1927 - The “Chicken Fancier” and His Lady Friend
1927 - The “Chicken Fancier” and His Lady Friend
By Joseph G. Bilby
An excerpt of chapter 5 from New Jersey Noir: Bizarre Tales of the Garden State from 1921 to 1952
By Joseph G. Bilby
An excerpt of chapter 5 from New Jersey Noir: Bizarre Tales of the Garden State from 1921 to 1952
Medical doctor A. William Lilliendahl also allegedly had a law degree, so the seventy-year-old physician should have known better, but the Feds caught him prescribing opiates to drug addicts from his offices in Mountain Lakes, New Jersey and New York City, while he was allegedly running an addiction rehabilitation program. In the wake of that incident, the Doctor, scion of a wealthy New York family, gave up his medical license and moved with his forty-year-old wife Margaret and eight-year old son Alfred to South Vineland, New Jersey, where, over the next two years, Margaret took a fancy to Willis Beach, a nearby fifty-seven-year-old poultry farmer, known locally as a “chicken fancier.”
As a neighborly friendship apparently transitioned into a full-blown love affair, Margaret and Willis allegedly plotted to eliminate the doctor. On September 15, 1927, while driving along the Atsion-Hammonton road with her husband as a passenger, Mrs. Lilliendahl unaccountably pulled off on Great Swamp Lane, a sand side road three miles north of Hammonton, and drove 100 feet into the pine woods. A short time later Margaret appeared running down the main road “screaming and disheveled,” crying desperately for assistance. Two men driving by in a milk truck stopped to aid her and she led them to a dead Dr. Lilliendahl slumped down in the car, oddly enough in the driver’s seat, with three bullets in his head and neck, one through his jugular vein. Margaret told arriving police that “two Negroes” with guns had “jumped from the bushes” onto the car’s running board, kidnapped the couple, made them drive off the main road, robbed them of his cash and her jewelry and then shot her husband when he tried to resist. According to Margaret, she then passed out and, when she awakened, the assailants had disappeared.
Police were mobilized all over southern New Jersey in an attempt to capture the alleged murderers, but a preliminary investigation caused local authorities to begin to doubt Mrs. Lilliendahl’s account and to look into her possible affair with Beach, a liaison local gossips were well aware of. There were bloodstained bills in her purse and one of her rings lay on the ground, along with a letter to a “Peggy Anderson” apparently from Beach, who was described by journalists as a “raiser of fancy chickens and a rustic playboy,” as well as a “rustic Romeo.” More letters to “Peggy Anderson,” a pseudonym used by Mrs. Lilliendahl, soon appeared and a man fitting Beach’s description pawned some of Margaret’s allegedly stolen jewelry in Philadelphia.
Neighbors told police that Beach had been a “frequent visitor” to the Lilliendahl home, and that the couple had “frequent quarrels” including a recent one involving Margaret’s relationship with Beach. Young Alfred Lilliendahl confirmed his parents’ troubled relationship. As police began to dig deeper into the evidence, they found that a road map in the “death car” had an “X” marking the spot where the fatal incident occurred, and that there was a piece of colored cloth tied to a tree at the location as well. A county detective stated that “the only people who could have committed this crime were the two Negroes or the woman.” There were, however, no male footprints in the sand around the car. Atlantic County Prosecutor Louis Repetto decided that there was more than enough circumstantial evidence to arrest both apparent perpetrators, who had been out on bail as “material witnesses,” four days after the murder.
Under arrest, Mrs. Lilliendahl came up with another scenario for her husband’s murder: “I am now convinced that my husband was killed by a drug addict.” Referring to his shady opiate distribution past in New York and northern New Jersey, she went on to state that: “My husband dealt with all sorts of people. If I had his books I could show you the names of many gunmen in them. When he closed his New York office he was arrested by government agents for violation of the federal narcotics act, but the case was nolle prossed. [“To discontinue something by entering a "nolle prosequi," which is an entry in a criminal action denoting that the prosecutor will not prosecute the case further in whole or as to one or more of several counts or one or more of several defendants.” Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of Law.] He gave up his medical practice. Lots of times on our automobile rides we have been followed by desperate looking men. On several occasions the doctor hinted to me that his life had been threatened.” She added that any arguments between her late husband and Beach had to do with “how to handle chickens” and that the admitted correspondence with “Peggy Anderson” was about the “chicken fancier’s” concern with keeping posted on the doctor’s health.
