The Hildebrandt murder

 It was a cold February evening in 1898 when Jonas Staats answered a knock at the door of his Chatham, N.Y.  farmhouse. He didn’t recognize the scruffy-looking man at first, but soon realized who was standing in his doorway.

“My God, It’s Joe,” he exclaimed, ushering the man inside. It was John Schmidt, an accused murderer who had been on the run for more than five years.  

That night after supper, Schmidt, in his broken English, admitted to the farmer that he had killed his stepson, William Hildebrandt, on the evening of Sept. 12, 1893, along the train tracks in nearby Philmont. He claimed that when he cracked the 19-year-old in the head with a hammer it was an act of self-defense.

Staats listened to the man’s story without much in the way of commentary, and allowed the alleged murderer to spend the night and made him breakfast the next morning.

The farmer had known Schmidt for about 15 years, having met him in New York City. Staats brought him to work on his Columbia County farm just after Schmidt arrived from Bromberg, in what was then called Prussian Poland. Schmidt remained at the Staats’ farm for about a year and a half. He then began working for a farmer in Ghent, John Coburn, with whom he stayed on and off for several years.

In 1891 Schmidt met Dora Sophia Johanna, a German immigrant five years his junior. The couple moved in together on Coburn’s property, but soon began a rootless life of travel, going from Columbia to Dutchess County to New Jersey and then Baltimore. When the couple returned to Ghent in 1893 Dora’s teenage son was with them. Schmidt had made enough money to pay the lad’s passage from Germany and now the family was back in Columbia County to work the fields of yet another local farmer.

Sept. 12, 1893

Schmidt and his 19-year-old stepson spent the day working in the field helping to bring in the corn crop of a Ghent farmer. After knocking off for the day they returned to the house. After dinner Schmidt insisted on walking into Philmont to pick up some meat for the family and invited Hildebrandt to go along.

A few hours later Schmidt returned home alone, his clothes bloody and with a leg wound — and without any meat.

He told Sophia that Hildebrandt had been arrested after they brawled with some rowdies in town and that he had escaped arrest by running off. This was just one of several versions Schmidt told of that night’s events. Early the next morning, the couple went to Ghent to catch a train to Hudson, where Hildebrandt would have been taken if arrested. The couple took the train into the city and walked to a building that Schmidt said was the courthouse. He went in alone and came out a few minutes later. Dora was crying and asking where her son was, but Schmidt told her a convenient lie and they headed back home. Later in the evening when the farm boss came around Dora overheard her husband tell the man that Hildebrandt had gone to visit his relatives in New Jersey.

Meanwhile, that afternoon, the crew on a freight train on the Harlem railroad noticed what appeared to be a drunken man passed out along the train tracks in Philmont. He was lying on his back with a leg cocked up, his cap hanging from a nearby tree. It wasn’t until the next morning, on the return trip, that the workers realized the man wasn’t a drunken hobo, but was in fact a corpse.

It wasn’t long until authorities determined young Hildebrandt had been killed by a blow from a hammer that was found near the body, a hammer belonging to Schmidt. He was arrested that afternoon and shipped off to Hudson.  But the constables in charge of the prisoner were drunk and when Schmidt made his escape, they were unable to keep up with him and he disappeared into the night.

For five years Schmidt evaded capture. He traveled widely from New Jersey to Michigan and Minnesota, working on farms and performing odd jobs. And then one evening he appeared on the doorstep of the man who had first taken him in when he arrived in  America.

Why he returned after more than five years as a fugitive is unknown, but Schmidt did say that being on the run and in constant fear of arrest had been hard on him both mentally and physically.

It is unclear whether Staats told authorities at the time about the conversation he had with Schmidt that night or whether he revealed that the fugitive was back in Columbia County. It would be another four months before Schmidt was taken into custody. While sitting in jail awaiting trial he allegedly confessed to two jailers that he had killed his stepson because the teen was having an incestuous relationship with Schmidt’s wife. Later, at trial, the testimony of the two men was called into question by the defense attorney, who told the jury that the jailers might have misheard Schmidt, because his English was so poor. Both witnesses stuck to their stories.

