Out of the Past: Series 2 Episode 1.
The Broadway Butterfly Murders
In the 1920s, few lights in the world burned brighter than those that lit the Great White Way. From dancers to comedians, pianists to models to playwrights, Broadway was the dream destination of almost every type of entertainer. Unfortunately, making it to the stage did not come with a great deal of security. There were no guarantees of success or safety. This week on Out of the Past: Dorothy King and Louise Lawson: The Broadway Butterfly Murders.
Louise Lawson was born at the turn of the twentieth century in Walnut Springs, Texas. Even as a child, she wowed locals with her many talents. Lou, as she preferred to be called, was considered a piano prodigy, playing virtuosic level pieces by the time she was twelve.
Her singing voice was also revered in Walnut Springs, and she sang with her church choir every Sunday until she turned 18. After that she left her family and supporters in Texas behind, with hopes of making it in New York City. She planned to study music and pursue her dream of making it to Broadway.
Unfortunately, being a big fish in a tiny pond doesn’t always ensure success when that fish migrates to the Big Apple. Not to say that Lou was a failure; she simply didn’t achieve the level of stardom she was seeking. Her biggest break came in early 1921 when she was cast in Florenz Ziegfeld’s Follies. It had been six years since she moved to New York, and she had finally made it to the Broadway stage, earning a living wage.
I can’t find much information about what exactly Lou’s role in the production entailed. I assume she was a chorus girl, as I think sources would mention if she performed any sort of solo routine. Keep in mind the Broadway musical was a very different art form a hundred years ago. This was still the age of Vaudeville, and Broadway shows took the form of what we might consider variety shows today. The Ziegfeld Follies productions were famous for their beautiful women. Ziegfeld Girls were the supermodels of their time. So Lou made it to Broadway, but not the way she intended. She wasn’t singing solos or playing the piano. For all intents and purposes, she was a model—part of the background. She also appeared in a D.W. Griffith movie, Way Down East, in 1920. She was only an extra, but is clearly visible in the film.
The show biz gig didn’t actually last long for Lou, primarily because she soon figured out that she could make a far better living using talents other than the ones that brought her to the city in the first place. After opting to perform in more “private” settings, her life changed dramatically. Keeping the company of wealthy men, many of whom were involved in bootlegging operations, boosted her income from $75 a week to more than $500. Her striking good looks and Texan charm became very popular among crowds of big spenders. As a result, she lived a lavish lifestyle. Friends described her as dripping with jewels and always having cash on hand. Her newfound wealth was no secret in the society she associated with, and in all likelihood was probably something her assailant or assailants would have known about.
On the eighth of February, 1924, Louise Lawson was found dead in her own West 77th Street apartment. Lou’s maid discovered her with her arms tied to the corners of her bed with her dog’s leash. She was wearing very little clothing, and was gagged elaborately with towels and tape. Texie, her dog, was found shut up in another room. Texie had apparently always been a very vocal dog, but none of the neighbors reported hearing barking on the night of Lou’s death.
The maid called for help, but Lou was already dead upon the doctor’s arrival. The physician on the site was easily able to classify the manner of death as homicide, but I’ve seen conflicting information about the actual cause. Some sources report that she suffocated on her elaborate gag, while others claim she was strangled. One detail that remains consistent, however, is that there was ample evidence of a struggle. Lou fought back.
Police concluded that nearly $20,000 worth of jewelry had been stolen from the apartment. The place was in shambles, and authorities could only describe it as “ransacked.” There was a coded message written on her front door. Authorities deciphered the message: “Louise Lawson is alone so long.”
Neither this message nor any other forensic clues law enforcement picked up at the scene helped them to solve this grisly murder. In fact, the case went cold almost immediately. Authorities seemed to give up and blame the murder on her lifestyle. They did this with full knowledge that another woman, a former Broadway performer and popular figure in the same crowds Lou ran with, had been murdered just eleven months prior. The two victims had a lot in common, especially when it came to the circumstances around their deaths.
Dorothy “Dot” King, real name Dorothy Keenan, hadn’t migrated to the big city like Louise. She was born in Harlem in 1894, but she set her sights on Broadway at an early age. To be more precise, she set her sights on the upper west side of Manhattan and the lifestyle that went with it.
Dot began her career as a model. Just like Broadway, modeling was very different a hundred years ago. Dot didn’t strut down a runway in the latest fashions, but rather wore outfits around actual haute couture shops so customers could see what the clothing looked like on a real human body. The job demanded that the employee conform to a set of beauty standards, but they were, of course, different from today’s. She wasn’t a six-foot-tall gazelle. Dot was petite and buxom, and she quickly became one of the most admired beauties in the wealthy cliques of Manhattan. She associated with very powerful men—men who didn’t always have the best intentions. Men who valued money more than human life.
