Unsolved Murders & Disappearances in Northeast Ohio

by Jane Ann Turzillo

  Three Zanesville men, two of whom had served time in the penitentiary, were picked up because they had a gun in their car. Newark officers Hupp and Connor went to question them but ultimately let them go because the fingerprints did not match.

  “We will not stop one minute,” Chief Detective Berry told the Advocate, “until we have exhausted every clue and followed every possible solution to clear this thing up in order to bring these criminals to court.”

  At one point, rumors circulated that a group of local citizens were looking to secure the services of private detective Ora Slater from Cincinnati. Slater had worked unsuccessfully on the Melvin Horst disappearance in Orrville but had helped solve and convict high-ranking police officials in the Donald Mellett murder in Canton. For whatever reason, Slater did not enter the Beasley case.

  On July 6, 1931, Patrolman Harry Beasley was buried with full military honors. Flags were lowered to half staff, and local businesses closed down from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. for the funeral.

  It was the largest funeral Newark had ever seen, attended by more than two thousand mourners, including Ohio governor George White. It was reported in the Advocate that the governor told the crowd that Beasley’s “assassins must be brought to justice to avenge American society.” He went on to say, “Society should pay its respects to the officer who was shot down by outlawry after he had escaped the ravages of war.”

  The service was held at the First Methodist Church, where Dr. L.C. Sparks gave the eulogy. He said Beasley had given “his life in the protection of life and property of other people.” Grace Cranston played a selection of sacred music on the organ. The procession was led down Newark’s downtown streets by the Knights of Pythias band. Thousands of flowers had been made into funeral sprays. They filled cars and lined the procession route. The full Newark police force, as well as firefighters, servicemen and veterans, followed the hearse. Police from across the state came to pay respects to a fallen brother who had been gunned down in cold blood. A tearful Newark citizenry watched the procession in respectful silence from the sidewalks.

  It took a half hour for the full cortège to pass through the entrance of Cedar Hill Cemetery. Six of Beasley’s fellow officers carried the flag-draped coffin to the grave site. The simple graveside ceremony ended with taps and a rifle volley from the Ohio National Guard.

  Beasley’s hearse in front of the First Methodist Church. Courtesy of the Licking County Historical Society.

  Officers carried Beasley’s flag-draped coffin in the funeral cortege. Courtesy of the Licking County Historical Society.

  Officers carried Beasley’s flag-draped coffin to his grave at the Cedar Hill Cemetery in Newark. Courtesy of the Licking County Historical Society.

  While leads would pop up now and then—one from as far away as Washington, D.C.—along with police corruption and conspiracy theories, the murder was never solved. The case file disappeared in the 1940s, according to an article by Jim Leeke in the October/December issue of Timeline.

  To this day, no one knows who shot and killed Patrolman Harry C. Beasley. The only thing for certain is the thieves did not get away with the safe on that hot June night, but they clearly got away with murder.

  7

  A DEADLY AFFAIR

  The last thing Rose Cable did every night before bed was take the canary cage out of the breakfast room window, set it on the table and cover it with a cloth. Thursday evening, March 11, 1937, was the last time she would ever carry out this routine. At 11:18 p.m., birdshot blasted through the window, peppering the society matron on the left side of the head and neck.

  Rose’s seventy-one-year-old mother, Pauline Beiter, was standing in the kitchen when she heard the gunshot, the glass breaking and her daughter’s shriek all at the same time. She rushed into the breakfast room to find Rose pitched forward on the floor with blood pooling around her head. At first, Pauline did not realize her daughter had been shot. To her, it looked as though she was hemorrhaging from her head.

  She ran next door to get help from the neighbors. Young Sarah Gaston answered the older woman’s plea and hurried with her back to the Cable house. She, too, did not realize Rose had been shot. She called the police and asked to have a physician sent to the house. In a matter of minutes, Sarah’s parents and Mr. and Mrs. John Keller, neighbors from two doors down, came to help.

