Part 1 recounted the unsolved murder of Joseph Brown Elwell, a wealthy man known for his card playing and womanizing. The Elwell case motivated S.S. Van Dine to write detective stories in the 1920s, which then inspired the creation of Ellery Queen decades later.

The Ellery Queen detective stories led Readex Editor Brian Benoit to reopen the case of Joseph Brown Elwell to see what a retrospective of historical newspapers reveals.

Whodunnit?

The time has come to weigh in on who this writer's prime suspects are. Since Ellery Queen is no longer with us and the witnesses and evidence of the Elwell case are long gone, I'm going to break the fourth wall and offer insights I've gained retrospectively through the benefit of Readex's prodigious digital resource, America's Historical Newspapers, in which I've reviewed over one hundred news accounts. Readex's AllSearch is like a time machine that fits in your phone or your backpack—not as cool as a tricked-out DeLorean, perhaps—but far more portable. It's eminently suitable for forensics. Now let's see where it can take us.

Image

My initial thought was that Marie Larsen, Elwell's housekeeper, had shot him. Elwell had been lax in paying his staff, and her skills were such that she could always find similar employment elsewhere. 

For all his doting upon women, Elwell was not a nice person. He was cold, vain, and manipulative. In representing himself as a young, lithe, love interest to women half his age, he was selling them a bill of goods. One wonders how he managed to keep the secret of his dissolution intact. Blackmail? Hush money? Social ostracism? 

We know he kept score and that he had a "love payroll." He allegedly purchased stock shares and bet on horses on behalf of dancers and actresses based on tips he learned at parties, then held the young women romantically to account. Although not lacking in charm and capable of magnanimity, Elwell was a predator. After more than a year in his employment, Marie Larsen had to have known this.

Her Irish predecessor, Anna Kane, was fired for what she learned and did about it during her tenure. There are only so many furtive "Miss Wilsons" whom one can ignore.

Image

Larsen demonstrated her appreciation for the moral peril that her employer brought to the lives of his partners by hiding the pink lingerie, and when she "tidied up" an active crime scene.

She proved she was capable of deception, even prone to it.

Her fingerprints were all over the house as a matter of fact, and no one knew the place and its owner's tendencies better. The authorities relied on her as their guide to a world beyond their imagination, and she could have used that to her advantage.

Image

Larsen's husband owned a military service weapon. As to whether a woman was capable of handling an Army handgun, it's insulting even to ask the question; eighteen-year-old Marion Rice, cited in Part 1 , proved it was possible.

Before Larsen carried a gun on her person, she would certainly have practiced with it.

Elwell would have been expecting her around the time that he was killed.

As vain as he was, he didn't seem overly concerned to be seen in deshabille by his housekeeper in his front room reading his mail on a Friday morning.

His trust in Marie Larsen was implicit, but her judgment on him was possibly severe.

Against this line of reasoning, Larsen could have worked against Elwell's interests in numerous other ways short of killing him.

Or she simply could have left her position.

She may have disapproved of her employer's lifestyle, but she did not appear deliberate or invested in meting out justice or vengeance. This crime had to be more… personal.

Image

The first turn in my thoughts arrived in hindsight, courtesy of Readex's lovely little time machine. I came across a news story from 1922 describing how a "sporty looking" blonde woman dressed in black contrived to gain access to Elwell's vacant abode in order to retrieve something concealed beneath the floor of a hallway closet outside his bedroom.

Marie Larsen wouldn't have needed to do this unless she had hidden the gun or something else there - unlikely - but a possibility, as she did take the time to run up to the third floor and hide the lingerie in a washtub in the basement.

More likely, she would have removed anything incriminating before she ceased her employment. One of Elwell's former paramours may well have concealed something embarrassing or valuable prior to his death. 

With the building demolished and an elementary school playground in its place, we may never learn what object waited several years for its owner to reclaim it.

Image

But who among Elwell's associates would have kept such careful track of the building's disposition over two years from the time he was killed, waiting for a moment when the renewal of its lease allowed them to enter using a false name and a fictitious address?

That endeavor was not without risk and required a cool, systematic approach.

This led me to consider the character of the woman who returned to the scene of the crime, initially with two male companions, then alone.

In looking more closely at the search results for "Selma Lewisohn," the opera star and wife of Walter Lewisohn, millionaire and Broadway producer, the pieces began to fall into place. I don't know what she or her emissary may have retrieved on that day, but overall, I think she got what she wanted.

Image

(Note the revolver instead of a Colt M1911, and that Elwell is still in formal attire. Neither detail is accurate. Also, the chair is wrong, and the letters were on the table.)

In many respects, Walter Lewisohn was a younger, richer, more socially palatable version of Joseph Elwell. If anything, he was even less disciplined though, because he had more money and was innately excitable. 