During Schmidt’s trial in Columbia County Court in Hudson, a two-week affair in May and early June of 1899, he told the jury a similar story to the one he had told Staats on that cold February night a year earlier, but in this version, he said he and the teen weren’t on their way to purchase meat, but had instead been trapping along the railroad tracks. Hildebrandt wanted to set a trap, Schmidt told the jury through an interpreter, but when it snapped on his finger he got angry and punched Schmidt.

 “I will give you more, yet,” Schmidt alleged the teen told him before pulling out a knife and taking a swing at him.

“(H)e stooped down and got the hammer and he raised the hammer and struck him,” the interpreter told the jury. “He says he didn’t want to strike him.”

After the boy fell to the ground and didn’t move, Schmidt said he stood there for about 10 minutes and cried, before pushing Hildebrandt’s body further down a culvert. He told the jury he didn’t think Hildebrandt was dead, merely stunned and figured he would wake up and come home. Before leaving, Schmidt left the teen’s cap hanging from a nearby tree. He tossed the hammer down the culvert, took his traps and headed home.

The jury deliberated for close to nine hours before returning a verdict of guilty of first-degree murder. After an appeal and a determination of insanity by a special panel appointed by the governor, Schmidt was electrocuted at Dannemora Prison in January 1902.

As a strange side note, during the hullabaloo surrounding Schmidt’s capture, he told his jailers that his wife had murdered her former paramour, a man named Gruber with whom she had been living before she and Schmidt got together. Police discovered the headless remains buried in a cellar on the property of the Ghent farmer John Coburn, whose home was known as “Broadstairs.”  Dora denied the killing, telling police that she came home one day to her residence, which she and Gruber had been sharing with Schmidt, to find Gruber gone. Schmidt allegedly told her Gruber had left her. Dora quickly took up with Schmidt and they were married a few months later.

There have been ghostly encounters reported at the residence since that time.

The wreck of the Albany and Hudson

The Rensselaer train station became a de facto hospital that day as the dead and dying lay on the ground. A low moaning filled the room from the wounded punctuated by hysterical crying from families searching for loved ones. Doctors tended to the accident victims as they awaited transport to area hospitals.

Among the dead the evening of May 26, 1901 was the man train officials would blame for the head-on collision between trains that claimed the lives of five people and seriously injured more than 50 on the new Albany & Hudson Railroad’s electric line.

“It was the worst accident in the history of electric railroading,” the Albany (N.Y.) Evening Journal of May 27, 1901 reported.

That morning had started like many others. It had been a busy Sunday with people as far away as New York City riding one of the first electric train lines in the country. Many spent the day at the train company’s brand new resort called Electric Park, located at Kinderhook Lake, in Columbia County, N.Y.

The Albany and Hudson Railroad and Power Company was formed in 1899 with the intent of creating an interurban electric rail line. Train service began in 1900 and ran from Hudson to Rennselaer, a distance of 37.2 miles. The company also provided local service in Hudson and Albany.

Both the train system and the park were run on electricity powered by a combination of steam and hydroelectric generation delivered through a dam and power station on Kinderhook Creek.

The train cars — 53 feet long and weighing 30 tons — used an electrified third rail for power and could reach speeds of up to 50 miles per hour.

That Sunday was a fine spring day and business was brisk for the train company with extra cars added to the regular runs to accommodate the crowds.

John DeWitt Peltz, his wife and their young son boarded the local Albany train on State Street at about 2 p.m., connecting to the southbound train in Rennselaer. They were glad to have made it on, as there were a number of people who couldn’t find room and had to wait for the next train.

“They will probably now consider themselves lucky for not obtaining seats,” Peltz later mused.

At 3:17 p.m. train number 22 left Rensselaer two minutes behind schedule and would eventually carry 83 passengers that afternoon. Three minutes later a northbound train, the number 19 — originating from Hudson — left Kinderhook Lake, 20 minutes behind its regular departure time. At the time of the crash there were 20 passengers aboard.

