Rosa Buckstahlen and Ida Bjornstad, servants in the Chicago mansion of Amos J. Snell, were awakened at 2:00 the morning of February 8, 1888, by the sound of a gunshot from the floor below. They heard someone shout “Get out! Get out of here!” followed by more gunshots, then silence. Thinking that all was well—or more likely, too frightened to do anything else—the girls went back to sleep.

Five hours later, Mr. Snell’s coachman, Henry Winklebook, entered the house to attend the furnace fires and found evidence of a break-in. Snell’s basement office was strewn with scattered papers, his safe was open, and a broken strongbox lay on the floor. Winklebook hurried upstairs to inform his employer and found his lifeless body lying in a pool of blood in the hallway. 

The police were called to the scene, and detectives managed to piece together what had transpired. Burglars had cut through a panel in a door at the rear of the house and had reached through the hole to open the door. From there the thieves went straight to Snell’s office and had attempted to pry open the safe before discovering that the combination had not been turned and the door opened easily. They also found and broke into a strongbox. 

No one but Snell knew what was in the safe and strongbox and there may not have been enough value there to satisfy the thieves. They went upstairs and began gathering items of silver which they piled onto a table in the parlor. This was when Snell awoke and came downstairs in his nightshirt, armed with an old muzzle-loading pistol. He fired a shot through the closed parlor door and shouted the words heard by the servants. The thieves responded by firing a pistol shot through the door. As Snell hurried toward the front door to go outside, the parlor door opened and the thieves fired two shots, one to Snell’s head the other to his chest. Snell fell dead, and the burglars fled out the back door and over the rear fence. 

64-year-old Amos Snell had made his fortune in real estate and was one of the wealthiest men in Chicago. He lived in the West Side mansion with his wife and servants. Their children, three daughters, and one son, had all married and moved away. On the night of the murder, his wife, Henrietta, had been in Milwaukee with their daughter, Grace Coffin. Their two grandchildren who had been staying with Mr. Snell had mercifully slept through the commotion.

The police believed that the Snell mansion had been targeted by professional burglars. Several houses in the neighborhood had recently been robbed, and earlier in the week suspicious men had been seen outside the house. From footprints in the snow, the police determined that two men had broken into the house, they believed that a third stood outside watching. By midnight a police dragnet resulted in the arrest of more than 20 known thieves and other suspicious characters. 

A young man named Charles Benedict was arrested carrying a suspicious bundle that was found to contain: 6 dark lanterns, 6 chilled augers, one chilled extension bit, 6 8oz slung shots, 6 steel knuckles,  2oz dynamite, 2oz giant powder, 3 dirk knives, 3 muffled alarm whistles, 6 42-caliber Colt's navy revolvers, 4 steel jimmies, 6 boxes of lucifer fuses, 44 mail-pouch keys (US regulation), 42 different skeleton keys, and 1 diamond glass-cutter. In custody, Benedict panicked and began crying. He said he had come to Chicago from Marshalltown, Iowa, to buy tools for his “gang” of burglars. He denied any connection to the Snell murder, though no one had asked. The police kept Benedict in custody but did not believe he was involved in the Snell murder. 

In fact, none of the men arrested could be connected to the crime and days passed without any progress in locating the killer. The newspapers began comparing the Snell murder with the murder of Benjamin Nathan in New York where the perpetrator was never caught. The main difference was in the Nathan murder even the motive was uncertain while Snell’s murder was almost certainly a burglary gone wrong. Snell’s son Albert offered a reward of $20,000 for the arrest of his father’s killer. Pressure on the police to solve the case became so strong that it forced the resignation of Chief of Police Ebersold.

The first break in the case came when Mrs. Ella S. Wicks, a lodging house landlady, reported that one of her tenants had what appeared to be stolen merchandise in his closet. The man, who gave his name as Mr. Scott, rented the room in January. In February he paid her a week’s rent in advance and said he was going away for a few days and she should keep his room locked. He left the day after the murder. Mrs. Wicks went into the room and found some silverware, clothing, and pieces of jewelry believed to be stolen. None of the merchandise was from the Snell house but among his possession were fragments of check stolen from Snell’s office. 

