Trouble at the Egbert House

Monday night, 3 July 1899, about 9 p.m., Jonathan Kimel,  prominent representative of a bank in Wichita who was spending some time in Chandler, was shot through the heart by R. W. McCloskey, a carpenter of the same town. The story has a barrenness that harmonizes with early day Oklahoma, the mother of homesteads and outlaws, eight years before statehood. 

Two years previously McCloskey, who was about 64 years old, came to town to board with the the Egbert family, who ran a boarding house called plainly enough Egbert House. It had been renovated just the year before, the dining room enlarged, the old part of the building refitted and repapered, and sixteen new rooms added. In the midst of this elegance dwelt Miss Vernal Egbert, just approaching her seventeenth birthday. The old carpenter became infatuated, and in the midst of the laughter occasioned by this "freak" (as the Chandler News called it), the carpenter shot and killed Vernal's friend and admirer the thirty-year old Jonathan Kimel, himself a married man of ten years standing. His wife and four-year-old boy were with him from Wichita. 

The cultural atmosphere of the Egbert House had acquired additional tone about a year earlier when Dr. A. M. Marshall moved to Chandler and set up his first office there. "Tone" has to be the appropriate word since just over a year after moving to Chandler Doc Marshall married Maude May Conklin, daughter of E. L. Conklin, already on his way to becoming the wealthiest man in Chandler. The wedding was held at the Sac and Fox Agency where Conklin's talents were fulling engaged in gouging Indian Lands. ("Gouging" is the term the historian Angie Debo used to described the nefarious practices by which Indian agents and conmen acquired land from the Indians by exploiting the recently mandated allotment system, which the white lawyers and bankers understood well and the red man not at all.  E. L. Conklin would later found the Union National Bank, and Doc Marshall would have a very successful career catering to patients of the professional class.

This then was the Egbert House and the matrix from which McCloskey’s jealous hatred of Kimel emerged. Vernal’s part in the plot was surely innocent enough. As her name, meaning “spring-like,” suggests, she was a young woman of energetic talent, a flower of the social season intent on enjoying herself. At seventeen, her doings about town are part of the social columns in every week’s newspaper. Her skill at the piano must have contributed to the tone of the boarding house. In June of the year following the killing, while attending “a female college” in Folton Missouri (formerly Fulton Female Academy,  it closed in 1928), she won first prize in the musical competition. In 1904 she married Herbert Hunt Johnson, a young banker in Chandler she’d met while he was staying at the Egbert House.

Where in the midst of the Egbert House’s concentration of tone did R. W. McCloskey fit? A carpenter by trade, 64 years of age, obviously he did not fit at all. He probably had mud on his boots, callouses on his hands, and black rings under his fingernails. His place at the table would have been well below the salt. He was vulgar, and it might rub off, Mrs. Egbert must have feared. In the nature of things no one would have felt this outcast status more keenly than McCloskey himself. He knew how people at the hotel regarded him, he resented it, and it fed his paranoia. 

McCloskey plays the vengeful shadow in this story, but I’ve found it impossible to add flesh and bone--kin and places lived--to his name. Apart from the descriptions in the newspapers following the murder, I have not found one certain document for him in the immense Ancestry.com database of vital records. To me, this indicates above all that he lived in poverty. The poorer people are, the fewer records they leave. He is said to be 64 years old, which would make him born in 1835, a prime period for him to have fought in the Civil War. He was probably Irish (which would have contributed to his persecution complex), and the Irish were great fighters, their skills honed against the British boot heel over centuries. They contributed 150,000 men to the forces of the Union Army--not because they cared about freeing the slaves but because they didn’t want to be enslaved themselves. Yet, for all this, I can find no military record attaching to R. W. McCloskey. Nor is there a homestead record, which makes sense if his main occupation was not farming but carpentering. 

What can be learned from the newspaper accounts is simple enough and sufficient in the eyes of the general public to condemn him. Given the absence of records, it is hardly possible to provide more than what is contained in these accounts. First it’s explained that about two years before, McCoskey had come to board with the Egbert family. “He became infatuated with Miss Vernal Egbert, and the amusement which this strange freak caused was the direct cause of the tragedy of last Monday night.” It may be doubted whether “infatuated” is the right word here. Later statements in the same article suggest that McCloskey saw himself as the girl’s guardian whose assignment was to protect her from being seduced by Kimel. This may be infatuation, but if so it is largely free of the overtones of sexual desire much less predation. It is more a form of paranoia in which the subject is aggrandized as his opponent is demonized, while the woman herself counts for little.