At the controls of the no. 22 was Frank Smith, a North Chatham resident and recent widower. Charles T.  Johnson, a 34-year-old from Clinton Heights, was conductor.

They chugged south, stopping in East Greenbush for a few minutes before leaving the station at 3:44 p.m., now 17 minutes behind schedule.

Meanwhile, the no. 19 pulled out of the Nassau station at 3:40 p.m., 25 minutes behind schedule.

The no. 22 should have pulled off the main line at the No. 69 siding, located 1.3 miles south of East Greenbush, to allow the northbound no. 19 to pass. That didn’t happen.

Five hundred feet south of the siding, on a wide and dangerous curve, the two trains collided head-on, with the impact so sudden that neither motormen had time to apply the brakes.  The no. 22 was traveling at about 45 miles per hour, the no. 19 at 25.

Peltz flew over a half-dozen seats, his son Jack in his arms, and landed in the aisle. His wife also flew through the air. The train car, he saw after gaining his footing,  was a seething mass of bodies. Peltz managed to get outside with his family.

“I saw the two motormen lying side by side, dead.” He later recalled. One, said Peltz, had been cut in half by the collision. Further on, he saw two women lying in a ditch; one was dead and the other unconscious. A third woman stood over them crying. The women had come from Albany and were on their way to visit the graves of relatives.

“Fully 120 men, women and children formed a struggling, shrieking pyramid framed with blood, detached portions of human bodies and the wreckage of cars,” the Brooklyn Eagle reported the next day. The number of people was actually less than that, but never the less, it was a gruesome scene.

Another witness said the two train cars had turned to splinters, with debris thrown 75 feet in all directions. The trains’ heavy axles lay halfway off the tracks, useless and twisted.

The injured were dragged to a fence near the north side of the wreck and those who were less badly hurt provided comfort and aid to the more seriously injured. One of the conductors telephoned for help and soon two doctors arrived, one from Rensselaer, the other from Valatie.

The state report, published the next year, listed the names of the dead and gave an accounting of the wounds suffered by the other passengers, which included numerous broken bones, internal injuries and one poor woman who had the skin from her face scraped off.

At least one report indicated that the accident might have been due to the company running two cars on one time schedule to accommodate the heavy Sunday travel.

The company, probably with the old adage “dead men tell no tales” at the forefront of their minds, firmly laid the blame at the feet of Smith. A state government report would corroborate the company’s version of events.

Newspapermen and others speculated that Smith, “practically insane” with grief over the loss of his wife, was demented at the time of the crash.

 Johnson, the conductor of no. 22, was also blamed for the tragedy because as the conductor he was in charge of overseeing the running of the train. He told officials he signaled Smith to stop at the switch, but that the motorman ignored him and continued barreling south.

Johnson was arrested and charged with manslaughter by the Rennselaer District Attorney’s Office, but the train company backed Johnson’s story. It was unclear what became of the charges.

Those who were killed included Smith; William Nicholas, the motorman from train no. 19; Rose Mooney a domestic servant from Stuyvesant Landing; Maude Kellogg, a 20-year-old from Ballston, N. Y.; and David Mahoney, a 60-year-old Brooklyn man who had been second mate on a Hudson River day liner. He later died in the hospital from his wounds.

The state made recommendations, including putting a steering mechanism and brakes at the back of the car where the conductors were stationed, to prevent this type of accident from happening again, but a little more than a year later, on Aug. 2, 1902, there was another accident on the system that killed two and injured 61.

It wasn’t long after the second crash that the company reorganized as the Albany and Hudson Railroad and again reorganized as the Albany Southern Railroad in 1909.

 The electric train’s final run was made in December 1929.

Surviving the Titanic

They were awakened by a tremendous crash near their staterooms. Anna Hogeboom, 51, got up and called out to her older sister, Kornelia Andrews, and her niece, 21-year-old Gretchen Longley, whose rooms were close by. “Go see what that was,” she told them, still half-asleep.

It was 11:45 p.m. Sunday, April 14, 1912 and the ship the three Hudson women were on had just had its hull breached and was beginning to sink, but at this point the women had no idea what had just occurred.