The description Mrs. Wicks gave matched that of a safe-cracker the police knew as Billy Gebright. Gebright was actually an alias of a man named William B. Tascott, the black sheep of a prominent Chicago family, who had a criminal record in cities further west. Claiming to have additional evidence against him, the police declared Tascott the suspected killer of Amos Snell and offered a $2,000 reward for his capture.

They had no photograph of Tascott but they issued a description—22 or 23 years of age, 5 feet 8 or 9 inches high, 140 pounds weight, slim built, very erect, full round face, heavy eyebrows, very fair complexion, dark brown hair, thin on top of head cut short, large blue eyes, small, thin, dark mustache may be dyed—and distributed it nationwide. The police were confident that Tascott would be convicted when caught and that his capture was imminent. 

Chicago police had no luck in locating Tascott, but with $22,000 at stake, the rest of the country was ready to take up the search. The grand jury in Chicago rushed an indictment against Tascott to facilitate any necessary requisition from other states. 

On February 18, a man matching Tascott’s description was arrested in Los Angeles, California—it wasn’t him. On February 23, he was arrested in Lebanon, Missouri—also not Tascott. At the same time, Tascott was seen in Louisville, Kentucky and Springfield, Illinois. In March he was seen in Winnipeg, Manitoba and Boulder, Minnesota. Oscar Garland, an escaped convict from Minnesota, captured in Chicago claimed to be the true killer of Amos Snell—the first of many false confessions.
The false arrests and random sighting slowly decreased, and by the end of the year Mrs. Henrietta Snell, fearing her husband’s murder would be forgotten, increased the reward for his killer’s capture to $50,000. According to the Daily Inter Ocean, this made the reward on Tascott’s head, “the largest amount ever offered for the capture of any human being in the world.”

The sightings of Tascott did not increase, but the search area widened. In February 1889, Tascott was seen in West Virginia. In June, a woman in San Francisco claimed she helped Tascott escape to China. Then sighting died down again.

At the end of 1890, Snell’s children began fighting among themselves. Albert Stone, husband of one of Amos Snell’s daughters, had taken control of the case from the start. In November 1890, the wife of Albert Snell, Amos’s only son, publicly took issue with Stone’s handling of the case. Albert Stone issued a terse response which Mrs. Snell interpreted as an implication that she and her husband were involved in the murder. She filed three libel suits against Stone, demanding $300,000 damages. The same day she announced she had hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency to investigate the case.

Henrietta Snell had tried early on to get the Pinkertons on the case, but she wanted them to work for the reward. This was against the company’s basic principle, and the Pinkertons had declined. Presumably, Mrs. Albert Snell was now paying the Pinkertons regular fee.

The Pinkertons did their work in utter secrecy and divulged little to the press. A detective named Frank Golden claimed that some of Snell’s documents were in a safety deposit box in Cincinnati. He further claimed that the break-in had not been an ordinary burglary but was to steal documents for the benefit of one man deeply in debt to Amos Snell. Golden claimed he knew where Tascott was, but he was not the killer; if Golden had access to the deposit box, he could prove who the killer was. The Chicago press assumed Golden was a Pinkerton operative. In any case, nothing came from the Cincinnati theory, and the Pinkerton Agency denied having any role in the investigation.

In May 1893, States Attorney Kern announced that the Tascott investigation had ended, but the indictment against him would still hold if he were ever captured. By this time, it was estimated that more than 1,000 men, nationwide, had been arrested on suspicion but no one was held. Tascott was still occasionally sighted throughout the country, but the Snell case faded from public view.  

In December 1910, a Chicago professional thief named James Gillan confessed on his deathbed that he killed Amos Snell while burglarizing his house. William Tascott, he declared, had nothing to do with the crime. This was not the first deathbed confession to the crime; other professional criminals hoping to advance their post-mortem notoriety had taken responsibility for the crime, but their confessions were all debunked. This time, however, the Inter Ocean took Gillan’s confession as fact.

But by now it hardly mattered; the Snell family was in decline. Henrietta Snell was dead. Albert Snell spent all of his inheritance and died in “a 10 cent lodging house.” A.J. Stone lived in broken health and reduced circumstances. Amos’s daughter Grace, with seven marriages and six divorces,  had the dubious distinction of being the most frequently married woman in the United States. The Snell mansion became a “gray, forlorn, and weather-beaten” boarding house. And there is an even chance that Amos Snell’s killer is still unknown.