  Keller picked Rose up and saw the wounds in her neck. He told Mrs. Gaston to call the police back and tell them Rose had been shot. Shortly after midnight, two detectives arrived at the Canton Tudor-style mansion on Fulton Road Northwest. The C.D. Spiker ambulance responded and took Rose to Mercy Hospital, where the forty-seven-year-old woman died from blood loss. The birdshot had punctured her jugular vein.

  Wealthy society matron Rose Cable was shot through the breakfast room window of her home. Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library.

  At the start, police concentrated their investigation on a man’s size ten and a half footprints outside the breakfast room window. The prints were from shoes of a popular style with treads on a rubber heel.

  Harry A. Anderson, Rose’s cousin, had visited the house earlier that evening and left shortly before the shooting. Police seized on this information and took the thirty-six-year-old into custody for questioning around 1:30 a.m. Upon leaving the Cable home, Anderson said he looked for a bus up and down Fulton Road but saw none. He walked to the corner of Fulton and Fourteenth, where the 11:00 p.m. bus picked him up. When he got off the bus, he went to a drugstore and bought some cigarettes before going to his room at the YMCA and going to bed.

  Rose’s wealthy husband, forty-eight-year-old Dueber S. Cable, was the president of Cable Company Inc., a contracting firm. He was working on a job in Cleveland, supervising the excavation for a new Republic Steel mill. That evening, he was staying at the Carter House and was with friends in the barroom from 9:00 p.m. until 1:00 a.m., when he went to his room. Around 2:00 a.m., he got word of what had happened and immediately drove home.

  The couple had two children: Jane, a student at Heidelberg College, and Hobart, a student at Riverside Military Academy in Gainesville, Florida.

  Canton police chief Ira A. Manderaugh comparing a suspect’s shoes with plaster cast and ink prints. Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library.

  Both Dueber and Pauline expressed surprise at the police interest in Harry Anderson. They insisted that he had nothing to do with the Rose’s killing and strongly urged the police to release him.

  Anderson had been detained all day Friday until noon on Saturday. He fully cooperated with investigators, telling them he did not see anyone outside the house and did not hear the shot.

  Detectives made a plaster cast of the shoe print outside the breakfast room window of Cable’s home. While the measurement was similar to that of Anderson’s shoes, investigators had to admit that many men wore the same size. The bus driver, as well as the drugstore clerk, verified Anderson’s alibi.

  Authorities were at a standstill until twelve-year-old Elden Yost, who lived in the area, found an empty shell from a .410-gauge gun just west of Lake Cable. Not knowing that it was important, he carried it around in his pocket for a few days before showing it to his father. A neighbor had read about the murder in the paper and thought the shell should be turned over to the police. Detectives figured the shell could be relevant because it was not weathered and looked as if it had been fired recently. Did the killer live around Lake Cable?

  It just so happened that the shell resembled ones that had been stolen, along with a pistol-type .410-gauge “game killer” gun with a short barrel, from Dueber Cable’s car several months before his wife’s murder. He freely admitted he had owned such a gun. He and friends used it to kill snakes and sparrows. Police called in a local gun expert to do some test fires. The expert found that a .410-gauge gun would not scatter the lead in the same pattern as had hit Rose. He guessed the gun used to kill her was a .12-gauge sawed-off shotgun, or some unusual model. However, Cleveland Police Department’s ballis
tics expert David Cowles’s tests showed that the gun was indeed a .410-caliber shotgun.

  Police combed the area around Lake Cable for any footprints that might match those outside the breakfast room window. Maybe if they were lucky, they would find the gun. The lake was covered by a sheet of ice, and there were no breakages in the surface, so searchers did not think the killer had thrown the gun in the water.

  On the theory that the killer would take the fastest escape route, police enlisted the help of thirty Boy Scouts in a systematic search along Fulton Road, through Avondale, down Lake Cable Road to the junction of Lake Cable and McDonaldsville Roads. It was an exercise in futility.

  It was not long before Dueber Cable came clean about having an affair with a forty-five-year-old, twice-divorced Akron woman named Mrs. Theresa “Dora” Ludwig Bail. He admitted that since July 1934, he had maintained a five-room apartment for his paramour at a cost of $200 a month at the swanky Hill Chateau on East Tallmadge Avenue in Akron. Police descended on the apartment and searched it. Dora was not there, but they did find several articles of men’s clothing that belonged to Dueber. While there, authorities showed a photo of Dueber to the owners and building tenants, who identified the couple as Mr. and Mrs. John Sherrard.

  Dueber and Ludwig’s “love nest” was in the swanky Hill Chateau apartments on East Tallmadge Avenue in Akron. Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library.

  When an Akron reporter for the Plain Dealer asked the owner of the building about the woman who lived there, she said, “She often entertained visitors. I seldom saw her with anyone. I only saw the man known to me as Mr. Sherrard about a half a dozen times.”

  A neighbor revealed that the so-called Mrs. Sherrard would host parties for three or four other businessmen from Canton and Akron and their girlfriends. The owner of the building said the parties were quiet and there were never any complaints.

  One of the tenants added, “She was one of the most charming persons I have ever known. She dressed well and wore her clothes beautifully. She was as charming to her neighbors as she was to women guests who called on her.”

  As authorities delved into Dora’s background, they found she had used four aliases, including Mrs. John Sherrard, Theresa Ludwig, Dora Ludwig and Theresa Bail. In July 1934, she was divorced from her second husband, Carl W. Bail of Canton, and must have moved into the Akron apartment soon after. Detectives also learned she owned part interest in a small downtown Canton dress shop and continued to work at the shop until sometime in 1936.

  On the morning of the murder, Dueber had stopped by Dora’s apartment for breakfast before going to work. Before he left for Cleveland, he called an auto dealership and ordered a new car to be delivered to his wife on Saturday for her birthday. A report in the Plain Dealer said he and Dora had a bitter quarrel over the new car. But in the past, Dueber had bought his lover four new cars.

  When later asked about that morning, Dora recalled it differently. She said Dueber had made several calls from her apartment. She was in the kitchen cleaning up, though, and did not know to whom he was talking or what he talked about.

  During the investigation, detectives found that Dora owned a 1937 black Dodge coupe. Two fifteen-year-old Lehman High School girls had seen a dark coupe several times on Fulton Road Northwest. One of the girls, Betty Chaffin, lived next door to the Cables. Her friend, Elizabeth Kratz, was at Chaffin’s visiting. The car drew the girls’ attention when they saw it drive by the Cable home on the Wednesday night before the murder. They watched it from the front window as it circled around the block several times. The girls said they saw the same car again on Thursday night. This time, its lights were out as it crept slowly past the Cable house. This was less than half an hour before the girls heard the shotgun fire.

  Dueber also had a black Dodge coupe, but one of his employees had driven his car to another part of the state sometime before the day of the murder.

  Detectives found Dora in Steubenville. She had driven there the day after the murder to visit her friend Bertha Mumaw. She was taken into custody and brought back to Canton, held and aggressively questioned all weekend by Stark County prosecutor A.C.L. Barthelmeh and Canton detective Captain Elmer E. Clark.

  Dora had no alibi, having spent both Wednesday and Thursday nights home alone. She did not feel well on Thursday evening and went to bed at 9:30 p.m., she told her questioners. Shortly before retiring that evening, she called and talked to a friend in Akron and then called a second friend in Canton. When police accused her of driving past the Cable home on the two nights in question, she insisted that her car had been parked in the garage and had not moved either of those nights. When police checked with tenants, none had seen Dora around the apartment building on those evenings. That was not unusual, however, because she was not neighborly. Authorities spoke with Dora’s two friends and ascertained the phone calls had been made that night sometime between 8:00 and 8:30 p.m.

  Theresa Dora Ludwig’s 1936 black Dodge coupe. Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library.

