One of Chicago’s most famous murder cases was that of the so-called “Ragged Stranger”. It has been recounted many times over the years; in books, in detective magazines and even in a Hollywood movie. There have been a number of different writers who have taken credit for solving the case and it's likely that this was one time when the press and the police department pooled their resources and brought a killer, a former war hero named Carl Wanderer, to justice.

Carl Otto Wanderer was born and raised in Chicago. His parents, German immigrants, taught him the value of a dollar at a young age and by the time he was 27, he had saved enough to open a successful butcher shop with his father. His strict upbringing and frugal ways left Wanderer an unhappy and restless young man and in 1916, adventure began to call to him.   The newspapers recounted the raids by Pancho Villa into the southwestern United States and called for volunteers to help pursue the Mexican bandit and his men. Wanderer enlisted in the military and was sent to New Mexico to serve under Black Jack Pershing as a cavalry officer. His experience with the First Illinois Cavalry gave him enough military stature to earn him a promotion to lieutenant with the first units sent to France when the United States entered World War I. He saw action on the Western front and returned home, with medals for bravery, in the spring of 1919.   On October 1 of that same year, Wanderer married his sweetheart, a chubby but attractive 20 year old named Ruth Johnson. The couple moved into an apartment shared by Ruth's parents and it was there that any affection that he had for her died. The claustrophobic flat became unbearable, thanks to Ruth's neediness and his nagging mother-in-law, who berated Wanderer about the fact that he didn't have enough money for the couple to get a place of their own. Carl's restlessness once more got the better of him and he began dating a 16-year-old typist named Julia Schmitt. He often met her at the Riverview Amusement Park while his wife was otherwise engaged. And then, shortly before Christmas, Ruth happily announced to her husband that she was pregnant. Carl accepted the news with dismay and fell into somber, sullen moods. He rarely spoke and avoided coming home. He pondered his options and as it turned out, bided his time, until a plan to rid himself of his problems slowly came to mind.   On June 21, 1920, Ruth and Carl attended an evening performance of a movie called The Sea Wolf, a rousing Jack London adventure story, at the Pershing Theater (now the Davis) at Lincoln and Western. As they strolled home afterward, Wanderer later reported seeing a sinister-looking man lurking near Zindt's Drug Store on Lawrence Avenue. According to his story, the man crushed out a cigarette as they passed by and then he followed behind them at a distance.

Carl Wanderer, brought in for questioning in the "Ragged Stranger" Murder Case

"Ruth went up ahead of me when we reached the house. She opened the outer door and I heard her fumbling with her keys to the inner door of the hall," Wanderer later told the police. Ruth reached up for the ribbon dangling from the overhead light so that she could find the right key. Carl asked her if she was having trouble and she laughed. Neither of them noticed the man who followed them into the dark vestibule. The "Ragged Stranger," as this man would come to be known, stepped forward with a gun trained on Ruth. "Don't turn on the light," the man said. "Throw up your hands!"

Before Ruth and Carl could comply with his order, the stranger fired two bullets into Ruth. Wanderer claimed that he heard the man shout out a string of obscenities as he continued to fire. Carl jerked out his own Colt .45 service weapon and emptied it in the direction of the dark figure. It was later discovered that 14 bullets had been fired in the small vestibule in a matter of a few seconds. When the smoke cleared, the stranger – and Ruth Wanderer — was lying on the floor of the vestibule, sprawled out in a widening pool of blood.

Ruth's mother rushed down to the door to find her daughter had fallen with two bullets in her. Wanderer had gone berserk with rage, smashing his gun and his fists against a man who was lying on the floor. Ruth lived just long enough to utter a few tragic words: "My baby…. My baby is dead."

Two of the police officers involved in the "Ragged Stranger" case: (Left) Detective Sergeant John Norton (Right) Summerdale Police Lieutenant Mike Loftus

Detective Sergeant John Norton arrived on the scene just minutes later. By this time, neighbors and onlookers had started to gather around Wanderer, who was covered in the stranger's blood. Ruth's mother was cradling her daughter's lifeless body in her arms. Norton pushed his way through the crowd. The hulking detective was well known in the neighborhood, having been shot four times during his celebrated career, and everyone knew that he would get answers quickly in the case. He started off with just one question: why was Carl Wanderer carrying a gun?   Wanderer had a quick answer: There had been a robbery attempt at his father's butcher shop a short time before and Carl was carrying his service revolver in case it happened again. He suggested to Norton that perhaps this man could have been involved. A search of the stranger's body turned up just $3.80 and a business card from a traveling circus. There was nothing else on the body, which was taken to Ravenswood Hospital for a check of fingerprints and an inquest. During questioning, Carl decided to embellish his connections with the stranger a little further. He looked familiar to him, Wanderer said. He believed the man had flirted with Ruth a few nights earlier. She had come home and reported the news to Carl in a near panic, terrified that "the stranger was laying a trap."

The morning editions of the Chicago newspapers jumped all over the story. They told of Wanderer's heroics and exemplary military record, touting his service in New Mexico and in Europe. He was a Great War hero who had fought to protect America from her enemies, they said, and now this same man had been forced to endure the cold-blooded murder of his wife and unborn child. It was a heartless and horrible crime and the public reacted with shock and outrage.

Carl Wanderer was awarded the status of a hero who had defended the honor of his wife, even though the end result had been tragic. The public expected to see him charged with nothing more than justifiable homicide in the murder of the "Ragged Stranger." He deserved to be left alone to grieve for his family, they believed, and this should be the end of the story. But little did they know – the story of the "Ragged Stranger" was just getting started.