Source: Murder By Gaslight 2019

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Dixon Sun News - February 15, 1888 (abrevated from a full page article):

Murder Most Foul

A Chicago Millionaire Shot Dead in His Own House by Burglars

He is Awakened by the Noise Made by Forcing a Door and Confronts the Intruders

The Latter Fire Two Bullets Into His Body, Either One of Which Would Have Proved Fatal

Amos J. Snell, the millionaire real estate owner and acknowledged wealthiest land proprietor on the West Side, was shot dead in the hallway of his brown-stone residence at the corner of Ada street and Washington boulevard, Wednesday morning at about 2 o'clock. Two bullets entered his body, one in the brain and the other in the heart. Either wound would have produced instant death. He was found where he fell, five hours later, at the head of the front hall stairway, stretched at full length near the top step, lying in a pool of blood. His pistol, within a few feet of his head, showed that one shot had been recently fired. The wounds in the head and heart were produced with a a 38-caliber revolver, and the shots were evidently fired at short range and while the dead man was facing south, thus exposing the left side to the murderer of murderers who were ransacking his parlors.

The Murdered Man
Amos J. Snell was a native of Little Falls, NY and was 65 years old. He had lived in Chicago and vicinity since 1844, and had accumulated a fortune of at least $3,000,000. he was the owner of not less than 400 substantial residences and business houses on the West Side, many of them handsome design and exceptionally expensive. As the city grew he improved his property, and now it is asserted that almost every foot of it is improved and bringing in handsome revenues.

Nearly all of his property consists of marble stone fronts, of which he is thought to have owned at least 350. Many of them are located on Ada, Randolph, Elizabeth, Sheldon, Fulton and Madison streets, Washington boulevard, Milwaukee avenue, and Ogden avenue. His own residence, corner of Washington boulevard and Ada street where he was murdered, is one of the handsomest on the drive. He has been known to say that he did not know how much he was worth, but supposed that it was more than $3,000,000.

He was a close business man and, although in his later years he became worth millions, he looked after his cents as carefully as when he was worth but a few hundreds. It mattered not how small the debt one owed to him, if only $1, he made it a practice to collect it when due, and demand it emphatically if it were not promptly forthcoming.

Besides the real estate he owned in the city, he possessed large tracts in Jefferson, Park Ridge, Schaumburg and in the State of Iowa.
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He is also the owner of the toll road that ran through Jefferson, Illinois, according to a Bloomington, IL newspaper.
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Over 2,000 people attended the funeral of Amos Snell.
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Henrietta Snell, widow of Amos Snell, offered $20,000 for the arrest and detention of her husband's murderers.  
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William B. Tascott claims to be the murderer of Amos Snell, but he was never caught. The unsolved case was revived in 1944 but not solved.
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The murder of Amos Snell appeared in many newspapers including the Chicago Daily Tribune.

An article published on the website Chicagology provides in griping details the murder of west side millionaire Amos Jerome Snell. The murder is one of the most sensational that ever occurred in the city, while one man confessed to the murder, it is still not proven to this day. 

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https://chicagology.com/notorious-chicago/snellmurder/#:~:text=JAMES%20GILLAN%2C%20a%20professional%20crook,8%2C%201888.

The Unsolved Murder of Amos Snell…
In the three decades since he had built a log cabin near the southwest corner of the original boundary of Niles Centre in 1857, Amos J. Snell had been a busy man. Acquiring hundreds of acres of land now on the north side of Chicago, he made a fortune selling timber to the new railroads and then garnered even more income by using the land he cleared to construct crude cabins to sell to new arrivals in the area.
Snell bought the Northwest Plank Road (Milwaukee Avenue) from a settler named Gould even though it was already beginning to suffer the fateful demise of all plank roads. In time, Snell rebuilt the entire road, however, using a gravel surface much more resistant to the ravages of time, and extended it northward to Wheeling. He also added a number of new tollgates, including one at Fullerton, Belmont, Jefferson and Leland Avenues. By the 1880s, each of these tollgates could take in $400 or more on a busy day. On some Sunday afternoons the gate at Fullerton collected more than $700, its coffers swelled with tolls from picnickers and visitors to the new cemeteries established north (in those days) of Chicago.
“One night in 1888,” Bertha Rosche wrote in her manuscript, Setting Down the Record …, “Snell was murdered in his home. Clues were few, and suspicions were many. It had appearances of being an inside job. A nephew, Willie Tascott, became the prime object of the search. Detective work spread through the nation, and trails were picked up in Europe. The case dragged on and all leads faded out. Neither Tascott nor other suspects ever were caught.”
The motive for the crime was never discovered, but it is known that many users of the toll roads in northern Illinois were becoming increasingly resentful of the fees they were compelled to pay for driving wagons on private roads. Complaints were many, as were attempts to dodge the toll by driving around the tollgates. Whether the culprit was Willie Tascott or a disgruntled toll-road traveler remains a mystery.

