Tarlton Law Library
Jamail Center for Legal Research

     Crime historian John Kobler long dreamed of submitting a baffling question to a big-money quiz show: "What American President was the second member of his family to be murdered?" The answer, which would have come easily to many residents of Canton, Ohio, is McKinley. Three years before the President's assassination, his wife's brother George D. Saxton was the victim in a murder case that has become known as the "Canton tragedy."
     It was around 6:00 p.m. on October 7, 1898, that the Canton police station received a telephone call reporting the murder. George Saxton had been shot dead on the sidewalk outside the residence of Eva Althouse, a widow of doubtful reputation, at No. 319 Lincoln Avenue. His face "was upturned, his right arm was lying over his face as if to guard it from assault and his left arm was under his body." Three bullets were found in his body; one that passed through his abdominal cavity had been the immediate cause of death. Among the large crowd the police found assembled at the scene, there were witnesses who asserted that the shooting had been done by a woman dressed in black. The woman had fired two shots and then walked away about fifty feet. When her victim cried feebly for help, she stopped and turned back; she fired two more shots and then disappeared in the darkness. The police had heard enough to identify their prime suspect; they proceeded at once to arrest Annie E. George, a jilted mistress who had made countless public threats against Saxton's life.
     The love (and hate) story of George Saxton and Annie George went back to the previous decade. The handsome, impeccably dressed George Saxton, born in 1848, was the only son of one of Canton's leading families; his father James was a banker and founder of the Canton Repository, and Ida, one of George's two sisters, was married to William McKinley. Saxton's prime interests seemed to be the pursuit of women (generally from a humbler social background) and, to a lesser degree, driving fast horses and bicycle riding. Annie George, born Annie Ehrhart in Hanoverton (Columbiana County) in 1858, married at age 20 a carpenter named Sample C. George. In 1883 the Georges moved with their two sons to Canton where Annie soon had the misfortune of attracting Saxton's admiring gaze. Sometime after her arrival in the city, Saxton came upon her while she was shopping at the Goldberg Bros. store in the Saxton Block, a large residential-commercial building that he owned and managed. Losing no time, he asked one of the clerks who she was. When he was informed of her name, he commented: "She 

is a remarkably handsome woman. I will make her acquaintance." He was good to his word, and the rest is crime history.
     Saxton arranged to be introduced to Mrs. George before she left the store and he promptly offered to rent her family a suite of rooms in the Saxton Block. Soon after the new tenants moved in, Saxton made frequent calls to see how they were getting on. On one of his visits he suggested in a joking manner that Mrs. George, who was a seamstress, mend a pair of his gloves. When her work was finished, he was delighted with her skill and went on to request that she try on and alter a sealskin jacket (sacque) intended for a friend who was about her size and build. It must have been a size and build he liked, because when the alterations were made and Annie modeled the garment for him, Saxton said that the fit was so perfect it would be a shame to take it from her; he offered it to the pretty seamstress as a gift. The present of the sealskin jacket capped the first phase of Saxton's amorous campaign, and in due course (the timing is uncertain) their romance began in earnest.
     For a long time the lovers met undisturbed, for Sample George seems to have been a patient man. But in February 1892, after an unsuccessful interview in which he had begged his landlord to discontinue his visits to Annie, he brought a $20,000 suit against Saxton for alienation of affections. Withdrawn but then reinstituted, the case got better and better for after the original filing Saxton persuaded Annie to obtain a divorce in South Dakota so that they would be free to marry. When she returned home, though, she found that her lover's ardor had cooled. Following her former husband's example, she plunged into a thicket of litigation with Saxton. She began the warfare with a $30,000 breach of promise suit and a replevin action to recover household goods she claimed he refused to allow her to remove from the Saxton Block. He countered with proceedings to restrain her from disturbing his peace and business relations and obtained an order enjoining her from visiting his building and especially his rooms, where his favorite activities, as she well knew, made privacy an absolute necessity.
     While the litigation dragged on, Annie George's sense of frustration was heightened by the common report that fickle George Saxton had now centered his attentions on a good-looking widow, Eva D. Althouse. This was not the first time Mrs. Althouse had figured in town gossip. She had divorced her first spouse and married Mr. Althouse when he was discovered by detectives cowering in her bathroom dressed, to quote the guarded language of a contemporary account, "in very scant attire so far as clothing was concerned."
     Annie George did not keep to herself her irritation over this new liaison. All over Canton she threatened Saxton's life, vowing, among other colorful outbursts, that she would shoot him so full of lead that he would 

