Chapter I — The Crime

The Night of February 8, 1888

Two servants hear a gunshot at 2 AM and go back to sleep. Five hours later, the coachman finds Amos Snell dead in his hallway — shot twice by burglars who vanished into the night.

Source: Murder by Gaslight — Robert Wilhelm, April 2019

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 reached through the hole to open the door. From there the thieves went straight to Snell's office and 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 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 found to contain: 6 dark lanterns, 6 chilled augers, one chilled extension bit, 6 slung shots, 6 steel knuckles, 2oz dynamite, 2oz giant powder, 3 dirk knives, 3 muffled alarm whistles, 6 Colt's navy revolvers, 4 steel jimmies, 6 boxes of lucifer fuses, 44 mail-pouch keys, 42 different skeleton keys, and 1 diamond glass-cutter. In custody, he 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 fact, none of the men arrested could be connected to the crime, and days passed without any progress. 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 newspapers began comparing the Snell murder with the murder of Benjamin Nathan in New York — where the perpetrator was never caught."