It was at the fourth meeting that ordinances establishing the real legal character of the new village were adopted. At the meeting of the Niles Centre Village Board, held at the firehouse on May 8, 1888, the trustees passed 10 ordinances. Covering some 15 printed pages, they were published in booklet form with a few additional laws the following year by the Chicago printing firm of Holton & Furbush. The booklet, now a century old, still exists. So that area residents could see the new ordinances more quickly, copies of the laws were also printed individually and posted in a number of different public locations, one at the post office, another at Meyer and Brown’s store and a third at the saloon of Ludwig Schmitz.

The first of the ordinances passed during the May 8 meeting, Ordinance No. 2, established the boundaries of the new village in terms only a surveyor could love:

“Section 1. That the boundaries of the village of Niles Centre area hereby declared to be and are hereby established as follows, to wit: The said village of Niles Centre shall embrace the East three-fourths (3/4) of the North one- fourth (1/4) of Section Twenty-eight (28), the East three-fourths (3/4) of the south one-half (1/2) of Section Twenty-one (21), and the East three-fourths (3/4) of the South one-half (1/2) of the Northwest quarter (1/4) of Section Twenty-one (21), situated in Township Forty- one (41) North Range Thirteen (13). East of the third principal meridian, in the County of Cook and State of Illinois.”

During the 1820s and early 1830s, U.S. land surveyors had worked northward through Illinois, dividing the land into enormous squares with range, township and section lines. Prior to the development of extensive road networks for automobiles during the first two decades of the 20th century, township and section lines were prominent figures on most large-scale maps.

The borders of the original village, drawn up along fractional section lines, coincide with present-day Main Street on the north (except for the northwest corner, which is marked by Laramie, Greenleaf and Linder), Long Avenue to the west, Mulford Street on the south, and Skokie Boulevard to the east, encompassing an area of just under one square mile. The northwest corner of the original village was expanded at the time of incorporation to include the cemeteries of St. Peter’s and St. Paul’s Protestant churches. Several large annexations, increasing the area of the town more than tenfold, were made in the 1920s.

In addition to Ordinance No. 2, establishing the boundaries of the village, a number of other laws were passed during the meeting of May 8, 1888. Among the more notable were proscriptions against various forms of misbehavior, an ordinance prohibiting livestock from running at large within the village limits or being staked along any village street, a law controlling dogs, and the establishment of a wide variety of licenses.

The license for a dram shop required the hefty fee of $150 plus the posting of a $3,000 bond payable to the state. Peddlers of food and other staples could acquire a license to sell their goods within the village limits, with fees averaging $10 a year. The carefully worded ordinances, undoubtedly patterned after those in other municipalities, helped to give the village a solid legal foundation, but growth, nevertheless, came slowly.

The 1890s began riotously. Early in May 1890, a group of farmers disguised as Indians attacked the tollgate, then owned by the heirs of Amos Snell, on Milwaukee Avenue at Fullerton. Angered that the Cook County Board had not taken fast action on their complaint made April 28 over high fees for the toll road, the ersatz Indians chased away the toll keeper shortly after midnight and burned his house and the tollgate to the ground. When police arrived, they did nothing to stop the mob, apparently sympathetic with their views.

The event to the south had an immediate effect on the residents of Niles Centre. Shortly after the attack, Cook County purchased the rights to Milwaukee Avenue from Amos Snell’s heirs, and those to Lincoln Avenue from Henry Harms. Although a single tollbooth remained on Milwaukee Avenue as late as 1892, the entire toll-road system was then abolished by the county. Both roads, once plank roads and later gravel roads, have remained public property ever since. But there is evidence that the county had as much trouble maintaining the roads as private owners had in earlier years. Testimony to that fact is found in this recorded anecdote. Near the end of the decade, in 1899, George H. Klehm stood for a week on Lincoln Avenue asking every passing teamster to haul a load of gravel to improve the road, which was sometimes nearly impassable to Chicago. In addition to 30 loads of broken bricks donated by two area brickyards to use as road fill, Klehm finally succeeded in getting 169 loads of gravel hauled free.

