LUXE RIDE & HOMICIDE
Gruesome end to stolen-car caper, with bizarre final act
In the 1920s, few things rivaled the Packard, a big gleaming display of wealth on four wheels, as a status symbol.
If you wanted to travel in style, a Packard, at a price of about $5,000 (roughly $140,000 today) or more, was the way to go.
So when a young man wandered into a Chicago Packard dealership on Sept. 8, 1921, the manager told his star salesman, Bernard J. Daugherty, to stop wasting his time. The stranger was a little shabby and did not appear to be Packard material.
But Daugherty believed the youth, who said his name was Harvey Church, 23, was a good prospect. Church, a Northwestern Railroad brakeman, said his wealthy father had given him thousands of dollars in Liberty Bonds to purchase one of these luxury cars.
Church told the salesman he had to drive to the bank and retrieve the bonds from a safe-deposit box.
Reluctantly, the manager agreed to allow Daugherty to take Church in the Packard to the bank. The manager sent along another employee — Carl Ausmus — for security. A third man — Edward Skelba — followed in a different car. After the transaction, Skelba was to drive his colleagues back to the dealership.
Skelba arrived at the bank, but the Packard never showed. After waiting two hours, Skelba got out of the car to telephone the dealership.
When he returned, he found one of Daugherty’s business cards tied to the steering wheel. “Ed, go back to the office. Will come in later.”
The next morning, a 10-year-old boy standing on a bridge over the Des Plaines River near Maywood, a village near Chicago, spotted a human form bobbing in the water.
“At first, it was only an unidentified body — a bit of human wreckage rescued with a grappling hook,” reported the
Chicago Tribune on Sept. 10. The dead man’s face was battered beyond recognition, and his head was nearly severed. A rope was tied around his neck, and his hands were secured behind his back with handcuffs.
Papers in the dead man’s pockets had Daugherty’s name on them.
As word of the murder filtered out to police in the area, a Maywood officer recalled seeing a Packard zoom by around two hours before dawn.
But it didn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to track Church down. At the dealership, he had written his name and a Maywood address where he lived with his mother, Eva.
No one answered when the police knocked on the door, so they broke in. A horror scene greeted them in the basement coal bin — a hatchet on the windowsill, a baseball bat and a hammer all caked with blood and hair. Blood spatters and pools covered the walls and floor.
They also found a hat with the initials
B.J.D.
Neighbors said the Church patriarch, Edwin, had recently purchased a farm in Adams, Wis. There, police quickly found Church and his little white-haired mama tooling around in the Packard.
Back in Maywood, searchers with shovels continued to look for Ausmus. They found his mangled corpse in a hole that had been recently dug in the garage floor.
Church first denied knowing anything about the murders; then he tried to blame others. Finally, after offering several different stories, he folded.
“I had no helpers. I did this alone. Let’s get this over with,” Church told a detective.
The notion seemed preposterous. Church was about 5-feet-6 and skinny. Ausmus and Daugherty, both veterans of the Great War, outweighed him by at least 50 pounds each. It seemed impossible for Church to have overwhelmed even one of them. And why would he?
“I wanted the car,” Church explained. Theft, not murder, was on his mind when he entered the dealership, Church said. But his plan got out of control.
“Things moved too fast for me,” he said. “Daugherty came to the house. I did not have the money.”
Church invited him down to the cellar for a drink and then pulled a gun, snapped on the handcuffs, and hit him with the baseball bat. “Then I just went nutty, I guess,” he said. “I grabbed the ax and cut his throat and pounded him again and again.”
Ausmus eventually entered the cellar looking for his colleague and got the same treatment.
Later, he dumped Daugherty’s body in the river and buried Ausmus in the garage.
At his trial, which started in late November 1921, Church’s attorneys tried hard to build an insanity case. But the jury took just one ballot to find him guilty with a death penalty recommendation.
The story took another bizarre turn as Church awaited execution. The condemned man became a zombie, totally paralyzed. Some doctors called it “mental suicide.” Others said self-hypnosis.
Medical researchers flocked to his cell, trying to provoke a physical response that would prove he was faking. Some went as far as to burn him with lit cigars or pierce his skin with knives. Nothing.
“Harvey was as though dead,” the Daily News reported. For more than 40 days, tube feeding kept him alive.
But his coma did not stop the wheels of justice, and his scheduled execution moved forward on March 3, 1922.
In a way, he got what he had wished for when he first set his sights on the Packard. For his trip to the gallows, Church was carried in a chair, like a king or ancient pharaoh, by a group of police deputies. Finally, he was traveling in style.
He was still unconscious and seated in the chair when he plunged through the trapdoor to his eternal rest.