Part 1
“Did you wrong her?”
As the taxicab neared a desolated spot in the forests on the outskirts of Rochester, New York, twenty-three-year-old Edward Kneip felt his heart throbbing. He twisted his wrists, but the handcuffs binding his hands behind his back wouldn’t budge.
A few minutes earlier, a man who represented himself as a “Detective Arnold” confronted Kneip at his place of employment—the Gleason Works in Rochester—cuffed him, and pushed him into a waiting car. As the plainclothes officer abruptly shoved him into the back seat, Kneip immediately recognized the curvaceous beauty waiting for him: his ex-lover, eighteen-year-old Pearl Odell. He sat upright and stared into the unfeeling eyes of Odell while the cop slid into the driver’s seat and sped away.
Detective Arnold escorted Kneip, with Pearl following on their heels, into the dining room of a bungalow on Richmond Street, where Arnold began grilling his suspect. “Did you wrong her?” He asked, pointing at Pearl.
Kneip shook his head and asked to be taken to the courthouse where he would tell his side of the story. Detective Arnold agreed, and the three left in an automobile.
The trio traveled a few blocks when the car sputtered and died. Detective Arnold jumped out of the car and ran across the street to call a taxi.
A few minutes later, a cab pulled alongside the stalled car. Arnold pulled his prisoner out of the car and shoved him into the taxi. Pearl climbed into the backseat after Kneip, followed by Arnold. Once in the backseat, Arnold handcuffed Kneip to Pearl.
Cabbie Charles Sherer cast a furtive glance at his friend, Edward Spink, and stepped on the gas.
At first, Kneip thought that Pearl had assumed the role of spurned and jealous ex, and as the payback for their failed love affair, had spun a tale that had landed him in legal trouble. He imagined himself facing a judge and talking himself out of a rape charge, but as the crowded taxi motored into the forest, it became clear to him that there was nothing official about his “arrest.” Real police wouldn’t use a taxi.
In a deserted glade surrounded by snow-capped evergreens, the cab screeched to a stop. The officer jumped out of the cab, turned, and yanked on Kneip’s elbow. He told Sherer that the Justice of the Peace was a short walk away, paid the fare, and dismissed him.
Detective Arnold watched as the cab motored away. When it was out of sight, he pulled a .32 revolver out of his coat pocket, jabbed it in Kneip’s ribs, and forced him at gunpoint to walk along Mosquito Point Road until they reached an old canal bed. The cop then led Kneip along the canal for a few hundred feet, and then handcuffed him to a tree while Pearl watched, her arms folded across her chest. Kneip now knew he had been tricked by the devious Pearl Beaver-Odell.
The officer smirked and nodded to Pearl, who pulled a long, sharp file that she kept concealed inside of her overcoat and tiptoed toward Kneip. At the sight of the blade—nearly two-feet in length and of the type used to stir coals in a furnace or fireplace—he frantically pulled against the handcuffs, lacerating his wrists. Warm blood oozed down his hands and speckled the snow around the tree. As Pearl neared, Kneip could hear his heart beating and the sound of blood drops tapping the ground.
Shredded
On the morning of January 8, a brakeman on a train crossing the bridge noticed what looked like a heap of flesh partially covered by snow. As soon as the train pulled into Rochester, he contacted the Sheriff Andrew Weidenmann, who thought the report warranted an investigation. Weidenmann and two deputies jumped into a car and headed to the spot.
As the three men stepped closer to the underpass, they realized that this would be no ordinary case of a vagrant who froze to death while attempting to seek shelter. Although they were hardboiled cops, none of them had witnessed anything quite like the macabre scene. The trickling of a small stream running under the trestle broke the eerie silence as the officers examined the body.
The face of the corpse, clad only in bloodstained undergarments, had been literally shredded. Both ears had been nearly hacked off and dangled from the victim’s head. The hair was greased with thick, clotted blood, indicating that the assailant bashed the victim in the head sometime during the savage attack. A series of stab wounds encircled the base of the mutilated victim’s neck, and there was another series of eight wounds in the left side of the victim’s chest. A large, gaping slash across the abdomen had exposed the intestines, which hung down like a tangle of reddish-purple ropes.
The damage to the victim suggested a ferocity that hinted at a wild animal attack, but the handcuffs left no doubt that they Rochester police had a crime to solve. The lack of blood in the snow indicated that the body had been moved from the site of the attack.
While the two deputies jotted descriptions in their notebooks, Weidenmann surveyed the scene. At the top of the railroad trestle, he noticed what looked like tracks leading into the forest. Evidently, the killer or killers dragged the corpse from the crime scene to the edge of the bridge and tossed it over. He followed the tracks along the old Genesee Valley Canal. About five hundred feet away from the bridge, he spotted a tree ringed with a crimson halo.
Footprints around the tree suggested two assailants, likely a man and a woman. Careful to avoid damaging any evidence, Weidenmann followed the smaller footprints a few feet from the tree, where they formed a circle. He envisioned the female perpetrator dancing a jig while her victim bled to death.
In the snow around the tree, he found other, tantalizing clues: pieces of a .32 revolver, and a heel from a woman’s shoe
James Louis Odell
The critical break in the case came when one of Rochester’s finest received a telephone call from a cab driver who told him a fascinating story. By the afternoon of January 8, the discovery of a mutilated body in the woods near Mosquito Point hit the front pages. Driver Charles Sherer read the accounts and called police to report his mysterious fare, which now had assumed sinister undertones.