 When Kornelia, 63, entered the corridor and found it full of ice crystals that had come through the portholes, she correctly surmised that they must have collided with an iceberg. Gretchen went and found a steward and was told there was nothing to worry about.

“They told us at once that there was no danger, and as we had not a moment’s suspicion that such a magnificent ship could ever sink, we foolishly all went back to bed without a fear,” Kornelia later wrote to a friend. But a little more than 15 minutes later the women heard a commotion in the corridor and again asked what was going on and were told that as a precautionary measure they should put on life preservers.


The women only had about five minutes to get dressed. Gretchen threw on a pair of stockings and some slippers, along with a shirtwaist, skirt and a fur coat, but no underclothing. Her aunts only had time to thrown their furs over their nightdresses. Kornelia later complained that she didn’t even have time to grab a hat, but did gather a few hair pins before they left their rooms and rushed up the stairs to the Titanic’s deck.

What greeted them there was very different than the scene when they boarded the Titanic at Southampton only four days earlier after a nearly five-month-long European tour.

On the morning of April 10, the port was a hive of activity as the White Star Line made final preparations for the Titanic’s maiden voyage: cranes loaded luggage. The ship’s employees, from officers to waiters, who hadn’t been on the overnight shift made their way aboard and prepared for departure.

The ladies from Hudson were among the 325 first class passengers who made their way onto the ship via a separate gangway and were able to get their first close-up look at the ship. They were met by polished brass and hand-carved woodwork wherever they looked.

“The vision of the great liner as she moved away from Southampton quay forms an imperishable memory. She looked so colossal and so queenly,” wrote one reporter who was dockside. Aboard ship, Lawrence Beesley, a science teacher from a London college who survived the sinking and later wrote a book about it, recalled watching the crowd as they kept pace with the ship while it moved along the waterfront.

There was a near-collision with the steamer New York as the Titanic was leaving port, a fateful portent many later felt. The suction created by the larger ship snapped the New York’s rigging, sending it dangerously close to the Titanic, but several tugs were able to prevent the disaster. On the early morning of April 15, there was nothing to prevent the disaster unfolding before the eyes of Kornelia, Anna and Gretchen as they stood on the ship’s deck, chaos swirling around them.

For four days, as the Titanic made its way across the English Channel to Cherbourg, France then to Queenstown, Ireland and finally to the open North Atlantic, the women had enjoyed nice weather, smooth seas and the finest luxuries available, but now as they waited for the fourth and final lifeboat, they would soon experience deprivation, pain and fear that would haunt them to their ends.

When the women arrived topside no one seemed to be panicked, according to Kornelia, but there was a lack of discipline as the ship’s officers hurried to get women and children on to the boats. Jack Williams, one of the Titanic’s crewmembers who survived, alleged it was a much more chaotic scene, with six men being shot while trying to rush aboard the lifeboats. Gretchen also later recalled that the ship’s captain, Edward J. Smith, shot himself in the mouth while on deck, after initially being stopped from committing suicide by his officers while in the library. It appears Gretchen didn’t witness the captain’s end, but rather heard about it from others after the fact.

“Sinking by the head, and women are being rushed into the lifeboats,” was the final message sent by wireless before it sputtered out, according to an account in the Columbia Republican.

The three Hudson, N.Y. women waited for the fourth lifeboat since there was no room in the others for them to all fit and they refused to be separated. The boat was lowered the 75 feet to the water. Above them stood a line of men waving goodbye to their wives and family, surely knowing they would soon be dead.

“Oh, it would have broken your heart to have seen them standing there so bravely and waving farewell to their wives and daughters. It would have made you so proud of your countrymen,” Kornelia later wrote to relatives in Hudson. “There was Mr. Thayer, president of the Pennsylvania railroad. Mr. John Jacob Astor, having to wave farewell to his beautiful wife, Major Butt and hundreds of others, who probably knew there was no hope for them. We have never seen them since.”

Three men had been allowed into their boat in the belief that they would do the rowing, but when the small craft hit the dark, icy water only one of the men, a sailor, turned out to be an able rower. Gretchen and three other women took to the oars.

