, leaving all his belongings behind. In his room, Chief of Police Dayton Abbott found a postcard photograph of the dead man. Sherwood's roommate, Herman Muldoon, identified the body and gave the rest: the dead man's real name was Harold I. Shaw, of Salem, Massachusetts. He was an electrician who had learned the trade in the United States Navy, enlisted in 1903, served aboard the USS New Hampshire — and deserted in the summer of 1910. The alias was his own initials rearranged; he had worked as an electrician at the Anthony Hotel, alongside Muldoon, since the previous August.

The investigation: The witnesses could not agree when Shaw was last alive — a hotel clerk placed him on the street about January 15; most others put his disappearance near New Year's Day. His pocket watch was missing, and the watch pocket of his vest was turned out; police traced the watch to a pawnshop, where a former Anthony Hotel co-worker had pawned it in January, saying he had bought it from Shaw in December. The man was detained and questioned at length, and released; the newspapers of March 1911 record the suspicion and its limit in the same breath — nothing in his account, however unsatisfying the detectives found it, could pin the murder on him, and no one was ever charged. Chief Abbott's own theory, printed at the time, was robbery by strangers at the dump. A coroner's inquest was held and produced no name. Within a few weeks, the Journal-Gazette's headlines tell the ending: "Clues Fail to Disclose Murderer."

The standing: Shaw's mother, told of his death while his father was recovering from surgery in Boston, chose to have him buried in Fort Wayne rather than distress the sick man. On March 14, 1911, Harold Shaw was buried in an unmarked grave in Lindenwood Cemetery, at a funeral attended by very few people. His family never sent for the body. The murder is the oldest open case in this section, and it stands exactly where the spring of 1911 left it.

Sources:

1. John Brassard Jr., "The Body in the River: A 1911 Murder in Fort Wayne, Indiana," The Kitchen Table Historian (August 18, 2021) — a reconstruction from the contemporary Fort Wayne press, the source consulted for the narrative; its dramatized passages are not relied on here.
2. The contemporary record as cited there: The Fort Wayne Sentinel, "Say the Murdered Man Was Harold I. Shaw, An Electrician" (March 11, 1911); Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, "Clues Fail to Disclose Murderer" (March 12, 1911), "Portland Stenographer Knew Shaw" and "Coroner's Inquest Probes Deep into Murder Mystery" (March 13, 1911), "Davis, Detained, Clings to Original Story of Watch" (March 15, 1911); The Fort Wayne News, "Davis' Story Looks Flimsy" (March 13, 1911).