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Ervin Lang's torso, wrapped in a blanket, was found in a swamp across the Indiana line. Headlines: TORSO MURDER; SWAMP MURDER. The legs, neatly sawed with the trousers, socks and shoes still on, were presently found seven miles away in a trunk. Evelyn Smith and her Chinese husband, Harry Jung, had vanished. For a week yellow men traveling with white women were detained all through the Midwest. The Press billed the crime as an endpoint of miscegenation. Fears were expressed that the "sinister Oriental," Harry Jung, had killed his white wife to make his getaway. This billing got a sorry jolt when prim-looking, thin-lipped, bespectacled Mrs. Smith was caught in a Manhattan rooming house. Mrs. Dunkel made more headlines by expressing a fear that her friend had already killed Harry Jung, who could not be found.
Misjudging Mrs. Smith's appeal at first, reporters described her "throaty voice," her "sinuous and startling attitudes," her "eye-rolling behind her tortoise-shell glasses." Mrs. Smith told nothing in Manhattan. Impressed, newshawks soon got on the right track: "the woman without nerves . . . the enigma woman."
In fascination the Press watched the Enigma Woman's fixed, prim smile as she arrived by plane in Chicago, stubbornly stuck to her story of innocence, finally declared, "Oh well, I might as well get it over with. Sure, I killed him. . . . Blanche didn't pay me a cent of the $500. ... I tried to get Harry Jung to help me cut up Ervin but he got sick at the sight of the blood. He was sitting in an automobile outside, scared half to death."
Mrs. Smith's silly, prim smile made her Chicago's Mona Lisa. Headline: WHAT OF MRS. SMITH'S STRANGE SMILE? with pictures. "Am I," she asked newshawks, "still front page?"
With Mrs. Smith firmly enthroned as No. 1 villainess, Mrs. Dunkel piously whimpered: "Evelyn did it all differently than she promised. When she told me how she cut him up, it just made me sick. The way we talked it over, Evelyn was to put Erv to sleep, strangle him and throw him in the lake." Headline: PAID FOR A NEAT "LAKE JOB," IS HER PLAINT.
Chicago No, 2. The two strange women had hardly been indicted last week before they were jostled off the Midwest's front page by a second Chicago murder in a higher class of society and with a totally different arrangement.
Dr. Wralter J. Bauer, 38, able, grave-faced professor of chemistry at Kirksville College of Osteopathy & Surgery at Kirksville, Mo., was neurotic. While police were still looking for Evelyn Smith, Dr. Bauer married Miss Louise Schaffer, the frail, pretty night superintendent of nurses in Kirksville College's hospital. Three hours after their wedding he left her to resume his postgraduate work at the University of Michigan's medical school. From there he wrote Kirksville friends that he was suspicious of his wife, notified Kirksville tradesmen to cancel her charge accounts, told university friends that he was afraid he was going crazy. In turn his bride informed him that an old suitor of hers, a tall, dour carpenter named Mandeville Zenge, was jealous of him.