I stumbled over this disturbing 1928 murder/mystery in my search for information on another. I’m pretty sure this hasn’t been discussed here before, apologies if it has (sorry also for the sheer length of this post – but there’s just so much information. I’ve done my best to summarise things).
The strange and horrible death of Elfrieda “Fritzie” Knaak in 1928 was deemed ‘solved’ as a suicide by the coroner, but there were a number of officials who suspected murder – with very good reason – and kept the case unofficially ‘open’.
I'm not normally the kind to jump on the “occult murder” thing, but I am in this case quite convinced that ‘Fritzie’ the victim of a new age cult, involving several Lake Bluff locals.
Anyhow:
On the morning of October 30, an employee of the Lake Bluff City Hall went down to light the Hall’s furnace. To his horror, he discovered a nude woman propped up against the cold furnace, with horrific bone-deep burns to her feet, hands and face.
The woman, later identified as Elfrieda Knaak, an attractive 29-year old book saleswoman and Sunday School teacher, was rushed to hospital. Police assumed she’d been attacked by a madman and her limbs and head forced into the furnace’s small opening. Metal clasps from her dress, burned remains of garments and bits of Elfrieda’s skin and hair were found when police examined the interior of the fire-box.
It was noted that the door leading to the furnace room had been locked on Louis’ arrival. The door to the City Hall itself had also been locked when Police Chief Barney Rosenhagen arrived at 7.00 am. Rosenhagen himself had been the one to lock up, coming back to check on things and re-lock the doors at around 9.30 pm. It was a mystery, then, as to how Elfrieda and her attacker had gotten in, and how her assailant had locked the doors behind him.
More puzzling was the fact that Elfrieda would confess to have done this damage to herself, claiming “It was all my fault,” and “I did it myself, there’s no-one to blame,” insisting that she’d burned herself for the sake of ‘faith” as well as “purity and love’.
When asked who locked the doors, she replied, “A mysterious hand”.
The police (along with attending doctors and State’s Attorney V. A. Smith) openly doubted her story, due to the seeming impossibility of the act – the furnace door was too high off the ground and too small for her to have burned her own feet and legs to the bone, let alone the question of how she’d stood on one ruined foot to put the other in.
They deduced that even if it was a willing act, she must have had help. So even when the coroner declared her death a suicide, some police stubbornly kept investigating.
Further noted in evidence was a bloody handprint on the door, and footprints in blood and ash that tracked up the stairs of the furnace room and back. Elfrieda’s shoes, wrist watch and purse were found ten feet from the furnace. Her purse contained a letter from a “B. Lock”, a woman with whom Elfrieda had recently developed a sudden and intense friendship based in 'religious discussion'. With her belongings was also a book titled “Christ In You”. This book may offer some important clues as to what really happened to Elfrieda, but more on that later.
Eyebrows were raised over Police Chief Rosenhagen's decision to have the janitor sift the ashes in the furnace and throw them away, before calling the Sheriff.
The next addition to the case’s extreme oddness was the discovery that the “love” Elfrieda had sacrificed herself for was a Lake Bluff police officer who was, she said, the reason she was in Lake Bluff that night.
The company Elfrieda worked for published spiritual and religious tracts, among other things. She had spent the day in Chicago giving a lecture to some fellow publishing company employees. It was from there she called her sister to report that she’d bought some new sheet music while she was out, and would be home about 7.30 that evening.
She left work and arrived at the Highland Park depot close to 6.00pm, where she learned the bus timetable had been changed so there’d be a wait of several hours for the bus home to Deerfield. She was observed to make two phone calls - one went unanswered, the other was spoken in whispers.
Elfrieda then checked her briefcase in at the station and bought a round trip ticket to Lake Bluff, catching the 6.01. The station master at Lake Bluff saw her arrive there (one report says she arrived at 9.40, but that seems to be off). This would be the last sighting of her until she was found in the furnace room the next day at 7.30 am.
