Saloonkeeper Sam Stout & The Banker’s Murder

 

Pursuing the idea that every whiskey container holds a story, the mini-jug shown here opened a tale of murder that rocked Waupaca, Wisconsin, for decades as investigations continued and suspects were brought to trial.  Among them was Samuel L. “Sam” Stout, the saloonkeeper responsible for the “Merry Christmas” giveaway.  Was Sam a killer?  Some still think so.

On Saturday night, October 7, 1882, in Waupaca, Wisconsin, Henry C. Mead, shown here, was brutally murdered in his local bank, with money and records taken from an open safe.  Initially suspicion fell on strangers in town but they eventually were cleared.  After an ensuing decade the Waupaca district attorney brought charges against a group of cronies, including Sam, who were known to congregate at Stout’s Saloon. 

Stout was born in Tioga County, Central Pennsylvania, one of eight children of Samuel and Sarah (Chase) Stout.  The family was English in origin, likely descended from migrants from New England and the western part of New York related to the English Puritans of colonial New England.  When young Samuel was about 10 years old, his father moved the family to Wisconsin where land was cheaper and established a farm.

When he was 21 Sam married Merora Strobridge from Trenton in nearby Dodge County.  At the time of his trial the couple had five children.  The oldest, Estella, was 22 years old followed by Albert at 21.  There followed three sons, Charles, Hugh, and David, only 22-months when his father was arrested.

After initially working in agriculture, Stout tried out a wide number of occupations, he said at his trial.  They included working on a riverboat as deck hand and pilot, felling and sawing timber, working in masonry, and raising and selling livestock.  

It likely was his experience working in two nearby New London, Wisconsin, hotels that he picked up bartending skills and an interest in the liquor trade.  That led him to operating a saloon of his own in Waupaca, where he lived for 30 years.  The town is shown below.

Stout’s saloon was one long building with three low partitions.  The front room was a bar, a pool room came next and the back room held a lunch counter and a liquor store.  On the night of Mead’s murder, Stout said, he had locked up the saloon about 10 o’clock, walked downtown when he was approached by a number of customers asking him to open again for beers.  He complied and others dropped by. “Always kept a light burning,” Stout remarked.  “After we had been in a few minutes I told the boys it was time to go home.”  Stout said when he got home his children were in bed but his wife was sitting up with a sick child. 

Meanwhile that same evening, not far away, Henry C. Mead as usual was in his bank, shown right. Unmarried and with no local family, the banker, shown here, spent most of his waking hours there, sleeping at night on a cot in a small room in the back.  Considered miserly in his personal habits but a “soft touch” for local charitable causes, Mead, shown here, was owed substantial amounts of money by a number of Waupaca residents, among them some noted for rowdy and dissolute behavior.

As was his custom when Mead was working he kept the door to his small vault open.  In addition to cash the vault also held papers recording debts owed him.  

When Mead failed to show up for a meal on Sunday, people went look for him and came upon a horrendous scene.  The banker’’s body was on the floor next to his desk.  Mead’s face had been blown away by a shotgun blast. “The room was spattered with blood, the floor streaked with gore, and pools of blood had collected against the baseboard,” reported the Waukesha Republican. The vault had been looted of money and records.

Suspicion first fell on three “drifters” who were arrested on a tip that they had shown up in Stevens Point with rolls of cash.  The case against them failed against ironclad alibis.  Attention went to locals being responsible when some of the contents of Mead’s record box, shown here, later were found in a Waupaca alley.  Years went by.  A $2,000 reward was offered.  

By 1892, the district attorney thought he had enough evidence to charge a group of local men with the murder.  Meeting in the Waupaca courthouse, shown below, a grand jury issued indictments against three men for murder and five others as accessories.  Among those arrested for murder was Sam Stout, whose saloon stood not far from Mead’s bank.

The theory of the crime was that a group of conspirators had gathered in Stout’s saloon, likely with the intention of rendering Mead unconscious and raiding his vault of money, but more important, evidence of their indebtedness.  Entering though a window in the rear, they had clubbed the banker from behind, but failed to knock him out.  As Mead rose he recognized his assailants.  Now in peril of discovery, an intruder who had brought a shotgun fired pointblank at the banker’s head, killing him instantly and creating the gory scene.

When asked if he had killed Mead, Stout denied it categorically.  He knew the two men arrested with him, but denied he had ever met Mead.  In an effort to sway the jury to conviction, the prosecution had the banker’s skull dug up and shown in the courtroom where it caused a sensation.  As shown here in a photo, held by the district attorney, the entire front of Mead’s face was missing.  As the press had a field day, the trial dragged on in summer heat for six week.  In the end the prosecution had only circumstantial evidence and dubious witnesses.  It look the jury of local merchants and farmers only 24 minutes to declare the defendants not guilty.  Stout went free and continued to operate his saloon until his death.

For decades afterward speculation about who had killed Banker Mead was rampant in Waupaca and elsewhere in Wisconsin.  In 1929, a story in the Milwaukee Journal sought to bring an end to speculation.  It  reported that a former sheriff, since deceased, in 1907 had obtained a deathbed confession from one of the three men, a confession later confirmed by the daughter of another one of the accused.  Since the only one to die in that timeframe was Sam Stout, the finger of guilt pointed squarely at him.  But again, this was hearsay, not proof.

Stout died in May 1907 and was buried in a family plot in Waupaca County’s Lakeside Memorial Park.  His widow, Merora, joined him there two years later. Shown above are their gravestones.  Sam’s is at left next to the urn.  Both are heavily covered with lichens.  Interred not far from the Stouts is Henry Mead, his skull later returned to his remains.  A large granite monument has been raised in the banker’s memory. 

Note:  Although it was the holiday mini-jug that first impelled me to seek out its origins, research soon led me to two books on the subject.  In his “Myths and Mysteries of Wisconsin” (2012), Michael Bie devotes a chapter to Mead’s death.  A more important source was “The Headless Banker:  The Murder of HC Mead - As Waupaca Saw It, by June Johnson (2001).  Shown right, this is a 561-page tome that contains all the local stories, official papers, and other documents related to this case.  It is from that source that many of the illustrations come.  Unfortunately, I can find no photo of Saloonkeeper Sam Stout.