Kornelia was disgusted with the two stowaways on board who shirked their manly duty. She was also angry with the White Star Line, which she felt committed “a perfect crime” by not providing a large percentage of the ship’s passengers with a means of escape, since there were only 22 boats on the ship when “sixty  (boats) could not have taken in more than two-thirds” of those on board.

Gretchen, her fingers already numb, pulled at the oar, helping to get the little craft as far from the dying behemoth as possible before it went under and dragged them down with her. A vessel that large would create an incredible amount of suction that could easily capsize or drag their lifeboat into the depths.

Kornelia stared out at the water and saw horror whereever she looked. She witnessed two other lifeboats collapse, scattering women into the water. Another boat was partially submerged, the passengers shivering in the ice-cold water that was above their knees.

She heard shouts of protest from women in one boat after a sailor lit a cigarette and carelessly tossed the match among them.

“Ah, we're all going to the devil, anyway,” the sailor growled, “and we might as well be cremated now as then.”

And through it all there was the constant sobbing of those who knew their husbands, sons, fathers were not likely to survive the sinking.

At about 2 a.m., they heard the Titanic’s death knell, a deafening explosion, caused, the women believed, by the ship’s boilers blowing up, followed by the shrieking of those left behind. They saw people jumping from the ship just before her lights winked out.  The Titanic broke in two and both halves were soon gone from sight.

The night was cold. Massive icebergs floated nearby. The only light now came from the firmament above. Miles of black water surrounded them.

Dawn broke and the ocean, which had been calm through the night, began to swell and pitch. Large waves tossed the little boat and the women feared it would be capsized. They had been in the boat for nearly eight hours and the sailor, Gretchen and the other women who helped row were completely exhausted. All began to give up hope. Suddenly on the horizon they saw a ship slowly coming toward them. It was the Carpathia, the Cunard Line steamer that had picked up the Titanic’s distress call.

The Carpathia had hurried to the coordinates given by the Titanic’s wireless operator just before the ship went down, but found no sign of the Titanic or her passengers. The captain ordered the ship’s engines shut off and the Carpathia floated quietly.

Kornelia recounted seeing the rescue ship pick up survivors from the water, 17 in all.

Two of them died “almost immediately” and a third “went mad,” according to Kornelia. A little dead baby floated past their boat as they waited for their turn to board.

The boat containing the Hudson women was the last to be rescued. Five hours after Carpathia’s arrival the little boat came alongside the steamer. Ropes were thrown down and tied around the women’s waists to keep them from falling into the water as they climbed the wet rope ladder, a task made more difficult by their frozen feet and hands.

Aboard ship they were provided with hot coffee, tea and soup. They were covered in warm blankets and taken to a first aid station in one of the ship’s dining rooms.

“The kindness of the Carpathia, captain, officers and passengers to all the survivors was wonderful and was appreciated by all,” recalled Kornelia. Passengers offered the three women their rooms, but they declined, feeling that there were others in more desperate straits. They slept in the ship’s library with about two dozen other survivors. While they were all glad to be alive, a pall of sadness filled the ship as small children cried out for parents who had died and adults wept for their lost loved ones.

The three women also despaired about having lost all their personal belongings. They had nothing but what they threw on in the last few minutes before leaving the sinking ship. Kornelia wrote about the joy she received when a woman gave her a handkerchief and another some hairpins. A man traveling back from Italy provided her with a toothbrush. Kornelia, who wasn’t able to retrieve her glasses, had a hard time getting around as well as writing. Gretchen was lucky enough to run into a school friend who gave her clothes and a hat. After two days of sleeping on the floor of the library they were given a stateroom. The next evening, April 18, they arrived in New York.

“The steamer Carpathia, laden with sorrow for a world, crept to her pier on the North River at 8:45 (p.m.) and discharged to the hysterical embraces of hundreds of half-crazed friends and relatives 710 survivors of the $10,000,000 Titanic,”  the Columbia Republican of April 19 reported.

