THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ALMA KELLNER
Eight-year-old Alma Kellner of Louisville, Kentucky was a good Catholic girl who said her prayers and went to chapel often. At 9:45 on Wednesday, December 8, 1909, she left her house and walked the short distance to St. John’s Church for mass, wearing a tan, brown, and rose-colored plaid jumper. She wore a red cap in the “mushroom” style that was popular at the time. It was cold outside, so she donned a black and white checked pea coat on top of everything, with warm black stockings and button-up shoes. On her way, she was spotted by several witnesses, including Mr. Yont, the druggist, and Mr. Augustus, the postman. Nobody, however, saw her arrive at St. John’s. In fact, no one saw her alive again. This week on Out of the Past: the disappearance of Alma Kellner.
Alma’s family ordinarily went to St. Boniface’s Church, a few blocks farther away from their house than St. John’s. In fact, that’s where her mother and aunt had gone that morning for the early service while she stayed home with her baby brother. When they arrived home, they helped her get ready to go to church on her own. She had attended mass at St. John’s the previous Sunday with a friend, so she wasn’t a completely unfamiliar face to the congregation there. And the church was so close that the Kellners could see the cross on top from their house.
Alma was a curious little girl who could get distracted sometimes, so her mother didn’t worry too much when she didn’t arrive home promptly that morning. Mrs. Kellner waited and waited, sure Alma would come through the door at any moment, but as time passed she began to feel very uneasy. When hours had gone by with no sign of her daughter, her uneasiness turned into all-out worry. She called all the local churches to see if Alma had changed her mind about her destination. When she called St. John’s, Father Schumann, the priest there, said he hadn’t seen Alma at mass. He also corrected her—the mass had actually been at 9, not at 10. So even if she had shown up, she would have missed the mass altogether.
The Kellner family began to panic after learning this. Catholic personnel around the neighborhood tried to help. Nuns and neighbors that knew her prayed for her at the chapel. Alma’s mother called friends and neighbors, but it led her nowhere. Nobody knew where her little girl was.
It took a little longer for Alma’s father, Fred Kellner, to start worrying. He remained certain she’d be home at any moment, and in fact, when police began to get involved, they found him oddly uncooperative and in denial.
Some wondered if Alma had strayed in the wrong direction, gotten lost, and was wandering in an unfamiliar area. But she was a smart girl, her parents insisted. It was basically impossible for her to become lost. She knew how to get everywhere in the neighborhood on foot, and if she ever did get lost, she had been trained to find an authority figure and give her name and address. Mrs. Kellner felt certain Alma had been taken, and she thought pursuing other theories was a waste of time.
The police were vigilant, as were volunteers. They retraced every step Alma could have made. They questioned every person at every location, all the residents of the homes along her route, and every child they could find, just in case she had run away and had only told her intentions to other children. But there was no trace of her anywhere. It was like she had simply vanished.
When the story broke in the media the next morning, it created a frenzy. Alma’s disappearance shook the community to its core. Nothing like this had ever happened before. Parental kidnapping wasn’t unheard of, but a stranger just grabbing a child? That didn’t happen in Louisville.
Every paper printed a small photograph of Alma, along with a written description of her appearance and the clothing she was last seen wearing. Police started receiving tips from everyone, from the confused-but-concerned to all-out nutcases. Some people claimed she was as far away as the other side of Kentucky. Most of the information received was of no use to investigators.
The Sewer and Drain Department even dragged the sewers with volunteers on their tail. They observed that all the sewers emptied into the Ohio River, and many feared Alma had been washed away by the fast-moving current. Fred Kellner asked that they drag every body of water they could, even after being told that her body would likely float in a place like the town’s main creek.
It came to light that Alma was the granddaughter of J.F. Kellner, the very wealthy president of the Central Consumer’s Company, and many began to wonder if this could be a kidnapping for ransom. Fred himself felt this theory was the most likely, even though his own immediate family wasn’t that well off. But at any rate, no ransom note or request for money of any kind ever came.
