Chicago Tribune · February 9, 1888

Preserved by Chicagology

Murder of a Millionaire

Amos J. Snell Shot Dead in His Own Hallway by Midnight Burglars

Chicago, Illinois  ·  Wednesday, February 9, 1888

The murder of Amos Jerome Snell, one of the wealthiest men on Chicago's West Side, sent a shock through the city unlike any crime in recent memory. He was found dead in the hallway of his own mansion on the morning of February 8, 1888 — shot twice by burglars who had broken in during the night and vanished before dawn.

Snell, 64 years old and a man of considerable physical courage, heard the intruders in his parlor and came downstairs armed with an old muzzle-loading pistol. He fired a shot through the closed parlor door and ordered the men out. They answered with gunfire. As he turned toward the front door, the parlor door swung open and two shots were fired — one struck him in the head, the other in the chest. He fell dead in the hallway.

His wife Henrietta was in Milwaukee with their daughter Grace Coffin. Two grandchildren were asleep upstairs. They heard nothing. The servants, Rosa Buckstahlen and Ida Bjornstad, had been awakened at 2 o'clock in the morning by the sound of a gunshot. They heard shouting, then silence. Too frightened to investigate, they went back to sleep.

It was not until five hours later — when the coachman, Henry Winklebook, came in to tend the furnace — that the body was discovered. The basement office had been ransacked. The safe stood open. A strongbox lay broken on the floor. Silver had been piled on the parlor table, ready to be carried out.

"Not knowing the sense of fear, he rushed downstairs and commanded them to leave his house. The only answer was the ball that pierced his heart."

— Biographical Dictionary of the United States, 1893

Police detectives pieced together the method of entry: the burglars had cut through a panel in the rear door and reached through the hole to open it from the inside. Footprints in the snow told the rest — two men had entered the house; a third stood outside and watched. By midnight, more than twenty known thieves and suspicious characters had been swept up in a police dragnet. None could be connected to the crime.

The first real lead came from a lodging house landlady named Ella S. Wicks. One of her tenants — a man who called himself Mr. Scott — had left the morning after the murder, paying a week's rent in advance and saying he would be away for a few days. In his room, Mrs. Wicks found silverware, clothing, jewelry, and fragments of a check stolen from Snell's office.

The description she gave matched a safe-cracker known to police as Billy Gebright — in truth, William B. Tascott, the black sheep of a prominent Chicago family with a criminal record stretching west. Police declared him the prime suspect and issued a description nationwide. They had no photograph. They were confident he would be caught within days.

He was not. Over the next five years, more than a thousand men were arrested on suspicion across the country. Tascott was reported seen in Los Angeles, Missouri, Louisville, Winnipeg, West Virginia, and San Francisco — where a woman claimed she had helped him escape to China. None of the sightings led anywhere. The reward, raised to $50,000 by Henrietta Snell, was described by the Daily Inter Ocean as "the largest amount ever offered for the capture of any human being in the world." It was never collected.

In December 1910, a professional Chicago thief named James Gillan confessed on his deathbed that he — not William Tascott — had killed Amos Snell during the burglary of February 8, 1888. Tascott, he said, had nothing to do with it.

It was not the first such confession. Over the years, several men had claimed responsibility for the crime, each seeking a measure of notoriety in their final hours. None were verified. The case was never officially reopened.

By then, the Snell family had already collapsed. Henrietta was dead. Albert Snell had spent his entire inheritance and died in a ten-cent lodging house. His daughter Grace — married seven times, divorced six — held the distinction of being the most frequently married woman in the United States. The mansion on Ada Street, once the grandest house on the West Side, had become a gray, weather-beaten boarding house.

The murder of Amos Jerome Snell remains, to this day, officially unsolved.