Kornelia, Anna and Gretchen went to stay with a third Andrews sister, Roberta Flack, and her husband Arthur, in East Orange, N.J. It wasn’t long before the press came calling. The women were quoted by far flung newspapers, from the New York Times to the Mexico, Missouri Message, and provided one of the more comprehensive accounts of the disaster.

Following their Titanic experience the women returned to Hudson and life resumed. Kornelia sued the White Star Line for the loss of her possessions. She died of pneumonia at her home in Hudson, on Dec. 4, 1913, less than two years after the Titanic’s sinking. She was 65. Kornelia would be remembered for her charitable works in Columbia County. She was on the board of the Hudson City Hospital and a member of many other local organizations, including the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Anna left Hudson and resettled in East Orange near her sister Roberta. She also kept a home in Hillsdale where she died in 1947. Both she and her sister Kornelia are buried in Hudson.

Their niece Gretchen married Dr. Raymond S. Leopold in 1913, moved to Philadelphia, Pa., where her husband became the executive vice president of Hahnemann Medical College and Hospital. They had three children.

Gretchen later ran an antiques store and traveled extensively, often by ship. She died in her sleep aboard the S.S. Constitution in the Mediterranean on Aug. 12, 1965.

Gretchen apparently didn’t often speak about her experience on the Titanic, according to a 1998 interview with one of her grandchildren, but it must have haunted all three women.

Kornelia, for one, said as much.

“All my life I will hear those shrieks,” she said of the sound of the dying as the Titanic sank into the cold, black water taking 1,514 passengers and crew with her.

The Greenport Christmas murder

Willis Van Wormer calmly read through the letter just handed to him by Warden George Deyo. The message sent by attorney J. Ryder Cady — who had represented Willis and his two brothers, Burton and Frederick, at trial — reported that all attempts at a stay of execution had failed. It would be the chair for the Van Wormer boys.

Two years earlier, on the night of Christmas eve 1901, it was a cool, but not exceptionally cold night. There was still snow on the ground from a recent storm.

Peter Hallenbeck sat reading while his wife, Margaret, sewed nearby in their farm house in Greenport, N.Y., a small town two hours north of Manhattan. Peter’s mother Almina was also home that night while Peter and Margaret’s son and his family attended church down the road.

Margaret, looking up from her handiwork, saw a wagon with two men walking behind pass by the window heading towards the church.

“They must be chicken thieves,” said Peter, watching them pass out of view. A few moments later there was a knock at the door and Peter got up to see who was there.

That’s when the shooting started.

Four men, two wearing devil masks, the others false whiskers, their coats turned inside out, rushed into the room. The sharp report of pistols rang out mixed with the screams of the two women. Margaret rushed to her husband’s side, but Peter yelled at his wife and mother to run to the attic. As Margaret fled a shot was fired over her head.

As the men continued to fire, Peter stumbled toward the stairs where his shotgun hung.

“For God’s sake get out of here. He is after his shotgun,” yelled one of the men, as they turned to flee.

Neighbors who heard the commotion ran over and soon the alarm was given that Peter Hallenbeck had been murdered.

By the next evening, Christmas Day, four men — the Van Wormer brothers and their cousin Harvey Bruce — had been rounded up by Sheriff Harry J. Best and his deputies and thrown in the Hudson jail, charged with murder.

Dec. 29 saw the start of an inquest in the case by County Coroner Edward Lisk and by this time the story had become a national sensation, with extensive coverage by the New York Times and the Associated Press, along with local media, including the Hudson Republican newspaper.

Judge D. Cady Herrick came down from Albany to preside over the grand jury proceedings on Jan.18, 1902.

Cady, the former judge from Hudson, was named as counsel to Willis and Burton Van Wormer, and to act as general counsel in the case. Alonzo H. Farrar was assigned as counsel for Fred Van Wormer and George M. Daly was appointed as counsel for Harvey Bruce.

According to the Hudson Republican, at the reading of the grand jury indictment for first-degree murder, the accused “appeared indifferent.”

They were arraigned and pleaded not guilty.

District Attorney Alfred B. Chace asked New York state Gov. Benjamin B. Odell Jr., to call an Extraordinary Session of the Supreme Court to try the case. The governor agreed.