The shooting itself occurred when a party from the Egbert House including Vernal and Kimel went out for ice cream. Kimel was in the habit of poking fun at McCloskey and assured people “he would not hurt anybody.” As they walked past McCloskey Kimel had just reiterated such an assurance to his companions, when the old carpenter walked up behind him and shot him in the back:

Almost as he spoke a revolver shot sounded behind them, quickly followed by another, and Kimel fell forward on the sidewalk with a groan. He was carried to the Egbert house, living about ten minutes. The first shot entered his body near the spinal column, and was all that was needed….The second shot, which indications point to as being accidental, as the revolver was a double-action .32 caliber, went through the awning of Becknell’s saloon, under which the shooting took place. 

McCoskey’s .32 seems to be the Colt New Police manufactured from 1896 to 1907 by Colt's Manufacturing Company of Hartford, Connecticut. The revolver was available with a 2 1⁄2-inch, four-inch, or six-inch barrel in a blued or nickel finish and hard rubber grips. The Colt New Police was selected by New York City (NYPD) Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt in 1896 to be the first standard-issue revolver for NYPD officers. As for the 2nd, accidental shot McCloskey fired, this would have been the result of the pistol’s double-action. The hammer could be cocked first (single action), or the trigger could be pulled and it would cock and release the hammer (double action). Once the gun has fired, the hammer stayed in the de-cocked position until the hammer was re-cocked (single action), or the trigger was pulled again (double action). Since a .32 has little kick, it’s hard to understand the wildness of the second shot.

The story continues:

Ren Egbert [Vernal’s brother] and a couple of others started in pursuit of the murderer, who walked north on Manvel avenue, but passed him without knowing it, as there were a great many people on the street. McCloskey saw them ahead of him near the postoffice and turned west on Tenth street and came to the back door of the Boston store, where he begged to be let in, being much excited and saying that the whole town as after him to kill him. 

McCloskey was afraid of being lynched, but the Chandler News states there was no such threat: “there was probably not a person in the city who had ever seriously entertained such an idea.” Nevertheless, McCloskey was afraid and stayed close to the arresting officers. 

We then get to hear something of the background behind the killer’s paranoia.

Several years ago McCoskey’s jealousy caused his wife to secure a divorce. As a part of his trouble he tried to decapitate his mother-in-law, and succeeded in giving her a slight cut on the neck, and was sent to the asylum for a short time. Later he became enamored of a child, and was sent to the asylum again, being released about a year ago. He has been regarded here as a crank, but of the harmless kind.

From the two episodes briefly referred to here, readers may feel they are approaching the heart of the man’s mystery, but nothing more is said about them. We don’t even hear if McCloskey had children. The reporter is interested only in the immediate:

McCloskey was interviewed Thursday at the jail. He abused Kimel in a manner that showed that he still hated the memory of his victim with all the fire of a perverted and jealous nature. He claimed that he had no intentions two minutes before of doing the deed, but was “compelled to do it by seeing Kimel and the girl together, when I knew what kind of man he was.”

What compelled him, it would seem, were spirits, thus adding to the sensational, especially because the 1890s had been a tremendous era of table rapping and ouija boards. It was the era of Madame Blavatsky’s Golden Dawn and many a homegrown séance where people gathered in darkened rooms to commune with the dead.

Miss Egbert has been with him constantly--in spirit--and all his efforts to get away have been in vain. Her spirit pleaded for protection, and he knowing from spiritual sources that Kimel was a wicked man with bad intentions, had to kill him to protect her. He regrets the necessity but rejoices in the deed. He says Kimel had an evil influence which he exercised promiscuously, and with which he successfully blinded all to his constant and varied crimes. 