Assistant Prosecutor A. Cameron Hinkle dismissed Margaret’s latest storyline and proceeded to have the county grand jury indict both her and Beach. The ensuing trial resulted in the invasion of May’s Landing, the Atlantic County seat and future “national capital of the nudists,” by the “H. M. T. L. (Husband Murder Trial Legion)” of reporters and photographers, eager to provide entertainment, much of it unrelated to the murder itself, for people across the country. Noted fiction writer and celebrity journalist Damon Runyan, who covered the trial for the Hearst Newspapers, observed that Margaret, dubbed “the Black Widow of South Vineland” by the press, was a “a passionate type of woman” and described Beach as “the hottest man in his home township, even if he is not as young as he used to be.” Runyon sat behind Margaret during the trial and observed that “Mrs. Lilliendahl uses a brand of perfume known as Incarnat, made by Piver. I offer this information for the benefit of my lady readers.”
Another reporter was puzzled as to why the “tall and stately Mrs. Lilliendahl” was attracted to the “short and dumpy” Beach, who, to the delight of the press, local people oddly regarded as an “ardent Lothario” and the “Don Juan of the countryside.” Yet another writer countered that opinion by noting that Margaret’s “dominant characteristic” was her “buck teeth.” Margaret’s demeanor was compared unfavorably with that of Frances Hall, who, also accused of her husband’s murder, had taken the stand at the recent Hall-Mills trial in New Brunswick.
Prosecution witness Samuel Bark, “a trick roper and circus man from Oklahoma” testified that Beach had approached him after the murder in Baltimore to borrow money, saying that he was “in a terrible jam” and admitting that he had killed Dr. Lilliendahl in a quarrel over money the doctor owed him. Bark also said that Beach told him that he was running “dope up to New York for Lilliendahl.” Conversely, Bark was accused of trying to blackmail Mrs. Lilliendahl’s attorney Robert H. McCarter through false testimony, which cast doubt on his admittedly improbable story. Harry F. Sanderson, a traveling aluminum salesman, testified that he saw a man resembling Beach fleeing the scene, although he waffled on the identification under questioning. Other than that, the rest of the evidence against Margaret and Willis was circumstantial.
Three defense witnesses swore they had seen Beach eating lunch at a location twenty-five miles away at the time of the murder, and Beach testified that he had never even known Bark. He denied an affair with Margaret and said that his disagreement with Dr. Lilliendahl was over a remedy to “cure chickens,” and denied killing the doctor. Margaret testified, amidst periodic sobbing, that she had nothing to do with her husband’s death and that he was indeed murdered by “two Negroes.” She said she was aware of neighborhood gossip about her and Beach, but that there was nothing to it. She insisted that she “kept no secrets from my husband.”
Hinkle asked for a first-degree murder conviction and the death penalty for Margaret and Willis, and the case went to the jury on December 7, 1927. After numerous ballots over twenty-three hours, the jury of five women and seven men denied the prosecutor’s request and convicted the defendants of voluntary manslaughter, arguing that “reasonable doubt” existed since there were no eyewitnesses to the crime. One juror later told a reporter that the initial vote was “9 to 3 for acquittal.”
Both defendants were sentenced to ten years in prison, the maximum penalty. The judge was unhappy with the jury’s decision, declaring “why the jury brought in that verdict of manslaughter I don’t know. The crime was, without question, murder. They were being tried for first degree murder, and since the jury believed them guilty of a criminal homicide, I would not be justified in imposing less than the maximum sentence.”
The couple continued to declare their innocence, and allegedly “laughed and chatted” on their ride to the state prison in Trenton. On arrival Beach said “we won’t be here long.” That turned out to be true for him, albeit probably not in the sense that Beach meant it, as he died of a heart attack at the Bordentown prison farm on October 12, 1930.
Margaret, who shared a cottage at the New Jersey Reformatory for Women in Clinton with Lakehurst’s Ivy Giberson, another convicted husband murderer, worked “cutting out garments for use of inmates in other institutions.” A model prisoner, she was paroled when it appeared she was “near death” from cancer on June 29, 1934, but prison authorities commented that she could still work “and intended to earn her living by sewing.” Margaret Lilliendahl left for Connecticut to rejoin her now fifteen-year-old son, who was in the care of relatives, and was not heard from again, although a 1948 account of the case reported that she had survived her illness and was working as a “housekeeper for a wealthy resident of Connecticut.”
Murder in the Highlands by “a dwarflike man”
On November 14, 1927, Elizabeth attorney Peter Olde was on the telephone in his office with his business partner, Highlands, New Jersey inventor Herbert O. Meisterknecht, when he heard a noise, a groan, and the phone went dead. Olde quickly called hardware merchant Frank Siegfried, whose store was 100 feet away from Meisterknecht’s Shrewsbury Avenue shop. Siegfried ran over to check on his neighbor, picking up lobsterman Irving Parker on the way. As they approached, a “dwarflike man in a blue suit” ran by them in the opposite direction and entered a waiting car.
