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1907 · VISTULA AVENUE — AND THE PARDON BOARD, 1913
The case comes down to this history through a single surviving newspaper account, the South Bend News-Times of 13 August 1913, which looked back six years to the murder of Carrie Vincent. Jay K. Armstrong, of Dowagiac, Michigan, had been convicted of her murder in South Bend and was serving a life term at the state prison at Michigan City. The killing had happened at the Grand View Hotel on Vistula Avenue. In the police account the paper repeated, Armstrong had come down from Dowagiac and taken a room with the girl at the hotel; in the night revolver shots were heard, and Carrie Vincent was found dead, a knife wound in her heart, while Armstrong was found with a bullet hole in him, believed to be self-inflicted.
What made the case still news in 1913 was not the trial but the campaign against its result. Armstrong's father had brought the case before the State Board of Pardons repeatedly — it had been presented a number of times, the paper said — maintaining that facts never uncovered would clear his son, and in August 1913 he was asking for a further hearing at the board's September sitting. The outcome of that campaign is not established in the sources reached for this history: the record preserves the conviction, the life sentence, and a father's refusal across six years to accept either. The case stands here as the record leaves it — the city's earliest twentieth-century murder case with a documented afterlife.
Sources:
- South Bend News-Times, 13 August 1913, p. 3 (Hoosier State Chronicles) — the pardon campaign and the paper's account of the 1907 case