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

Mrs. Benhayon then went on to say that Mrs. Bowers’s aunt and cousin, calling to see their sick relative, had been forcibly ejected from the sickroom by Bowers, who was very much excited when he found them there.

“Although Bowers had seventeen thousand dollars’ insurance on my daughter’s life,” she said, “he has always refused to have any policy made out for Tillie Levy, the daughter of the first marriage.

“When doctors left medicines for Cecelia, he would never allow any one to give them to her, but took them off, examined them, and then gave her what he said were the medicines, himself.”

On the 8th of March, 1886, began the trial of J. Milton Bowers for the murder of his wife, Cecelia.

Eugene Duprey, who was afterward to defend Durrant long supposed to be the murderer of two girls in a church, and who was hanged on that charge, was, in this case, the special prosecutor. In his opening speech he stated that he expected to prove that a Mrs. Zeissing, who was Mrs. Bowers’s nurse, and Thresa Farrell — who afterward married a John Dimmig — had attempted to shield the doctor.

He claimed that he could prove that before the death of his wife, Bowers had made arrangements to marry a woman in San Jose, and that she actually had her trousseau ready while her predecessor was alive; and that this courting of one wife before the death of the other was habitual with the man — that it could be proved that he had done it before.

It was also charged by Duprey that the practice on which Bowers had subsisted for many years was that of illegal operations. The prosecutor tried to have the police of Chicago bring forward much damaging testimony which had been unearthed in that city, but to this Bowers’s lawyers made a successful protest.

The case was carried through rapidly, and the verdict brought in was that of murder in the first degree. This was on April 23, 1886.

In June of that year Bowers was sentenced to be hanged, but he appealed, and while the decision was still pending, the truly remarkable feature of this case came to light.

Three Telltale Letters

Henry Benhayon, the brother of Cecelia, had always been a sort of ne’er-do-well, trying now this and now that, sometimes being a salesman, but more often living on his mother’s bounty, and frequently being helped by his sister, after she married again.

He and Bowers were sometimes friendly, but frequently were not, so that there were times when he would sneak into the Bowers’s menage and get money from his sister, unknown to the doctor.

This man had attracted little attention during the progress of the trial of his brother-in-law, and had seemed to continue his usual, shiftless life.

On Sunday, October 23, 1887 — while the decision as to the new trial of Bowers was still pending — some one called up the coroner’s office and said that the body of an unknown man had been found in a rooming house at 22 Geary Street.

The officials proceeded at once to this address and found the landlady, Mrs. Higgson, very much upset over the extraordinary circumstance of finding a dead man, whom she had never seen before, in a room which she had rented to another person, who had seemingly never arrived. How the man came to be in the room she had not the slightest idea.

On the 18th of the month, a young man, not the one now dead, had called and asked if room number twenty-one in her house was for rent. She told him that it was not, but offered other rooms, which he refused.

He called the next day to see if the room was still occupied, and she then told him that it would be vacant Saturday. He offered five dollars’ deposit on the understanding that he was to have the room on Saturday, and Mrs. Higgson, agreeing to this, accepted the money and gave him keys, both to the front door and the door of room twenty-one.

On Sunday, hearing nothing in the room, she opened the door with her pass-key and found a strange young man dead.

This dead man was laid out very carefully, as though in his coffin, so that it was obvious that he could not have composed himself in that way, no matter how peaceful his manner of death.

The next hour the body was identified as that of Henry Benhayon.

Three bottles were found in the room, one containing liniment, one cyanide, and one whisky.

Three letters were found, too. One to the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. It said:

To the Editor of the Chronicle:

Sir — Inclosed find one dollar to pay for this advertisement and the balance as a reward. I will call in a few days.

Yours truly,

Henry Benhayon.

October 31, 1887.

The copy for the advertisement was as follows: