Historic Milwaukee Crimes

Milwaukee saw its share of violence as it transformed from frontier village to modern metropolis. The city was barely established when an argument over a bridge linking east and west was nearly settled with cannon fire. A local developer killed his estranged wife, severed her head and burned it in the furnace of the apartment building he built. A wronged woman murdered her lover on a busy downtown street and was found innocent by a sympathetic jury. Another woman lethally poisoned her family and laughed about it in the press. From a robbery in which the bandits got away by stealing a streetcar to the attempted assassination of President Theodore Roosevelt, local historian Carl Swanson uncovers dramatic true stories of villainy and murder from Milwaukee’s long-forgotten past.

Carl A. Swanson explores and writes about his adopted hometown of Milwaukee. A magazine editor and author of Lost Milwaukee from The History Press and Faces of Railroading from Kalmbach Media, Carl studied journalism at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and photography at the Woodland School of Photography. He lives in Milwaukee with his wife and blogs about the city and its history at MilwaukeeNotebook.com.

160 pages