Detective John Norton, along with help from legendary crime reporter Harry Romanoff and his editor at the Chicago Herald-Examiner, Walter Howey, began to ask some hard questions about Wanderer's version of the murders.

To start with, there was the matter of the two guns that had been used. Both of them were big .45 caliber automatics. Carl Wanderer's gun was explained in that it was his service pistol, but what about the matching weapon owned by the stranger? Howey and Norton could not understand how he could afford such an expensive sidearm. A man who was down on his luck could have easily hocked the weapon and made a decent amount of money. This should have been preferable to risking a street robbery. It didn't make sense so Romanoff sent a telegram to the Colt firearms company that contained the serial number of the stranger's gun. A reply soon came back. The gun had first been sold in 1913 to Von Lengerke & Antoine Sporting Goods Store in Chicago. The reporter checked with the store and found that Peter Hoffman, a telephone repairman who lived on Crawford Avenue, had purchased the gun.

The next day, Romanoff went to see Hoffman and discovered that he had sold the gun to his brother-in-law several years before. The brother-in-law's name was Fred Wanderer and he was Carl's cousin. Stunned, the reporter confronted Fred Wanderer with the information about where his gun had ended up. Fred admitted that he had gotten a gun from Peter Hoffman but he had loaned it to his cousin, Carl, on June 21 and didn't have it anymore. Suddenly, Fred realized that this had been the day when Ruth had been killed. When this occurred to him, he was so shocked that he fainted.   Romanoff reported the problems with the gun to Detective Norton and Summerdale Police Lieutenant Mike Loftus. Carl Wanderer was brought in for questioning and was confronted with what had been discovered about the gun. Wanderer shrugged it off. He admitted that he had been carrying Fred's gun and apparently, the other one, which had been used by the "Ragged Stranger," was mistakenly identified as his. As it turned out, this was a possibility. A check with the Colt Company revealed that the other gun had been part of a massive shipment of weapons sent to military training camps during the war. The whole thing, Carl assured them, was all an innocent mistake.   Loftus and Romanoff were not convinced. While Carl was delayed at the police station, the two men went to Wanderer’s house to speak with Ruth's mother. While Loftus engaged the woman in conversation, Romanoff searched through Wanderer's bedroom and found incriminating photos of Carl and portions of love letters that had been written to Julia Schmitt, the young woman he had been seeing without Ruth's knowledge. When Julia was tracked down, she unraveled Carl's story and the motive for the murder became clear. Carl Wanderer had wanted to get rid of his wife and arranged to have someone carry out the crime.

Legendary Chicago crime reporter Harry Romanoff

 When confronted with this new information, Wanderer finally confessed. Carl had grown to hate his wife, he told detectives, and longed to be free of her so that he could marry Julia. Knowing that he could not commit the murder himself, he began hanging around seedy saloons until he met Al Watson (whose real name may have been Bernard T. Ryan), a Canadian ex-soldier who was living in a flophouse on Madison Street, Chicago's skid row. Wanderer told Watson that he was trying to win back his wife's affections and wanted to seem like a hero to her. He would pay would pay him $5 down and $5 on completion to carry out a phony robbery. Carl would hand Watson a gun when the couple went into the dark vestibule and then he would slug Carl with it. Wanderer would seem to fight the man off and Watson would run away, restoring Ruth's faith in his hero status.

Watson saw it as a harmless way to make a few bucks and so, he agreed. When Watson came into the vestibule that night, though, Carl did not hand him a gun. Instead, he cocked both weapons and fired at both Ruth and Watson at the same time. After they had fallen, he fired several more shots to make sure they were dead and then went into his "avenging husband act" for Ruth's mother, whom he knew would rush to the scene.

Carl Wanderer was twice indicted and twice convicted, once for the murder of Ruth Johnson Wanderer and once for the death of Al Watson. After his first trial, Wanderer was sentenced to serve 20 years, which so outraged editor Walter Howey that he used the editorial might of his widely read newspaper to keep the story alive and to demand a new trial. Public outrage resulted in a second trial and a death sentence for Wanderer.

While Carl was in jail, awaiting the hangman, he became a favorite subject for doctors, who tried to discover whether or not he was insane when he planned his wife's death, and for reporters, who kept milking a good story. Two of Wanderer's favorite visitors were Ben Hecht and Charley MacArthur, two of the most famous writers from the era of Chicago journalism’s most colorful and sensational era. They were covering Carl's story for their respective newspapers and visited him often, playing poker with him and becoming quite chummy. They even convinced Carl to read two letters that they had written, hilariously attacking their bosses, from the gallows. The newsmen didn't remember until the last minute that Carl's hands and feet would be bound when he was executed so he couldn't read the letters. They asked him to croon a rendition of the maudlin tune "Old Pal, Why Don't You Answer Me?" moments before the drop instead.

On the day of his hanging, Carl was brought to the gallows and to the surprise of everyone, save for Hecht and MacArthur, Wanderer began to sing. The hangman came forward after the first chorus but Wanderer warned him away with a shake of his head. After the second chorus, even though Carl was still singing, the black shroud was placed over his head. When the song finally finished, he was asked if he had anything to say. "Christ have mercy on my….", Carl Wanderer began but never finished his plea. The trap sprung open and Carl shot downwards until the rope snapped tight and instantly killed him.

Charley MacArthur had the last word. He turned to his friend Ben Hecht and said with a sigh, "You know, Ben, that son-of-a-bitch would have been a hell of a song plugger."