He too enjoyed intimate congress with women not his wife—and Selma knew this. Worse, Walter was lusting after his wife's sister, Viola Kraus, she of the pink pajamas in Elwell's boudoir, the celebrant of her liberation from her marriage to Victor von Schlegell on the eve of the murder.

Elwell had recently asked his estranged wife, Helen, for a divorce as well. Helen had granted that request, but the papers hadn't been drawn up at the time of his death.

Despite official denials, it was understood in their social circle that Elwell and Viola Kraus were likely to be married sooner than later. Once again, he was trading up.

Consider how Selma Kraus-Lewisohn would have felt about this imminent catastrophe.

Her own sister was about to be launched into a maelstrom of matrimony with a man who was but a pretender to their social class, who was utterly indifferent to his own wife and child, who had neither the health, the wealth, the judgment, nor the breeding to qualify as a match for Viola.

At least Victor von Schlegell had been a football star at Yale and was a successful industrialist. Elwell was next to nothing in comparison. He would ruin Viola if he had not already done so.

Helen Derby may have gracefully withdrawn from the fray, but Selma Lewisohn was made of different stuff.

Elwell was then in debt to Walter Lewisohn as a backer and promoter of a show that had failed. Moreover, Selma's own husband was jealous of Elwell's sway over his sister-in-law. God forbid that man should be brought into the family. There would be no limit to his avarice and pretensions. What a fop! What a cad! What an obsequious, self- indulgent, problematic man was Joseph Elwell!

But what to do about him…

My second break in the impasse of this locked-room mystery arrived via search results for "Walter Lewisohn" with an open date range forward from 1920.

I learned that the estimable Mr. Lewisohn had been involuntarily committed by his wife to Blythewood
Sanitarium in 1923, a posh psychiatric hospital in Greenwich, Connecticut, because he was running through  the family fortune for hedonistic, chaotic reasons.

He was in fact lured to this establishment with the promise that Leonora Hughes, a stylish Broadway dancer was awaiting him there. Here's a salient example of his mental decline:

In Paris in an exclusive shop a beautiful woman sells hats to fashionable customers; in the Argentine a world-famed dancer lives in luxury with her millionaire husband and forgets that she was once a cabaret star; in another corner of the world a former grand opera diva prepares for a gala return to the concert stage; and behind the bars of a private sanitarium near New York City sits a crazy millionaire holding imaginary telephone conversations with the phantoms of these three beautiful women. He babbles into the end of a "dead" telephone wire—as dead as the once brilliant intellect that now sends meaningless phrases into nowhere.

The man is Walter Lewisohn, once a famous millionaire spender on Broadway. Despite the fact that he is a madman and as such, "legally dead," he was recently divorced by his wife Mme. Marie Selma, a grand opera star.

His ex-wife is one of those to whom he phones meaningless messages. 

Another is Viola Krauss, his sister-in-law, who was questioned in the famous Elwell murder case, went to Paris shortly after Elwell's death, and is now established there in a small hat shop. 

When the hours hang heavily, Lewisohn "puts through calls to Paris," and carries on—so he thinks—one-sided conversations with Madame Krauss.

The third woman at the end of Lewisohn's "dead" phone is Leonora Hughes, famous dancer and present wife of the wealthy Argentinian, Carlos Basualdo. In the old days when Lewisohn scattered his millions along Broadway, the beautiful Leonora scarcely knew him. Yet in his ravings he insists that all three women are his "wives."

Image

If Selma had any misgivings as to her husband's depravity and her own actions in squelching them, his enthusiastic acquiescence to this charade would have settled them. He tried to get out of the asylum through a legal challenge in 1923. He failed.

Image

She had finally brought the dog to heel. She concluded her own divorce from this certifiably incompetent, decadent man and secured the attentions of a lawyer in 1928.

Image

In fairness to Selma, Walter does indeed appear to have been mentally afflicted and unstable, although his derangement was said to have been due at least in part to a steep downturn in his copper investments.

In 1938, he perished in a freak accident at the hospital when the cottage in which he lived was being fumigated. He had come full circle from splashy Broadway fantasies to a place where a prop telephone passed for the real thing. 

The executrix of his remaining estate? His former wife, Selma Farr.

Image

My conjecture is that Selma Lewisohn convinced her husband, Walter, to kill Elwell to protect their class privilege and to preserve the honor and happiness of Viola Kraus— admitting the tawdry reality that Walter also craved Viola for himself.

His complicity in this would ensure Selma's power over him forevermore.

Acquiring a weapon would have been no problem for them. Von Schlegell owned one.

They knew Elwell's house, his schedule as recently as that evening, his haunts, and his peccadilloes. They knew the habits of his staff and might have easily manipulated Marie Larsen to protect Viola and themselves.

As a respectable, wealthy, influential married couple they could backstop each other's alibis as they did Viola's.

