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Early last week, a tall dour man with dark glasses appeared at Dr. Bauer's Ann Arbor hotel, asked him for a lift in his automobile, forced Dr. Bauer to drive to a lonely Chicago alley. There the stranger bound Dr. Bauer's feet & hands, deliberately castrated him with a penknife. Driving the car slowly into a Chicago garage, the tall, dour man jumped out, fled into darkness. In the car the garagemen found Dr. Bauer bleeding to death.
The Chicago Press, once over the difficulty of Bauer's dreadful injury by calling it variously "penknife mutilation," "sex-operation," "rude emasculation," straightway pointed "The Finger of Suspicion" at Mandeville Zenge.
Mandeville Zenge promptly supplied more headlines by paying off a cab at a Chicago pier and walking into the night. Behind he left a blood-stained coat and a suicide note: "I left home because I was so miserably unhappy over losing Louise ... I suppose she is better off married to that doctor ... I know what I am doing."
What Mandeville Zenge was doing was hiding out until the next night when he was caught in a garage telephone booth in Chicago's west side. He firmly refused, however, to tell anything. The baffled newspapers thereupon pounced on Mrs. Bauer, headlined her as THE PENKNIFE WIDOW.
Cleveland. A pair of simple psychotics made the week's final murder headlines in the Midwest. According to Mr. and Mrs. Waldman of Cleveland, just because Mr. Waldman had once known Mrs. Ida Rose Cooper, she sent magic fireballs into their windows at night. Mr. Waldman had been burnt. The Waldmans slept with a pair of pliers in the bed to catch the floating fireballs, a hammer and anvil to smash them with, and "even in this hot weather we had to keep the windows closed to keep the fireballs out." When Mrs. Matilda Waldman shot and killed Mrs. Cooper last week, headlines ran NO MORE FIREBALLS FOR WITCH SLAYER.
According to diligent newshawks, Mrs. Dunkel, Mrs. Evelyn Smith, Mandeville Zenge and Mr. and Mrs. Waldman all had one thing in common. After they made their respective headlines, they all declared they had enjoyed "the best night's sleep in years."