The Tillie Bergsterman Murder
On the night of September 30th, 1912, three weeks prior to Leon and Chester Goetz taking over management of The Crystal and The Princess theaters in Monroe, a Janesville murder shocked Southern Wisconsin. Tillie Bergsterman, a woman in her mid thirties, was raped and beaten to death by two teen boys with whom her alcoholic father had been drinking at one of Janesville’s bars.
Tillie’s murder exposed not just lax enforcement of saloon laws, but a culture of child-grooming and prostitution that had been nurtured at the highest levels of city government prior to the election of Mayor James A. Fathers six months prior. This vice empire was controlled by members of Janesville’s retail liquor industry.
Tillie’s murder exposes a seedy side of the film industry, too. As public consciousness of the social cost of juvenile delinquency and consequent White Slavery increased, so did the efficacy of citizen organization against these evils. The success of homemakers’ institutions like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union drove “red light districts” and the worst saloons out of business. However, the “alcohol men” who ran these hell-holes looked to the film business to make up their profits. I will explore this in my next post.
Mathilda “Tillie” Bergsterman was 36 years old and the only remaining unmarried child of a low-functioning alcoholic named Fred/Fritz/William. (Tillie’s father went by William according to the 1910 census, but local Janesville press always called him “Fritz” or “Fred”.) Pa Bergsterman had immigrated from Germany to Chicago, where Tillie was born on December 29, 1875. At 10 P.M. on the evening of the murder she had been walking the streets outside her home on the wrong side of the Rock River. Sometime later she returned to her dwelling, where her father brought two teen boys after a drinking spree. The boys took Tillie to a nearby barn where they beat and raped her until she died. Her father was too dead drunk to even know what happened.
Fred/William Bergsterman was the police’s primary suspect until the boys, Harry F. Berger (17) and Edward Meyer (19), were identified by other bar patrons as having taken Fred/William home that evening. The boys, neighbors to the Bergstermans, confessed on October 3, 1912 after having been identified by multiple separate witnesses. They had also been heavily drunk at the time of the murder-rape and were sentenced to 18 years imprisonment.
Feeling in Janesville was against the boys, but it was even stronger against the saloons and hotels known to exploit children by selling them alcohol or paying them to strip on bars. Revulsion at rampant child abuse motivated Janesville’s responsible population to organize.
It wasn’t just responsible citizens who took action after the murder, however. Many of the surnames associated with the prosecution of Tillie’s murderers were the same surnames which profited from Monroe, WI’s vice scene since the 1850s. For instance, a Treat was on her inquest jury and, even more importantly, a Dunwiddie was the prosecuting attorney for the murder. Smart vice money in Monroe knew what was happening in Janesville before anybody else. Could it be that in Monroe, WI the worst of the vice-lords fled to the film industry, just like what happened in the rest of the Anglophone world following the morality movements?
One of the immediate consequences of Tillie’s murder was a crack-down on the saloons which illegally supplied liquor to children. The following newspaper clippings are in chronological order as they appeared in either the Monroe Evening Times or the Janesville Daily Gazette (an anti-saloon publication). The first describes citizen efforts to create a “Committee of Fifteen” like in NYC, note how the resolutions pertain to crimes against children carried out by these saloon-keepers.
Janesville Daily Gazette, Oct 12, 1912. This is the first part of a larger article, the remainder of which is reproduced at the end of this post for completeness.
According to witness testimony, Tilly had been walking the streets near her home at around 10 P.M. the night she was killed, which suggests she may have been a prostitute herself. (Certainly earlier Janesville city directories list her as a “domestic”, a profession which often lead to prostitution.) As the only regularly working person in the home of an alcoholic father, it’s not hard to understand why she may have turned to this lifestyle. The very first action that the councilmen took after her murder was the expulsion of known prostitutes from the town, the number of which had grown considerably since the closure of “red light districts” in Chicago and Milwaukee. While this may seem harsh action to take, the reality is it would have broken up grooming pipelines targeting Janesville’s children.
