Bath Massacre: America's First School Bombing (5 page)

Outside, beneath the window, the family dog gave a plaintive wail for his mistress.
³¹

It would take years for questions to be asked about the tragedy and for hints to surface of Andrew Kehoe’s possible involvement. In the wake of the school bombing, the story of Frances Kehoe rustled throughout Bath. One version of the tale claimed the tragedy happened when Kehoe was just fourteen rather than forty—a natural mistake when stories are spread through rumor.
³²

Did Kehoe arrange his stepmother’s horrific death? Having tinkered with gadgets and machinery since his childhood, he conceivably had the know-how to rig a stove for detonation.

There is—of course—no way to find the answer; it is another part of the labyrinthine mystery of Andrew P. Kehoe.

Philip Kehoe had not expected to outlive his young wife. Now filled with pain in both body and soul, the elder Kehoe’s condition deteriorated further.

Andrew had other things on his mind besides his stepmother’s death and his father’s declining health. Now in his early forties, he resumed an
old courtship with Ellen Price—known to all by her nickname, “Nellie”—whom he’d met years before at Michigan State. The two briefly dated as students (such as dating was in the late nineteenth century), then parted before Kehoe left for Saint Louis. Now was as good a time as any to get reintroduced.

Nellie Price’s background was similar to her beau’s. Born in 1875, she was the daughter of an Irish Catholic immigrant, Patrick Price, and his wife Mary Ann. Her mother died when Nellie was just eighteen. As the eldest daughter in a family of five, Nellie was charged with raising the children. They lived in Bath, where Patrick Price farmed the land owned by his older brother Laurence. In 1908, Patrick Price moved to Lansing, where he and the children would be closer to his beloved brother Laurence.
³³

A Civil War veteran and successful Lansing businessman, Laurence Price made his fortune in the fledgling automobile industry, opening a factory to manufacture car parts for Henry Ford. Wealthy and with a passion for public service, Price turned to politics. He won a few elective offices, making him a well-known and important figure in many powerful Lansing circles.
³⁴

On May 14, 1912, just seven months after Frances Kehoe’s gruesome end, Andrew and Nellie wed.
³⁵
They moved to Tecumseh, where Kehoe resumed work on his father’s farm. The old man, now confined to a wheelchair, died on January 8, 1915.
³⁶

The couple largely kept to themselves, though they briefly attended a nearby Catholic church. When the original parish church was torn down, congregants were assessed a fee to pay for a new sanctuary. Andrew and Nellie Kehoe’s share came to four hundred dollars. As if in a nod to his father’s feelings about taxation, Kehoe simply ignored the bill. One of the parish priests called at the Kehoe home to collect the money. In no uncertain terms, the clergyman was ordered off the property. Kehoe never returned to the congregation. It was said he also forbade his wife to worship at the new church.
³⁷

Another story was told of Kehoe’s belief that a neighbor had cheated him in a livestock sale. After buying eight steers, Kehoe penned the animals in a clover field on his property. The field, wet from a recent rainstorm, proved deadly. Two of the cattle bloated badly from the damp feed and quickly died. Kehoe harvested their carcasses, sold the hides in town, then returned to the man from whom he bought the animals. He demanded half his payment back, an unreasonable request the seller
naturally would not honor. The argument that ensued between the two is lost through the mist of decades. Yet people noticed that for some time whenever they crossed each other’s path in town, Kehoe remained silent, turning whatever thoughts he had inward.
³⁸

In 1916, Nellie’s uncle was nominated as a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate. Although Laurence Price lost to Michigan’s Republican incumbent Charles E. Townsend, he was still a formidable presence throughout the Lansing area.
³⁹
When Price died on February 12, 1917, he left behind a considerable estate with money going to a variety of charities and relatives. His house and land in Bath—Nellie’s childhood home—remained in the family.

The eighty-acre farm was ideal for Kehoe and his wife. At the center of the property was a three-story home with a roomy front porch and an elegant set of bay windows on the second floor. More windows filled the exterior, providing plenty of portals for sunshine. The good-sized spread had a roomy barn and separate chicken coop. Its land was rich, perfect for a good variety of crops. To the east was a wooded area, lush and green in the spring and summer and a kaleidoscope of colors come autumn. It was a showcase for the region, a well-kept estate that seemed like a regal memorial to the late Laurence Price.

