The Strange Confession of Leopold Rowe

 

In July of 1893, murder was the hot topic of conversation around Lebanon County. On the morning of July 6, in the tiny North Dakota town of Cando, just south of the Canadian border, a family with local roots was horribly slaughtered. Fifteen years earlier, the Kreider family had left their home in Lebanon County for the frontier, taking with them a distant relative from Campbellstown to work as a hired hand on their North Dakota farm. This man, Albert Bomberger, killed Daniel Kreider and his wife, along with their five children, before being captured in Manitoba. On Tuesday, July 11, the bodies of the Kreider family arrived in Elizabethtown by train, and, the following day, were laid to rest in one huge grave at Risser's Mennonite Meeting House cemetery in Mt. Joy Township (Barbara Kreider, the slain wife, was the daughter of John Risser). The funeral, which is believed to be the largest ever held in Lancaster County, drew between eight and ten thousand mourners, many of whom had been friends and acquaintances of the Kreiders during their time in Lebanon County.

Because of the sensational nature of the Kreider murders, not many people took notice of another murder which was discovered near Campbellstown while Lebanon County buzzing with gossip about the horrific slayings on the prairie. On the afternoon of July 10, just as the train carrying the corpses of the Kreiders was chugging into Pennsylvania, Coroner Reager of Lebanon County received a telegram requesting him to come to Palmyra to hold an inquest over the badly-decomposed remains of a man who was found dead beneath a haystack on a farm.

New York Fatty

Farmhand Edward Bachman was loading a hay wagon on the farm of S.F. Engle, on the road between Palmyra and Campbellstown, when he lifted a bale from a pile and stared into the unseeing eyes of a corpse. The head of the dead man was covered with vermin; the farmhand's shouts soon attracted a large crowd. The coroner arrived in mid-afternoon, and his examination of the remains revealed two bullet holes in the left temple. The dead man was a large fellow of about thirty years of age, heavy in build and six feet in height, clad in brown trousers, white shirt and a vest, though his shoes were missing.

The coroner immediately concluded that the man had been murdered and the body dragged about one hundred feet into Mr. Engle's field. There was no proof of identification, and no clues to lead authorities to the murderer. With nothing more to go on that statements from locals, it was eventually believed that the victim was a German tramp known throughout the vicinity as "New York Fatty". The victim's real name was unknown, though some said that it might have been Shaeffer, and that the man might have had connections in Wilkes-Barre.

Physician M.B. Fritz, upon examining the corpse in Palmyra at the direction of Coroner Reager, issued the following statement:

Palmyra, Pa., July 10, 1893. I, the undersigned, duly sworn by the Coroner, on the above date, do declare and say that the said corpse, unknown to any jury or community at large, has been murdered, to the best of my belief. I find on the left side of his head over the temporal region two fresh stabs, also two bullet holes in the same region, the effect of which was sufficient to cause his death. Otherwise there were no scars or bruises on his body.

The coroner, upon returning to Lebanon on the seven o'clock train, notified the county almshouse and instructed the body to be brought back for burial. At three o'clock in the morning the body arrived and was interred at the almshouse potter's field with little fanfare. Detective George Hunter conducted an investigation, but no clues were found and the murder at the Engle farm quickly faded from memory.

The Tramp's Confession

On February 20, 1900 a tiny, hot-tempered, middle-aged German tramp found himself confined to a steel cell in the basement of the Lebanon city hall. He had been brought to Lebanon from the Berks County jail, where he had been picked up on a vagrancy charge. This was nothing out of the ordinary for 50-year-old Leopold Rowe, who had been drifting from town to town for the past ten years of his life. Rowe was no stranger to county jails and small-town lockups, and, under normal circumstances, he would've been out on the streets in a day or two after serving his routine vagabond sentence. But this time, things would be different. This time, Leopold Rowe admitted to be being something more than a neighborhood nuisance or a petty thief-- he admitted, on February 18, that he was the one who had slain New York Fatty in a farmer's field in Lebanon County seven years earlier.

Of course, there are many reasons why a habitual miscreant would cop to committing an offense which occurred in another jurisdiction. Sometimes, the quality of food is better in one county jail than another, and sometimes a prisoner has a pal locked up in another county whom he wishes to be reunited with. In the case of Leopold Rowe, however, it appeared that he had been brutally mistreated by the other inmates at the Berks County jail, and it was reported that Rowe's stay in Reading had been so miserable that he had attempted suicide. 

