Henry C. Spencer was convicted of one murder: the killing of Mildred Allison Rexroat, a dancing instructor from Chicago, near the village of Wayne in DuPage County, Illinois, on the evening of September 26, 1913. He had told her that a group of young men at Wayne wanted lessons in the tango, the dance then sweeping the country, and he rode out with her on the electric line that evening. She was shot, and her body was found near Wayne that evening.
Police in Chicago arrested Spencer on October 5, 1913. He confessed to her killing, then went much further, claiming in the days after his arrest that he had killed a dozen or more other people over many years. The newspapers carried those claims across the country and abroad. None of them was ever charged. At his trial in DuPage County they were kept out of evidence at his own lawyer's request, and a November 1913 report said police inquiries had found many of them to be fiction.
Little is recorded about Mildred Rexroat's early life. The court record shows that she had three sons with her first husband, whose surname was Allison, and that she divorced him a few months before her death. She then married a man from Macomb, Illinois, whose surname, Rexroat, she took; a 1913 newspaper report described him as a farmer near Macomb. She lived with him in Macomb for a time, but by the late summer of 1913 she had not lived with him for some while.
In September 1913 she was working in Chicago as an instructor at a dancing academy on the city's South Side, and she rented a room in a private house. Her second husband had given her a diamond ring, which he testified had cost him $300. She also wore a gold bracelet engraved by her first husband, who later identified it as a gift he had given her.
Her work as a dance teacher put her at the center of a fashion. The tango was the popular dance of 1913, and in the newspapers her death became the tango case.
Spencer had been taking lessons at the academy for a short time. On the evening of Thursday, September 25, 1913, he danced almost entirely with Mrs. Rexroat. The academy's owner and other people present heard her say, with Spencer standing by, that he had arranged for her to teach the tango to a class at Wayne. She told them she would be paid $15 a night, plus her hotel bill. When the evening was over, Spencer, Mrs. Rexroat and another man went to a cafe nearby and shared four bottles of beer, and she repeated the story about the Wayne class in Spencer's presence.
There was no such class. The court record does not describe any club or group at Wayne, and Spencer later told the police that he had led her along the railroad tracks by telling her they were a short cut to a farm his father had left him.
On the afternoon of Friday, September 26, a man telephoned the house where Mrs. Rexroat roomed and arranged to meet her at the Fifth Avenue station of the electric line in Chicago. At about 3:30 that afternoon she packed a rattan suitcase and left. She was wearing a dark blue suit, a large new hat and her jewelry, including the diamond ring, and she carried a white handbag. Her landlady later identified the hat, the suit, the handbag and the bracelet.
At about six o'clock a man and a woman who matched Spencer and Mrs. Rexroat, carrying a rattan suitcase, were at the Fifth Avenue station asking about trains. They were told that the first train that stopped at Wayne left at 6:30. The conductor on that train later testified that Spencer and a woman who resembled Mrs. Rexroat sat near the rear of the first car. A passenger from Wheaton who sat directly in front of them heard them talking about how the tango should be taught, about a diamond, and about the will of the man's father. Both the conductor and that passenger identified Spencer at trial. At about 7:25 the man asked the conductor not to carry him past Wayne, and the conductor told him they would arrive at 7:45.
The car reached Wayne on time, and the couple got off. A woman who also left the train there never saw the man's face, but her description of the woman with him fit Mrs. Rexroat. She testified that the pair walked east along the road and then along the railroad tracks, laughing and talking. Five or six minutes after she herself had crossed the tracks, she heard what sounded like a pistol shot from the south.
The electric car went on to Elgin and came back through Wayne at about 8:12 p.m., when one passenger got on. At Wheaton another conductor took over the car. He testified that Spencer was aboard and that he had to wake him to collect his fare. The car reached Chicago at 9:30.
Later that evening her body was found near Wayne, and it was taken to West Chicago under the coroner's direction. The next morning the coroner found her white handbag near the tracks, turned inside out. Torn business cards bearing her name were found near the Wayne station of the electric line that same morning.