Sherer related the strange incident. He had received a call from a “Detective Arnold” whose car broke down. Arnold said he needed help transporting a prisoner and a young woman. Suspicious, Sherer called police headquarters and spoke to Detective Sergeant John Nagle, who had never heard of a “Detective Arnold” but thought he was probably a private detective. He suggested that Sherer take the job but report any funny business.
Detectives brought Sherer in for questioning. Sherer explained that he had picked up the three passengers—“Detective Arnold,” a young woman, and a handcuffed man—and took them to a crossroads on the outskirts of the city. He collected his fare and drove off, not suspecting any foul play. The manacled man, he said, didn’t say a thing during the entire ride, so he just assumed that “Detective Arnold’s” business was legitimate. He did, however, note down the tag number of the stalled vehicle: 510-637.
The car belonged to James Odell, a twenty-one-year-old machinist who had less than a month earlier married a teenage beauty named Pearl Beaver. Pearl grew up in Lopez, Pennsylvania, where her father labored in the coal mines.
Police brought Sherer to the morgue in an attempt to identify the body as the handcuffed man he transported to the woods. The mutilations made it hard for the cabbie to say for certain, but he thought the slain man resembled Arnold’s prisoner.
Meanwhile, a missing persons report was filed for Rochester native Edward Kneip who dropped out of sight around the time Sherer took his strange fare to the woods. It didn’t take long for detectives to realize that the body at Mosquito Point belonged to Kneip.
Investigators also learned that Kneip once dated Pearl Beaver, the new bride of James Odell.
Detectives collared the Odell couple at their home, where a stack of packed suitcases hinted at their next move. They dragged them to the police station where James and Pearl were placed in separate cells a floor apart.
District Attorney William F. Love and Sheriff Andrew Weidenmann questioned James Odell first.
Odell admitted to impersonating a detective and kidnapping Kneip.
He described his motive as rage that emanated from something Pearl told him when he first popped the question. According to Odell, Pearl rejected his marriage proposal because she wasn’t a virgin and essentially characterized herself as damaged goods. She said that she had been raped by Kneip when she was sixteen, although Pearl refused to describe the alleged assault in any detail.
Odell insisted he loved Pearl despite her past, and eventually she agreed to marry him. They wed on December 15, 1919.
After their nuptials, Pearl opened up about the alleged rape. Kneip, she said, wanted sex, but she wanted to wait until they exchanged vows. Impatient, Kneip plied the unsuspecting Pearl with a box of doped chocolates. Then he supposedly raped her.
After the incident, Kneip agreed to marry Pearl, and she continued to see him until he began to propose what Pearl characterized as “unnatural things” and slapped her around when she refused. She broke off the relationship in June, but Kneip wouldn’t let go. He continued to harass her even after she met Odell and at one point threatened to tell Odell about their affair.
Embarrassed and confounded, Pearl became despondent and threatened suicide. And she told Odell about Kneip’s threat.
Odell reassured Pearl, but the alleged wrong done to his teenaged bride, however, continued to dog him.
“Every time I walked down the street,” Odell explained, “I would imagine people would look at me and sneer. I imagined they would say to themselves: ‘Odell, you needn’t hold your head so high; your wife has been out with other fellows before.”
He went to the Rochester Police Judge and asked about the possibility of having Kneip prosecuted for rape, but the judge explained that without corroboration, Pearl’s story was just a story. A confession, the judge told Odell, would provide the needed corroboration. So he hatched a plot to obtain that confession. He purchased a pair of handcuffs and obtained an old, rusty revolver.
Odell described the arrest with a hint of pride in his voice. “He never asked me who I was. I just flashed that fake badge at him and told him he was wanted on a charge of assault. He asked, ‘Who said so?’ I replied ‘Pearl Beaver,’ which was my wife’s maiden name. Then he turned red. He knew we had something on him. She was underage when he wronged her. It happened December 30, 1918.”
He said he took Odell to the home of his step-parents, the Arnolds, where Kneip admitted to having sexual intimacy with the underage Pearl on numerous occasions.
With the confession made, Odell said, he planned to take Kneip to the police station. En route, Kneip said he had to “piss,” at which point Odell pulled over and warned his prisoner not to use such language in front of a lady. According to Odell, Kneip shrugged and said coarse language didn’t matter to a “little whore.”
Then, Odell admitted, he took the unsuspecting Kneip into the forest so the “little whore” could teach him a lesson, but the car broke down, so he had to call a taxi.
Kneip, unaware that Detective Arnold was really Pearl’s husband, apparently didn’t suspecta thing at this point. “He never said a world,” Odell recalled. “I told him we were going to take him to headquarters. He didn’t make any struggle when we handcuffed him to a tree. I came up to where my wife was and said, ‘Pearl, if that man ever wronged you, now is your chance to finish him. He caused you many heartaches and much suffering.’”
Odell went on to describe a frenzied attack during with Pearl shredded Kneip’s face with a long-bladed file. He also admitted to hitting Kneip with the butt of the rusty revolver. They then left Kneip for dead, but they forgot about an incriminating letter.
“My wife and I then started to leave the place. We happened to remember that Kneip had a letter that we wanted and we went back to get it. When I came to where the body was lying Kneip sprung up at me and struck me in the eye. My came up from behind and again attacked him with the file.”
Kneip collapsed to the ground, unconscious. Odell then said he smashed the fallen man in the head with a large chunk of hickory.
With James Odell’s confession in hand, Love and Weidenmann planned to confront Pearl. They expected the young bride to come clean and corroborate James’ statement, but they were completely unprepared for what Pearl was about to say.
End of part 1. Stay tuned for the conclusion to this shocking, true crime tale!
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