Parker said later that the man stopped for a second and handed him a note. There were various reports on what that note said. One version reported that it announced that: “I have shot my brother-in-law.” There were several other versions of what was written on the paper, however, including: “Alexander Schreiber, Everton Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio. It might be necessary to call the police soon, and if they want me I can be found at this address.” Siegfried and Parker caught a glimpse of the license plate on the getaway car, but only enough to discern that it was registered in Essex County, New Jersey. Entering the shop, they found Meisterknecht dead on the floor, shot once in the head and three times in the body. Siegfried called the police.
The “dwarflike man” was the apparently short in stature Alexander Schreiber, who indeed was Meisterknecht’s brother in law, and was known as a mentally unstable religious fanatic, who, ironically, also ran a speakeasy in Cleveland. Parker recalled that Schreiber approached him and Meisterknecht several days before, belligerently shouting at Parker: “Do you know this fellow Meisterknecht? He has been impersonating a navy officer and has committed bigamy.” Schreiber yelled that Meisterknecht had “a wife and kids in Yonkers” and had been treating his sister Sophie “like a dog.” Parker left as the two men argued. Meisterknecht later asked the lobsterman: “What did you make of that duck? A little off his nut, wouldn’t you say?”
It turned out that Meisterknecht, who had met and married Sophie Schreiber while on a business trip to Cleveland the year before, was indeed previously married and had apparently never filed for divorce from his first spouse, Susan. She did, however, refuse to sign a statement saying that she was Meisterknecht’s housekeeper, rather than his wife. Susan was aware of her husband’s bigamy, but he sent her support money to keep her quiet and she later said “I did not object to his association with the other woman. What was the use?” She told a reporter that she had last seen her husband at the funeral of their son, who had died in an accident in September, 1927, and that he had hinted at a possible reconciliation. She added that a private detective who said he had been hired by Schreiber had contacted her in New York and quizzed her on her marital status.
Meisterknecht was another of those eccentric and elusive characters who seemed to proliferate in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Born in Germany in 1883, he emigrated to the United States in 1909, became a naturalized citizen, and in 1920 was a shipyard mechanic in New York, although he had claimed to be a mechanical engineer on his draft registration card in 1918. Meisterknecht met Peter Olde while working on Olde’s boat and convinced the attorney that he was actually an engineer and inventor developing an innovative “gauge for gasoline pumps” that would measure flow more accurately than those in service at the time, as well as “a new type of internal combustion engine.”
Olde, convinced he had met a “mechanical genius,” agreed to finance Meisterknecht’s work as a partner in “Emmo Manufacturing” and the inventor moved to Highlands, where he had previously lived some years before. Most of Meisterknecht’s time seems to have been spent developing his allegedly revolutionary gasoline gauge. The partners wanted to sell the rights to the invention to Standard Oil, which had reportedly expressed considerable interest in the device, and they traveled to Cleveland several times to negotiate a possible deal with the company.
Police all over the state of New Jersey and beyond were soon searching for the thirty-seven-year-old Shreiber, who continued to elude them. A man resembling him was arrested at a Trenton gas station, but released. Another report had him boarding a train in Newark for Cleveland, but when state troopers reached the city with a murder warrant, there was no sign of him. Rumors that he was hiding in Newark or New York City also turned out to be dead ends. The case was further complicated by the discovery by Monmouth County detectives of correspondence between Olde and Meisterknecht indicating that Olde intended to break up the partnership, and that Meisterknecht had previously turned down a significant offer from Standard Oil for his invention. Olde denied that that had been his intention.
Meanwhile, funeral preparations for Meisterknecht proceeded, with one complication. Susan and her daughter came down from Yonkers, accompanied by an attorney, and, in an emotionally charged confrontation during the services, claimed Meisterknecht’s body. As both wives, “who alternately sobbed and ridiculed each others’ grief ” stood by, Meisterknecht was stashed in a “receiving vault” at Fairview Cemetery in Middletown until things were sorted out. The first Mrs. Meisterknecht prevailed and the murdered inventor’s body was eventually granted to Susan and transported to Yonkers for burial. Susan also inherited Meisterknecht’s patent rights. In death, as in life, Meisterknecht remained a man of mystery. Although his coffin was covered by a flag at the Fairview temporary interment, the inventor’s claim to have been a United States Navy officer in World War I seems somewhat dubious, to say the least, with no extant records reflecting such service, although someone from Ohio with the same name served as an enlisted man in the Army’s Corps of Engineers in World War I.
It appeared that the elusive Schreiber had committed the perfect crime, escaping to parts unknown. On April 13, 1928, however, a Keyport clam digger working in shallow water along the shore of Raritan Bay came upon a decomposed body, which “in many respects resembled the missing Alex Schreiber, murderer of Herbert O. Meisterknecht, Highlands inventor.” Relatives were unable to definitively identify the badly decomposed corpse, however, which was buried in a local “Potter’s Field.” The police told the press that “the search for him is going to continue, for some time at least.”