Charles W. Hitchcock was a handsome former movie actor working as a night policeman. During the day he taught classes in 'elocution and salesmanship', in a Waukegan studio kept for that purpose. Elfrieda had been one of his students. It was Hitchcock, she said in hospital, who she’d come to Lake Bluff to see that night.
Hitchcock would strenuously deny any close relationship with Elfrieda, though she described their relationship as ‘spiritual’ in nature. They had, as “Fritzie” – a pet name her family gave her, and one that Hitchcock called her on her deathbed – would put it, “a pure love”. An “astral love”.
Police rushed over to question Hitchcock about Elfrieda. He was at home, with his wife and kids, because he’d broken his leg some length of time before and was apparently still unable to walk on it past a brief and painful hobble.
Which begs the question of who, exactly, Elfrieda was supposed to have been meeting up with in Lake Bluff that night. Hitchcock? At his home -- with the wife and four kids? Awkward.
So. Back to this book:
It’s not mentioned in any report I could find, but a few hours hard digging revealed the anonymously authored “Christ In You” to be a ‘channeled’ religious text, purportedly dictation from a group of beings who’d ascended physical reality. This book is one of the main instructional texts recommended to followers of the “New Thought” movement, one of many part-religious, part-occult, motivational pseudo-science spin off groups that have sprung from the original Eastern-inspired occult/philosophy organisation ‘The Theosophical Society” (which also inspired Aleister Crowley, at the darker end of its scale) and would be fundamental to the development of the modern “New Age”and “Self Help” industries, which market recipes for happiness and success – often at a very steep price.
Interesting, I think, keeping in mind the self-improvement stuff Hitchcock was peddling.
Have I mentioned that Elfrieda was also a wealthy drug company heiress? Well. She was.
Anyhow, this ‘channeled text’ was found to have a single page marked, on which a few chillingly apt words had been singled out:
“I tell you, it is impossible to know true joy – the heights of joy – until you have known corresponding depths of pain. This is the process known as ‘the refiner’s fire’.”
The last three words are underlined by hand. But whose hand?
It was assumed that Elfrieda had been studying the book and marked the words herself. But Sheriff Lawrence Doolittle’s convictions that another person had been present in the furnace room proved right. So maybe the book actually belonged to somebody else - perhaps Hitchcock, or the woman friend who wrote the letter found in Elfrieda’s purse.
I can’t find the full text of this letter from "B. Lock" anywhere (which is driving me nuts), and only a partial quote was given reporters. It said Elfrieda was -- “forgiven, but would be sorry.”
Before she passed away, police made Hitchcock hobble over on his broken leg to sit at her bedside and gently urge her to tell the truth. Elfrieda held fast to her story for a time but eventually recanted her previous claims to being alone, stating that somebody else had been present, and that her horrible injuries were the fault of more than one person.
Among several scenarios she described to various people, the heavily-drugged and dying Elfrieda told her brother Alvin that she’d made a pact with another girl, who’d not gone through with it after Elfrieda was burned, and who then ran off, leaving her in the furnace room alone. But her story changed, and changed again, until in her final moments she admitted she was, after all, attacked.
“Frank threw me down,” she said, repeatedly (though it’s also reported as ‘Frank turned me down’
, and “They did this”.
Sheriff Doolittle sought out the only Frank known to her locally – violin teacher Frank P. Mandy, who shared the Waukegan studio with Hitchcock – but Doolittle could find nothing to connect him to the crime.
(AUSNOTE: I’d LOVE some more info on Mr. Frank P. Mandy, if anyone can find some!)
Elfrieda is said to have also named a woman accomplice, but spoke the name too faintly for it to be heard. She died, soon after, and was officially declared a suicide.
So. Now it gets really weird:
A month after Elfrieda died of her burns, a man in Texas contacted police by letter, and confessed to having ‘helped’ her burn herself.