Now, this is where the story starts to get really strange. Out of nowhere, the Kellner’s former servant, Katie Martin, told Alma’s mother that she had had a meeting with two men, one dressed as a woman, and that they had discussed the kidnapping with her. They were supposedly ready to meet with Mrs. Kellner to discuss terms for Alma’s return. But once this information came out, Martin retracted her entire story, denying that she had even ever said these things in the first place, though reporters insisted the words had come from her mouth. This suggests three possibilities: 1) the reporters made it all up; 2) Martin herself made it up for some reason, then denied the story to cover her lie; or 3) it had really happened, but when it leaked to the press, it scuttled the plan. Martin had earlier claimed that the men had threatened the Kellners with death if they got the cops involved, and if there was any truth to the story, the threat of being caught could have scared the men away. Anyway, nothing came of this strange interlude, and the police changed directions.
Originally, no reward had been offered, and even when the case went to the governor, he dragged his feet, as he thought the child would return in time. But when things started to look bleak he decided to offer the highest possible reward in Kentucky law at the time: $500. This amount of money brought in people from all over, intent on solving the case. Unfortunately, most of the amateur sleuths canvassing the area did more harm than good. Solving the crime became a competition for wealth, not a community effort. It wasn’t just volunteers who proved unhelpful. For example, the police consulted ten-year-old psychic Freda Rinke, who was something of a national celebrity at the time, but—big surprise—she couldn’t provide any information.
A month passed. In January of 1910, Joseph Wendling, the janitor at St. John’s church, fled the area, leaving his wife. No one found it strange at first, as he had a long history of unreliability. We’ll get back to that in a moment, but first I want to talk about the media.
The press stood in the investigation’s way more than it helped. Headlines were sensational. They would print anything anyone from the area would say, whether they had anything to do with the Kellner family or not. Unbelievably, on April 15, the Courier Journal deduced that Alma had probably been taken by a “band of gypsies” who were presently camping out near Los Angeles, as a “fair skinned girl” had been seen traveling with them, and they had recently been traveling through Ohio and Kentucky. Despite this being a crazy, racist, ethnocentric theory, they still followed up on it. Alma—again, big surprise—was not with the traveling group.
On May 30, 1910, the nightmare of uncertainty ended for the Kellners, only to be taken over by the pain of mourning a murdered child. Her body was found just a hundred yards from where she was last seen—on the property of the very church to which she was headed for mass. She was found by a plumber who noticed a “fearful odor” while he was pumping out the cellar.
The press latched onto the story of the poor little rich girl who had lost her life. The day after her body was found, the lead headline above the fold in the Courier read, “Arrest Follows Discovery of Alma Kellner’s Mutilated Body.” The press didn’t keep the details about her remains private. The coroner concluded, based on the state of the remains, that she had been “murdered in the most brutal and inhuman manner.” Almost all her bones were broken, and some were missing. Her body appeared partially burnt.
The death was officially ruled a homicide. Nuns familiar with Alma said she would slip away, sometimes even during school, for little moments of prayer. The rumor soon spread, again thanks to the press, that Alma was snatched as she knelt at an altar to pray and taken to the cellar where she met her grim and tragic fate. This was a very popular notion, and you’ll even see it mentioned if you Google the case today, though the events are so old that that’s almost all you can find on the internet.
Joseph Wendling, the janitor at St. John’s who had skipped town a few months earlier, was immediately accused of the crime. Since he couldn’t be found, the police brought his wife, Lena Wendling, down to the station for interrogation. She had been living in the rectory without her husband since January, and she insisted that she didn’t know where he’d gone. Though items thought to belong to Alma were found in her living space, she still claimed to have no knowledge about the crime. They arrested her for obstructing the investigation when she claimed to have no photos of her husband, yet one was found in the home.
While all this was happening, Alma was laid to rest in a tiny white casket. A silver plate was affixed to the top that read, “Our Darling.” No religious services were held.
The next step for authorities, obviously, was to find Wendling. The manhunt was somewhat disorganized. The authorities knew Wendling was a Frenchman, so they went looking for a man with an accent. Several European gentlemen were wrongfully arrested, including an Austrian. I’m not sure how you would mix up Austrian and French accents. Different sources began to offer extravagant rewards for his capture. A grand jury convened and they secured Joseph’s indictment, ensuring that they could move forward with the legal process when he was found.
