In 1884, there were riots in the streets of Cincinnati unlike anything they had ever seen before. Sure, there had been riots in the past, but nothing like this. People had been upset before – Cincinnati was changing (and expanding) and not everyone liked the direction it was heading. But now, people were starting to get scared. And they thought they had some damned good reasons to feel that way. All it took was just one small event to spark a fire that would forever change the city.
The Murder of William H. Kirk
In December, 1883, Sand Dealer and Horse Trader William H. Kirk said goodbye to his wife and left his house on Elizabeth Street in Cincinnati. He was on his way to Cheviot to buy a horse for $200. When he did not come home that evening, his wife started to get worried.
A few days later, a body was discovered in Cumminsville (several miles to the east). It had been floating among the reeds of Mill Creek, had a noose around its neck, and there were several wounds on his head. He had clearly died a violent death.
The only real clue that the police had to go on were some hayseeds that had stuck to the bloody rope. This led the police to believe that the man had been killed in a barn or stable, or transported by a hay wagon.
When the newspapers reported on the dead body, William Kirk’s wife headed off to the morgue to view the body. She indicated that it was her husband. When the police went to check out Kirk’s stable, they found bloodstains and bloody clothing.
The police were starting to figure out what had happened. That morning when William left to buy the horse, he must have stopped by his stable for some reason. Perhaps to pick up something he would need to transport the horse he was about to buy. While he was there, someone attacked him, bashed him over his head to render him unconscious, then strung a rope around his neck until he was dead. His body was then transported, via wagon, several miles north and dumped in Mill Creek. The two hundred dollars that Will had on him was missing, so robbery was deemed the most likely motive.
The big question that remained was who would do such a thing?
As it happens, there were two of Kirk’s employees who were acting mightily suspicious. When the police discovered they didn’t have alibies for the morning in question, and the fact that they had both recently come into, roughly, a hundred dollars each – the police were convinced they had their men.
William Berner and Joe Palmer were taken to the police station and questioned. Both men professed their innocence and weren’t being all that forthcoming with any information, so the detectives decided to split the men up and interview them separately.
Palmer, almost immediately, confessed, however he tried to put all the blame squarely on Brener. According to him, Brener had asked him to help with a delivery, but he had no idea they were disposing of a corpse, or that it was their boss. He claimed he had no idea how Kirk was killed.
Berner’s story was completely different. According to him, Palmer had hit Kirk on the head with a hammer. While he (Berner) had hired the cab, he claimed that it was only Palmer who disposed of the body, and he did not know what had happened to it.
The police didn’t really believe either of those stories, but the guys were confessing so they were pretty sure they had the right guys. Innocent people don’t confess to crimes they didn’t commit. Guilty people sometimes do confess but provide details that make them appear to be less guilty than they truly are. Besides, neither confession explained everything, so they knew there had to be more to the story.
When Palmer heard Berner’s story, he got mad. Finally, he was ready to say what truly went down.
What Really Happened
Ever since Palmer and Berner had started working for Kirk, they saw that he often carried large sums of cash. They were both typical young men at the time. They saw themselves as hard workers, often struggling to make it payday to payday, yet it was Kirk who stood to make all the money. What hard labor did he do? Sure, he ran a business (two, actually) so why was it fair that he had all this money in his pocket when they had so little.
One night, they came up with a plan – they were going to rob their boss, William H. Kirk, and get their hands on some of that cold, hard cash. The only problem was that Kirk knew them both, so if they didn’t want the law to come after them, Kirk was going to have to die. But, I guess, the money was worth it.
When they saw Kirk at the stables that Monday morning, and knowing he had some cash on him so that he could procure another horse – they decided it was time to put their plan into action. After Kirk had entered the stables, Berner grabbed a hammer and hit Kirk on the top of his head. Then Palmer picked up a club and did the same. They took turns hitting their (soon to be former) employer for several minutes.
By the time they had all but exhausted themselves, Kirk was still somehow alive. They had to finish what they had started.
One of the men had found a rope and looped the middle of it around Kirk’s throat a couple of times. Then, each of the guys took an end of the rope and pulled. They did not let go until Kirk was, finally, dead.
From his pockets, the guys retrieved $245, and each took $100 for themselves. The rest they were going to use to hide their crimes, such as hiring a wagon to take the body as far away as they dared to go and dump it where they hoped it wouldn’t be easily found.