On the afternoon of Saturday, September 27, two physicians and the coroner examined the body at West Chicago. They testified that she had died of a gunshot wound. No bullet was recovered.
She was identified as Mildred Allison Rexroat. Her diamond ring was missing. A November 1913 report said that her identity was established from the bracelet and from a bag that held a card and papers, that she had been robbed of money and jewelry, and that DuPage County swore in a hundred deputy sheriffs to search the area. The same report said several people were arrested in the first days of the inquiry and each was able to prove an alibi.
At about 10:15 on the night of the killing, Spencer called at the Chicago flat of a man and his wife who had known him for about eight years under the name Burke. He looked pale. He checked himself in the mirror and asked whether his clothes looked dirty, and he wiped dirt from his shoes. Then he showed the couple a diamond solitaire ring that matched Mrs. Rexroat's and offered to sell it for $100. When no sale was made he wrapped the ring in a handkerchief and put it back in his pocket. It was never seen again. Before he left, he took a blue-steel .38 revolver out of a newspaper, took out a shell, and threw it out the window, calling it a dead shell.
He came back on the following Monday. He put on a pair of glasses he carried in his pocket and talked about the newspaper stories of the tango case. The husband told him that the published description of the wanted man fit him. Spencer answered that the police were looking for a tall man.
On Saturday, October 4, the wife met Spencer by chance at a picture show in Chicago. She noticed that he wore his glasses while the room was dark and took them off whenever the lights came up. Afterward, at a chop suey restaurant, he told her he had sold the ring. Then, by her testimony, he warned her that if she or her husband talked, he would send them both "the same route."
On Sunday night, October 5, 1913, Spencer returned to the couple's flat. Captain Halpin of the Chicago police and two other officers were waiting for him there, and they arrested him. A November 1913 newspaper account said the arrest followed a lead from the victim's friends.
Spencer had $260 on him. He had rented a room in Chicago on September 23. He had been there briefly on the morning of the 26th and stayed there on several nights afterward. When officers searched the room with him, they found in a lower dresser drawer a .38 revolver with three loads, a rattan suitcase and a woman's handkerchief. A man who had lent a suitcase to Mrs. Rexroat's former husband in early September identified the one in the drawer as his. The former husband said he had left the borrowed case with her; he could not be certain it was the same one, but he said it looked like it.
An employee of the electric line had told Captain Halpin that he recognized Spencer as the man who had asked about trains in the company of a woman. At trial the same witness would say only that Spencer looked like the man. The Supreme Court held that this did no harm, since several other witnesses identified Spencer and he admitted being there.
Captain Halpin told Spencer that anything he said could be used against him. The officers present testified that no promises or threats were made, and Spencer said he was willing to tell everything.
He described meeting Mrs. Rexroat and dancing with her, arranging the class at Wayne, and riding out with her on the electric line. He said he told her the tracks were a short cut to a farm his father had left him, and that he shot her. He said he took her suitcase and her ring, and on the ride back to Chicago threw things from the suitcase out of the car window. He also said he had met her earlier, at an amusement park in Chicago, and that she had stayed with him at hotels; nothing in the court record confirms that part of his account.
He admitted that he had made the telephone calls to her rooming house: the call on the Friday that set up the meeting, and a call the next day, in which a voice the landlady recognized as the same caller told her that Mrs. Rexroat would not be coming back because she was going to marry him.
He told Halpin that before the killing he had taken a hammer out to Wayne and left it near the tracks. Officers found the hammer there several days after her death. Halpin then took Spencer out to Wayne, where he pointed out the place where he said he had shot her and the place where he had left the hammer. The officers judged that both matched what they already knew.
Later that same night, in Halpin's office, Spencer repeated essentially the same account before an assistant state's attorney of Cook County, the state's attorney of DuPage County and others. He was warned again and said that was all right, because he wanted to tell the truth. A shorthand reporter took down the statement. It was transcribed, but Spencer never signed it.
In the same sessions with the police, Spencer said he had committed many other crimes over the previous ten years or more. Those statements produced the national headlines.