Monroe Evening Times, November 11, 1912.
In Monroe’s paper, which was always quick to point the finger at Janesville, reports of routine sexual abuse of young girls at local bars made the front page. As one may expect, it wasn’t solely the blue-collar johns buying women and girls. Note how the Monroe paper defends the behavior of Janesville’s open prostitutes, the “segregated women”:
Monroe Evening Times, November 20, 1912 1/2
Monroe Evening Times, November 20, 1912. 2/2
In fairness to Janesville, the negligee party described in the Monroe paper above probably happened 25 years prior and had nothing to do with conditions in the south side of the city where Tillie lived. (See Janesville Daily Gazette, November 25, 1912.) However, several weeks prior to Tillie’s murder, JDG’s editors provided detail on precisely the type of “dancing upon bars” that the MET alleged.
Janesville Daily Gazette, July 30, 1912
As a result of Janesville’s citizen action— the likes of which Monroe wouldn’t see until 1921 and Leon Goetz’s Mann Act indictment— the worst saloons and prostitution-hotels in the city were closed the following April (1913). This included W. A. Knipp’s place, Richard Finley’s joint, as well as the following:
Janesville Daily Gazette, April 8, 1913. “Important Resolution Passed Council this Morning Relative to Retail Liquor Licenses in the City” page 1. This list represents about 25% of the liquor retailers in town, forty were permitted to continue running because they were not found to be breaking any laws.
Below are four maps comparing the location of Tillie’s home, Tillie’s murder site and the grooming hotels/saloons. Since not all readers will be familiar with the city of Janesville, I’ve included the first map which provides orientation around the European Hotel, a long-time vice den (red star), and where Tilly’s body was found (purple star).
An early map of Janesville, WI showing where the European Hotel is (red star); where Tilly Bergsterman’s body was found (purple star) and the approximate location of her home, 412 South Third Street (green shading). The boys took her from her home to the area of the purple star to kill her.
Mayor Fathers’ closures of the worst taverns/hotels west of the Rock River are represented by blue and red stars. Areas shaded in green are where saloons were still permitted to operate. (Knipp’s is the only blue star inside the green zone on W Milwaukee Street, while Finley’s is the blue star in the green zone on S River Street). These joints were named as primary suppliers of liquor to children in the Bergsterman trial. The European Hotel is shown as a red star. Please compare to the image above for an orientation to greater Janesville, WI. The west side of the Rock River was generally a bad side of town.
Approximate location of the S River street grooming-saloons/hotels (blue stars) closed by Mayor Fathers, in relation to where the body of Tilly Bergsterman was found (purple star).
Tilly’s home, 412 South Third Street according to the 1910 US Census, would have been somewhere along the street shaded in green above. Her body was found approximately where the purple star is, in the “Rehfeld Barn”.
Naturally, Janesville’s vice lords were not going to take this lying down. They immediately organized a recall petition to remove Mayor Fathers from office. They did not want their own names in the papers, so they organized two lists of signatures for the recall petition so that a mob of ‘common men’ could be the face of their efforts. (More on who this mob were in a moment.) The JDG did not hesitate to identify this public list as patsies. Here’s what Monroe’s paper said:
Monroe Evening Times, November 20 ,1912.
Monroe Evening Times, December 10, 1912.
And here’s a sample of what the Janesville Daily Gazette had to say about the recall:
Janesville Daily Gazette, December 20th, 1912. 1/3
Janesville Daily Gazette, December 20, 1912. 2/3
Janesville Daily Gazette, December 20, 1912. 3/3
That’s a lot of petition signers, no?! There were about 14,000 people living in Janesville in 1910.
From the beginning, it was obvious to all that the recall movement was about Janesville’s powerful retail liquor cartel keeping power in the city. This standoff was several months coming, as Fathers had won the mayorship that March on a ticket to reform the way the Corporation of the City of Janesville was governed. Favoritism in tax assessments and the corrupt behavior of the retail liquor-men were motivating factors for this governance re-haul. Readers should bear in mind that wholesale liquor-men, ie. beer-brewers mostly, were generally considered less of a social menace than the hotel/saloon keepers, but this is not a distinction people in the temperance movement found convincing.