So, what did the guys do with the money? Well, it was the day before Christmas and even though they claimed to feel a little guilt over killing someone, they were now in a rather festive mood. The money lasted each man about three days, where they were eating in the best restaurants, drinking at the best saloons, and disappearing for a few hours inside the best brothels. By the day after Christmas, both men were, once again, quite broke.
Palmer had said that the reason he initially blamed Berner was because he believed his friend had a large chance of getting away with it. Palmer was mulatto (half-African, as he called himself) and because of that, he feared he would surely hang. Berner, however, came from an affluent family, and even though his family wasn’t among the elite members of Cincinnati society, they were well enough off to negate any consequences of their actions. Palmer indicated that he didn’t think Palmer would have even gotten arrested at all, considering how wealthy his family was compared to them.
While giving his final confession, Palmer seemed to express genuine remorse over what they had done. Local reporters quoted him as saying, “This is a hell of a murder, and we ought to be lynched.”
Berner’s Trial
On March 3, 1884, Berner’s trial began. Prosecutors had decided to try the two men separately and they were going to start with Berner.
Unlike Palmer, Berner tried as hard as he could to stick with his original story. For two weeks, the prosecution laid out a very convincing, yet circumstantial case while Berner continued to insist that he witnessed Palmer commit the murder and how if he was guilty of anything, it was not turning his friend over to the police.
By most accounts, the defense was weak. Berner could not explain certain parts of the story, such as how and why the rope was used or why he wound up with almost half the money Kirk had on him. The prosecution, however, hit him hard with the circumstantial facts, pointed out his lies, and when the trial finally ended, not one single person (at least, outside the jury) believed a word he said.
Everyone believed the jury’s verdict would be guilty of first-degree murder.
It came as quite a surprise when, the following day, the jury went back before the judge and asked if they could be “lenient”. To most, this was a signal that the jury was thinking about second degree murder.
What they got instead was a verdict of manslaughter.
Cincinnati was not happy about this.
Cincinnati Problems
Cincinnati in the 1880s was known for a few things. Some were good things, like Beer and Pork Products, or offering services for people traveling down The Ohio River. New companies were being formed, such as Proctor and Gamble and their new must-have product, ivory soap (so light it floats) was starting to take over the world.
There was a downside to living in Cincinnati, though.
Cincinnati was made up of various suburbs, each representing a distinct ethnic group. And many of these communities didn’t get along all that great with their neighbors. The Germans hated the Italians, who hated the Irish, and then you had the Protestants and the Catholics going at it … you get the idea. Each of these groups also didn’t trust anybody but themselves, so when disputes broke out between them, they were handled among themselves – so, it’s safe to say that Cincinnati back then had a wee bit of a violent gang problem.
Local government wasn’t much better. Corruption was the standard across the board. In the previous few years, the mayoral race alone was a nightmare. There were so many candidates that nobody won anything close to a majority, and the poor guy who did win didn’t have the political power to get anything done, except try to make life harder for whichever community they were currently at odds with.
Perhaps, the most corrupt was the criminal justice system. Police were bribed to look the other way when it came to everything from taverns to brothels and to not police certain streets where anything and everything could happen. Officers were known to accept bribes or even fabricate evidence against people when there was no crime being committed (or, at least, not the crimes being charged).
At the top of the corruption ladder, however, was the court system. If the price were right, everyone from the prosecution (or the defense) up to the judge could be purchased for the right price.
There was no doubt in anybody’s mind that both Palmer and Berner were guilty of a very heinous crime, committed the day before Christmas, all for a relatively small sum of money. After Berner was found guilty not of first-degree, or even second-degree murder, but manslaughter – that was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
The city was already on edge over things nobody could control – in particular, the weather. Massive rainfall had recently decimated the city, with the added complication of not just both Miami rivers flooding, but the Ohio River crested at 71.9 Feet, among the worst in recent history. It didn’t seem like the city was able to do anything about that, even if they could.
For the three days after the Manslaughter verdict, a group of about sixty-four people banded together to call for a public meeting at the Music Hall. The murder rate was getting out of hand, there were too many criminals getting away with stuff, the public corruption was getting out of hand. It was, they said, time for some serious reform. They wanted to return the rule of law to the city.
The crowd that gathered at the Music Hall was a bit more than they were expecting. Ten thousand people showed up. It was instantly clear that they weren’t there for any sort of reform. What they were chanting was, “Hang Berner!”
Cincinnati Riots
As evening descended over Ohio, a massive mob (most likely ranging in the thousands) descended on the city. Gun shops were looted, as were other places as every man went looking for their weapon of choice. Alarm bells were sounding all across the city.