stand stiff. One evening when Saxton and Eva Althouse were bicycling near her home, Mrs. George confronted them "wild with rage." She drew a revolver and pointing it at Saxton forced him to accompany her home; on the way she threatened to kill him if he did not keep his frequent promises to marry her when her husband's breach of promise suit was settled. Saxton was able to calm her down, but Mrs. Althouse, who was unaccustomed to Annie's violence, promptly appeared before a magistrate to seek an order placing her rival under a bond to keep the peace.
     Then strangely the turmoil ceased. Shaken by the news that Annie had approached Sample George's lawyers with an offer to testify in his case, Saxton patched up his quarrels with the woman he had wronged. After he and Annie took a sentimental journey together to Pittsburgh, the litigation between them was settled, and he renewed his promise to marry her when her husband's action terminated. But he was only playing for time; when Mr. George settled for $1,800, Saxton kept Annie at bay and, what was worse, pursued his assiduous wooing of the charming Mrs. Althouse. This new treachery threw Annie George into a frenzy of activity. On Thursday, October 6, the day before the murder, Mayor Rice of Canton deputed Patrolman Dickerhoof to accompany Mrs. George in a visit she planned to pay her faithless lover at his rooms in the Saxton Block; she was afraid to go alone, she had said, and wanted protection. She and the policeman waited together in the street watching Saxton's dark window, but when a light at last went on, Annie seemed to lose her nerve and asked Dickerhoof to meet her there again the following evening. At 5:30 p.m. on the next day she called on Judge McCarty to ask if she could ignore his injunction barring her from visiting Saxton. The judge told her that the order was still in effect. She kept Dickerhoof waiting in vain for her at the Block that evening, but of course the light did not go on again in Saxton's room. He lay dead at the threshold of Eva Althouse's home.
     When police arrested Annie George at her residence on the night of the murder, she remained resolutely silent, but her dress and hand told secrets of their own. Burrs and "Spanish needles" that clung to her skirt resembled those that grew in abundance in a vacant lot near the Althouse home. At the police station Dr. Maria Pontius, called to search the suspect, found that the thumb and forefinger of her right hand was discolored with something that looked like burnt gunpowder. After this matter was scraped off, a number of police officers smelled the substance and agreed that it was gunpowder. (Later Annie's counsel was to refer to them contemptuously as a "smelling committee.")
     The prosecution of Annie George, which went forward in the face of public sentiment strongly partial to the alluring defendant, was ably led by Attlee Pomerene (later a United States Senator) with the assistance 