With such associations, it was easy for Dot King to leave her Broadway aspirations behind. She was soon drowning in more money than she could ever have imagined as a child in Harlem. She was an unmarried woman living a life of luxury. Dot was New York City’s eminent flapper. With her short blond bob and blue eyes the size of saucers, she was always extravagant in some way. It was people like Dot and the company she kept that kept the twenties roaring. Prohibition and the wild lifestyle fostered by the bootleggers who defied it made her nightlife experiences exciting and sometimes dangerous. Bootlegging brought in great money, and it attracted some of the most apathetic, sociopathic, and dangerous figures of the generation. These men made the most money, so obviously, Dot wanted to run in that crowd. She had a number of beaus, including the son of President Harding, reportedly.
Dot King was a prime example of a flapper, but that’s not the only 20s vocabulary she’s associated with. The term “sugar daddy” was coined by Daily News columnist Julia Harpman during this time, possibly in direct reference to Dot’s case. Dot’s favorite daddy was a man she would only ever refer to as “Mr Marshall.” Mr Marshall put her up in a nice apartment on 57th Street: the top floor of a brownstone. This was where her maid, Billy Bradford, discovered her body sprawled across the bed in a filmy nightie on March 15, 1923.
Bradford didn’t even realize she was dead at first. Dot was a nightly partier, so Bradford simply assumed she had passed out from another long evening at the local speakeasies. Bradford went along with her business, tidying up the room, until she accidentally brushed Dot’s foot. It was like ice.
Before contacting the authorities, Bradford tampered with the crime scene extensively. The window was open when she arrived, and she closed it, in all likelihood to make herself more comfortable in the apartment. There had been record-breaking low temperatures the previous night. What I can’t think of a way to explain is why Bradford cleaned so much before authorities arrived. She washed drinking glasses with fingerprints on them. She also found a pair of men’s pajamas and stashed them underneath the couch. Some suggest that she did this to protect Dot’s reputation, but we don’t know for sure.
Friends and neighbors traipsed around the apartment for hours before authorities had a chance to survey it for evidence. Of course, forensic sciences were in their infancy at the time. Even if it had been perfectly preserved, it’s unlikely that the prosecution would have found their suspects using forensic evidence from the crime scene.
Murder wasn’t the first conclusion that people jumped to. The first doctor who arrived at the scene thought it was an accidental overdose or a suicide. Chloroform was used as a recreational drug back then, and a bottle was found beside her. Dot wouldn’t have been the first party girl to have used chloroform to take her own life. It wasn’t until another professional examined the body that authorities learned that it was absolutely a homicide. Dr. Charles Casassa pointed out that Dot’s arm had been bent into an unnatural position behind her back. The back side of her body was also covered in bruises. There were marks around her neck, like she’d been strangled. He notified the chief medical examiner, Dr. Charles Norris, who didn’t arrive until 6PM. (Norris’ autopsy determined that there was no alcohol in Dot’s system, and that she had not engaged in sexual activity.) Detectives arrived even later. Law enforcement seemed to be dragging their feet for some reason.
The apartment had been burglarized and ransacked. Authorities estimated that she was missing about $15,000 in jewelry. This is one of the many details that have been used to connect Dot’s and Lou’s murders. They were both women living in fancy apartments alone, who were in possession of a fortune’s worth of jewels. They ran with similar crowds: the crowds that could afford this kind of jewelry, obviously, and many wealthy people in the 1920s did not come into their money through ethical means.
The only person who had observed anything unusual during the time Dot would have been assaulted was a downstairs neighbor who reported hearing noises above them and smelling a terrible odor coming from the dumbwaiter. Could this dumbwaiter have been used as a way to get to the apartment? Was the smell the chloroform that was used on Dot? There was also very likely a roof garden above Dot’s room, which might have provided access as well.
Another significant piece of potential evidence uncovered at the site was Dot’s will, found on a table. It began “I, Dorothy Keenan, believing that something unforeseen might happen to me, hereby bequeath all my worldly possessions to my mother.”
I don’t think the murders of Lou and Dot are linked by a single killer, but I do think it’s important to talk about them together because their life circumstances were so similar, and people used their circumstances in order to prey on these young women.
Whereas Louise Lawson’s murder went cold pretty quickly, several suspects stood out in the Dorothy King case.