From his cell in Lebanon, Rowe denied these accusations. No, the reason he had confessed to killing a fellow tramp was because he had been tormented, day and night, but the ghostly vision of his victim's face. When visited in jail by reporters, the self-styled murderer claimed that the image of his victim was constantly before his eyes, giving him no rest. It mattered not that Rowe's confession might send him to the gallows; he urgently needed the relief that a confession could bring. "I have trouble," Rowe moaned painfully, rubbing his temples. "My head hurts me," he said, before he told his tale to Detective Sattazahn and newspaper reporters.

On the night of February 18, Rowe asked the night guard, Edward Koch, to come to his cell. When Koch obeyed, Rowe told him that he, along with a fellow tramp known only as "Yockey", had committed the foul deed on the road between Palmyra and Campbellstown in 1893. After Rowe pulled the trigger, the tramps had robbed the corpse of $50 before crossing the Susquehanna River and concealing themselves on a farm.

Normally, one would've scoffed at the notion-- standing just 4'6" and weighing a mere 128 pounds, Leopold Rowe looked more like a gnome than a cold-blooded killer. But what made the confession believable was that Rowe knew every minute detail of the murder-- not just the color and style of the clothing the victim had been wearing or the nature of the fatal injuries, but other details which had never made it into print. Warden Kintzer and Berks County officials looked into the matter and concluded that Rowe was probably telling the truth. He was transferred to Lebanon County by berks County sheriff Frank Brobst and the case of the Engle Farm corpse was reopened by District Attorney McCurdy. 

Leopold Rowe, however, didn't stick around long enough to wait for the conclusion of the investigation. Just hours later, after telling his story to the detective, Rowe wove a rope from strips of his bedsheets and hanged himself. Perhaps because of the impropriety of burying Rowe in the same potter's field as his purported victim, the almshouse steward, John Light, decided to ship Rowe's body to the University of Pennsylvania medical school in Philadelphia.

Truth or the Ramblings of a Madman?

After a photograph of Leopold Rowe appeared in the Reading Times, former Reading chief of police Jacob Etzel recognized it as the likeness of a man who had been declared insane two years earlier, before escaping from the Harrisburg State Hospital. While Berks County Detective Kershner admitted the similarity in appearance, however, he denied that Rowe and the escaped mental patient were the same man; the man who was committed to the asylum was named John Seifert, not Leopold Rowe. It was Etzel and Kershner, who was deputy sheriff at the time, who had conveyed the man to the asylum. To settle the debate, one journalist from the Times decided to investigate the matter, and concluded that the tramp who had hanged himself in Lebanon after confessing to the 1893 murder was indeed the same tramp who had escaped from the Harrisburg State Hospital in June of 1897. But what was his real name?

On June 10, 1897, a man going by the name of John Seifert was arrested in Berks County by Chief of Police Albrecht at the request of farmers, who accused him of being a general nuisance. While locked up at the city police station, Seifert exhibited signs of insanity and a petition was presented to the court for the appointment of a lunacy commission. Judge Ermentrout appointed attorney Fred Hartgen, alderman E.S. Kirschman and Dr. Charles Haman to evaluate the tramp's mental condition. The report of the commission was filed on June 15, finding Seifert to be of "unsound mind" and recommending that he be committed to the state lunatic asylum. According to the report, the prisoner showed signs of extreme violence, having torn the steam heating pipes from his cell and smashing his bench into splinters.

On the morning of June 16, 1897, Seifert was transported from Berks County to Harrisburg. He spoke only in German during the trip, and was so delusional that he believed that he was back in the old country, on the road to Bomberg. Physicians at the asylum pronounced his case a mild one; as a result, John Seifert (Leopold Rowe) was given minimal supervision, thereby giving him an opportunity to escape, which he did twenty-three months later, on May 9, 1899.

Whether Leopold Rowe was actually the man who had killed New York Fatty, or was merely an unfortunate sufferer of mental illness who happened to learn the story from a fellow tramp before confessing it innocently as his own deed, will most likely never be known.


Sources:

Lebanon Daily News, July 10, 1893.
Lebanon Daily News, July 11, 1893.
Glen Rock Item, July 14, 1893.
Lebanon Daily News, Feb. 19, 1900.
Philadelphia Inquirer, Feb. 21, 1900.
Lebanon Courier, Feb. 28, 1900.
Lebanon Daily News, March 5, 1900.