At about 8:23 on the evening of September 26, 1913, the engineer of a northbound freight on the Elgin, Joliet and Eastern Railroad saw a dark shape on the track just south of the interurban viaduct at Wayne, in DuPage County, Illinois, and could not stop before his train passed over it. The crew walked back and found a woman cut in two above the hips, a blue jacket still on the upper half of the body and a gold bracelet on one arm engraved "from W. H. A. to M. A." They had every reason to think the train had killed her. It had not. At the post-mortem in West Chicago the next afternoon, the coroner and two physicians found a bullet wound entering at the right corner of the mouth and passing up through the brain and out of the skull, and no bleeding where the wheels had done their damage. She had been shot first and laid across the rail afterward.
She was identified the next day as Mildred Allison Rexroat. She had three sons by her first husband, W. H. Allison of Chicago, had divorced him a few months earlier, and had then married Everett Rexroat of Macomb, Illinois, with whom she lived there for a time but not, it appears, in the weeks before her death. She had come back to Chicago to work as an instructor at a dancing academy owned by Frank L. Oleson at 459 East Thirty-first Street, and she rented a room from a Mrs. Ada Johnson on Eggleston Avenue. The dance she taught was the tango, then a national craze, and the newspapers quickly named the crime the tango case. When she left her room on the afternoon of the 26th she was wearing a dark blue suit and a new large hat, and she had on a diamond solitaire in a Tiffany setting that her new husband said had cost him $300. The ring was not on the body.
The man who took her to Wayne had been a pupil at Oleson's academy for only a few days. He danced with her on several evenings, and on Thursday, September 25, he danced with almost no one else. Oleson and at least two other witnesses heard her say that night, with the man standing beside her, that he had arranged for her to teach the tango to a class of young men who had formed a club at Wayne, at $15 a night and her hotel bill; when another woman offered to come along as her assistant, Rexroat told her it was not needed yet. After closing, the pair and a man named Carl White shared four bottles of beer at a nearby cafe, where she repeated the story. All of those witnesses later picked out the same man: Henry C. Spencer.
The next afternoon a caller telephoned the Eggleston Avenue house. Rexroat could not make out the voice, so Mrs. Johnson took the call, and the caller set a meeting at the Fifth Avenue station of the Aurora, Elgin and Chicago electric line. At about half past three Rexroat packed a rattan suitcase and left. Around six a couple matching her and Spencer asked at the station for a train to Wayne and were told the first one that stopped there left at 6:30. The conductor on that run, Hugh Cargo, later identified Spencer as the man in the third seat from the rear of the first car. A Wheaton resident, C. A. Goodwin, sat directly in front of them and heard them talk about how the tango should be taught, about a diamond, and about the will of the man's father. At 7:25 Spencer came forward to ask Cargo not to carry him past Wayne.
They got off at 7:45 with one other passenger who could be traced, a local woman named Louisa Pratt. She never saw the man's face, but she watched the couple walk to the end of the platform, go east along the road to the steam railroad and turn south down the tracks toward the viaduct, laughing and talking. Five or six minutes after she had crossed the tracks herself she heard what sounded like a pistol shot from that direction. When Cargo's car came back through Wayne at about 8:12, one passenger boarded. The conductor who relieved him at Wheaton, C. S. Croumer, had to wake Spencer to take his ticket, and the car reached Chicago at 9:30.
Forty-five minutes later Spencer knocked at 2215 Michigan Avenue, the flat of W. R. Patterson, who had known him for about eight years under the name Burke. "You look as white as a sheet," Mrs. Patterson told him. He studied himself in the mirror, asked whether he looked dirty, and when Patterson pointed at his shoes said the dirt was not Chicago dirt but came off the country road, and wiped them with his handkerchief. Then he unwrapped a woman's diamond solitaire in a Tiffany setting from a lady's handkerchief, offered it to Mrs. Patterson for $100, slipped it onto his tie and went back to the mirror. "Isn't it a beauty?" he said. Before he left he took a blue-steel .38 revolver from a folded newspaper, removed an empty shell and threw it out the window. Nobody saw the ring again.
He kept coming back. On the Monday night he found the Pattersons reading about the tango case, and Patterson told him the published description fit him "pretty good" and that he had better look out. Spencer said there was no danger; the police were looking for a tall man. On Saturday, October 4, he ran into Mrs. Patterson at a dime picture theater on State Street, where she noticed he wore his glasses while the room was dark and took them off whenever the lights came up. Over chop suey afterward she asked what had become of the ring. He said he had sold it, and then, by her account, warned her that if she or her husband said a word he would "send you both the same route." The next night, Sunday, October 5, he walked into the Patterson flat and found Captain Halpin of the Chicago police and two other officers waiting for him. The appellate record does not say who told the police where to wait, and a later retelling that credits a jeweler who was offered the ring does not square with the Pattersons' testimony that the ring had already vanished.
