Whiskey Men and Murder

        

Foreword:  Although incidents of gunplay in pre-Prohibition saloons were fairly common and deaths too frequently were the result, those usually involved the Wild West where reckless males with few family ties were on the loose.  By contrast, the four incidents of murder involving whiskey men briefly recounted here all involve relationships — fathers, mothers, children.  Family ties have an emotional dimension that barroom shoot-outs lack.  While each of these stories differs significantly from the others, their common thread is…

Shown here is Julius Goldbaum as a young whiskey man who in his own time was accounted as an outstanding pioneer in making the Arizona Territory a viable place for settlement.  But first he had to overcome the trauma of the murder of his father, Marcus Goldbaum.  Marcus, a butcher by trade, was a restless man, moving his family from Denver to Arizona in 1861, never settling in one town very long.  By the early 1880s Marcus had moved to Benson, Arizona, a rail terminal about 45 miles south of Tucson.  There he expanded beyond butchering to dealing in beer and liquor.

Still Marcus was not content.  Catching gold fever, he turned over operating the businesses to his wife and set out prospecting in the nearby Whetstone Mountains.  As one writer has observed:  “It was a bad idea.”  Geronimo’s Apaches were on the warpath.  They raided Marcus’s mountain cabin, killed him, ransacked the place and took what they wanted.   A cavalry patrol found him days later but did not immediately recognize that the prospector was Marcus Goldbaum because he had been scalped.  An etching by the famous Western artist, Frederic Remington, in the book “On the Bloody Trail of Geronimo,” caught the scene.  The dead man was only 51.

Moving to Tucson, Julius opened a saloon and liquor dealership, shown here.  From that beginning, he began to “rectify” (blend) his own brands of whiskey.  His success was immediate and he became one of Tucson’s wealthiest men.  Civic minded, he also was a volunteer fireman and elected to the Tucson City Council. Goldbaum was singled out for praise in an 1891 book that focussed on men “Who Have Made the Territory.”  Despite his father’s killing — or perhaps in part because of it — Julius stayed to make Arizona a desirable place to live. 

It is not clear when Dan and Mary (Sullivan) Hanley emigrated from Ireland to the United States.  Hanley first surfaced in San Francisco directories in 1863 working as a bartender at the Rotunda Saloon.  Before long he owned a grocery store and liquor business, including his own saloon.  Also living with the couple and their three young children was John Hanley, Dan’s older brother.   According to an account in the San Francisco Bulletin, the Hanleys had fenced in some property to the objection of a neighboring landowner named Dennis Ryan.  The result was ongoing trouble between the two families. 

In October 1877, during a raucous party at Ryan’s house, a dispute broke out between the two Irishman.  Both sides had firearms and shots were exchanged. John Hanley was hit in the hand and Dan was shot through the right thigh.  Ryan and an accomplice were arrested on a charge of assault to murder.  After lingering for six months Dan, only 37 years old, died of blood poisoning and the charge against Ryan became manslaughter.  Asked about what fueled the fight, witnesses told the press:  “Beer and wine were involved.”  Hanley’s grave is shown here.

Left with three children to raise, Mary Hanley, shown right, proved to have “the right stuff.”  Overcoming her grief she took over management of the family grocery, liquor store and saloon, running them for more than a decade.  As her son, John, reached maturity, he was tasked with working in his mother’s enterprises and learned the liquor trade, pursuing it for much of his life. 

When his father August died in 1905, William Krogman was well prepared to take over the operation of the family’s distillery in Tell City, Indiana.  He likely was unprepared, however, for subsequent events.   In 1911 a Tell City man named Joseph Wiegand was feuding with his neighbors next door, the Drury family.  According to press accounts, the problem was “some little difference about chickens.”  Mrs. Drury was standing in the yard of her home one day when Wiegand came around the corner of the house and shot her dead. Convicted of murder, Wiegand, apparently because of advanced age, escaped the gallows and was given a prison sentence.  

Left with five minor children and no one to care for them, the bereaved husband sued Krogman, characterized as a “wealthy man,” for $10,000 in damages (equivalent to $250,000 today).  Drury charged that his wife’s slayer had been drunk on liquor sold him by the distiller.  After legal maneuverings that lasted almost two years, a jury awarded Drury $2,500 in “blood money.”  He rejected that result as too little and filed for a new trial, this time suing in the name of his motherless children.  This second time around, after a venue change to an Indiana county where Mrs. Drury had once resided, a sympathetic jury increased the award to $7,000.  A local newspaper headline read:  “Heavy Judgment Rendered Against William Krogman.” 

Krogman’s problems were just beginning.  As prohibitionary forces closed in on the production and sale of alcohol in the Midwest, his whiskey markets slowly dried up along with profits.  Finally, in 1920 the advent of National Prohibition caused the distillery his father had founded 57 years earlier to shut down completely.

This murder story made newspaper headlines from Bridgeport, Connecticut, to San Bernardino, California.   Across America people knew that two sons of Peter Dorsheimer, a prominent Lancaster, Pennsylvania, liquor wholesaler, had been jailed, accused by a third son of having murdered their father and mother 14 years earlier in their home, shown here, while making it look like an accident.   Until then, the public face of the Dorsheimers was of a happy family of solid Pennsylvania stock, high achieving and affluent, civically and politically active, and strong adherents to the German Reformed Christian Church.  Whatever tensions roiled beneath the surface had gone unnoticed. 

 On April 16, 1910, tragedy had struck the Dorsheimers.  The parents were found dead in their bed, asphyxiated by illuminating gas from a fixture in their bedroom. The flame had been extinguished but the deadly gas continued to flow.  The decision of the coroner, backed by the sheriff, was accidental death, as noted on Peter's death certificate shown here.  The theory as was that an errant piece of clothing from one of the two had brushed against the jet, blowing out the flame, and the couple had not noticed. 

Fast forward 14 years:  Benjamin and Chester Dorsheimer were arrested and jailed in Lancaster County on an allegation that they had murdered their mother and father on that April night as a way to get control of the lucrative liquor business.  The accuser was their brother, Frank, abetted by a sister, Lizzie. Frank also found a sympathetic ear in a rural justice of the peace with the power to incarcerate.

The brothers spent seven days languishing in jail.  At last a county judge held a hearing that included evidence that the door to Peter and Anna’s bedroom had been locked from the inside, making it impossible for someone to slip in and blow out the gas jet while they were sleeping.  He ordered Benjamin and Chester immediately released, ending their ordeal.  In the process, however, the Dorsheimer family circle that once had looked so strong had been broken and likely irreparably so.

Human interest is evident in each of these stories.  All of these murders — including the one alleged — involved families.  Fathers killed, leaving children to be raised;  a mother murdered, leaving a father with minor children, and adult children accusing each other over the deaths of their parents.  These are tragedies with implications well beyond shootouts inside a Western saloon.

Note:  More complete vignettes on these whiskey men are available on this blog:  Julius Goldbaum, March 2, 2017;  the Hanleys, May 5, 2018;  William Krogman, December 6, 2014; and the Dorsheimers, March 26, 2017.