The Cold File

Documented, unsolved mysteries

Cold Cases Case file

The Locked Reception Room at 244 West 70th Street: The Killing of Joseph Bowne Elwell, 1920

On the morning of 11 June 1920 the leading American auction bridge authority was found shot through the forehead in a chair in his locked Manhattan brownstone. The New York Police Department, the District Attorney, and a grand jury investigated through the summer and autumn of 1920, and no one was ever charged.

Case type
Cold case
Status
Unexplained
Event date
June 11, 1920
Location
244 West 70th Street, Upper West Side, Manhattan, New York City - United States
Evidence
  • Official record
  • Physical
  • Testimonial

The open question Who shot Joseph Bowne Elwell through the forehead in the reception room of his locked Manhattan brownstone on the morning of 11 June 1920?

At about eight o’clock on the morning of Friday 11 June 1920, the housekeeper Marie Larsen let herself into the four-story brownstone at 244 West 70th Street in Manhattan. She found her employer in a chair in the reception room. He was in pyjamas. He was not wearing his toupee. His dentures were soaking in a glass of water in an upstairs bathroom. The morning mail was open on a table beside him, with a glass of milk and a newspaper. A single .45 caliber bullet had passed through the centre of his forehead. He was still breathing.

The man in the chair was Joseph Bowne Elwell, the most prominent American teacher and author of auction bridge of his generation, partner in a thoroughbred racing stable, and the owner of houses in Manhattan and Palm Beach. He died later the same day without speaking. The front door, the basement door, and the rear door were all locked. The vestibule chain was on. The ground-floor windows were closed behind their iron grills. Four hundred dollars sat undisturbed on a dresser, along with his gold watch and his diamond and ruby studs. No firearm was found in the house, and none has ever been recovered.

The New York Police Department’s Manhattan Homicide Squad, Police Commissioner Richard E. Enright in person, Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Charles Norris, and New York County District Attorney Edward Swann all worked the case across the summer and autumn of 1920. A grand jury heard witnesses. No indictment was returned. In Swann’s published words, the evidence was “entirely devoid of any fact that would justify accusing any man or woman.”

Who shot Joseph Bowne Elwell through the forehead in the reception room of his locked Manhattan brownstone on the morning of 11 June 1920?

The night of 10 June 1920

The previous evening Elwell dined at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. The party was small. With him were Walter Lewisohn, the copper-mining heir and Broadway producer; Lewisohn’s wife Selma Kraus-Lewisohn, a singer; Selma’s sister Viola Kraus, who had earlier that day been granted a divorce decree from Victor von Schlegell; and the journalist Octavio P. Figueroa (the spelling varies across the period press, per the standing accounts). The dinner was unremarkable in the record. None of those present has ever been shown to have raised a voice at Elwell that night.

After dinner the party went on to the Midnight Frolic, the late cabaret on the roof of the New Amsterdam Theatre run by Florenz Ziegfeld. Von Schlegell, separately, was at the same Frolic that night at his own table; the period accounts note the coincidence without making more of it than the seating chart. The show ended at approximately two in the morning. Elwell declined a ride home in the Lewisohn car. He took a taxi alone north and west to 244 West 70th Street.

The cab driver dropped him at his door at approximately 2:15 to 2:30 AM. He entered the brownstone. He locked the front door behind him. At some point between his arrival and the hour the housekeeper let herself in five and a half hours later, he received one visitor, or one bullet, or both. Telephone records examined by the investigators in the following weeks showed a small number of calls made and received from the house in the early morning hours. The identity of the person at the other end of the call that mattered was never publicly resolved.

What can be said from the record of that night is narrow. Elwell was sober enough to walk into his house on his own. He was awake enough to open mail. He was not, on the evidence of the chair, alarmed by his visitor. He admitted whoever it was without rising from where he sat, or admitted them and sat down again with them in the room.

The morning of 11 June 1920

The morning newspaper was delivered to the front step at approximately 7:10 AM. The paper was still folded under Elwell’s hands when Larsen found him. She let herself in at her usual hour, a little after eight. She crossed into the reception room from the front of the house. She did not, at first, recognise the man in the chair.