Authorities finally found Wendling when a tip came in from a police officer in Texas—he thought he’d found him, and he was right. He was working on a ranch outside of Houston. Police weren’t discreet enough and Wendling fled the country—he went all the way down to Panama. Throughout this manhunt, so many men were mistakenly arrested that the Houston Post started calling the arrestees members of the “Wendling Suspect Club.” The search went on worldwide until July 31, 1910, when a tip came in from Wendling’s lover and he was finally arrested in San Francisco.
Wendling denied killing Alma. He tried pinning it on others at the church. They pointed out that he was the only one with access to the cellar. He then argued that it must have been his predecessor, but he couldn’t remember the man’s name.
He and his wife struggled with the expenses of effective legal counsel, and even wrote a letter to the public at one point begging for financial assistance. Big surprise number three: people were not eager to help an accused child murderer with his bills.
Wendling pled not guilty, and on November 28, the prosecution presented their case: heartfelt testimony about that day from Alma’s family members, a woman who saw Wendling near Alma that morning, a woman who stayed to pray after mass and saw no other man in the church but Wendling, and Father Schumann, who testified about the cellar hole to which only Wendling had access. The jury then heard the testimony of Dr. Ellis Duncan, who described the heartbreaking state of her body, which no doubt made the jury emotional. Other witnesses were called to establish that the shoes found were indeed Alma’s, or to describe the location where the body was found. This kind of testimony does not help the prosecution meet the burden of proof.
The defense made the questionable choice of having Wendling take the stand. He adamantly denied having raped or murdered Alma Kellner. They also called witnesses who tried to explain why some items might have been in his possession, as he was responsible for the lost-and-found and the laundry chutes. The final witness was Alma’s father, who testified where he had chosen to have his daughter buried. I’m not sure why this was relevant.
The jury deliberated for three hours before convicting. They did not recommend the death penalty. But why? If there were ever a justified use of capital punishment, wouldn’t it be in a case like this, where an innocent child has been assaulted and murdered? But the fact is that they didn’t have a great deal of evidence on Joseph Wendling. The prosecution’s entire case was based on speculation and circumstantial evidence. The jury couldn’t bring themselves to put a man to death without the proper evidence. They had no problem locking him up, though.
Behind bars, Wendling set his mind to creative endeavors, like writing poetry. In 1919, after nine years in prison and problems in the appeals process, he escaped, but they caught him a few counties away within a few days. They locked him back up, and after a while he became eligible for parole. Alma’s father and grandfather sat at every one of those parole hearings, doing everything they could to keep this man behind bars.
Weirdly, and this is part of the mystery of the case, Alma’s father and Frank Fehr, her grandfather, eventually relented and gave their consent for Wendling to be released after receiving a twenty-page letter from him. Nobody knows what that letter contained. Wendling served twenty-five years in prison: 1910 to 1935. He was deported to France afterward, and he maintained his innocence to the grave.
It gets weirder yet. While Wendling was behind bars, Father Hans Schmidt, a Catholic priest, had secretly married his mistress Anna Aumuller, whom he had impregnated. In 1913, he was arrested for the murder of that same woman. Her body was mutilated. Schmidt was given the death penalty.
When Schmidt’s past was explored a little further, it was discovered that he worked very near Alma’s house when she was murdered. When he was interrogated about Anna’s murder, he spoke in detail about her mutilation having specific religious significance. This led many people to believe that he was Alma’s real killer, but he insisted he’d confessed to all his crimes and he would have confessed to Alma’s murder had he been the assailant, but he was not.
I don’t know what really happened. I think it’s likely that Wendling was indeed Alma’s murderer. What happened with Father Schmidt is shocking, but it doesn’t necessarily make him any more likely to be Alma’s murderer. Schmidt didn’t have access to the location where Alma’s body was found. They only person who did was Wendling.
One can only wonder what might have been if Alma wasn’t killed. Who would she have been? What would her life have been like? What talents and gifts would she have shared with the world had she gotten the chance?
If you want to make a difference in the life of someone affected by a situation like this, I recommend making a donation to the Center for Missing and Exploited Children. They are a very important organization that helps kids in all sorts of terrible circumstances. I’ll have the link to where you can donate in the description box.
That’s all for this week. If you found this video interesting, please subscribe, and I’ll see you next time on Out of the Past.