The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
1870–1880 · FROM CHAPMAN'S "DARK DEEDS"
The killings of the 1870s in Chapman's record share a geography: the saloon. Orange G. Stage was charged with the murder of Charles Tibbetts in a South Bend saloon standing, Chapman notes, "where the opera house now stands," the weapon a large dirk knife. Indicted at the October term of 1870, Stage was tried on a change of venue to Marshall County, where the defense's plea of self-defense — aided by Tibbetts's reputation as a dangerous and quarrelsome man — acquitted him.
On November 27, 1873, a hunting party — Frank Treanofski, Martin Sass, Max Strafe, Joseph Pinkowiski, and John Schulkoski — drank diluted alcohol at Kitkoski's house, danced, and quarreled. Schulkoski cut at Treanofski with a knife without wounding him, then fired from the window and struck Martin Sass in the left side of the face, destroying the left eye and killing him instantly. Schulkoski was arraigned on December 26, convicted, and sentenced to twenty-one years in the penitentiary.
The decade's worst case came out of the countryside. On Tuesday, July 16, 1874, the cabin of Thomas Cihanski — "Tommy Polander" — and his wife, about three miles north of New Carlisle, was found burned, both bodies in the ashes, the man's skull crushed in, and the ground outside showing the signs of a struggle: hair, clotted blood, a bloody nightcap. The motive the inquest testimony supplied was money — Cihanski carried about $600 in a belt. Sheriff Turnock fastened suspicion on James Bennett and Jonathan Hickman; arrested once and discharged for lack of evidence, they were re-arrested days later on the sheriff's continued tracking. At the December term, Judge Stanfield presiding, Bennett turned state's evidence, and Hickman was found guilty and sentenced to the penitentiary for life.
John Sullivan walked into the county jail on Saturday evening, March 18, 1876, and asked to be locked up, stating that he had stabbed William Quinlan in front of a saloon on South Street, opposite the Lake Shore depot. Behind it stood a quarrel between Quinlan and a man named Harrington over aspersions cast on a woman, and a fight arranged at Thomas Krick's saloon; Sullivan, Harrington's cousin, stood by with an open knife and, as the fight began, slashed Quinlan in the bowels. Quinlan died about six the next morning at his parents' residence. Sullivan was tried on Wednesday, May 31, 1876; the jury was out only minutes before returning its verdict, and he was sentenced to eleven years in the penitentiary.
The chapter closes mid-case. Trouble that began on Friday night, August 20, 1880, renewed itself on the Monday following at J. K. Seltzer's saloon, No. 117 Michigan Street, and then in front of Hughes' saloon, where Ephraim Dice, aiding his brother Benjamin against a crowd, was knocked down — supposedly with metal knuckles on a slung-shot — kicked into the gutter, carried into Snyder's drug store, and died within ten minutes without speaking. The post-mortem examination by Coroner Miller and Drs. Partridge, Myers, and Flory found a bruise and cut over the left eye and the neck dislocated close to the base of the skull — caused, the examination concluded, by the fall into the gutter, or possibly by kicks. Police arrested Michael Lynch, Charles Kelley, Martin Pfaffenbach, Charles Perkins, Daniel Casey, Patrick Touhey, and George Briner, with witnesses; after a two-day examination before Justice Harbaugh, Charles Kelley and Andrew Pfaffenbach were held to bail at $2,000 each and the others discharged — Chapman prints the arrested man as Martin Pfaffenbach and the held man as Andrew Pfaffenbach, and the record as reached does not reconcile the two names. Pfaffenbach was afterward brought before Judge Noyes on habeas corpus and remanded to jail without bail. There Chapman's book, published in 1880, leaves the case: held for trial, its outcome beyond the county history's close and not established in the sources reached for this page.
Sources:
- Chas. C. Chapman & Co., History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880), ch. XVI, "Dark Deeds," pp. 586–592 — read first-hand