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A century ago, a peculiar discovery in the river

by Jack Neely

The police were busy, but then, they generally were in 1904. That spring had seen maybe a trifle more than its share of violence. Back in April, Houston Jennings showed his wife just how jealous he was by cutting off her head with an axe. When he saw what he had done, he cut his own throat. There had been several murders in May, including some routine saloon shootings. In separate incidents from March to June alone, Knoxville cops had shot four suspected malefactors.

On Thursday, June 2, two off-duty constables were at Alexander the Greek’s hamburger shop on Central and got in a fight with Lum and Wash Miller, two black men who resented having to wait to be seated until after the white policemen finished their sandwiches. One of the Millers pulled a knife and “showed fight.” What happened next happened too fast for anyone to remember with certainty, but when it was over, Lum Miller was dead with a bullet through his brain, his brother and one of the policemen bleeding, both seriously injured with gunshot wounds.

The cops were particularly embarrassed by one baffling rash of crimes. The police headquarters was on Market Square. But businesses on the square were prey to unusually stealthy burglars: store doors locked, windows closed, but, somehow, valuables vanishing.

There were also allegations of fraud against the mysterious Professor Khiron, the clairvoyant whose parlor was over on Main Street. His customers were amazed about how much he instantly seemed to know about them.

Nevertheless, it was kind of a big weekend in Knoxville, the weekend of the gala East Tennessee Farmer’s Convention, over at UT, and of Confederate Memorial Day, which drew hundreds of widows and others from around the region to Bethel Cemetery on the east side. Beneath the tall marble monument at the cemetery, women scattered flowers over the unmarked graves and sang “Tenting On the Old Camp Ground.”

On the night of Friday, June 3, just after 11 p.m., farmer J.E. Henderlight, who worked the fertile Boyd property along the Holston River on the east side, observed something peculiar. A wagon drawn by two horses drove rapidly onto Boyd’s Bridge and abruptly stopped in the middle. Two men got out and dropped something over the side. Henderlight heard it splash. The men got back in the wagon and rode back toward Knoxville. At the time, Henderlight didn’t think much about it.

Saturday was time for baseball, at Baldwin Park, near Mechanicsville. The Knoxville Reds were on the road, winning most games, but fans turned out to see the champs of Brookside Mill playing Knoxville Iron Works. Late Saturday night there were no reported murders, but some saloon fights and a ruinous fire in a residence at the corner of Henley and Clinch.

The river was a dependable escape from the chaotic city. There’d been some rain, and the water was up. Sternwheelers slowly churned up and down the channel. Early Sunday morning, Isaac Johnson put his rowboat out. The June morning was lovely, cool and clear. He was running a trotline near Island Home, around the eastern end of Dickinson Island, when he noticed a rectangular object hovering just below the water’s surface. He rowed over to it, saw that it was a wooden crate, like a big soap box. Assuming it was some lost river freight, he attempted to pick it up. It was much heavier than he expected. He maneuvered to haul the box into his boat; as he did, he noticed the box had an open end, and the bottom of a canvas bag had been tacked over it. He also noticed there was a sizeable hole in the canvas. As Johnson finally succeeded in hauling the box into his boat, something slid out of the hole. It looked a lot like a human thigh.

Johnson reluctantly gave up on his trotline that June morning and rowed to the south bank, near Perez Dickinson’s farm. He and some neighbors inspected the box and found that it held several other interesting objects. A foot, sawn off at the ankle. The rest of a leg, sawn in half at the knee. A breastbone, cut in half. No head. They called the coroner. J.P. Hackney assembled enough jurors for a hasty inquest at the scene. As jurors were gunning questions at the witnesses, someone spotted an arm floating on a piece of driftwood nearby. The skin had been cut away from the muscle from the elbow down.

Over on Market Square, police had finally cracked the case of the embarrassing burglaries. They traced them to a gang of agile young men whose MO was to climb up onto the Square’s roofs with the aid of telephone poles in the alleys and slip through skylights.

That Sunday afternoon an orator at the YMCA downtown made a controversial plea for the organization. “I’ll tell you, young men, we must fight the devil with his own fire,” said the charismatic speaker. “If we can attract a class of young men under the good influences of this association by having billiards and pool, I say let us....”

The same afternoon there came reports that small boys playing on the east side found a lady’s head.

Puzzled Coroner Hackney conveyed the mysterious flotsam the fisherman found to the firm of Hall & Donahue, morticians. An undertaker inspected the remains and figured it was about half of a human body, that of a rather corpulent female.

There was something else peculiar about the body parts, besides their uncouth arrangement. They had a peculiar smell, one very different from what you’d expect from a body that had been floating in the river.

On a hunch, the authorities contacted Charles McNabb, dean of the Tennessee Medical College. The medical school on the north side of town. Dr. McNabb examined the pieces and said, yes, the body parts smelled peculiar because they’d been soaked in preservative, probably for some months. He also noted that the body appeared to have been professionally dissected.

Authorities immediately suspected medical students disposing of an unwanted cadaver. It had been awfully hot lately, they surmised, and the cadaver probably became oppressive. And many students didn’t own property in town, and didn’t have a proper place to bury their homework without drawing attention. So they just dropped it off Boyd’s Bridge.

McNabb was quick to insist it couldn’t have been any of his students. At the close of the session there were only a few bodies on hand, he insisted. And the flesh had been boiled off of them, to prepare them for a class in osteology. There was another medical school in town in 1904, the Knoxville Medical College; its administrators insisted that it couldn’t have been theirs, either, since they’d been out of session for two weeks.

With no one to claim it, the county buried what they’d found of the unknown woman in Potter’s Field, the pauper’s graveyard adjacent to the Bethel plot where the Confederate graves were still carpeted with flowers.

The Sentinel pondered, “What is the penalty for polluting water by casting a corpse into a river?” No one seemed quite sure.

Police, unclear about a charge and lacking obvious clues, decided it was none of their business. And they had other affairs to attend to.

June 3, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 23 © 2004 Metro Pulse