One of these suspects was the mysterious figure at first known only as “Mr. Marshall”—probably even by Dot herself. Mr. Marshall, as I’ve said, was Dot’s main squeeze, her “sugar daddy.” He was the one who supposedly paid for her living expenses, including the apartment in which she was murdered. He was extravagantly wealthy, and chose to shower Dot with that wealth in the form of jewelry, flowers, champagne, and savings bonds. He was also the owner of the pajamas that Dot’s maid had stashed under the sofa.
Mr. Marshall would always arrive at Dot’s apartment with his associate, “Mr Wilson.” Mr Wilson appears to have served as a lookout. After checking to see if the coast was clear, he would escort Mr. Marshall to the elevator where he would tip the operator (a man from the West Indies named John Thomas) for his discretion. Keeping his relationship with Dot a secret was clearly a priority for Mr. Marshall.
Mr. Marshall had taken Dot out to dinner on the last night of her life, and they dined as a trio with Mr. Wilson. (Some sources claim that Dot and Mr. Wilson were closer than they let on. If they were having an affair with each other, this could have provided a motive for Mr. Marshall—or, conceivably, for Mr. Wilson.)
A short time after the murder, law enforcement received an anonymous phone call from a woman stating that she was in possession of a love letter sent to Dot by one of her many admirers.
“Darling Dottie, only two more days and I will be in your arms. I want to see you. O so much, and to kiss your pretty toes,” it said. The anonymous caller told the police that the man who wrote it was one of the most powerful men in the country. When the author of the letter came forward, investigators finally learned the identity of the mysterious Mr. Marshall. He was actually Philadelphia businessman John Kearsley Mitchell, the son-in-law of E. T. Stotesbury, who was a close associate of J.P. Morgan. “Mr. Wilson” was Mitchell’s lawyer friend John H. Jackson.
Investigators began to pursue Mitchell as a person of interest. Some conjectured that Dot had tried to blackmail him in some way, so he’d had her taken care of. But Mitchell, though he admitted to penning the letter, and to having dinner with Dot before she was murdered, denied having a romantic relationship with her. He claimed he was happily married, and his wife was always there to confirm that. Of course, it seems like a fair question to ask why Mitchell was so eager to kiss the toes of someone with whom he was “just good friends.” And then there are the pajamas!
At any rate, Dot’s mother, Kate Keenan, didn’t think the “Mr. Marshall” path was the right one to follow. She didn’t think Mr. Marshall would hurt a soul. She wanted the police to look into another one of her daughter’s boyfriends, a gigolo named Albert Guimares. Guimares was an all-around bad guy. He swindled innocent people into investing in bogus stocks. He was known to run with the mob and there were warrants out for his arrest. The evidence also indicates that Dot was complicit in his fraudulent investment schemes: she had a list of “suckers” in her apartment. Most damningly, he had allegedly beaten Dot up just a few nights before her death. Dot’s mother was certain he was the killer, but he had an alibi that could be corroborated by several witnesses, including someone the media simply referred to as “an attractive blond.”
The case sat open for years, and law enforcement kept an eye on Guimares. Years later, the identity of the “attractive blond” surfaced, and along with it new information to investigate. There had been two witnesses that alibied Guimares in the original investigation: Guimares’ best friend Edmund McBrien, and this blond, whose identity was finally revealed as McBrien’s girlfriend, Aurelia Fischer.
Six years later, as the decade was coming to an end, Fischer and McBrien attended a posh party in Washington D.C. At one point during the night, Fischer took to the balcony for some fresh air. She never came back inside. She either jumped or was pushed. It was revealed soon afterward that she had recently confessed to family members: “I perjured myself in the Dot King murder.” Some wonder whether O’Brien pushed her to her death in order to prevent her from disclosing Guimares’ role—or his own—in Dot’s murder.
One surprising suspect law enforcement looked into was Draper Daugherty, the son of the nation’s Attorney General. He was nowhere near Manhattan at the time of the crime, but the media took quite an interest in this famous, married suspect. It made for good headlines.
Another person of interest was up-and-coming Broadway performer Hilda Ferguson, who had been Dot’s roommate until just a few weeks before the murder. They were close, even sharing a bed when they lived together. Dot took Hilda to all her usual clubs and speakeasies and introduced her to rich, powerful men. Soon, Hilda was arm candy to Willie McCabe, one of mob giant Arnold Rothstein’s cronies. (Hilda was supposedly in Central Park the night Rothstein was slain.) As Hilda gained notoriety, she became more successful professionally, making it to Broadway as a Ziegfeld girl. (She didn’t get to enjoy her success for long, though. She died at the end of the twenties at the age of 30.)
