Chicago is a city that long been plagued by strange and unusual crimes but there is probably no murder as bizarre as the so-called “torso murder” that occurred on the city’s North Side in 1935. This blood-soaked and grisly murder was made all the more strange by the cast of characters involved, including a desperate mother in love with her daughter’s husband, a sickly young woman, her unwitting spouse, and a former burlesque dancer and cold-blooded killer.   The story of the “torso murder” began in a backyard flat on West Waveland Avenue in the Wrigleyville neighborhood. The small apartment belonged to Blanche Dunkel, a semi-attractive, 42 year-old survivor of four failed marriages. She shared it with her daughter, Mallie, and son-in-law, Ervin J. Lang, a grocery store clerk who could not afford a place for himself and his wife during the Depression. Mallie was a delicate young woman with a “weak constitution” and was unable to work. Blanche largely supported the family by working in the linen supply room of Passavant Hospital.   Blanche was a hard worker but was not terribly bright. She had managed to make it most of the way through the eighth grade before she dropped out of school and newspapers later reported that she had an I.Q. of 79. It’s likely that she had some additional mental issues as well, which would be evidenced by the events to come.   Living in close quarters in the cluttered apartment, Blanche soon found herself falling in love with her daughter’s charming husband. She described his nature as “gentle and refined” and mistook his kindnesses toward her as something other than innocent affection for his wife’s mother. She was later quoted as saying: “My God, it was selfish of me but no one will ever understand the thrill I got when I looked at that boy.” Blanche constantly fantasized about Ervin making love to her. “I had to fight with myself to control my anger,” Blanche said, “when I saw him with her.”

"I am Ready for the Chair!" said the caption under the photo of former burlesque dancer turned killer Evelyn Smith

Mallie Lang soon began to notice the extra attention that her mother was paying to Ervin and the way that she mooned over him whenever she thought her mother wasn’t looking. She and Blanche began to argue and she threatened to move out if her mother persisted with her foolish crush. Blanche angrily dared her to leave; knowing there was no way that the young couple could afford their own flat. Blanche even went as far as to borrow some money from friends to give to Mallie as a deposit for the first month’s rent in an apartment of her own. Mallie gave up on her threat to leave. She felt trapped but knew that she and Ervin could not afford to move out. To make matters worse, Mallie’s health, never good to start with, was failing. Some days, she was barely able to get out of bed. All that she could do was to try and ignore her mother’s behavior but it was becoming increasingly harder to do.

One night at a neighborhood party, Blanche saw Ervin sitting quietly, holding Mallie’s hand. She later recalled: “Something came over me, something I don’t understand. I jumped up from the table and ran over to him and smothered him with kisses. I was sorry then, she was already ill. And at the same time I wanted her to suffer because she had made me suffer --- making me jealous.”

Murder victim Ervin Lang

Blanche began working harder and harder to seduce her son-in-law. Eventually, it worked and Ervin succumbed to her advances. No one knows how she finally succeeded but it’s thought that perhaps she used the fact that Mallie had been too weak to engage in relations with her husband for a very long time. But whatever happened, Ervin found himself ravishing Blanche on every occasion when Mallie was away from the house – and sometimes when she wasn’t.   It all became too much for the delicate young woman to take. Mallie’s health continued to decline and she died, some say from a “broken heart”, on December 20, 1934. The simple-minded Blanche was shattered by her daughter’s death and began her descent into madness. She began to blame herself for the fact that Mallie had died and turned her frenzied hatred toward Ervin. He had wasted no time in tossing the older woman aside and finding a new lover. He began to date a woman closer to his own age, a 21 year old named Josephine McKinley, who had a young son. Blanche, likely delusional by this time, imagined that Ervin had killed Mallie in order for him to start seeing to Josephine, a woman that he had never met before Mallie’s death. Blanche was simply lying to herself. She had really wanted Ervin for herself but he had quickly lost interest in her. She would later claim that her hate for Ervin was not because he had broken things off with her but because he had failed to remain loyal to the memory of his late wife.

 Half-crazed with jealously, Blanche took her suspicions about Ervin murdering Mallie to her sister, Mrs. Jessie Langdon. Her sister then put her in touch with a woman named Evelyn Smith, a laundry worker at the Medinah Club. Smith was a retired striptease dancer and became the strangest figure in this odd collection of characters. Her weird past was later revealed to investigators in the case.

Smith had been born in Berlin, Germany and had been brought to North Dakota at a young age. Soon after arriving, her father died from pneumonia and her sister burned to death in a horrible “bonfire accident”. Her mother went mad with grief and died herself a short time later. Evelyn was sent to live with a foster family, but she did not stay with them for long. At the age of 10, she began riding the rails of America, traveling in boxcars and living the life of a hobo. In the big cities, she wound up wherever there was a Chinatown district, thanks to the fact that the Chinese were always willing to provide shelter and food.

In 1929, Evelyn and another traveling woman ended up in Minneapolis, where they learned the laundry trade. Three years later, Evelyn drifted to Chicago and met a man named Harry Jung. He and his brothers had established a successful chain of laundries and Evelyn saw him as the perfect “mark”, a man she could con into providing her with a comfortable living. After a short acquaintance, they were married.

