LUCK BE A LADY
Lethal bootlegger laughs her way off death row
THE CORPSE of a Chicago cabinetmaker named Bill Lindstrom turned up one night on a dark, icy side street near his home on busy W. North Ave.
He had an egg-sized knot at the nape of his neck. Chicago cops diagnosed bad luck: a fatal slip.
Then some clever Dick took a look at the soles of the dead man’s shoes. The leather was as dry as Death Valley. Detectives reconsidered. Police learned that Lindstrom lived with Lillian Fraser, whom the cops called his common-law wife. This shocked her husband, Mr. Fraser, who apparently had not noticed that she had split four years before.
Lillian Fraser was a nurse, and her husband thought she was working at a hospital out of town. He said she came to see him weekly — like a good visiting nurse.
Cops also learned that Mrs. Fraser was the beneficiary of a $7,500 insurance policy on Lindstrom’s life. With coercion, she admitted she tried to cash in when her thing with Lindstrom got humdrum.
She snitched on two accomplices. The case, played out in the Roaring Twenties, became a curtain-raiser on the criminal endeavors of one of those partners, Catherine Cassler, a rotund blonde felon from the Indiana sticks who giggled her way through several feeble attempts to bring her to justice.
Though she is an obscure figure in the distaff wing of American crime annals, Cassler deserves her own exhibition.
To begin with, she was a placard-carrying member of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. And when she wasn’t marching against alcohol, Cassler moonlighted as a bootlegger, captain of a convoy that ran homebrew into parched Chicago from northwest Indiana.
Lillian Fraser said the insurance scheme was the idea of her friend Cassler, who enlisted one of her jailed rum-runners, Loren Patrick. His compensation was $137.50, the amount Cassler paid to bail him out.
The murder plan was executed on Dec. 6, 1926. While Cassler waited in the car, Patrick knocked at Lindstrom’s house, posing as a customer for his handmade furniture. Lillian Fraser slipped him a lead pipe, and Patrick clubbed the cabinetmaker. One blow did the trick.
Angling to avoid a noose, Patrick and Fraser pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against Cassler, who refused a plea deal.
Her trial, in June 1927, was a head-scratcher.
T he Chicago Tribune described Cassler as “fair, fat and 40, undistinguishable by looks or appearance from any of the women spectators.” She wore a smile as wide as Miss America’s as she sat listening to testimony from Fraser and Patrick that nudged her toward the gallows.
It was a quick conv iction for first-degree murder. Jurors recommended hanging.
But Illinois had never executed a woman, and before sentencing Judge Phillip Sullivan urged Cassler to plead guilt y, like her accomplices, and accept their sentence of life in prison. She declined. “Plead guilty? Why should I?” Cassler said through her perpetual smile. “This is no life behind prison bars. I would sooner die on the gallows than that.”
So Sullivan condemned her to die on Oct. 21, three months hence. An Associated Press report said she was “ready to trip gaily to the noose .” The Trib said that as she left court , Cassler “retained her unemotional attitude and chatted freely and apparently in a friendly spirit with her codefendant, Mrs. Fraser, while waiting for a prison elevator.” Days before Cassler’s scheduled execution, Patrick changed his story to say that the woman was innocent. The prosecutor dismissed this as “just the old trick to try and save someone from the gallows.”
But the execution was delayed, and the Illinois Supreme Court eventually ordered a new trial. By then, neither Patrick nor Fraser was willing to testify, and Cassler gallivanted from prison on April 20, 1929. She did not fade away. Before her expected execution, she had written a self-pitying note after learning that her husband, Truman Cassler, had a new lover named “Cameola, better known as Babe.”
Cassler wrote, “He told me he was getting a divorce from me to marry her.”
Forty days after Cassler’s release, the body of Cameola (Babe) Soutar, 24, a vaudeville dancer and roller-skater, was found with a bullet through the heart in a swamp near Cassler’s home turf of Hebron, Ind.
Weeks after gaining freedom, the cackler stood accused of another murder.
She was defiantly jovial. “I’m laughing at life,” she said. “I’ll never frown again.”
There was plenty of evidence, including a beating she inflicted on the younger woman three days after her release from prison. Truman Cassler told police that three days before the murder, his wife warned him, “You won’t be bothered with your sweetie anymore.”
But Indiana authorities declined to prosecute, and she emerged scot-free from the specter of murder for the second time. She said she planned to retire to a family farm in Missouri.
She must have gotten sidetracked.
Eight years later, Cassler was questioned by Chicago police when a boarder, Warren Shattuck, 29, died after he tumbled off a terrace at her home on the South Side. Cassler had taken a $1,000 life insurance policy on Shattuck six weeks before he perished, claiming she was his mother.
She chuckled and explained she got confused because Shattuck sometimes referred to her as “mom.” She waived the insurance claim, and police shrugged off the investigation.
Chicago’s lady luck walked away grinning, one last time.