A wire story printed in South Carolina weeklies on October 16, 1913, under the headline "Murdered Many," reported that he had confessed to killing Mrs. Rexroat and had said he had killed about fourteen people in all. The story said he described most of the killings as robberies. It reported that he claimed that he and a companion had killed two Chicago policemen about twelve years earlier to avoid arrest, that he had married four women, and that he listed other killings at resorts in Michigan and Wisconsin. He was quoted as telling the chief of detectives that he had been a thief all his life, and the story said he claimed to have spent $400 to $500 a week on nightlife. The same report said that the police had found the victim's suitcase and the revolver he said he had used, in his room.
The police did not simply accept these statements. A report from Wheaton printed in The Daily Gleaner of Fredericton, New Brunswick, on November 8, 1913, said that Spencer had given detailed accounts of many other murders and robberies across Illinois, and that police inquiries had found many of the claims to be fiction, with no record of crimes matching his descriptions.
None of the other killings Spencer claimed was ever charged. None was tried. At his trial the court excluded all of his statements about other crimes, at his own lawyer's request. On appeal the Illinois Supreme Court said only that he had confessed to many crimes unconnected with the one charged and that those statements were properly kept out. No court ever found that any of the other killings he described took place, or that he committed them.
A DuPage County grand jury, at the October 1913 term of the circuit court, indicted Henry C. Spencer for the murder of Mildred Allison, alias Mildred Rexroat. The case was tried at Wheaton, the county seat. The November 1913 report from Wheaton said the trial was set to open the following Monday, and that Spencer had refused to plead guilty.
The court first appointed two DuPage County lawyers to defend him. At Spencer's own request they withdrew, and Anton Zeman became his only counsel. The State's attorney was assisted at trial by a second lawyer.
The prosecution's case retraced those steps: the witnesses from the academy and the cafe, the landlady and the telephone calls, the two conductors and the passenger from Wheaton, the woman who walked from the Wayne platform and heard the shot, the couple who saw the ring and the revolver, the search of his room, the hammer, and his confession to Captain Halpin and the prosecutors. Two physicians described the cause of death.
Spencer made the trial difficult. He interrupted witnesses again and again, called them liars, and called them bone-heads and pinheads. He spoke to the jury about the "fifty murders" attributed to him and joked about a "necktie party." When he took the stand, he answered nearly every question, from either side, with "I don't know." His lawyer called no other witnesses. The defense theory was that his behavior showed he was insane, but neither side offered any direct evidence about his sanity. During the trial a photographer took a picture of him on the stand, apparently pointing at the jury, at a moment when the judge was not in the courtroom.
The jury found him guilty of murder and fixed his punishment at death. The trial court denied his motions for a new trial and in arrest of judgment and sentenced him to be hanged. Before sentence was passed, Spencer made a long statement. He said he had confessed because he was tired of prison and would rather die than go back.
Zeman took the case to the Illinois Supreme Court on a writ of error. The court, in an opinion by Justice Carter, rejected every point he raised and affirmed the conviction on June 16, 1914.
The defense argued that the State had not proved that a crime had been committed at all, apart from Spencer's own words. The court answered that the body of a crime may be proved by circumstantial evidence, and that the undisputed facts about the body and the train proved it here without the confession.
The defense objected to the physicians' testimony about the wound and their qualifications. The court held that no objection had been made at trial, so the point was not preserved, and that admitting the evidence was not an abuse of discretion in any case.
The defense argued that the officers should not have been allowed to describe his statement from memory when a shorthand transcript existed, and when Spencer had never signed it. The court held that witnesses may testify to what a defendant said even when a transcript was made, with an exception only for confessions taken before a magistrate under the statute. It also held that statements made in his presence, which he accepted by his words or conduct, could be used against him.
On the other crimes, the court held that his lawyer had asked for those statements to be excluded, so he could not complain of the ruling, and that parts of a confession unrelated to the crime charged are not admissible anyway.
