Job in Chicago to return home to Fort Wayne and work in a defense plant. Wilhelmina Haaga, 38, was one of those women. The country was in the third year of the war, and women in Fort Wayne wereįollowing the advice of War Department posters that urged them to "Do the job Was significantly less reaction to the first slaying by the "killer in the It took three killings to stir the town to such a state of hysteria. Police and sheriff departments received hundreds of reports Men were picked up and grilled byĭetectives. ''No one is above suspicion," Sheriff Walter Adams told a frightenedĬommunity after the third murder. One was tried and convicted but the conviction Three other men would be charged in some of the killings over the next Indicated he probably didn't kill anybody. Three decades in prison, much of it on death row, later investigations Night in 1947 and confessed to three of the killings. Ralph Woodrow Lobaugh walked into the Kokomo police station late one summer
Any of them might be our man."Īs it turned out, four men came under prominent suspicion in the slayings. "The next-door neighbor, the man downstairs, theĪcquaintance down the street. ''Everyone should be suspicious now," Captain of Detectives John Taylor
Hyde type of murderer," the Journal-Gazette reported. ''Officials believe it is quite possible that the killer is a Dr. ''It looks like the work of a maniac," declared Police Chief Jule Stumpf See in our own violent age and, for that simpler time, it was a cause for
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It was a series of murders as horrific as any we Haaga's beating death was shocking news for World War II-era Fort Wayne,īy the end of 1944, two more young women would be beaten and strangled inġ945, another two would die. Like a stone into the calm pond that was Fort Wayne half a century ago. Hartzell Road farmhouse on the rainy night of February 2, 1944, she dropped For when Billie Haaga collapsed on the porch of a It would take a few months before the shiver spread throughout the city,īut spread it would. It began, as so many dreadful stories do, with a shiver.Īdeline Haaga had a feeling something terrible had happened to her sister NO ONE WAS ABOVE SUSPICION IN A STRING OF VIOLENT DEATHS OF LOCAL WOMEN IN THE 1940S - CRIMES THAT WOULD BAFFLE AUTHORITIES FOR YEARS. A HALF-CENTURY AGO, FAST-GROWING FORT WAYNE WAS PARALYZED WHEN YOUNG WOMEN STARTED TURNING UP MURDERED, ALL THOUGHT TO BE VICTIMS OF A KILLER IN THE RAIN.
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