It turned out to be far more than “some time.” The case remains officially open to this day, although the fact that Schreiber was never heard from again makes it distinctly possible that the corpse found floating in Raritan Bay was him. Despite that possibility, rumors of Schreiber sightings circulated for many years. He was back in Cleveland, he had fled to Germany, he was sighted in Miami, and he was hiding in Lakewood, New Jersey. On one occasion in 1934 the Highlands Police were notified that New Jersey State Police had detained a man named Alexander Schreiber in Pennsauken. Accompanied by a Highlands policeman, Irving Parker traveled to Pennsauken, but could not provide a positive identification, saying that although the man resembled Schreiber, he had only glimpsed him briefly years before. Over two decades later a newspaper article on the case noted that there was still a murder warrant out for the “dwarflike man.”
A 1949 interview with Monmouth County Detective William S. Mustoe disclosed that Mustoe, who was involved in the initial investigation, believed Schreiber had “a combination of motives,” and that “a group of Cleveland men sought one of Meisterknecht’s inventions and inflamed the emotionally unstable Schreiber, then the operator of a Cleveland speakeasy, to kill the inventor because of the fake marriage.”
Around 1960, young Leslie Layton and his father were visiting his uncle Irving Parker, the lobsterman who was at the scene of the murder, at the Highlands sewer plant, which Irving had managed for many years. While they were there, a man walked in and asked the sewer manager some questions about the Meisterknecht murder. Irving told him “that about a week after the murder, two men drove up in a black car and asked him some questions, and then one opened his coat and showed a revolver, said “be careful” and drove away.” Leslie later asked his father who the men in the car they were talking about were, and was answered with two words: “Standard Oil.”
Encompassing a span of thirty-one years, author Joe Bilby’s latest book about the Garden State is a chronicle of the bizarre, curious, and sometimes startling criminal events that took place in New Jersey and made national news between 1922 and 1952, a period sometimes referred to as the “Noir” era.
The modern public is obsessed with and entertained by crime stories, but that interest is not just a recent phenomenon. The unusual story sells newspapers, and the weirder the story or the people involved the better. Back in the era when much of America’s home entertainment was provided by reading the newspaper, the post-World War I “Jazz Age” decline in societal mores was exacerbated by the lawlessness that accompanied Prohibition, leaving the American public appalled, but also fascinated, by tales of love, betrayal, and murder.
The stories you are about to read include those of William d’Alton Mann, the nineteenth century founder of tabloid journalism, “rum running” and real estate swindling in Nucky Johnson’s Atlantic City, the murder of a monkey-collecting circus owner by a howling hit man hired by his brother-in-law, the “Hollywood on the Hudson” death of stuntman “Handsome Jack,” the career of Trenton’s freelance executioner, the creative counterfeiter from Elizabeth, the case of a Klansman literally hammered to death, the murder of a bigamist inventor in the Highlands by a “dwarflike man,” the sad fate of the “Radium Girls” of Orange, the bizarre Westfield “torch murderer,” a foiled lynching in Asbury Park, the con man founder of “Storybook Land,” the ironic end tale of New Jersey’s Sherlock Holmes, the Hoboken stamp collector who put his wife up for sale, ghost pretenders on the Morro Castle, the death of the “Dutchman” in Newark, the veteran who claimed to be the shortest man in the army, and much, much more.
About the Author
As a neighborly friendship apparently transitioned into a full-blown love affair, Margaret and Willis allegedly plotted to eliminate the doctor. On September 15, 1927, while driving along the Atsion-Hammonton road with her husband as a passenger, Mrs. Lilliendahl unaccountably pulled off on Great Swamp Lane, a sand side road three miles north of Hammonton, and drove 100 feet into the pine woods. A short time later Margaret appeared running down the main road “screaming and disheveled,” crying desperately for assistance. Two men driving by in a milk truck stopped to aid her and she led them to a dead Dr. Lilliendahl slumped down in the car, oddly enough in the driver’s seat, with three bullets in his head and neck, one through his jugular vein. Margaret told arriving police that “two Negroes” with guns had “jumped from the bushes” onto the car’s running board, kidnapped the couple, made them drive off the main road, robbed them of his cash and her jewelry and then shot her husband when he tried to resist. According to Margaret, she then passed out and, when she awakened, the assailants had disappeared.
Police were mobilized all over southern New Jersey in an attempt to capture the alleged murderers, but a preliminary investigation caused local authorities to begin to doubt Mrs. Lilliendahl’s account and to look into her possible affair with Beach, a liaison local gossips were well aware of. There were bloodstained bills in her purse and one of her rings lay on the ground, along with a letter to a “Peggy Anderson” apparently from Beach, who was described by journalists as a “raiser of fancy chickens and a rustic playboy,” as well as a “rustic Romeo.” More letters to “Peggy Anderson,” a pseudonym used by Mrs. Lilliendahl, soon appeared and a man fitting Beach’s description pawned some of Margaret’s allegedly stolen jewelry in Philadelphia.