When the mob finally reached the county jail, all hell broke loose. Rather than looking for Berner, the crowd focused more on the jailers and deputies. Jail staff had managed to lower the iron gates over the front doors. Some in the crowd began climbing the walls and entering through the second story windows, one guy had actually managed to get ahold of a cannon and was threatening to blast the gates down. It may have taken a little time, but eventually the crowd managed to tear down the gates and enter the building.
In a mass of chaos, angry (and drunk) citizens began filtering through the building, attacking the guards and trying to set the building on fire. The city had just employed its first volunteer fire department, but the crowds outside would not allow them anywhere near the building.
At one point, several people cornered a prisoner, thinking he was Palmer, who was still awaiting his trial. He cried out that he wasn’t Palmer and he could prove it. Palmer was black, and if someone could just light a match or something, he implored, they would see he was white. Someone did, in fact, strike a match and sure enough the man had a lighter skin color, so they let him go. (Spoiler Alert! It was Palmer, and his rouse probably saved his life, at least, for now.)
What none of the crowd knew at the time was that by the time they had arrived at the courthouse, Berner was already gone. They had just missed him. When his jailers found out about the unruly mob headed their way, they at least had the good sense to send him off to another facility. So, posing as cigar salesmen, two deputies and a reporter from the Cincinnati Enquirer, were on board a train heading to the State Penitentiary while chaos reigned in town.
By the time the train had reached Loveland, word had already spread and there was a small group of men waiting who boarded the train looking for Berner. Somehow, in the confusion, Berner managed to climb out the window and escape into the nearby forest. Once the posse had discovered this, they set off in search of the man, who they had thought must have escaped deep into the woods. Except, he hadn’t gone very far at all. Once he realized that he’d be safer with the Cincinnati policemen than the vengeful crowd, he silently returned to the train and turned himself in. The train then proceeded to the penitentiary without any further incident.
While all this is going on, city officials reach out to Columbus. Things are well beyond their control and the Cincinnati police commissioner begged for the State Militia.
After the crowd had unsuccessfully tried to burn down both the city jail and the courthouse, they moved throughout the neighborhood leaving carnage in their wake. By the time The State Militia arrived, the city looked like a war zone. No business, it seemed, had been spared from the wrath of the mob. And from there it had spilled westward, through the black neighborhood, leaving the citizens there cowering in fear.
The presence of The State Militia did nothing to calm the situation. After a few hours, The State Militia had determined that their presence was making matters worse, not better. The militia pulled back to assess the situation, thinking that maybe the tension would die down. But, it did not.
Instead, the local anarchists used the lull in policing to burn down the courthouse.
By the end of the third night of violence in the city of Cincinnati, things finally began to calm down on their own, before finally coming to an end.
The nightmare was, at long last, over.
The Palmer Trial
In June, nobody wanted a repeat performance of the rioting that had taken place after the Berner trial. The prosecutor’s first move was to ask for a change in venue. Everyone in town, it seemed, had been aware of the riots and therefore, he reasoned, it would be impossible to seat a jury that had not been affected by the first trial, or who had already formed opinions on it. Ultimately, the judge denied the request and after a potential jury pool of over five hundred men had been gone through, a jury was finally sat and the trial was set to begin.
This time, the verdict was guilty of first-degree murder. Palmer would be set to hang. He would be executed on July 15, 1885.
That day, the gallows was set up behind a stone wall at the jail house, as a massive crowd gathered outside. At 10:02, the noose was fastened around his neck and the trap door was sprung open. However, Palmer didn’t die right away, as was usually the case. No, he hung there for the next twenty-six minutes in agony before he could be pronounced dead.
The Aftermath
After the rioters had all calmed down, after the buildings had restarted to rebuild, and after the city had taken a moment to collectively catch its breath, ti was clear that something was about to change. Of course, this would not be an overnight process.
The reforms they had hoped for were still a few years off, but the city seemed to strive for stability. And the first one to lead them in that direction was George B. Cox. While he tried to advance his career from the Board of Public Affairs, he unsuccessfully ran for several public offices, such as Hamilton County Clerk, he still managed to get his hands (or his name) into nearly every aspect of local government. While all did not necessarily agree with his politics, his ability to stabilize government was particularly noticed.
In June, 1895, William Berner was released from prison (early for good behavior) after eleven of his twenty years in prison. After his release, he took a train to Indiana and history is unclear what happened to him since.
Outside the current courthouse, you will find a statue of John J. Desmond, lawyer and militia captain who was killed during the 1884 riots.