“James Kelley,” AKA “Ezra McVeagh”, described as an Army deserter from Selfridge Fields, Mt. Clemens, MI, claimed he watched Elfrieda tear her clothes off, before hitting her over the head with a ‘poker’ and helping her place her feet, hands and head into the furnace – on her own request. He also admitted to attacking another (unnamed) woman in Lake Forest whom he thought he’d killed, but he'd found out she survived. The man was quickly thrown into the nearest mental institution.
In his letter, which was said to be intelligently written, Kelley/McVeagh had described himself as a 'student of occult mysticism', and signed it with the Crowley-esque, Egyptian-style pseudonym: "A-Os-Wun-Aken".
And because there’s apparently just not enough weird here:
The autopsy suggested Elfrieda had not just been burned in the furnace, but also severely electrocuted. There were high voltage transformers not far from the Lake Bluff City Hall. She had also suffered a blow to the head, leaving injuries akin to those ‘typically’ caused by a ‘sandbag’.
(AUSNOTE: I suspect ‘sandbags’ – which sound nothing like ‘pokers’ - might have been employed by both robbers and night policemen in 1928… I intend to check it out!).
So there’s the case, give or take another ton of info I can’t find yet. The connection between Elfrieda and the New Thought movement seems pretty strong – and I suspect Hitchcock was involved with it, too. The movement attracted some wealthy, famous and powerful people back in the early 20th C, and still exists today as “New Thought” and “Divine Thought”, among other appellations.
Astral projection is a common belief among these Theosophy offshoots, as is the concept of ‘spiritual purification’ so people might ascend to a higher realm of existence while still alive. From experience, I surmise that such a movement would very likely have attracted just as many poseurs and creeps trying to get in the pants and purses of vulnerable women as they do today. I believe Hitchcock was one of them.
But no firm conclusions, yet. Still digging!
Some source articles:
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=94dSAAAAIBAJ&sjid=gDsDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6803,4981966
http://www.newspaperarchive.com/SiteMap/FreePdfPreview.aspx?img=105951839
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=4W8bAAAAIBAJ&sjid=80oEAAAAIBAJ&dq=knaak letter&pg=3386,1362591
http://news.google.com/newspapers?i...&pg=6023,5505797&dq=elfrieda+knaak+1928&hl=en
The strange and horrible death of Elfrieda “Fritzie” Knaak in 1928 was deemed ‘solved’ as a suicide by the coroner, but there were a number of officials who suspected murder – with very good reason – and kept the case unofficially ‘open’.
I'm not normally the kind to jump on the “occult murder” thing, but I am in this case quite convinced that ‘Fritzie’ the victim of a new age cult, involving several Lake Bluff locals.
Anyhow:
On the morning of October 30, an employee of the Lake Bluff City Hall went down to light the Hall’s furnace. To his horror, he discovered a nude woman propped up against the cold furnace, with horrific bone-deep burns to her feet, hands and face.
The woman, later identified as Elfrieda Knaak, an attractive 29-year old book saleswoman and Sunday School teacher, was rushed to hospital. Police assumed she’d been attacked by a madman and her limbs and head forced into the furnace’s small opening. Metal clasps from her dress, burned remains of garments and bits of Elfrieda’s skin and hair were found when police examined the interior of the fire-box.
It was noted that the door leading to the furnace room had been locked on Louis’ arrival. The door to the City Hall itself had also been locked when Police Chief Barney Rosenhagen arrived at 7.00 am. Rosenhagen himself had been the one to lock up, coming back to check on things and re-lock the doors at around 9.30 pm. It was a mystery, then, as to how Elfrieda and her attacker had gotten in, and how her assailant had locked the doors behind him.
More puzzling was the fact that Elfrieda would confess to have done this damage to herself, claiming “It was all my fault,” and “I did it myself, there’s no-one to blame,” insisting that she’d burned herself for the sake of ‘faith” as well as “purity and love’.
When asked who locked the doors, she replied, “A mysterious hand”.
The police (along with attending doctors and State’s Attorney V. A. Smith) openly doubted her story, due to the seeming impossibility of the act – the furnace door was too high off the ground and too small for her to have burned her own feet and legs to the bone, let alone the question of how she’d stood on one ruined foot to put the other in.