December 31, 1912 image from the Janesville Daily Gazette.
To understand what Fathers was up against and just how powerful Janesville’s retail liquor-men were, consider the following newspaper clip. Not only did Janesville beat out places like Milwaukee to hold the retail liquor industry convention, but the statewide association was aware of wide-spread law-breaking by their members. This article is from just over a year prior to Tillie’s murder. (Note displaying pornography in bars was also discouraged, please see my post Cigarettes and the White Slave Trade for more information on pornography and child grooming.)
Janesville Daily Gazette, July 31, 1911.
Janesville Daily Gazette, August 6, 1912
On December 28, 1912 a Janesville judge found the above recall petition so vaguely worded that it did not met legal requirements to trigger a recall. The liquor-men responded with a second petition, drafted by lawyers this time, and again with a copious list of common men as its ‘face’. This time, signatories came forward to claim their signatures had been forged. The list contained at least 120 men who were non-citizens, therefore ineligible to vote. A few of the ‘common men’ said they’d been forced to sign for fear of their jobs being taken away or other retribution.
Janesville Daily Gazette, February 21, 1913. 1/2
Janesville Daily Gazette, February 21, 1913. 2/2
The type of pressure put on working men to sign the retail liquor recall petition was elaborated in an editorial from the JDG the following July:
Janesville Daily Gazette, July 21, 1913. “Least We Forget” column.
Why were the retail liquor men able to marshal an army of foreign men to fraudulently sign their recall petition? Not all these liquor-men were just liquor retailers. The owner of the European Hotel, one of the grooming-parlors shut down by Fathers, was a preeminent construction baron who controlled hoards of manual laborers, most of whom he kept busy digging ditches for railway development out of Chicago, Milwaukee and into Minnesota. Many of his employees were Irish, or otherwise foreign-born. He’d only bought the European about five years before it was busted and he owned other property in Janesville’s depressed areas. It would have been very easy for him to press his vassals into subverting Janesville’s democratic systems and the pimps associated with Janesville’s brothels would have been available ‘muscle’ for the task.
The retail liquor gang’s recall languished until a third and final effort brought it to vote in July of 1913: Fathers won again, but only by a small margin. The liquor men had organized a massive voter registration among their vassals prior to the vote, but it still wasn’t enough. They had run a candidate, John C. Nichols, who espoused socialism and incited class warfare to protect the pimps, but that wasn’t enough.
Janesville Daily Gazette, July 27, 1913.
Having defeated the retail liquor gang this time, Mayor Father’s first public action was to donate $5.00 to the St. Patrick’s Church fund organized by Mrs. Daniel Ryan, a local undertaker’s wife. She liked to hold ‘casino night’-type fundraisers for this church.
Janesville Daily Gazette, August 9, 1913.
What concluding thoughts can we take from this episode from over one hundred years ago? What has changed in the meantime? Would the voices of responsible citizens find a champion in city government today?
What we can say with certainty is that a young man and his teen brother from Monroe, WI got funding three weeks after Tillie’s death to purchase the two dedicated movie theaters in town, the film biz being the favored alternate-income for retail liquor men driven out of business by morality crusades…
We can also say that five months after Tillie’s death, this same young man bought a pool-hall/ice cream parlor/dancing-hall outfit in Darlington, WI. (See Monroe Evening Times, February 19, 1913). This is exactly the type of establishment which caused so much trouble for the youth of Janesville. In addition, this young man added a movie theater to the complex.
Monroe Evening Times, February 19, 1912.
We also know that in September 1920, shortly before his Mann Act indictment, this young man pleaded guilty to running a slot machine in his pool hall on Monroe’s historic Courthouse Square…
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Here’s the remaining part of the Oct 12th 1912 article from above.
Janesville Daily Gazette, October 12, 1912 2/2
