Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction. Vol. 25, No. 2, August 13, 1927

If he really had a bad opinion of his sister he had kept it carefully to himself, for he had vigorously defended her before her marriage to Bowers, and after her marriage she seemed to have entirely lost her tendency toward a gay life. The accusations of the letter as to the person named and “others” was obviously not true of the woman’s life after she became Mrs. Bowers.

Just before he was found dead Benhayon expressed to friends his belief in Bowers’s guilt as to Mrs. Bowers’s death and expressed undying hate for what he called “that damned murderer.”

The lost memorandum book was never found. The “large reward” offered for it could not have been more than sixty cents, since the advertisement itself would have cost about forty.

The identity of the person who engaged the room was never learned, as Mrs. Higgson soon remembered that that person was a different one from the man who asked about the room on the eighteenth — that man being proved, without the shadow of a doubt, to have been John Dimmig, who had married Bowers’s housekeeper, Thresa Farrell.

Mrs. Dimmig and Mrs. Zeissing, who had been Mrs. Bowers’s nurse, were close friends and frequently visited Bowers during his long incarceration. Dimmig was born in Ohio, where he learned the drug business, but later drifted about a good deal and finally worked in a drug store at Eleventh and Mission Streets, San Francisco, where he left to become a book agent.

Dimmig admitted that he had inquired for room twenty-one at 22 Geary Street, although he had a home on Mina Street. He claimed that it was sheer accident, his asking for that particular room, and that was just one of the ways in which he “stalled” when he wanted to get into a house to sell books.

When Dimmig saw that the police openly scoffed at the idea that he used this for a “stall,” he then pretended to confess that he had wanted the room so that he and “a woman from San Jose” might have a “chat.”

He said that he knew this woman only by the name of “Timkins” and that she had written to him, saying that she wanted the room for Saturday night and that they could then have a talk. He claimed that he destroyed the letter.

All Sorts of Forces at Work

Dimmig heatedly denied delegating any one to go and engage the room for him, denied that he met Timkins at all, on Saturday, and said that he had not an idea how Benhayon could have got into the room, but that, being very drunk on the day after he had been to see about the room, he might have mentioned to Benhayon, whom he had met, that he had asked for it and that that might have put it into the other’s mind. He could not explain why he had mentioned that particular room.

After all this, which took several days, Dimmig then handed to the police a letter which had been addressed to him at the Weston Perfumery Company, 26 Second Street, which read as follows:

J. A. Dimmig:

Sir — Call on me at once. I am in a devilish fix. I don’t want your money, but your advice. I think that it is all up with me. You will find me at room 21, 22 Geary Street.

Henry Benhayon.

Notwithstanding the astonishing fact that this letter showed that Benhayon was now occupying the room which Dimmig had been so eager to get, the latter contended that this did not occur to him as at all remarkable.

It was shown that Dimmig was not in the habit of receiving mail through the perfumery company, but that just after the letter arrived for him there he called and asked if anything had come to the company for him through the postal service and that they gave him the letter, expressing surprise that it should have been sent in the care of the company.

A Dr. Lacy, who owned a drug store, soon came forward and proved that Dimmig had procured through him twenty-five grains of cyanide.

Next, it was discovered that Mrs. Zeissing roomed at a house on Morton and Grant Avenues and that the back entrance to the house at 22 Geary Street adjoined the back entrance of Mrs. Zeissing’s rooming place. Mrs. Benhayon stated that her son Henry hated this woman greatly.

Louis Goldberg, who had known Benhayon quite well, told how he had met his friend on the street some weeks before his death and went with him to a room on Market Street where, as Benhayon stated, “he was doing some copying for a book agent.”

Goldberg knew that the others writing was very poor and very slowly made and wondered at the occupation. Of course, if Dimmig had forged all the letters and notes, then his “hiring” of the always impecunious Henry was easy enough to understand.

It was for the purpose of getting samples of his handwriting, otherwise scarce and hard to come by, for Benhayon was not a man to write anything unless necessity demanded.