They deduced that even if it was a willing act, she must have had help. So even when the coroner declared her death a suicide, some police stubbornly kept investigating.
Further noted in evidence was a bloody handprint on the door, and footprints in blood and ash that tracked up the stairs of the furnace room and back. Elfrieda’s shoes, wrist watch and purse were found ten feet from the furnace. Her purse contained a letter from a “B. Lock”, a woman with whom Elfrieda had recently developed a sudden and intense friendship based in 'religious discussion'. With her belongings was also a book titled “Christ In You”. This book may offer some important clues as to what really happened to Elfrieda, but more on that later.
Eyebrows were raised over Police Chief Rosenhagen's decision to have the janitor sift the ashes in the furnace and throw them away, before calling the Sheriff.
The next addition to the case’s extreme oddness was the discovery that the “love” Elfrieda had sacrificed herself for was a Lake Bluff police officer who was, she said, the reason she was in Lake Bluff that night.
The company Elfrieda worked for published spiritual and religious tracts, among other things. She had spent the day in Chicago giving a lecture to some fellow publishing company employees. It was from there she called her sister to report that she’d bought some new sheet music while she was out, and would be home about 7.30 that evening.
She left work and arrived at the Highland Park depot close to 6.00pm, where she learned the bus timetable had been changed so there’d be a wait of several hours for the bus home to Deerfield. She was observed to make two phone calls - one went unanswered, the other was spoken in whispers.
Elfrieda then checked her briefcase in at the station and bought a round trip ticket to Lake Bluff, catching the 6.01. The station master at Lake Bluff saw her arrive there (one report says she arrived at 9.40, but that seems to be off). This would be the last sighting of her until she was found in the furnace room the next day at 7.30 am.
Charles W. Hitchcock was a handsome former movie actor working as a night policeman. During the day he taught classes in 'elocution and salesmanship', in a Waukegan studio kept for that purpose. Elfrieda had been one of his students. It was Hitchcock, she said in hospital, who she’d come to Lake Bluff to see that night.
Hitchcock would strenuously deny any close relationship with Elfrieda, though she described their relationship as ‘spiritual’ in nature. They had, as “Fritzie” – a pet name her family gave her, and one that Hitchcock called her on her deathbed – would put it, “a pure love”. An “astral love”.
Police rushed over to question Hitchcock about Elfrieda. He was at home, with his wife and kids, because he’d broken his leg some length of time before and was apparently still unable to walk on it past a brief and painful hobble.
Which begs the question of who, exactly, Elfrieda was supposed to have been meeting up with in Lake Bluff that night. Hitchcock? At his home -- with the wife and four kids? Awkward.
So. Back to this book:
It’s not mentioned in any report I could find, but a few hours hard digging revealed the anonymously authored “Christ In You” to be a ‘channeled’ religious text, purportedly dictation from a group of beings who’d ascended physical reality. This book is one of the main instructional texts recommended to followers of the “New Thought” movement, one of many part-religious, part-occult, motivational pseudo-science spin off groups that have sprung from the original Eastern-inspired occult/philosophy organisation ‘The Theosophical Society” (which also inspired Aleister Crowley, at the darker end of its scale) and would be fundamental to the development of the modern “New Age”and “Self Help” industries, which market recipes for happiness and success – often at a very steep price.
Interesting, I think, keeping in mind the self-improvement stuff Hitchcock was peddling.
Have I mentioned that Elfrieda was also a wealthy drug company heiress? Well. She was.
Anyhow, this ‘channeled text’ was found to have a single page marked, on which a few chillingly apt words had been singled out:
“I tell you, it is impossible to know true joy – the heights of joy – until you have known corresponding depths of pain. This is the process known as ‘the refiner’s fire’.”
The last three words are underlined by hand. But whose hand?