Neighbors told police that Beach had been a “frequent visitor” to the Lilliendahl home, and that the couple had “frequent quarrels” including a recent one involving Margaret’s relationship with Beach. Young Alfred Lilliendahl confirmed his parents’ troubled relationship. As police began to dig deeper into the evidence, they found that a road map in the “death car” had an “X” marking the spot where the fatal incident occurred, and that there was a piece of colored cloth tied to a tree at the location as well. A county detective stated that “the only people who could have committed this crime were the two Negroes or the woman.” There were, however, no male footprints in the sand around the car. Atlantic County Prosecutor Louis Repetto decided that there was more than enough circumstantial evidence to arrest both apparent perpetrators, who had been out on bail as “material witnesses,” four days after the murder.
Under arrest, Mrs. Lilliendahl came up with another scenario for her husband’s murder: “I am now convinced that my husband was killed by a drug addict.” Referring to his shady opiate distribution past in New York and northern New Jersey, she went on to state that: “My husband dealt with all sorts of people. If I had his books I could show you the names of many gunmen in them. When he closed his New York office he was arrested by government agents for violation of the federal narcotics act, but the case was nolle prossed. [“To discontinue something by entering a "nolle prosequi," which is an entry in a criminal action denoting that the prosecutor will not prosecute the case further in whole or as to one or more of several counts or one or more of several defendants.” Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of Law.] He gave up his medical practice. Lots of times on our automobile rides we have been followed by desperate looking men. On several occasions the doctor hinted to me that his life had been threatened.” She added that any arguments between her late husband and Beach had to do with “how to handle chickens” and that the admitted correspondence with “Peggy Anderson” was about the “chicken fancier’s” concern with keeping posted on the doctor’s health.
Assistant Prosecutor A. Cameron Hinkle dismissed Margaret’s latest storyline and proceeded to have the county grand jury indict both her and Beach. The ensuing trial resulted in the invasion of May’s Landing, the Atlantic County seat and future “national capital of the nudists,” by the “H. M. T. L. (Husband Murder Trial Legion)” of reporters and photographers, eager to provide entertainment, much of it unrelated to the murder itself, for people across the country. Noted fiction writer and celebrity journalist Damon Runyan, who covered the trial for the Hearst Newspapers, observed that Margaret, dubbed “the Black Widow of South Vineland” by the press, was a “a passionate type of woman” and described Beach as “the hottest man in his home township, even if he is not as young as he used to be.” Runyon sat behind Margaret during the trial and observed that “Mrs. Lilliendahl uses a brand of perfume known as Incarnat, made by Piver. I offer this information for the benefit of my lady readers.”
Another reporter was puzzled as to why the “tall and stately Mrs. Lilliendahl” was attracted to the “short and dumpy” Beach, who, to the delight of the press, local people oddly regarded as an “ardent Lothario” and the “Don Juan of the countryside.” Yet another writer countered that opinion by noting that Margaret’s “dominant characteristic” was her “buck teeth.” Margaret’s demeanor was compared unfavorably with that of Frances Hall, who, also accused of her husband’s murder, had taken the stand at the recent Hall-Mills trial in New Brunswick.
Prosecution witness Samuel Bark, “a trick roper and circus man from Oklahoma” testified that Beach had approached him after the murder in Baltimore to borrow money, saying that he was “in a terrible jam” and admitting that he had killed Dr. Lilliendahl in a quarrel over money the doctor owed him. Bark also said that Beach told him that he was running “dope up to New York for Lilliendahl.” Conversely, Bark was accused of trying to blackmail Mrs. Lilliendahl’s attorney Robert H. McCarter through false testimony, which cast doubt on his admittedly improbable story. Harry F. Sanderson, a traveling aluminum salesman, testified that he saw a man resembling Beach fleeing the scene, although he waffled on the identification under questioning. Other than that, the rest of the evidence against Margaret and Willis was circumstantial.
Three defense witnesses swore they had seen Beach eating lunch at a location twenty-five miles away at the time of the murder, and Beach testified that he had never even known Bark. He denied an affair with Margaret and said that his disagreement with Dr. Lilliendahl was over a remedy to “cure chickens,” and denied killing the doctor. Margaret testified, amidst periodic sobbing, that she had nothing to do with her husband’s death and that he was indeed murdered by “two Negroes.” She said she was aware of neighborhood gossip about her and Beach, but that there was nothing to it. She insisted that she “kept no secrets from my husband.”
Hinkle asked for a first-degree murder conviction and the death penalty for Margaret and Willis, and the case went to the jury on December 7, 1927. After numerous ballots over twenty-three hours, the jury of five women and seven men denied the prosecutor’s request and convicted the defendants of voluntary manslaughter, arguing that “reasonable doubt” existed since there were no eyewitnesses to the crime. One juror later told a reporter that the initial vote was “9 to 3 for acquittal.”