of James J. Grant, a friend of the President who accepted the assignment with reluctance, fearing "the possibility of nasty things." In fact, the connection of the dead man with McKinley was only cursorily referred to in the course of the trial. The State relied on a combination of direct and circumstantial evidence to build its case. A streetcar conductor testified that he had seen Mrs. George on his car on the fatal evening; she stayed aboard when it passed the stop nearest her home and left the car west of the bridge at Hazlett Avenue (within one block of the murder scene) at about six o'clock; however, he did not believe she was dressed in black. Only one witness, the elderly Christena Eckroate, positively identified Annie as the murderess. On the night of the shooting (which others described as dark and foggy) she heard the first shot and went to her bedroom window as the second shot sounded. She saw the flash of the revolver; then a figure stepped forward and fired twice more aiming toward the ground. When the assailant fled through the vacant lots near the Althouse residence, Mrs. Eckroate recognized her as Mrs. George. On cross-examination (bolstered later by a stream of defense witnesses) Mrs. George's counsel attacked the witness's credibility on the basis of her addiction to opium.
     The State also offered evidence of a revolver found by Ex-Sergeant William J. Hasler under a culvert near the murder locale. Hasler's testimony lost force due to his long delay in reporting his discovery and the prosecution's failure to prove that the gun had belonged to Mrs. George. The jury must have been puzzled by the witness's story that about the time of his testimony to the grand jury he had visited the prisoner in her cell and asked her: "Mrs. George, what shall I do with the revolver that Mayor Rice told me about; what shall I do with it?" According to Hasler, she had replied, "Go and see my attorney, Mr. Welty; he will advise you about it." The judge ordered stricken the reference to Rice, and the implied suggestion that the defendant had confided to the mayor the hiding place of the murder weapon.
     To shore up the weaknesses of its attempts to identify the defendant and her weapon at the scene of the crime, the State placed strong emphasis on Annie's threats against Saxton's life, and particularly on sensational testimony offered by W.O. Werntz, law partner of one of Mrs. George's defenders, James Sterling, who attempted in vain to block the testimony on the basis of attorney-client privilege. After the Court ruled that the privilege does not shield the planning of a crime, Werntz told the jury that, on the Monday prior to the crime, Annie had asked him what effect it would have on her husband's suit if she killed Saxton. The attorney had advised her (in jest, one would hope) that if she was going to kill her lover she had better wait until the case was settled. If the lawyer was joking, his client was not. She said that if she shot 

Saxton she would make a good job of it, that she would give him all the bullets she had. She inquired, turning to details of her grim project, whether "it would not be a good plan to have two revolvers; throw one at his feet and shoot him with the other."
     Mrs. Althouse did not testify at the trial, having quietly slipped out of Canton to escape the ordeal of testimony. At the preliminary hearing, she had stated that she was not at home when Saxton came calling on October 7. She explained demurely that he had a passkey and often arrived unannounced to water the plants and feed her birds. His responsibilities for the domestic flora and fauna failed to account for the discovery near his body of a satchel containing a bottle of champagne.
     In defense of Annie George, her lawyers, John C. Welty and James Sterling, flatly denied that she committed the murder, and also offered an alibi (which, however, did not fix her whereabouts in the crucial moments around the time of the murder or explain why she left the streetcar after passing her home). For the main, the defense team played without embarrassment to public sentiment, proclaiming the murder a benefaction, leading on witness after witness to testify to the dead man's dissolute ways with women and even bringing Sample George to the stand to attest to his wife's purity before the appearance of the unscrupulous seducer. Counsel for the State heatedly argued that the victim's misconduct could only be considered if the murder was conceded and if provocation was in issue. The rejoinder of the defense was clever. Saxton's misconduct was relevant to show why Annie had been moved to angry threats against him - threats, of course, that she never intended for one moment to carry out. Then, too, the defense evidence showed there were countless women whom he had wronged besides Annie. Why weren't the others on trial? Why didn't the State, for example, pursue Mrs. Althouse who had fled the jurisdiction?
     After deliberating overnight, the jury acquitted Mrs. George. When the verdict was announced, hundreds of spectators roared their approval in defiance of the Court's order. Annie, surrounded by her friends, stood in the courtroom for a full ten minutes receiving congratulations.
     After her release from jail, Mrs. George dined with her jubilant relatives at the Conrad Hotel, acknowledged the applause of the huge crowd that gathered outside, and received the visits of well-wishers. Telegrams offering stage appearances poured in from theatrical managers. The president of the Women's Rights Club of Pittsburgh offered her $500 for a one week's engagement to talk on women's rights. After consulting with her lawyers, she accepted but later withdrew in the fact of hostile reactions from the Pittsburgh press. She did not have to wait long, however, to be compensated for her disappointment. She was invited to lecture on May 11 at Akron's Grand Opera House. This seemed 

an appropriate place for her debut since the murder case was the stuff of which grand opera is made. In fact, if she was guilty after all, the Canton tragedy was (from her point of view) Rigoletto with a happy ending, featuring a seduced woman triumphant and her treacherous well-born lover brought low.

* This article was previously published in 14 Cleveland Magazine 56 (July 1985).