The whole subject of roads became increasingly important throughout the decade. Around 1892, two village residents, John Noesen and slightly later Henry Heinz, became the first area owners of motorcars. Without a single paved road in the village or the county, early automobile trips had to be at the least joltingly adventurous.

The unpaved roads of Niles Centre, especially those north of town, passed by the village’s many saloons, which became the focal point of yet another controversy during the l890s. Back in the l850s, Dr. John Evans, for whom Evanston was later named, began buying land for the new Northwestern University. In 1855, eight years before Evanston was incorporated, the university’s charter was altered to forbid the sale of alcohol within four miles of the campus, a restriction that was not rescinded until 1971. Niles Centre’s saloons, just outside the four-mile boundary, became tempting spots for Northwestern students seeking a liquid escape from the pressures of college life.

Source: Stokie A Centennial History

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part 1

The near-west side in the 1880s had no shortage of villains. E.A. Trask was operating on Washington street, possibly in conjuction with H.H. Holmes. A block to the south had been the offices of the notorious Dr. Thomas N. Cream. A block west of all of this stood the mansion of Amos J. Snell, a local millionare who owned hundreds of houses, including most of what is now Milwaukee Avenue, which he turned into a toll road that made him a fortune. He lived at the Northwest Corner of Washington and Ada (where a vacant lot now stands).

A millionare with a streak of paranoia, Snell kept a pistol by his bed and was known on several occasions to wake up, grab the pistol, and run off to investigate any strange noises he heard. Usually, it turned out to be nothing but the wind. But in February of 1888, Snell heard a strange noise in his house at 2 in the morning, came down to investigate, and was shot to death by burlgars – who stole nothing. The only clues were scattered views of coaches running by in the freezing street reported by servants, two sets of footprints in the snow, and a bag of tools – the kind used by burglars – left on the scene.

Read more of Part 1

Part 2

Posted on October 26, 2008 by adam

Continuing our story on the mysteirous murder of Amos J Snell in his Washinton Blvd mansion in 1888…

Some believed that Snell’s strange sense of foreboding came not from some pyschic feeling, but, perhaps, from some sort of warning from the recently-freed burglar, and that burglar was one of the first men rounded up. But he was found innocent very quickly. 

The Snell Mansion at the time of its destructionEvidence that it had been a two-man job was fairly overwhelming: there were two sets of tracks in the snow, and two kinds of bullets in Snell’s body. But, when no solution had been found after 10 days, the frantic police decided that it had been the work of one person: Willie Tascott, a young man who lived on Ashland near Union Park before becoming something of a drifter, working for railroad companies all over the country, serving some jail time in Kentucky for robbery, and eventually drifint back to Chicago working odd jobs, including operating the elevator at the Palmer House Hotel, while engaging in some petty thievery here and there.

A few days before the murder, Tascott went to a jeweler to have a pearl set in a ring. The jeweler noticed his strange bag of tools and asked if he was a piano tuner.

Read more part 2

part 3

Posted on October 27, 2008 by adam

No examination of the Amos Snell story (ours is the first that we know of in about 65 years) is complete without a few words on what became of the well-to-do family.

In 1901, Snell’s son, Albert, was penniless and living in the barn on the property. He was committed to an insane asylum and died in a rooming house a few years later.

Mrs. A.J. Stone, one of Snell’s daughter, sued for a share of the estate. Her claim was struck down on the grounds that she was allegedly an adopted daughter (I don’t know all the particulars of the trial, but what a horrible verdict!)

One of his daughters married several times, beginning by running away with a coachman at 16. She eventually left him and was forgiven by the family (daughters of rich men who married servants could generally be expected to be kicked out of the family in those days). She was married often, including being married and divorced from the same guy three times. She was eventually known as Mrs. Grace Snell-Coffin-Coffin-Walker-Coffin-Layman-Love-Love. Papers called her The Most Married Woman in the World. The second marriage to Mr. Love appears to have lasted; her name was still Mrs. Love when she died in 1941.

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Source: Mysterious Chicago Blog