He was sitting upright, in his pyjamas, without his toupee, and without his dentures, which were upstairs in a glass of water. Those details are reported here as the investigators reported them: forensic facts about the state of intimate domestic acquaintance in which Elwell had received whoever came to the door, and not as comment on his person. He was a man in his late forties who, as the case file later set down, did not wear his public face for strangers.

On the small table beside the chair were the morning mail, including at least one partly opened letter; the glass of milk; and the unfolded morning paper, which had partly slipped into his lap. The room was undisturbed. The chairs were where chairs are. The rug was where the rug was. There was no sign of struggle and no overturned furniture. Elwell had been shot once, from in front, at close range. The bullet had passed through his forehead and into the back of the chair. He was still alive and unconscious. He never spoke.

Larsen telephoned for help. A patrolman, identified in the case records as William Singer, was the first uniformed officer at the scene. An ambulance was dispatched at approximately 8:31 AM. Elwell was taken to a hospital, per the standing accounts, and died later the same day without regaining consciousness. The spent cartridge case was found on the floor of the reception room. The recovered bullet was logged into the police file. No firearm was found in the house.

The first uniformed officers walked the building. The front, basement, and rear doors were all locked, the vestibule chain was on, and the ground-floor windows were down behind their iron grills; a single window on an upper floor was found open. The four hundred dollars in cash on the dresser, the gold watch, the diamond and ruby studs, and the paintings on the walls were all untouched. Robbery was ruled out of the working theory within hours.

Dr. Charles Norris, New York City’s first Chief Medical Examiner, performed the autopsy. He ruled the death a homicide and rejected the initial suicide hypothesis. The position of the wound, the angle of fire, the absence of a weapon at the scene, and the absence of powder consistent with a self-inflicted shot all pointed the same way. Someone had stood or sat in front of Joseph Bowne Elwell in the small hours of 11 June 1920, raised a .45 caliber pistol, and shot him through the forehead from arm’s length. That person had then left, taking the weapon, while leaving the doors of the house locked behind them.

The investigation

The case was assigned to the Manhattan Homicide Squad. Police Commissioner Richard E. Enright took personal interest in it through the summer. The failure to clear it within the season was, per the modern published accounts of the bureau, one of the high-profile homicides that prompted Enright’s elevation of John D. Coughlin to the head of the detective bureau in September 1920. The case file passed across many hands.

Fingerprints were taken from every reachable surface in the brownstone. The only prints identified were Elwell’s and Larsen’s. There was no third set on the chair, on the table, on the door handles, or on the glass of milk. The killer either wore gloves or wiped what they touched. In a house that Elwell shared with no one but a daily housekeeper, the absence of any third print is itself a piece of evidence.

The published Readex account of the investigation gives the count of persons of interest identified across the inquiry as roughly a thousand. Several names belong on the record because the police interviewed them at length and the period press named them by name.

Helen Derby Elwell, his estranged wife, had a documented alibi for the early morning hours of 11 June 1920 and was interviewed and cleared. The Cold File reports her interview status as the case file recorded it, and does not reopen the question.

Marie Larsen, the housekeeper, was the only other person whose prints were in the house, consistent with her daily employment, and investigators identified no motive. She told them, in the days after the killing, that on first finding Elwell unconscious in the chair she had gone upstairs, collected a pink silk dressing gown and matching slippers belonging to one of his intimate associates from a bedroom, and removed them, and had then telephoned that associate to inform her. That admission is in the case file and the period press and is reported here as the documented investigative act it was. The Cold File does not name the associate. The investigators considered Larsen’s conduct and did not treat her as a serious suspect.

Walter and Selma Lewisohn and Viola Kraus, the previous evening’s dinner companions, were interviewed at length by police and by the District Attorney’s office and not charged. The period press attached the label “Pink Lady” to one of the women in the case in connection with the dressing gown detail; that label is a period press framing and is not adopted as voice here. Victor von Schlegell, Kraus’s former husband, was interviewed in connection with his presence at the Midnight Frolic the same night and cleared. Colonel Edward Riley Bradley, Elwell’s racing-stable partner, was, per the standing accounts, in Lexington, Kentucky on 11 June 1920 and was cleared.

