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Murder of
Mildred Semrow Allison Rexroat.
Spencer's
trial and execution.
The evening of
Friday, Sept 26, 1913, using the alias
Henry Spencer, Spencer 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 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 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 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 added mental illness to the mix
and Mildred ended up dead.
Spencer's arrest
Spencer was
arrested in Chicago nine days later, on
Oct 5, 1913, after several other men,
including Mildred's past and current
husbands, had been targeted then ruled
out as suspects. Spencer 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'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 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'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'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 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's 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 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's 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'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 three times. He sent
three
alienists to talk with and observe
Spencer 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 was crazy.
Higley was
present at Spencer's 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 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 was hung July
31, 1914 before a crowd of over one hundred
witnesses, some personally invited to the event by
Spencer. 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 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 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 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 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 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. |