Both defendants were sentenced to ten years in prison, the maximum penalty. The judge was unhappy with the jury’s decision, declaring “why the jury brought in that verdict of manslaughter I don’t know. The crime was, without question, murder. They were being tried for first degree murder, and since the jury believed them guilty of a criminal homicide, I would not be justified in imposing less than the maximum sentence.”
The couple continued to declare their innocence, and allegedly “laughed and chatted” on their ride to the state prison in Trenton. On arrival Beach said “we won’t be here long.” That turned out to be true for him, albeit probably not in the sense that Beach meant it, as he died of a heart attack at the Bordentown prison farm on October 12, 1930.
Margaret, who shared a cottage at the New Jersey Reformatory for Women in Clinton with Lakehurst’s Ivy Giberson, another convicted husband murderer, worked “cutting out garments for use of inmates in other institutions.” A model prisoner, she was paroled when it appeared she was “near death” from cancer on June 29, 1934, but prison authorities commented that she could still work “and intended to earn her living by sewing.” Margaret Lilliendahl left for Connecticut to rejoin her now fifteen-year-old son, who was in the care of relatives, and was not heard from again, although a 1948 account of the case reported that she had survived her illness and was working as a “housekeeper for a wealthy resident of Connecticut.”
Murder in the Highlands by “a dwarflike man”
On November 14, 1927, Elizabeth attorney Peter Olde was on the telephone in his office with his business partner, Highlands, New Jersey inventor Herbert O. Meisterknecht, when he heard a noise, a groan, and the phone went dead. Olde quickly called hardware merchant Frank Siegfried, whose store was 100 feet away from Meisterknecht’s Shrewsbury Avenue shop. Siegfried ran over to check on his neighbor, picking up lobsterman Irving Parker on the way. As they approached, a “dwarflike man in a blue suit” ran by them in the opposite direction and entered a waiting car.
Parker said later that the man stopped for a second and handed him a note. There were various reports on what that note said. One version reported that it announced that: “I have shot my brother-in-law.” There were several other versions of what was written on the paper, however, including: “Alexander Schreiber, Everton Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio. It might be necessary to call the police soon, and if they want me I can be found at this address.” Siegfried and Parker caught a glimpse of the license plate on the getaway car, but only enough to discern that it was registered in Essex County, New Jersey. Entering the shop, they found Meisterknecht dead on the floor, shot once in the head and three times in the body. Siegfried called the police.
The “dwarflike man” was the apparently short in stature Alexander Schreiber, who indeed was Meisterknecht’s brother in law, and was known as a mentally unstable religious fanatic, who, ironically, also ran a speakeasy in Cleveland. Parker recalled that Schreiber approached him and Meisterknecht several days before, belligerently shouting at Parker: “Do you know this fellow Meisterknecht? He has been impersonating a navy officer and has committed bigamy.” Schreiber yelled that Meisterknecht had “a wife and kids in Yonkers” and had been treating his sister Sophie “like a dog.” Parker left as the two men argued. Meisterknecht later asked the lobsterman: “What did you make of that duck? A little off his nut, wouldn’t you say?”
It turned out that Meisterknecht, who had met and married Sophie Schreiber while on a business trip to Cleveland the year before, was indeed previously married and had apparently never filed for divorce from his first spouse, Susan. She did, however, refuse to sign a statement saying that she was Meisterknecht’s housekeeper, rather than his wife. Susan was aware of her husband’s bigamy, but he sent her support money to keep her quiet and she later said “I did not object to his association with the other woman. What was the use?” She told a reporter that she had last seen her husband at the funeral of their son, who had died in an accident in September, 1927, and that he had hinted at a possible reconciliation. She added that a private detective who said he had been hired by Schreiber had contacted her in New York and quizzed her on her marital status.
Meisterknecht was another of those eccentric and elusive characters who seemed to proliferate in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Born in Germany in 1883, he emigrated to the United States in 1909, became a naturalized citizen, and in 1920 was a shipyard mechanic in New York, although he had claimed to be a mechanical engineer on his draft registration card in 1918. Meisterknecht met Peter Olde while working on Olde’s boat and convinced the attorney that he was actually an engineer and inventor developing an innovative “gauge for gasoline pumps” that would measure flow more accurately than those in service at the time, as well as “a new type of internal combustion engine.”
Olde, convinced he had met a “mechanical genius,” agreed to finance Meisterknecht’s work as a partner in “Emmo Manufacturing” and the inventor moved to Highlands, where he had previously lived some years before. Most of Meisterknecht’s time seems to have been spent developing his allegedly revolutionary gasoline gauge. The partners wanted to sell the rights to the invention to Standard Oil, which had reportedly expressed considerable interest in the device, and they traveled to Cleveland several times to negotiate a possible deal with the company.
