The Austerlitz Cannibal

Oscar F. Beckwith, alleged cannibal, was executed for the gruesome murder of Simon Vandercook. He spent his last days in the Columbia County, N.Y. Jail. The sheriff of Columbia County, Henry Hanor, tracked Beckwith down three years after his escape

Oscar Beckwith sat in the Columbia County Jail in Hudson, N.Y. eating his last supper. He ate sparsely of the roast beef, ham and potatoes on his plate and sipped at his tea.

In 16 hours the 78-year-old would be swinging at the end of a rope for the murder of Simon Vandercook. The gruesome details of the killing and charges of cannibalism by some made the case a sensation as did Beckwith’s escape from the law, eventual capture in Canada and evasion of the death penalty for three years.

It seems that the New York City papers were responsible for leveling the accusations of Beckwith consuming human flesh, with the New York Times describing him in an 1887 article as a “murderer and cannibal,” but giving no further background of the case.

There were no reports in the local papers that leveled those charges at Beckwith and no testimony in the initial November 1885 trial indicating cannibalism.

What was found in the small cabin in Austerlitz, N.Y. on Jan. 11, 1882 were the partially burned body parts of Vandercook, along with other pieces of flesh, described as “meat” that had been cut into “stove-length” pieces by one witness, stacked up in the back room of the shanty, along with a hanging basket containing Vandercook’s innards. Two “greasy” axes, one with hair on it, were also found, as was the victim’s clothing.

What wasn’t found was Beckwith. He had fled into Massachusetts, eventually finding his way to Canada, where he was living under the assumed name of Charles White. He was apparently living an exceedingly sparse existence, based on a letter he tried to send to his daughter in which he asks her to send $5 for a pair of false teeth and laments his impoverished state.

The sheriff of Columbia County, Henry Hanor, tracked Beckwith down three years after his escape, apprehending him “a few hundred miles from civilization,” according to a Hudson reporter, in the Parry Sound district, east of Georgian Bay, in the Province of Toronto, Canada,

A March 18, 1885 article in the Amsterdam Daily Democrat described Beckwith’s return to Hudson by train, saying that he was heavily guarded and had a chain around his leg, “which makes him very despondent.” But not so despondent that he didn’t speak with journalists, claiming self-defense for the killing and telling them that Vandercook had tried to poison him before attacking him with a wooden stick. Beckwith would reiterate this story when he took the stand at his first trial in November 1885.

According to him, he met Vandercook in 1878 and told him about a silver and gold mine he had been working on land owned by a man named Woodruff. Beckwith believed the man would sell the land for $500 and tried to convince Vandercook to go in with him, offering him a two-thirds interest in the mine for $1,000. Instead, alleged Beckwith, Vandercook swindled him, incorporating a mining company in Kingston and cutting him out of the deal. Beckwith said he was too poor to pursue a lawsuit.

It was at that time that Beckwith built the cabin on the side of the mountain where the mine was located and where, on Jan. 10, 1882, the fateful meeting with Vandercook took place.

Beckwith testified that Vandercook forced his way into his cabin and a fight ensued, apparently helped along when he called Vandercook a “dirty whoremaster.”

“He hit me in the forehead,” recalled Beckwith, “made my nose bleed and knocked me down.”

They struggled, he testified, Vandercook grabbing a piece of wood and threatening to kill him before beginning to choke Beckwith. It was then that Beckwith grabbed a butcher knife and stabbed Vandercook.

Beckwith later testified that he slit Vandercook’s throat from ear to ear, pulled out his tongue and put an ax through his head. The jury found him guilty of first-degree murder and he was sentenced to die.

Beckwith’s court appointed attorney, L. F. Longley, described as “indefatigable” by the Hudson Daily Evening Register, took the case through two trials and before the state Supreme Court and Appeals Court twice each. Beckwith was sentenced to death five times, but couldn’t escape the noose on the sixth go round. After Gov. David Hill denied him executive clemency it was only a matter of time. And now that time was upon him.

It was March 1, 1888 and Beckwith was waiting for Sheriff Felts, who had since replaced Hanor, to come read him his death sentence. The night before he had gone to bed just after 9 p.m. and slept soundly, snoring “unpardonably,” according to one local reporter. Another reported that “perfect quiet presided about the jail and not a whisper was heard for several hours in any part of the building, except that of the reporters at work in adjoining rooms.”

Beckwith woke briefly at 4 a.m., then returned to bed until “the morning light shone through the grated window of his window on the south side of his cell” looking, to the journalist, as if he was “feeling refreshed from an excellent rest that no man under the sentence of death, save (Beckwith), could have passed through.” When asked, Beckwith replied that he slept well because he was “used to trouble.”

After waking he dictated a letter to his daughter who was then at the Homeopathic Hospital in Albany, telling her that he had been sentenced to death by a “parcel of Free Mason’s skulls,” but not to worry, since he had read in the Bible that “blood shall be up to the bridle rings” and that he believed Europe would soon be at war. Beckwith talked a lot about the Masons on his final day on Earth, telling one deputy that his death “would be a death blow to Free Masonry and all secret societies.”

Around 9:30 a.m. Rev. Smith of St. Mary’s Parish came and performed the ordinance of Baptism. At 10 a.m. the death sentence was read and Beckwith responded by again proclaiming his innocence. His hands were tied, the noose slipped around his neck and the black hood placed on his head, but not pulled down. The procession left the jail and walked the short distance to the 90 by 90 foot temporary building just outside, a “rude structure” in the words of a Hudson Daily Evening Register reporter, where the hanging was to take place. The scaffold, “an unassuming piece of mechanism…as uninviting as it was unassuming,” wrote the Register’s reporter, had been put up by Joseph Atkinson, the executioner, who had come from Brooklyn to perform the deed. It was 14 feet high, with a crossbar 16 feet in length and was “suitable for hanging three people at the same time.” When the execution took place a hidden weight, weighing 380 pounds, would drop, sending the condemned up in the air, as opposed to other devices in which the floor would drop, sending the person hurtling downwards.

The rope was of Italian hemp and the noose was the same one, pointed out the reporter, used to hang Danny Driscoll. Driscoll was the co-leader of the New York City gang the Whyos who was hanged Jan. 23, 1888 for killing Breezy Garrity, a prostitute, during a gunfight between Driscoll and Five Points Gang member Johnny McCarthy.

On the morning of the hanging a massive crowd had gathered outside the jail in Hudson, held back by local militia. Every nearby tree and telegraph pole was covered in children hoping to get a glimpse of the famed murderer. Inside the structure a number of local dignitaries and press gathered to watch Beckwith hang.

The condemned wore a black suit and was clean shaven. His step did not waiver. On the scaffold he kissed a proffered crucifix and mumbled “Jesus have mercy on me, have mercy on me.” A minute later, reported the Register, an executioner “sent the soul of Oscar Beckwith to its maker and his body bouncing into the air.”

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to keep up this and my other blogs, but here's a link to the series of old time farm crime I've been writing for Modern Farmer. Enjoy!

More of my old time crime from Modern Farmer. This one on the horrific, and real crime, of ostrich feather theft.

Here's a few links to some great old-time mug shots from the Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums in England from the 1930s. These are from the 20s. And these are of 19th century child prisoners, as well as a cat murdering dog.

A link to more old time farm crime

The latest in my series on old-time farm crime: Trench Warfare.

I've begun writing a bimonthly series for Modern Farmer magazine called Old-Time Farm Crime. Here's the first piece, a look at an 18th century horse thief and highwayman named Dick Turpin and some contemporary examples of equine thievery.

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.