“Our Murderers” · the docket the Sentinel counted in November 1875

NOVEMBER 1875 · FORT WAYNE DAILY SENTINEL

On 6 November 1875 the Fort Wayne Daily Sentinel stopped and counted. Under the headline “Our Murderers,” the paper told its readers that Fort Wayne and Allen County had “gained an unenviable reputation abroad” for violence, and that eleven men were then awaiting trial in the county for homicide — two for murder in the first degree, six for murder in the second degree, and two for manslaughter, with a sixth second-degree name added by the week's grand jury. Beside the docket the paper listed three more killings, committed within little over a year, “of which no clue to the perpetrators was ever obtained.” The survey is the city's first act of stock-taking over its own murder record, and it is the fullest single picture of what a famous case looked like in the Fort Wayne of 1875: not one trial but a season of them.

The case the paper put first was Joseph Wall's. Wall, a Black man of about sixty, was indicted for murder in the first degree for the killing of his upstairs neighbor, a man whose name the Sentinel printed as Kronkheit, on the night of 1 July 1875 in a small house in White's Fourth Addition. The paper reported that a trifling dispute between the two men, who occupied the two floors of the house, ended with Wall going up the stairs armed and inflicting seven wounds with a large knife, from which Kronkheit died at the hospital within days. Wall had been in jail since his arrest, indicted at the July term. His trial was to begin the Monday after the survey appeared, defended by Stratton & Stratton, who were expected to plead religious insanity. “Its result,” the Sentinel wrote, “is looked for by the public with the most intense interest” — the period's own definition of a cause célèbre.

The rest of the docket the paper marched through in order. Charles Krout was indicted for murder in the first degree for stabbing Carey Hicks to death in September 1875 during a drunken row that followed the “belling” of a newly married couple north of the city; his brother Henry Krout was held for manslaughter as an accessory, out on $3,000 bail. Gabriel Fair, a farmer of Eel River Township, was indicted that week for murder in the second degree after striking his neighbor Robert Dolin with a club on 11 October; Dolin died the next day, and Fair, out on bail, had attended his victim's funeral. Six men — John Dollerheit, Emsley Dollarheit, Isam Dollarheit, Josiah Roberts, G. W. Emery and Elias Hoover — were indicted for murder in the second degree in what the paper called the canal boat affray of 28 October, in which Albert Cronkheit, captain of the canal boat Shamrock and a cousin of Wall's victim, was shot and killed. And David Brundige awaited a second trial for manslaughter in the 1874 killing of Archibald McDonald, having been convicted once and sentenced to two years before Judge Brackenridge granted him a new trial; he was out on $5,000 bail.

The three unapprehended cases the paper named were Andrew Tiernan, whose body was found in the canal at the east end of Main Street in the summer of 1874 with a deep gash on the head; David Boesch, a young carpet weaver who disappeared on the night of 1 August 1875 and was never seen again, the circumstances pointing, the paper said, to murder for robbery; and James W. Chaney, an old man whose body was found in the St. Marys River near Beaver's mill, the coroner's jury having found murder by persons unknown, for robbery. Of Chaney's case the Sentinel recorded, as suspicion only and never as proof, that suspicion had pointed to “a well known desperado” named Henry Brown, who had left the country — and it condemned the authorities' “masterly inactivity” in offering no reward. The paper closed by calling its own summary “an alarming record for a city and county of this size.” The verdicts that followed these indictments are not followed in the record reached for this section; the survey itself, with its names, charges and bail figures, is the document that survives whole, and it is printed here as the record of the era's famous docket.

Sources:

1. Fort Wayne Daily Sentinel, “Our Murderers,” 6 November 1875 (reprinted in full, Murder by Gaslight)