But Evelyn could not have been more wrong about Jung. He had plenty of money but he wasn’t willing to share it with his new wife. After she suffered a miscarriage, Jung forced her to go out and look for work. She supported herself through a series of odd jobs and eventually began dancing in a burlesque house under the stage name of “Trixie.” Her striptease career was short-lived, mostly thanks to the fact that Evelyn was a plain-looking woman with a rough face, wire-rimmed glasses and auburn hair that she kept close-cropped like a man’s. She was living in an apartment near the intersection of Clark and West Barry when she first met Blanche Dunkel.

Smith later claimed that she “fell under the spell” of Blanche when they met and she was eager to help her out of the situation that she was in with Ervin. The police files in the case allude to the fact that Evelyn was a lesbian and that the “spell” she was under was one of sexual attraction. She had fallen for Blanche and would do anything to win her over. A short time later, she asked Jessie Langdon why Blanche didn’t just have Ervin killed. “I could get it done for $500,” she told her. Evelyn was by now very familiar with the inner workings of Chicago’s South Side Chinatown and offered the services of her husband and his associates for a sum of money that she knew Blanche would be able to obtain.

Blanche was able to get the money and got it from an unbelievable source— Ervin himself! She approached Lang’s naïve little brother William for a key to the safety-deposit box that Ervin kept at the Lake View Trust & Savings Bank. She withdrew $100 of Ervin’s own money as a down payment for his murder. Blanche met Evelyn at the corner of Belmont and Lincoln and handed her a plain brown envelope with the cash inside. She instructed Blanche to bring the young man over to her house that evening.

That evening, Blanche managed to entice Ervin over to Evelyn’s apartment with the promise of a night of drinking and card playing. Over the course of a few hours, he was served four whiskey highballs that each contained knockout drops. The women waited until nearly 4:30 a.m. before he finally passed out. Irritated and impatient, Evelyn slapped him hard across the face to see if he was really unconscious or if he had just nodded off. Satisfied that he would not wake up, Evelyn sent Blanche on her way. She promised to take care of Ervin from that point on.

“You might as well go home,” she reportedly said. “I got him now.”

Blanche, as filled with regret as she had been about hurting her daughter, fled the apartment. Meanwhile, Evelyn dosed Ervin with ether, tied him securely and then dragged him into a closet, where she strangled him to death. The next morning, Harry Jung arrived with a saw and the two of them set to their bloody work. Evelyn cut off Ervin’s legs at the hip so that he would fit into a large trunk that Jung had purchased at a Salvation Army store. They loaded the trunk into Jung’s car and then set out for the southeast side, eventually crossing into Indiana to leave Ervin’s legs in a roadside ditch near Munster. The torso was taken to Wolf Lake, which straddles the Illinois-Indiana border, and dumped the remains into a one of the many swampy areas nearby. The newspapers referred to the lake as a “gangland cemetery” because of the number of bodies that had been dumped there over the years.

Evelyn and Jung were sure that the body would never be found but the severed corpse was discovered just four days later. The trunk that had been used to transport the body was found in a Chinatown warehouse at 231 West 22nd Street.   Once Ervin’s body was identified, the police began to investigate and the first break came in the case within twenty-four hours. Blanche’s sister, Jessie Langdon, told Chief Investigator Thomas Kelly of the state’s attorney police about Blanche’s hiring of Evelyn Smith to kill Ervin. The unmistakable smell of laundry soap on Ervin’s clothing confirmed the story and led the police to the Jung laundry business. Harry Jung vanished but Evelyn was arrested in New York two weeks later.   Blanche was arrested and freely admitted to her part in the crime. She confessed after being taken out to Wolf Lake to view the remains. “I am his common-law wife,” she said, imagining that their relationship had gone much further than it had. She continued to talk of how much she loved the young man as the police led her away to jail. States Attorney Charles S. Doughtery easily convinced a grand jury to return murder indictments against Blanche and Evelyn. “I am ready for the chair,” Evelyn sighed wearily in a public statement after the indictments were handed down. “It’s better than putting up with all that happened. It wouldn’t break my heart, though, if Blanche walks up to the chair with me.” The news reporter went on to add that “Mrs. Dunkel anticipated the prospect of death with different feelings.”

A swampy area around Wolf Lake, near where Lang's body was found. The lake, located on the far Southeast side, was often referred to as a "Gangland Cemetery" during the 1920s and 1930s, thanks to the number of bodies found dumped there.

 The judge at their trial, Cornelius J. Harrington, did not sentence the women to death, however. He felt that it was too good for them. Instead, he imposed a 180-year sentence to be served at the Dwight Reformatory for women. He added another grim addendum to the sentence. Beginning on July 6, 1936 and for every year after, the women were ordered to spend the anniversary of Ervin’s murder in solitary confinement.

In 1955, on the twentieth anniversary of the murder, a reporter for the Chicago American visited the two women in Dwight. Blanche, who was now 63, held a bible and praised Jesus a number of times throughout the interview. She had devoted her life to the Lord, she said, and had great remorse for the act that she had committed.

Evelyn Smith, however, was unrepentant. She told the reporter that her conscience was clear and her only interest in life these days was growing flowers. In the past twenty years, the only visitor to Evelyn’s cell, expect for the reporter, was a Catholic priest. She had turned him away.

Blanche was paroled from Dwight on March 6, 1961, with a final discharge from Governor Otto Kerner three years later. Evelyn was also paroled, more than a year later, on December 12, 1962. The two “women from hell” as the cops dubbed them, were now senior citizens and both of them vanished from history, leaving a dark stain on the annals of crime in Chicago.