The Chiropractor's Confession: The Dismemberment of Anna May Dietrich

 

It's not every day a chiropractor admits to dismembering the body of one of his patients, but, in January of 1926, that's exactly what occurred in Philadelphia. 

William Rowson, a blacksmith who lived by the Rose Tree Hunt Club, near the Delaware County borough of Media, was directed to a cow pasture near McClure's Woods by local resident Sadie Worrell on Thursday, January 21. Mrs. Worrell had grown alarmed after finding scraps of blood-soaked newspaper strewn across Palmer's Mill Road, and her alarm turned to terror when she traced the paper trail to a white bundle surrounded by cows in the pasture about twenty feet from the roadway, on the property of wealthy lawyer Samuel J. Henderson. Rowson went into the pasture to investigate, and discovered that the object in question was a pair of human legs encased in silk stockings. Rowson found the woman's headless torso nearby, under a pile of bloody newspapers. He immediately notified the police.

At the scene, detectives hoped to uncover the victim's identity through her belongings. She had been wearing a blue serge dress, and a watch on her wrist was engraved with the initials H.B.Z. to T.T. Identification of the corpse was made later that afternoon at the county morgue by the victim's brother-in-law, Alexander Schuhl of Norwood, who identified the torso as that of his wife's sister, 35-year-old millinery shop employee Anna May Dietrich, who lived with them at their Leon Avenue home. Schuhl stated that his wife had made the blue dress. However, Schuhl did not recognize the watch. He returned later to the morgue with his wife, who identified the brown shoes the victim had been wearing. The autopsy, performed later that night, failed to disclose the manner of death, though it seemed by the precision of the dismemberment that the killer must have had medical training. The identification was also confirmed by the victim's brother, Albert Dietrich, who viewed the remains at the W.C. Rigby & Son funeral parlor.

The spot where the torso was found is now a public park.

 

A Private Dancer

According to Mrs. Schuhl, she had left her sister during a shopping trip in Philadelphia on Tuesday, January 19, and hadn't seen her since. That evening, Anna told her sister that she was going to the theatre and dinner with a "man from the west", and she had also purchased a new dress to wear for another date on Saturday night with a Germantown roofing contractor named Nathaniel Warren, whose office was located above the millinery shop where the victim worked. According to friends, Anna had been taking dancing lessons, with Anna signing up under the name of Anna Warren. Her next class was to be on Tuesday evening, but Anna called the dance academy Tuesday afternoon to cancel.

On January 23, Anna May Dietrich's head was found stuffed in the trestles of a railroad bridge over Naylor's Run by Upper Darby policemen and a troop of Boy Scouts, a spot seven miles from the Rose Tree Hunt Club. There was an expression of horror stamped upon the face-- Anna's nostrils and pupils were dilated, her teeth clenched. Strangely, the head had been severed above the neck, and the neck wasn't found with the rest of the torso at McClure's Woods.

That same day, police were able to track down Nathaniel Warren, who had been in Wilmington on business the day of Anna's disappearance. Warren, however, had no intention of answering any questions. He showed up with his attorney and read a prepared statement. "I have no comment to make on the death of Miss Dietrich," he said. "I have conferred with my attorney and have nothing to say. All I know about Miss Dietrich is that I took her to dances several times. I did not see her Tuesday or Wednesday. That is all I have to say now."

 

The victim's employer, Catherine Girling, whose millinery shop was located at 5817 Germantown Avenue, was unable to shed any light on the mysterious death of the woman who had worked under her for six years. Girling had helped the Schuhls look for Anna after her disappearance, and provided an explanation why Anna was using the last name of Warren when attending the dance academy at 19th and Market streets. According to Girling, she had missed a class she had signed up for under her real name several months earlier, and chose the name Warren to avoid any possible cancellation fees. As far as she knew, Anna rarely went out on dates.

"She used to go out when she was younger, but she hadn't bothered much with men for some years," stated a family friend, Mrs. McCann. This seemed to discredit the statement made by Nathaniel Warren. Casting further doubt on Warren's claim were statements made by Mr. White, proprietor of the dance academy. Anna had been attending ballroom dancing classes for four months under the name of Anna Warren, but had always come alone. 

"She never attended any of our public dances and did not appear to be the kind of woman who would attend public dances," said Mr. White. "She seemed very cultured and refined."

Detectives, however, believed that Anna May Dietrich may have had a string of suitors a mile long. District Attorney William Taylor's investigation revealed that Anna had been "very sweet" on a man from Ridley Park. The Schuhls had heard Anna gushing about this man, but didn't recall his name. However, Anna had confided to her sister that she had gone out with him several times and was in love. This man was identified as Bennett J. Gleason.

 

Was Anna Pregnant With A Lover's Child?

Detectives believed that Anna's wrist watch and its mysterious engraving might lead them to the killer. Who was H.B.Z.? For that matter, who was T.T.? The watch was stopped at 4:26. The last person known to have seen her alive was Mrs. McCann, who saw her on Market Street at 6:30 on Tuesday evening. It stood to reason that, unless Anna's watch was broken, she had met her demise sometime early Wednesday morning.

 Detectives also found a small glass vial near the body, marked "essence of licorice". They enlisted Dr. J. Atlee Dean to analyze the contents of the dead woman's stomach, under the belief that she may have been poisoned. Since licorice (the plant, not the candy) has been used in folk medicine as an abortifacient-- a substance intended to induce a miscarriage-- this also raised the possibility that Anna may have experienced complications from a botched abortion. The doctor, fearing prosecution, may have mutilated the body to conceal his involvement in the illegal procedure. Unfortunately, the earlier autopsy had revealed that all of Anna's organs had been "expertly" drained of blood.