On sanity, the court began from the rule that every person is presumed sane. It assumed, without deciding, that Spencer's behavior in court could be weighed. But it pointed to his own speech before sentence, which in the court's words "shows clearly that he did know and remember" the very matters he had claimed not to know on the stand. "Depravity of character and abandoned habits are not in themselves evidence of insanity," the court wrote, and the jury was justified in finding him sane. It added that the defense had no right to force the State to call expert witnesses on the question.
The court found no prejudice in the courtroom photograph, no error in allowing a second lawyer to assist the State's attorney, and no unfairness in Zeman acting alone, since that was Spencer's own choice.
The judgment was affirmed. The court directed its clerk to fix the execution of the death sentence for July 31, 1914, between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., and to send a certified copy of the order to the sheriff of DuPage County.
Little is reported about Spencer's life before 1913. The court record shows he used the name Burke with at least one couple who had known him for about eight years. He told the police that he did not know who his parents were, that his earliest memory was of the Home for the Friendless, and that he had served at least two terms in a penitentiary and one in a house of correction. He told the chief of detectives, according to the 1913 wire report, that he had been a thief all his life.
Proven in court, and final: the murder of Mildred Allison Rexroat near Wayne on September 26, 1913. A jury convicted him; the Illinois Supreme Court affirmed.
Claimed only: every other killing. Reports in October 1913 put his claims at about fourteen killings, including two policemen and women at Michigan and Wisconsin resorts; at trial he spoke of "fifty murders." None was charged or tried. A November 1913 report said police found many of the claims to be fiction.
Details that differ between sources: the 1913 wire story said Mrs. Rexroat was shot at Wheaton; the court record places the killing near Wayne. The November 1913 report described a different cause of death; the physicians at trial testified that she died of a gunshot wound. The wire story said he was arrested in a room near the South Side levee district; the court record says officers arrested him when he came to the flat of the couple who knew him as Burke. The November 1913 report said he gave his full confession in the Cook County jail; the court record places his statements with Captain Halpin and in Halpin's office. The wire story said he had killed about fourteen people "in all" in one passage and thirteen others in another.
Not established: whether he knew Mrs. Rexroat before he came to the academy, as he said; what became of the ring; whether the farm and the father's will he spoke of on the train ever existed.
Before 1913: by his own account to police, no knowledge of his parents, an early childhood in the Home for the Friendless, and at least two penitentiary terms and one term in a house of correction.
September 23, 1913: rents a room in Chicago.
September 25, 1913: dances with Mildred Rexroat at a Chicago academy; she tells others he has arranged a tango class for her at Wayne at $15 a night.
September 26, 1913: a caller arranges to meet her at the Fifth Avenue station; she leaves her rooming house at about 3:30 p.m.; the two take the 6:30 train and get off at Wayne at 7:45; a shot is heard soon after; her body is found near Wayne that evening; Spencer rides back to Chicago, reaching the city at 9:30, and at about 10:15 shows a diamond ring to a couple who know him as Burke.
September 27, 1913: post-mortem examination at West Chicago; her handbag and torn business cards are found.
The following Monday: Spencer discusses the tango case with the couple.
October 4, 1913: tells the wife he has sold the ring and warns her not to talk.
Several days after the killing: a hammer is found by a telegraph pole near the tracks at Wayne.
October 5, 1913: arrested at the couple's flat by Captain Halpin; confesses that night, tells Halpin where he left the hammer, then repeats his account to prosecutors from Cook and DuPage counties; also claims many other crimes.
October 16, 1913: wire reports say he has claimed about fourteen killings.
October 1913 term: indicted in DuPage County for the murder of Mildred Allison, alias Mildred Rexroat.
November 8, 1913: a report from Wheaton says his trial is set to open the following Monday and that police have found many of his other claims to be fiction.
After trial: jury verdict of guilty with the death penalty; motions for a new trial denied; sentenced to be hanged.
June 16, 1914: Illinois Supreme Court affirms in People v. Spencer, 264 Ill. 124, and sets the execution for July 31, 1914.
July 31, 1914: date fixed for his execution by hanging.