Hilda eventually moved out of the apartment, claiming that Dot’s partying and drinking was too much for her. According to a lot of other people, however, Hilda’s lifestyle was if anything even wilder than Dot’s. Just days before the murder, there was a report of an altercation between Dot and an unidentified woman on the street. A blogger named Brooks Peters has speculated that this might have been Hilda, who had moved to a building not far away. It’s not clear why Hilda would have been angry enough at Dot to attack her, let alone kill her, but there is at least a slight possibility that their falling out could have been bitter enough to cause bad blood.
Other suspects some have proposed are Dot’s older brother John, who often slutshamed her and didn’t approve of her flapper lifestyle, and her ex-husband Eugene Oppel, whom she referred to as “a big bum.” There is no real evidence that either of them was involved in her death, however.
Brooks Peters proposes on his blog An Open Book that the answer to Dot’s mystery could actually lie in the history of the brownstone in which she was murdered. I’ve gotten a great deal of my information about Dot from Peters’ research, which is extensive and fascinating. It’s also overwhelming and at times bewildering. His findings involve several decades’ worth of real estate purchases and development plans, with a huge cast of characters ranging from the obscure to the rich and famous. How any of it relates to Dot or her murder is pretty vague, but it’s definitely interesting and worth checking out. The most striking thing Peters comes across is a strange coincidence that seems too weird to be accidental. Two of Dot’s neighbors in her building, in two different apartments, were named Frances Stoddard and Robert Sanborn. Dot and Guimares were known to have been involved in some pyramid schemes together wherein they duped investors out of large amounts of cash. According to one news article, they even had an office in the Giske Building downtown with a fake name that they used as a cover. The name was “Stoddard & Sandborn.” The most likely explanation is that when they were trying to come up with a name for their front, Dot or Guimares just thought of these names because they were handy: maybe they were printed on mailboxes in the lobby of the building, for example. But if the real Stoddard and Sanborn were somehow caught up in their shenanigans, say as investors or partners, this could have provided one or both of them with a motive for violence when they discovered they’d been tricked. It wouldn’t be the first time such a thing had happened: about a year earlier, another of Dot’s and Guimares’ “suckers” had accosted her in a club.
So these are two mysteries that will probably never be solved. In my opinion, these cases are not connected by an assailant, but rather by a lifestyle that attracted predators. In the Lawson case, there are several questions that leave me guessing. If you have any theories, please leave a comment below.
What did the coded writing on the door mean? Was it supposed to be “Louise Lawson is alone. So long”? If not, how do we explain the grammar of the sentence? In either case, how do we determine its meaning? And how reliable was the method used to decipher it?
Did Lou have a particular sugar daddy who was able to deflect interest off of himself? It seems the apartment she was living in was even fancier than Dot’s. Could he have had a key?
The tying and the gagging make me wonder if this could be the work of a serial killer. It seems ritualistic and rehearsed, but the house was also more burglarized than many serial killer crime scenes. Remember, whoever did it made off with more than $20,000 in jewelry. It could have been someone Lou knew, or an unknown/possible serial intruder. We don’t have enough information to rule either one out.
As for Dot King’s case, other questions bother me.
Why is there so much misinformation out there? It seems like many of the details that are commonly reported are completely made up. We don’t even know that Dot was ever on Broadway, for there was another Dorothy King trying to make it at the same time. Some hold she never made it to the Great White Way.
Why did police think that they could accurately survey the apartment for stolen valuables after so many people had rummaged through the house already? It is rumored that Dot had much less than 15K in jewels stolen, and that some of her family members actually came in and took things they considered to be theirs now.
What was going on with Dot’s will, which was found at the scene of the murder? What sort of “unforeseen” thing could she have had in mind? Did she know someone wanted her dead? And why? Why was it just sitting out in plain sight and not filed away? Is it possible that Dot’s own mother forged it and planted it? And if so, to what further degree might she have been involved in the whole thing?
Why were they able to pin so many other crimes on Guimares, but not this one? Why wasn’t he arrested after the deathbed confession of Aurelia?
They call them Broadway butterflies because they’re young women so transfixed by the lights of Broadway, they must move toward them, like moths to lightbulbs. But these women were no moths. They were so beautiful and extravagant, we have to change the analogy to butterfly. Dot and Lou flew so close to the lights that they took on their glow themselves. The lights burned so bright in these women that they couldn’t be blown out completely. That’s why I’m still telling their stories a hundred years later. Regardless of their own involvement in various crimes, what happened to them was wrong, and they deserved better.These were strong, talented women who could have contributed so much more to society if their lives weren’t cut short. Everyone always said Dot King could make your day with a smile. Why would someone want to take that smile away?