Police all over the state of New Jersey and beyond were soon searching for the thirty-seven-year-old Shreiber, who continued to elude them. A man resembling him was arrested at a Trenton gas station, but released. Another report had him boarding a train in Newark for Cleveland, but when state troopers reached the city with a murder warrant, there was no sign of him. Rumors that he was hiding in Newark or New York City also turned out to be dead ends. The case was further complicated by the discovery by Monmouth County detectives of correspondence between Olde and Meisterknecht indicating that Olde intended to break up the partnership, and that Meisterknecht had previously turned down a significant offer from Standard Oil for his invention. Olde denied that that had been his intention.
Meanwhile, funeral preparations for Meisterknecht proceeded, with one complication. Susan and her daughter came down from Yonkers, accompanied by an attorney, and, in an emotionally charged confrontation during the services, claimed Meisterknecht’s body. As both wives, “who alternately sobbed and ridiculed each others’ grief ” stood by, Meisterknecht was stashed in a “receiving vault” at Fairview Cemetery in Middletown until things were sorted out. The first Mrs. Meisterknecht prevailed and the murdered inventor’s body was eventually granted to Susan and transported to Yonkers for burial. Susan also inherited Meisterknecht’s patent rights. In death, as in life, Meisterknecht remained a man of mystery. Although his coffin was covered by a flag at the Fairview temporary interment, the inventor’s claim to have been a United States Navy officer in World War I seems somewhat dubious, to say the least, with no extant records reflecting such service, although someone from Ohio with the same name served as an enlisted man in the Army’s Corps of Engineers in World War I.
It appeared that the elusive Schreiber had committed the perfect crime, escaping to parts unknown. On April 13, 1928, however, a Keyport clam digger working in shallow water along the shore of Raritan Bay came upon a decomposed body, which “in many respects resembled the missing Alex Schreiber, murderer of Herbert O. Meisterknecht, Highlands inventor.” Relatives were unable to definitively identify the badly decomposed corpse, however, which was buried in a local “Potter’s Field.” The police told the press that “the search for him is going to continue, for some time at least.”
It turned out to be far more than “some time.” The case remains officially open to this day, although the fact that Schreiber was never heard from again makes it distinctly possible that the corpse found floating in Raritan Bay was him. Despite that possibility, rumors of Schreiber sightings circulated for many years. He was back in Cleveland, he had fled to Germany, he was sighted in Miami, and he was hiding in Lakewood, New Jersey. On one occasion in 1934 the Highlands Police were notified that New Jersey State Police had detained a man named Alexander Schreiber in Pennsauken. Accompanied by a Highlands policeman, Irving Parker traveled to Pennsauken, but could not provide a positive identification, saying that although the man resembled Schreiber, he had only glimpsed him briefly years before. Over two decades later a newspaper article on the case noted that there was still a murder warrant out for the “dwarflike man.”
A 1949 interview with Monmouth County Detective William S. Mustoe disclosed that Mustoe, who was involved in the initial investigation, believed Schreiber had “a combination of motives,” and that “a group of Cleveland men sought one of Meisterknecht’s inventions and inflamed the emotionally unstable Schreiber, then the operator of a Cleveland speakeasy, to kill the inventor because of the fake marriage.”
Around 1960, young Leslie Layton and his father were visiting his uncle Irving Parker, the lobsterman who was at the scene of the murder, at the Highlands sewer plant, which Irving had managed for many years. While they were there, a man walked in and asked the sewer manager some questions about the Meisterknecht murder. Irving told him “that about a week after the murder, two men drove up in a black car and asked him some questions, and then one opened his coat and showed a revolver, said “be careful” and drove away.” Leslie later asked his father who the men in the car they were talking about were, and was answered with two words: “Standard Oil.”
About the Book
Encompassing a span of thirty-one years, author Joe Bilby’s latest book about the Garden State is a chronicle of the bizarre, curious, and sometimes startling criminal events that took place in New Jersey and made national news between 1922 and 1952, a period sometimes referred to as the “Noir” era.The modern public is obsessed with and entertained by crime stories, but that interest is not just a recent phenomenon. The unusual story sells newspapers, and the weirder the story or the people involved the better. Back in the era when much of America’s home entertainment was provided by reading the newspaper, the post-World War I “Jazz Age” decline in societal mores was exacerbated by the lawlessness that accompanied Prohibition, leaving the American public appalled, but also fascinated, by tales of love, betrayal, and murder.