It wasn’t long before Bruce turned state’s evidence, admitting to the killing and laying the blame with his cousins.

According to Bruce, who was 21 at the time, his cousins Fred, 26, Burton, 23, and 20-year-old Willis had made plans for that night, buying masks, renting a horse, and in Burton’s case borrowing a gun from a friend. He went on to say that on the way to Hallenbeck’s they had stopped by the Greenport Church to make sure that their cousin Charles wouldn’t be home when they went to the farmhouse.

Once there Bruce told of how the three brothers immediately began shooting when their uncle opened the door. Bruce said he had only shot into the air.

Afterwards when he asked his cousins why they had shot Hallenbeck they told him to “shut up.”

This, paired with the circumstantial evidence — shoes that matched the footprints in the snow around the house, testimony that masks had been bought prior to the murder by the Van Wormers in Kinderhook, wagon wheel tracks matching the get away vehicle and the unpersuasive testimony of the Van Wormer boys themselves — led to a guilty verdict in the case.

The testimony of the Van Wormer boys rang hollow with the jury.

Burton Van Wormer testified that they had gone there that night “to have a little fun” and never intended to hurt their uncle.

According to him, when Peter Hallenbeck opened the door he hit Burton in the face several times, a struggle ensued and the gun accidentally discharged.

The sheriff later testified that there were no bruises on Burton Van Wormer’s face. There were also 11 bullets recovered from the victim’s body.

The efforts taken by the defendants to hide their tracks didn’t help their case either. They allegedly drove to Valatie so they could be seen, cleaned their guns and later burned the masks once they got home to Kinderhook.

According to several newspapers, there had been bad blood between the two families for some time before the incident.

While Peter Hallenbeck had prospered, his brother-in-law, John Van Wormer, barely scraped by as a river boatman. He was able to finally buy a small cottage not far from Hallenbeck, who held the mortgage.

After John Van Wormer’s death, Hallenbeck allegedly foreclosed on the property. The remaining Van Wormers, including the three boys, were put out and moved to Kinderhook.

Their attorneys tried their best to persuade the jury it was an accidental shooting.

“They went to their uncle’s house for fun,” Farrar, special counsel for Frederick Van Wormer, told the jury. “They were probably foolish, but they never intended to injure his person.”

He said that “the tables were unexpectedly turned on them” when Hallenbeck pummeled Burton and “a desperate struggle began.” He called the resulting death “a tragedy that no one had anticipated.”

During his summation the defendants openly wept, the first time they had shown any emotion, reported a Syracuse newspaper.

Cady followed on Farrar’s heels, echoing his sentiment saying that in his 30-year career at the bar he had never seen such a tragic, heart-wrenching, soul-wracking case.

He argued that there couldn’t have been any premeditation in the case based on his clients’ actions.

Cady pointed out that they had rented a horse, traveled on public roads and had brought their cousin as a witness.

The jury was unmoved finding them all guilty of first-degree murder.

Judge Alden Chester, who presided over the trial, passed sentence a few minutes later.

“It is the saddest act of my judicial career to be compelled to sentence three young men, three brothers, under a verdict of murder in the first degree,” he said from the bench, sentencing them to death by electrocution.

On Oct. 1, 1903 the brothers went to the electric chair at the Clinton State Prison in Dannemora. Willis was first, followed by Frederick and Burton. Their bodies were taken back to Kinderhook and interred in the Kinderhook Cemetery.

Strangely, the memory of the assassination of U.S. President William McKinley in 1901 seemed to float through the case. The judge who presided over the grand jury proceedings went to Albany Law School with McKinley; Bruce alleged that Burton Van Wormer had bragged that he had “gotten a Czolgosz shot. I shot (Hallenbeck) in the stomach,” referring to McKinley’s assassin Leon Frank Czolgosz who shot McKinley in the stomach during the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo; and the doctor who performed the autopsy on the mens’ remains after they were executed had also performed the autopsy on McKinley’s killer.

Bruce was later found guilty of manslaughter and received an 18-year sentence in prison.