It was assumed that Elfrieda had been studying the book and marked the words herself. But Sheriff Lawrence Doolittle’s convictions that another person had been present in the furnace room proved right. So maybe the book actually belonged to somebody else - perhaps Hitchcock, or the woman friend who wrote the letter found in Elfrieda’s purse.
I can’t find the full text of this letter from "B. Lock" anywhere (which is driving me nuts), and only a partial quote was given reporters. It said Elfrieda was -- “forgiven, but would be sorry.”
Before she passed away, police made Hitchcock hobble over on his broken leg to sit at her bedside and gently urge her to tell the truth. Elfrieda held fast to her story for a time but eventually recanted her previous claims to being alone, stating that somebody else had been present, and that her horrible injuries were the fault of more than one person.
Among several scenarios she described to various people, the heavily-drugged and dying Elfrieda told her brother Alvin that she’d made a pact with another girl, who’d not gone through with it after Elfrieda was burned, and who then ran off, leaving her in the furnace room alone. But her story changed, and changed again, until in her final moments she admitted she was, after all, attacked.
“Frank threw me down,” she said, repeatedly (though it’s also reported as ‘Frank turned me down’
, and “They did this”.Sheriff Doolittle sought out the only Frank known to her locally – violin teacher Frank P. Mandy, who shared the Waukegan studio with Hitchcock – but Doolittle could find nothing to connect him to the crime.
(AUSNOTE: I’d LOVE some more info on Mr. Frank P. Mandy, if anyone can find some!)
Elfrieda is said to have also named a woman accomplice, but spoke the name too faintly for it to be heard. She died, soon after, and was officially declared a suicide.
So. Now it gets really weird:
A month after Elfrieda died of her burns, a man in Texas contacted police by letter, and confessed to having ‘helped’ her burn herself.
“James Kelley,” AKA “Ezra McVeagh”, described as an Army deserter from Selfridge Fields, Mt. Clemens, MI, claimed he watched Elfrieda tear her clothes off, before hitting her over the head with a ‘poker’ and helping her place her feet, hands and head into the furnace – on her own request. He also admitted to attacking another (unnamed) woman in Lake Forest whom he thought he’d killed, but he'd found out she survived. The man was quickly thrown into the nearest mental institution.
In his letter, which was said to be intelligently written, Kelley/McVeagh had described himself as a 'student of occult mysticism', and signed it with the Crowley-esque, Egyptian-style pseudonym: "A-Os-Wun-Aken".
And because there’s apparently just not enough weird here:
The autopsy suggested Elfrieda had not just been burned in the furnace, but also severely electrocuted. There were high voltage transformers not far from the Lake Bluff City Hall. She had also suffered a blow to the head, leaving injuries akin to those ‘typically’ caused by a ‘sandbag’.
(AUSNOTE: I suspect ‘sandbags’ – which sound nothing like ‘pokers’ - might have been employed by both robbers and night policemen in 1928… I intend to check it out!).
So there’s the case, give or take another ton of info I can’t find yet. The connection between Elfrieda and the New Thought movement seems pretty strong – and I suspect Hitchcock was involved with it, too. The movement attracted some wealthy, famous and powerful people back in the early 20th C, and still exists today as “New Thought” and “Divine Thought”, among other appellations.
Astral projection is a common belief among these Theosophy offshoots, as is the concept of ‘spiritual purification’ so people might ascend to a higher realm of existence while still alive. From experience, I surmise that such a movement would very likely have attracted just as many poseurs and creeps trying to get in the pants and purses of vulnerable women as they do today. I believe Hitchcock was one of them.
But no firm conclusions, yet. Still digging!
Some source articles:
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=94dSAAAAIBAJ&sjid=gDsDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6803,4981966
http://www.newspaperarchive.com/SiteMap/FreePdfPreview.aspx?img=105951839
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=4W8bAAAAIBAJ&sjid=80oEAAAAIBAJ&dq=knaak letter&pg=3386,1362591
http://news.google.com/newspapers?i...&pg=6023,5505797&dq=elfrieda+knaak+1928&hl=en