Inspector Caleb J. Brinton, head of the detective division, assigned a dozen men to question every known male and female acquaintance of Anna May Dietrich. He theorized that Anna may have been strangled, the killer severing the head to hide the woman's manner of death. 

 

The Debonair Chiropractor

One of the acquaintances questioned was David L. Marshall, a debonair Philadelphia chiropractor with an office just two blocks away from Mr. White's dance academy. Marshall said that he had been treating Anna for quite some time and had made numerous visits to her home. The last time he saw her, he claimed, was on January 11, when she was treated at his office for sinusitis. Interestingly, Dr. Marshall was not considered a suspect, as police stated their opinion that Anna was most likely strangled by a jealous woman at a wild roadhouse party near Media.

 Detectives were so certain of this theory that they told the Philadelphia Inquirer that they knew the names of the woman who did the strangling and the two men who helped dispose of the body, and that they had been driving a red automobile. According to County Detective Quinn, Anna was a frequent visitor to local cabarets and dance halls, and had recently been seen in the company of a married man. This, apparently, aroused the anger of the man's wife, who had reportedly warned Anna several times to break off her relationship with him.

However, the case took an unexpected turn on Monday, January 25, when David Marshall-- after twelve hours of intense grilling-- confessed that he had mutilated Anna's body. Marshall insisted that he did not murder Anna, but disposed of her body after she committed suicide in his office by taking poison. His confession came after detectives took him to the morgue and presented him with the severed head of Anna May Dietrich (Note: The grilling was performed by William Hannum, a former Yale football star and former D.A. of Delaware County. A wonderfully detailed account of the interrogation, including a description of  the tactics used to trip up Dr. Marshall, can be found in the January 26, 1926, edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer). 

According to the 42-year-old married chiropractor, he met Anna on the afternoon of Tuesday, January 19. She appeared depressed, and confided that she had been jilted by a wealthy suitor named George Nichols. Marshall then invited Anna up to his office at 30 South Seventeenth Street (now the site of Duane Morris Plaza) to lie down, which she did, while he went home to eat dinner. When he returned, he found Anna unconscious on the floor with a bottle of white crystals beside her. He carried her to his table and attempted to revive her, to no avail. He left her on the table, locked up his office and went home to consider his options. In the morning, he purchased surgical tools and returned to his office to dismember the body. It was only after Marshall had secreted the bundled bodyparts in the woods that he realized he had left the head in his office. On Wednesday night, on his way home from work, he dropped the head from the railroad trestle, where it was found on Saturday.

 

Marshall Comes Clean

It seemed that Anna May Dietrich wasn't the only one guilty of leading a double life. During a second round of interrogation, Marshall confessed to strangling Anna and slashing her throat. He insisted that Anna had attempted to blackmail him. He claimed that Anna had gone to his office to demand $100 for new clothes to wear to parties they had planned to attend together. When he refused to give her the money she screamed and threatened to expose their eight-year affair to his wife. "She had to die," Marshall explained without emotion. "She was troublesome."

David Marshall was charged with Anna May Dietrich's murder and arrested. Over six hundred people crammed into the courtroom of Magistrate Carney to witness his arraignment on January 27, with fifteen police officers keeping order. During the hearing, Anna's brother-in-law testified how he had telephoned Dr. Marshall asking if he had seen Anna, only to be told that he hadn't seen the woman for a week. Marshall stared at the floor as his romantic relationship with Miss Dietrich was revealed to the public. Even more painful to the chiropractor was the fact that his wife had renounced her marriage after learning about the affair, and had refused to attend the hearing. She also refused to visit him in jail, where he was held without bail pending the outcome of the police investigation.

"I will not spend a cent to free him," said Mrs. Marshall to her friend, Isabella McDowell. "I often thought he was leading a double life, but when I accused him of it he would laugh and accuse me of being jealous."

This development didn't exactly paint the unfortunate millinery shop worker in a good light; for a "cultured" woman who didn't care much for men, she certainly had quite a full dance card (no pun intended). There was Dr. Marshall, Nathaniel Warren, George Nichols, Bennett Gleason, the man with the initials H.B.Z. who had given her the engraved watch, and the married man she had been seen with in Delaware County roadhouses. Because of her many romantic entanglements, the prospect of blackmailing Marshall didn't seem so far-fetched, and this mitigating factor is what ultimately prevented Marshall from going to the electric chair.

The Chiropractor's Fate

Because the murder took place in the city, the case against Marshall was prosecuted by Philadelphia County district attorney Charles Edwin Fox. He was tried and convicted of second degree murder in May and sentenced to ten to twenty years at Eastern Penitentiary by Judge Harry McDevitt, the maximum penalty under the law. "My only regret," said Judge McDevitt after pronouncing sentence, "is that I cannot inflict a stiffer penalty."

A few weeks after he was sent to prison, his wife, Jennie, filed for divorce. David Marshall was a model prisoner and was released in April of 1936 after serving ten years. He moved to Miami, where he died of a heart attack five years later at the age of 60.




Sources:
Pittston Gazette, Jan. 22, 1926.
West Chester Daily News, Jan. 23, 1926.
Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 23, 1926.
Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 24, 1926.
Franklin News-Herald, Jan. 25, 1926.
Hazleton Plain Speaker, Jan. 27, 1926.
Mount Carmel Item, May 21, 1926.
Philadelphia Inquirer, Nov. 3, 1957.