Elwell's locksmith said he had changed the lock and ordered three keys about six months before the murder. Elwell and Larsen each had a key. Neither the chauffeur nor the valet got one. If anyone had had that third key to Elwell's inner vestibule it would have been Viola, and Selma would have had access to it.

Did the conspiracy drive Walter mad? It surely couldn't have eased his turbulent mind.

The accounts below seem more fraught than the doleful melancholy for a fallen friend. Perhaps he was worried that he would be next. Yet to impugn his wife would have cost him his life. It's no wonder he drank and caroused to great excess. Either way, Walter Lewisohn was doomed.

Image

[But one day the tide turned and the] horizon darkened for a favored son. Misfortune instituted its reign. Everything that Lewisohn touched turned to the dross of tragedy. Curiously enough, coincidence seemed to date this frowning of the fates from the occasion of the mysterious and unsolved Elwell murder—just as though the slaying had placed some hidden curse across Lewisohn's path.

"Joe" Elwell, the millionaire sportsman and "bridge king," was a close friend of Lewisohn's. They moved in the same circles, backed the same horses and enjoyed the same pleasures. The last party that Elwell attended was "thrown" by Lewisohn, one of the last persons to see the wealthy sportsman alive.

The last person Elwell saw before he was shot, that is. I propose that Lewisohn's "curse" was quite real, had a name even, different than any clinical one later assigned to his condition.

In just a few years he went from possession to dispossession in every sense. He lost everything he loved, although he had probably lost Selma's love long before she launched him on his fatal errand.

Image

When nothing could be proved, the case was finally dropped and tagged "unsolved." That was a long time ago. Broadway soon ceased to speculate on the mystery of Elwell's death. But Fate did not forget; it continued to deal straight cards to those closely associated with the slain bridge expert. Most particularly, it trumped Lewisohn's ace of fortune and took his remaining tricks for its own.

A slow transition began for Lewisohn. He entered into a wild phase—wilder than he had ever known. He painted glittering Broadway one streak of crimson and spent what had been estimated as over a million dollars on months of continual carousal. As a rolling stone collects moss, he attracted a bevy of willing friends, more eager than he to scatter his great wealth. Where riot reigned there also did Walter.

Here's the Kraus-Lewisohn engagement announcement from happier days in 1909. Would you entrust this fortune teller with your future? In the excerpt below, "Deal" is a coastal town in New Jersey.

Image

Society is greatly interested in the engagement announced here of Miss Selma Kraus to Mr. Walter Lewisohn. The young pair have been showered with congratulations and announcements were sent by cable to relatives in Europe. Miss Kraus is one of two daughters of Mr. and Mrs. Maurice J. Kraus, who have a villa in Sydney avenue, Deal. She is greatly admired and is one of the prettiest of the young women who have been active in society here this season. She made a great hit as a palmist during the amateur circus and likewise added not a little to the fund for charity.

Mr. Lewisohn is one of the sons of the late Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Lewisohn of New York and Long Branch, who left a very large fortune to their children.

No one saw the murderer arrive, so he might have been waiting for Elwell. The back of Elwell's building was an informal, uncontrolled space through which the murderer could have escaped.

The damage to the phone provided valuable time for that to happen, as did the mistaken police response to a suicide rather than to a murder. 

Upon the arrival of the police and their cryptic summoning of Viola Kraus, who should accompany her but her sister, Selma, deeply distraught over Viola's shattered dreams. What a tragedy! What a calamity! What a mercy in disguise.

Dr. Charles G. Norris, Chief Medical Examiner for New York City in 1920, who declared the Elwell case a homicide, wrote an article on medical forensics that appeared in the July 3, 1927, issue of the Seattle Daily Times. Much of it was devoted to analyzing the case about which he asserted, "Clever players completely blocked the game." Players. Plural.

Also, this:

Big money was involved in this affair. It immediately began to operate. It played a desperate game of chess with the police. It made the decisive moves. It got to the essential witnesses. It was able to get to them before the police got to them. That was because the police did not press an immediate and rigorous investigation. And that was because it was thought that Elwell had killed himself.

Image

We'll conclude with a tiny snippet of an article from the Boston Sunday Advertiser of March 13, 1955. The reporter, Ruth Reynolds, related a story she heard secondhand quoting Dr. Norris.

Before he died in 1935, Dr. Norris told the late Fred Pasley, a newspaper man: "Certain people have said I know Elwell's slayer. I do. But I also happen to know that this person established an incontrovertible alibi."

Image

That person would have been Walter Lewisohn, whose wife, Selma, guaranteed his alibi, as he did hers. When their mutual assurance society began to fray at the seams over Walter's indiscretions, Selma found a way to keep their secret locked away—literally and psychically—forever. That final touch made this a crime worthy of Ellery Queen.

Image

Whodunnit? Readex, of course—in the library, with the database!

Find research solutions to all of life's mysteries.