The stories you are about to read include those of William d’Alton Mann, the nineteenth century founder of tabloid journalism, “rum running” and real estate swindling in Nucky Johnson’s Atlantic City, the murder of a monkey-collecting circus owner by a howling hit man hired by his brother-in-law, the “Hollywood on the Hudson” death of stuntman “Handsome Jack,” the career of Trenton’s freelance executioner, the creative counterfeiter from Elizabeth, the case of a Klansman literally hammered to death, the murder of a bigamist inventor in the Highlands by a “dwarflike man,” the sad fate of the “Radium Girls” of Orange, the bizarre Westfield “torch murderer,” a foiled lynching in Asbury Park, the con man founder of “Storybook Land,” the ironic end tale of New Jersey’s Sherlock Holmes, the Hoboken stamp collector who put his wife up for sale, ghost pretenders on the Morro Castle, the death of the “Dutchman” in Newark, the veteran who claimed to be the shortest man in the army, and much, much more.
About the Author
Joseph G. Bilby was born in Newark, New Jersey, received his BA and MA degrees in history from Seton Hall University and served as a lieutenant in the First Infantry Division in Vietnam in 1966-1967 and in the Army Reserve as assistant economics officer in the 303rd Civil Affairs Company from 1968-1970. He is retired from his position as Supervising Investigator for the New Jersey Department of Labor, has taught military history on the community college level and lectured widely on Civil War and New Jersey history. He is currently part time Assistant Curator of the New Jersey National Guard and Militia Museum in Sea Girt, New Jersey and a free lance writer and historical consultant. He is the author, editor or co-author of fifteen books and over 400 articles on New Jersey history and folklore, military history and outdoor subjects in both Internet and print venues and also a columnist for The Civil War News and New Jersey Sportsmen News.
Mr. Bilby also contributed a number of entries on historical and outdoor subjects to the Encyclopedia of New Jersey (Rutgers University Press, 2004). A second, expanded, edition of his history of the 15th New Jersey Infantry was published in July 2001. He was appointed a Guest Curator for the New Jersey State Museum’s New Jersey Civil War flags exhibit, which was opened to the public on October 26, 2000, a consultant to the Middlesex County Heritage Commission’s 2004 Civil War exhibit, a member of the Board of Review for the Princeton Historical Society’s 2007 Civil War exhibit, an assistant curator for the Middlesex County Heritage Commission’s 2017 World War I exhibit, and has reviewed and edited manuscripts for Rutgers and the State University of New York presses.
Mr. Bilby was the 2011 recipient of the Jane G. Clayton Award, annually presented by the Monmouth County Clerk to honor an individual who, over a substantial number of years, has made exceptional contributions to an awareness, understanding, and/or preservation of the history of Monmouth County, New Jersey. New Jersey Goes to War, which he edited, was named the “Best New Jersey Reference Book” for 2010 by the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance, and he is also the recipient of a 2011 New Jersey Historical Commission Award of Merit for his work on the state’s military history. He was recently named as an ex-officio member of the board of the Advocates for New Jersey History. In 2013 he was awarded the New Jersey Civilian Meritorious Service Medal by the state’s Division of Military and Veterans Affairs for his work in dealing with the aftereffects of Hurricane Sandy, which devastated the museum at Sea Girt.
Mr. Bilby is a member of the Outdoor Writers Association of America, the Society of the First Infantry Division and the Company of Military Historians. He has three grown children and three grandchildren and lives at the New Jersey shore.
Mr. Bilby also contributed a number of entries on historical and outdoor subjects to the Encyclopedia of New Jersey (Rutgers University Press, 2004). A second, expanded, edition of his history of the 15th New Jersey Infantry was published in July 2001. He was appointed a Guest Curator for the New Jersey State Museum’s New Jersey Civil War flags exhibit, which was opened to the public on October 26, 2000, a consultant to the Middlesex County Heritage Commission’s 2004 Civil War exhibit, a member of the Board of Review for the Princeton Historical Society’s 2007 Civil War exhibit, an assistant curator for the Middlesex County Heritage Commission’s 2017 World War I exhibit, and has reviewed and edited manuscripts for Rutgers and the State University of New York presses.
Mr. Bilby was the 2011 recipient of the Jane G. Clayton Award, annually presented by the Monmouth County Clerk to honor an individual who, over a substantial number of years, has made exceptional contributions to an awareness, understanding, and/or preservation of the history of Monmouth County, New Jersey. New Jersey Goes to War, which he edited, was named the “Best New Jersey Reference Book” for 2010 by the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance, and he is also the recipient of a 2011 New Jersey Historical Commission Award of Merit for his work on the state’s military history. He was recently named as an ex-officio member of the board of the Advocates for New Jersey History. In 2013 he was awarded the New Jersey Civilian Meritorious Service Medal by the state’s Division of Military and Veterans Affairs for his work in dealing with the aftereffects of Hurricane Sandy, which devastated the museum at Sea Girt.
Mr. Bilby is a member of the Outdoor Writers Association of America, the Society of the First Infantry Division and the Company of Military Historians. He has three grown children and three grandchildren and lives at the New Jersey shore.
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