Halpin took him to a room Spencer had rented on September 23 from a Mrs. Schofield at 3212 Rhodes Avenue. He had dropped a grip there at eight on the morning of the murder and been seen again only the following morning, though the landlady could tell he had slept there that night. In the bottom dresser drawer the officers found a blue-steel .38 revolver with three loads, a rattan suitcase and a lady's handkerchief. A man named Wade Hudson identified the suitcase as one he had lent W. H. Allison early in September, and Allison said he had left the suitcase he borrowed with his former wife, though he could not swear it was the same one. Spencer had $260 on him. Other pieces were already in hand: a white handbag turned inside out and spotted with blood that the coroner had picked up beside the track, and a scatter of torn business cards bearing Rexroat's name found near the Wayne station the morning after the killing.
At the station, warned that anything he said would be used against him, Spencer said he was willing to tell everything. By the testimony of Halpin and the officers present, no promises or threats were made. He described meeting her, the tango class, the ride to Wayne. He had told her the tracks were a short cut to a farm his father had left him. They walked south under the viaduct with his left hand on her right arm, and just past it he took out the revolver and shot her in the jaw. She fell without a sound. He laid her across one of the rails, took her suitcase and her ring, rode back to Chicago and threw things from the suitcase out the car window on the way. He said he had known her before the academy, from Sans Souci Park, and that she had stayed with him at hotels downtown; that part rested on his word alone. He admitted he was the caller Mrs. Johnson had spoken to, both on the Friday and on the Saturday, when he had phoned to say Rexroat would not be coming back because she was going away to marry him. And he said that before the murder he had gone out to Wayne and left a hammer at the foot of a telegraph pole beside the track, in case he ran out of cartridges. The hammer was found there several days later. When Halpin took him out to Wayne he pointed out the place of the shooting and the place of the hammer, and both matched what investigators already knew.
That same night, in Halpin's office, he repeated the account in front of an assistant state's attorney of Cook County, the state's attorney of DuPage County and a shorthand reporter. He never signed the transcript, and it was in these sessions that the statement grew. He described crimes he said he had committed over the previous ten or fifteen years. Wire copy out of Chicago on October 6 reported the police as saying he had confessed to fourteen killings, all for money, and quoted him: "I needed the money to have a good time at the cabaret shows." One of those he named was reported to be a maid in the household of Mrs. Finley J. Shepard, the former Helen Gould, whom he was also said to have married. By the time he was hanged, the United Press was describing his claims as nearly a score of women killed across the country. At trial he taunted the room about "the fifty murders they have got me down for." He also told the police he did not know who his parents were, that his first memory was of the Home for the Friendless, and that he had served at least two penitentiary terms and one in the house of correction. None of the other killings was ever charged, and the court record does not establish that any of them happened.
A DuPage County grand jury indicted him at the October 1913 term for the murder of Mildred Allison, alias Mildred Rexroat. The judge appointed two local lawyers to defend him; at Spencer's own request they withdrew and Anton Zeman represented him alone. The trial in Wheaton was a spectacle he did much to create. He interrupted nearly every prosecution witness, telling them "You lie from your heart," calling them bone-heads and pinheads, turning the same insults on the state's attorney and his own lawyer, and praising the one young woman whose testimony pleased him as "the only one that got up and said the plain truth." At one point he was photographed on the stand pointing his finger at the jury. When he testified, he answered almost every question from either side with "I don't know." The defense called no witnesses. Its case was that his conduct showed he was insane, though neither side offered any evidence on his sanity. The jury convicted him and fixed the penalty at death. In a long, rambling speech before sentence he said he had confessed because he was tired of prison and had decided he would rather die than go back.
On appeal, Zeman argued that the doctors were not qualified, that the unsigned transcript should have been used instead of the officers' recollection, that the other confessions should have gone to the jury as proof of insanity, and that the courtroom photograph and a second prosecutor had made the trial unfair. The Illinois Supreme Court rejected every point in People v. Spencer, 264 Ill. 124 (1914). Justice Carter wrote that the physical evidence proved the crime without the confession, that the other crimes were properly kept out, and that it had been the defense itself which asked for their exclusion. As for his behavior at trial, the court observed that "Depravity of character and abandoned habits are not in themselves evidence of insanity," and that Spencer's own speech before sentence showed he remembered perfectly well what he had claimed not to know on the stand. The court set his execution for July 31, 1914.
He was hanged that day in Wheaton. The United Press reported that his voice turned husky near the end but that he showed no nerves as the white shroud and black mask were fitted, that spectators closest to the gallows heard a muffled "good bye," and that he dropped eight feet and was pronounced dead two minutes later. The same dispatch quoted him saying the happiest days of his life had been the ones spent in jail waiting to be hanged. The only killing any court ever examined was the one beside the Elgin, Joliet and Eastern tracks at Wayne, and what convicted him of it was less his own talk than the testimony of two conductors, a woman walking home from the platform, a couple on Michigan Avenue, and a hammer left at the foot of a telegraph pole.