Kehoe approached Richard Price, another of Laurence’s brothers, to see if he could buy the property. Richard, along with Laurence’s widow Beulah and their attorney Joseph H. Dunnebacke, served as executors of the departed’s business interests. A deal was negotiated. Kehoe would buy the property for twelve thousand dollars. He would make a six-thousand-dollar down payment with the balance and interest held in a mortgage to the Laurence Price estate. On March 27, 1919, the deed was turned over to Andrew Kehoe.
⁴⁰
Once he sold his place in Tecumseh, Kehoe and Nellie could move to her childhood home in Bath.

Kehoe placed his farm in the hands of a real estate agent. Two weeks later an interested buyer stopped by to speak with Kehoe. Ironically, it was the same man who had entered into the ill-fated agreement with Kehoe over the cattle. The two, it seemed, had managed to work past their old rift into a tentative truce. When the man asked if the property was on the market, Kehoe exploded. “Yes,” he snapped back, “but why in the hell didn’t you come two weeks ago, before I turned it over to the real estate hands and I would have saved the commission!”
⁴¹

Regardless of this new spat, Kehoe sold the farm to his adversary for eight thousand dollars. The down payment was made on the Bath property. Kehoe and Nellie packed up their belongings and readied themselves for a new home.

Before leaving, Kehoe made one last business transaction. There were fifteen cords of wood on his Tecumseh farm. Obviously this wouldn’t be packed up for the move. Kehoe approached a neighbor, offering to sell the entire load at half the regular price. At a dollar fifty per cord this was a considerable bargain, yet Kehoe’s neighbor amiably turned it down. Like every farmer in the region, he had all the wood he needed and then some.

Kehoe insisted the man go for this bargain. Again he was refused, and once more Kehoe pushed the sale.

Kehoe made it clear that he did not want to leave the wood for the new owner. The house and farm were sold, but the fifteen cords of wood were still Kehoe’s and he’d be damned before leaving something on his former property that hadn’t been bought and paid for. Ultimately the neighbor acquiesced to Kehoe’s pressure.
⁴²

Andrew Kehoe was nothing if not dogged.

The 1920s really started on January 16, 1919, when the U.S. Congress ratified the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Section 1 of the new law read “After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.” The amendment was followed on October 28 by the Volstead Act, a regulation named after its chief sponsor, the clout-heavy Minnesota congressman Andrew Volstead. This new law banned the sale of adult beverages, defining booze as better than 0.5 percent alcohol used for “intoxicating purposes.” Both edicts were filed together under the dirty name “Prohibition.”

Naturally, outlawing a high-demand product is about as easy to enforce as repealing the law of gravity. The liquor industry easily found new routes to a thirsty public. Gangsters in New York, Chicago, and other major cities developed a thriving—if sometimes violent and deadly—underground business. Morals codified by law were gleefully ignored. It was a new era dubbed the Jazz Age by its poster child, scribe F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of the quintessential 1920s novel
The Great Gatsby.
In big
cities throughout the country bathtub gin flowed, hemlines rose a few notches as flappers danced the Charleston, the sounds of jazz blew from bandstands in smoky clubs, and old-fashioned morals were stomped into ashes by the fun.

Some of the seedier elements of the day took hold near the Bath area. Al Capone, that most notorious of all gangsters, often headed to nearby Lansing to visit a “friend,” a low-level and anonymous gang member who had resettled in Michigan after a Windy City killing went horribly wrong. This former thug reinvented himself as an honest businessman, opening a profitable fruit and vegetable market. Local restaurants relied on the store for their produce. Still, business was business, and the owner kept vestigial ties to his former employer, letting Capone occasionally use the legitimate fruit and vegetable establishment as a warehouse for contraband booze shipped in from Canada.
¹

Capone had a more pressing reason to visit his former associate after the murder of Chicago prosecutor William McSwiggin. The crusading attorney, son of a Chicago cop, had led a double life. A good guy by day, McSwiggin enjoyed slumming with Al Capone and his crew during off hours.

One night McSwiggin made the mistake of getting into a car owned by two of Big Al’s bootlegging rivals, the O’Donnell brothers, Myles and William (aka “Klondike”). When the O’Donnells’ automobile was seen driving through the streets of Capone’s territory, loyal members of the gang (and possibly Scarface himself) followed. When the time was right, Big Al’s men opened fire. Tommy guns spat angry bursts at the O’Don-nells, filling the night air with the stink of metal, gunpowder, and blood.

The offending siblings escaped serious harm, but the unlucky prospector was hit in the back and neck by a hail of bullets. The O’Donnells picked up McSwiggin’s lifeless body, removed all identification, and dumped the hapless corpse in a deserted woods.