  Dora said she left Akron for Steubenville at 9:30 a.m. on Friday. She was going to help Bertha Mumaw, who had injured her ankle and was having trouble taking care of her husband, who was ill. Dora arrived there about mid-afternoon. Before she left Akron, she tried calling Dueber at his office but was told he had gone home to Canton. She was given no explanation. She and Dueber had planned to have dinner Friday evening, so she wanted to get hold of him to let him know she would be unable to keep their date. She called a “prominent Canton businessman,” whose name turned out to be Lester H. Higgins, to have him call Dueber. Higgins was a business advisor and close personal friend to Dueber. Nothing was said about the murder during the conversation.

  That evening while Dora was in Steubenville, a friend called about the murder. The friend read a newspaper article to her over the phone. Dora then got hold of the Steubenville Herald Star to read it for herself. The murder upset her, and she cried after reading about it because she felt badly for Dueber and the two children. She said to her Steubenville friend, “Well, thank God, I’m innocent of any crime.”

  The next morning she said she placed a call to Higgins to find out how Dueber was doing. “You had better lay low until this blows over,” Higgins told her. “Don’t go back to your apartment in Akron.” Higgins verified the two phone conversations he had with Dora for police. He and his girlfriend were frequent visitors to the apartment Dueber had rented for Dora. It came out that four other men and their paramours also used the apartment, or what the newspapers began calling the “love nest.”

  Theresa Dora Ludwig, alias Mrs. John Sherrard, was Dueber Cable’s mistress. Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library.

  During Dora’s detention and questioning, she was moved about from an all-night interrogation at the prosecutor’s office to the home of Detective Bert Minesinger, where she was held in “technical custody.” A few days later, she was taken to the Canton city jail, then to Chief Ira A. Manderbaugh’s house and back to the city jail. A week after that, police installed her in the hospital ward of the Stark County Jail, where female prisoners were often held. During all the questioning and even a lie detector test, she remained resolute in her story.

  Dora talked freely about her affair with Dueber Cable and made it seem like the ideal relationship. Dueber’s take was much different. He felt she was not telling the police all she knew. For one thing, Dora had asked him several times if the gun that had been stolen from his car had ever been recovered. He also said they argued about their future.

  Visiting hours for Rose were held on Monday, March 15, 1937, at her home. Later in the day, Reverend R.W. Blemker officiated at the funeral service at the First Reformed Church, where Rose had been a devout member. She was buried in Westlawn Cemetery.

  Dueber’s doctor ordered him to bed rest because of “a serious cardiac condition resulting from the strain of the long questioning Mr. Cable was subjected to Monday night,” but the evening after the funeral, police were on his doorste
p. The Plain Dealer learned he was taken to jail.

  Little by little, he added to his story. He had been trying to disengage himself from Dora, he said. In fact, he had told her twice that he wanted to end their affair, including at a party the week before Rose’s death and on the morning of the murder.

  Because Dora’s and Dueber’s stories were at odds, Prosecutor Barthelmeh, Detective Clark and Chief Manderbaugh decided to bring the two together to see how their stories stacked up.

  Dueber took the opportunity then and there to tell Dora flat out that he was through with her.

  Dora was taken aback at Dueber’s rejection, but she held on to her story. She elaborated on the quarrel they’d had a week before Rose was murdered. They were at an all-night party at a hotel in Cleveland with three other couples. The men were all business associates, and the women were not their wives but Cleveland girlfriends. The disagreement had to do with one of the girls at the party. Dora threatened to walk out of the party. Dueber told her if she did, they were through. She stayed, and they patched things up, she said.

  The next afternoon, she went home to her Akron apartment. Dueber came and went for the next couple days. She denied any talk of them ending their affair. To illustrate, she said he had given her twenty dollars to buy a cocktail table for the apartment, which she then ordered from an Akron store. A salesperson at the store verified the purchase and the date. The table had been delivered and was left outside the apartment door until the custodian moved it inside.

  Dora denied ever having asked about the gun.