The period press framed Elwell’s circle in language we do not adopt here. The investigative record is that police interviewed many of his associates and did not indict any of them. The named women in the case are reported here, as in the file, as witnesses and as cleared persons of interest. They are not characters in a 1920 newsroom morality play.

The Grand Jury and the District Attorney

New York County District Attorney Edward Swann took personal interest in the case from its first week. He consulted the former governor of New York, Charles S. Whitman, who was acting as a special assistant in his office, on the documentary side of the inquiry. Swann’s office worked through the summer of 1920 on the surviving correspondence, the bank records, the racing accounts, and the witness statements developed by the Homicide Squad.

A New York County grand jury heard witnesses in the case in 1920. The standing accounts give the figure of witnesses heard as over a hundred. No indictment was returned. At the close of the sitting Swann issued his public statement. The evidence, he said, was “entirely devoid of any fact that would justify accusing any man or woman.” The phrasing was deliberate. It refused to clear any particular person and refused to charge any particular person, and it pointed at the structural problem of the case: the documented record could not be moved from suspicion to indictment by any path the office could see.

A confession to the killing was made by a man in 1921. It was investigated and determined to be the false utterance of a person suffering serious mental illness. No further confession of evidential weight has ever come to light. Chief Medical Examiner Norris was later reported in the press as having said he believed he knew the killer’s identity but that the alibi could not be broken. That statement is press-attributed and is reported here as Norris’s stated opinion, not as a charge and not as a name. Norris named no one.

The hypotheses

The Cold File labels speculation as speculation. Five hypotheses sit on the record. One sits beside it.

Hypothesis A: that Elwell was killed by an intimate woman acquaintance. For: the state of dress, the absence of a struggle, and the absence of any third set of prints. Against: no specific female suspect was ever developed by police as actionable, and multiple women associates were interviewed at length and none was indicted. The period press’s framing of Elwell’s circle in the language of “ladies’ man” and “harem” is documented period misogyny and is not adopted as voice in this account.

Hypothesis B: that Elwell was killed by a male rival, including a husband or partner of an intimate associate. For: motive in the abstract and the long history in the police literature of such cases. Against: no specific male rival was ever indicted, and Victor von Schlegell was investigated and cleared. The modern Readex essay’s identification of Walter Lewisohn as the killer, with Selma arranging the alibi, is one writer’s hypothesis, not the period investigators’ finding.

Hypothesis C: that Elwell was killed over a gambling or horse-racing debt. For: Elwell’s documented heavy gambling and the known rivalries of the thoroughbred industry. Against: no specific debtor or creditor with motive and opportunity was developed, Colonel Bradley was in Kentucky, and the intimate-state argument cuts the other way.

Hypothesis D: that Elwell was killed by a burglar with a personal motive. For: the locked-house configuration and the absent weapon. Against: nothing in the house was taken, and the intimate-state argument reads against any stranger.

Hypothesis E, a combination reading. Elwell admitted a visitor he knew well enough not to bother with his toupee or his dentures. The visitor shot him at close range from in front and left, taking the weapon, by a route that did not require disturbing the locked doors. The single open window on an upper floor is consistent with such a route, though it does not prove one. The identity of the morning visitor is undetermined.

Suicide was raised at the scene before the absence of a weapon was confirmed. Norris’s autopsy and homicide ruling closed it. It is recorded only for completeness.

What remains unknown

The identity of Elwell’s killer is unknown. The relationship between killer and victim, beyond what can be read from the state of dress and the configuration of the house, is unknown. The route the killer took into and out of the brownstone is unknown. The contents of any correspondence reported as removed or destroyed from the scene are unknown. Whether the complete NYPD Manhattan Homicide Squad and District Attorney case files survive in the New York City Municipal Archives, and what they would add to the published record, is a question that, to the knowledge of this account, has not been put to the Archives in print.

Sources

Primary.

Secondary.

We have named witnesses and persons of interest only as named in 1920 by the New York Police Department, the New York County District Attorney’s Office, the Grand Jury, and the contemporary press. We do not allege any specific person committed this homicide; we report only what the investigating institutions documented.