At the trial, McCloskey had to decide whether to plead not guilty by reason of insanity or to plead guilty. The first plea might have brought a quick release after a few years, but he didn’t want release, he said. He was afraid people were waiting to lynch him. Instead, he chose to plead guilty and go to prison for life where he could be safe. He was duly sent to Lansing after his conviction on July 21st--and beyond that the record sayeth not. I have inquired at the Kansas Department of Corrections and they have no record of his imprisonment. Nothing more is heard from R. W. McCloskey.

Which brings us, at last, to the person who may be regarded as the principal in the goings on at Egbert House, both inside and out, and that is the proprietress, Vernal’s mother, Martha Malinda Egbert. She fits the classic prototype of the boardinghouse mother as we know her from many novels of the period--the strong-minded widow with a daughter of marriageable age. Mrs. Egbert prefigures Mrs. Mooney of James Joyce’s “The Boarding House” in Dubliners (published 1914 but written about 1905). Mrs. Mooney has a problem that must be common to most boarding houses, and that is keeping up the tone of her clientele while at the same time making sure all the rooms are occupied. She is preoccupied with finding a husband for her daughter Polly. It takes some careful designing on her part, but find him she does. Mrs. Egbert’s problem is similar and her success the same. Kimel’s death was a simply by-blow of her climb to success. He mattered not at all, as his married condition precluded him from being a candidate for her daughter’s hand. Like McCloskey, he was collateral damage.

Mrs. Egbert’s maiden name was Canady and the movement in her career is bold and clear: it is upward and mobile. That fact, however, evident though it may be, leaves one thing unexplained--her money. She first ran the Manvel House, beginning as early as 1894. Somehow she had the money to build a new hotel in 1897 called the Egbert House, and then after the great 1897 cyclone destroyed it she bought the old Mitchel Boarding House the next year and remodeled it extensively, so that the News could call it “one of the neatest and best arranged hotels in the territory.” Even with all this expenditure, the 1900 census shows she owned the business clear without any mortgage. This required funds that would not have been available from either her father or her husband, both of them ordinary farmers. 

Either she was a very astute entrepreneur and made money during her previous ten years as a proprietress, which is possible, or something additional is required to explain these funds. Only one hint emerges. In 1870 she appears on two censuses. This in itself is not unusual. If a person is living in one place and has a family in another, the census may show him or her in both places. In the first case, Mrs. Egbert is shown under her married name with her family in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. In the second, she is Martha Canady, a “domestic servant” in the home of William H. Barnum, a wealthy attorney in Chicago,  a long way from Cuyahoga County. This certainly would have given her a view of the monied life, and we can even speculate that upon her departure Barnum gave her a substantial bonus for good service. More certain is the fact of her independent spirit. She was married in 1867 but already had a daughter born two years earlier and would have another the next year. Then there is a hiatus from 1868 to the birth of her first son in 1874. This may well correspond to the period of her employment in Chicago. 

A similar pattern emerges with the 1900 census, in which she lists herself as a widow, though her husband is alive and living in Chandler. This is in itself is not puzzling, for due to the shame attached to divorce in this period, many women who were separated from their husbands listed themselves as widows. Still, it does chime with the independent spirit manifested in the 1870 census.With her husband’s obituary when he died in 1901, an element of untruth enters her self-presentation, for she would have had a hand in the obit, whether as author or editor. The obituary posted at his Find-a-Grave site in Chandler’s Oak Park states that “For many years he was a prominent hotel man in Illinois.”No evidence of any such hotelier activity on his part exists. In 1870 he’s listed as a farmer, and in 1880 as a well-borer. He probably had muddy boots and dirt under his fingernails, putting him on McCloskey’s side of the class divide at the dining table. The “prominent hotel man” is Martha Egbert’s fiction. 

Martha excluded her husband from the life of Egbert House and from her marriage. It might not be too much to say that she decapitated him. If his head wasn’t literally removed, he was removed from where the census would have placed him--at the head of the household.

Of the 1500 pages of the Lincoln County Oklahoma History, two thirds of one is devoted to Mrs. Egbert. It fills in some of the gaps in her life between Ohio and Oklahoma. For example, we learn that she had indeed been keeping a hotel “for many years,” an employment she attributes to her husband. She arrived in Guthrie in 1889 and ran the Carlton House until 1891 when she came to Chandler. Except for his death, the long article makes no mention of her husband. Its  full title is herself--“Mrs. M. M. Egbert.”