The Schuendler Murders and the Hanging of Thaddeus Baber

Thaddeus Baber was smitten with Lizzie Schuendler from the time he first met her in St. Louis about 1873. She was only fifteen or sixteen, but she had “already begun the downward course of life,” according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She’d worked as a call girl in the “assignation house” run by her mother, Fredericka Schuendler, and she had a baby boy by another man. But none of that mattered to the twenty-four-year-old Baber. He knew Lizzie was “not the chastest woman in the world,” but he still loved her.
Baber and Lizzie lived together as man and wife off and on for several years. Baber wanted to marry Lizzie, and he treated her little boy as his own son. But Fredericka, who disliked Baber, opposed the match, and he and Lizzie often argued over the interference of the “old woman.”
In 1879, Baber and Lizzie moved downtown, just a few blocks away from Fredericka’s place, and Lizzie would often drop by to see her mother. Sometimes she spent the night, and Fredericka continually encouraged her daughter to come back home permanently and work for her. Baber strongly opposed Lizzie’s visits to her mother’s “den of sin,” and he grew increasingly bitter toward the old lady.
On Sunday, August 10, 1879, Lizzie and Baber had a violent quarrel, and she left to stay with her mother. “Half crazed by the desertion,” according to the Post-Dispatch, Baber “lay drunk Monday and Tuesday,” trying to drown his misery.
Baber tried to get Lizzie to come back, but she refused. Finally, she agreed to see him outside her mother’s place on Thursday evening.
Baber showed up at Fredericka’s address on schedule and stood on the street in the rain waiting for Lizzie to appear. When she came to a window in a second-story room, he waved a handkerchief as a signal, but she retreated without acknowledging him. Waiting despondently for Lizzie to come down, Baber grew convinced that she was with another man, and he became intensely jealous.
About 8 p.m., he strode upstairs with a pistol in hand to see what was going on. At the top of the stairs he found Lizzie’s mother seated in the parlor reading, and he asked to see Lizzie. What the old woman replied is not known, but whatever she said prompted Baber to level his pistol and shoot her in the head, killing her instantly. He then heard footsteps approaching from an adjoining room, whirled, and fired again just as the door swung open. The bullet struck Lizzie in the breast, and she collapsed to the floor gravely wounded.
Arrested almost immediately, Baber freely confessed his guilt and “rather glorie(d) over the killing of the old woman,” but he expressed deep regret about Lizzie. Claiming that shooting her was an accident, he said he thought she was with another man and that the footsteps he heard approaching were those of her gentleman caller.
In reporting the crime the next day, the Post-Dispatch said, “The case is a demoniac one throughout, and has seldom, if ever, been surpassed in the annals of crime.” Lizzie was rushed to the hospital, where she lingered for two days. The body was then removed to the morgue. Baber was allowed to see his dead lover, and he sank to the floor in sobs when he was brought into the room.
A grand jury indicted Baber for first-degree murder in the case of Fredericka Schuendler. When the defendant appeared in court in June 1880, he was described as “a stumpy little fellow with horny hands, a low forehead, wide temples, teeth like Dickens’ Carker.”
When Baber’s trial got underway at the November 1880 term, Baber’s lawyers pled insanity. Various witnesses, including the defendant’s aged mother, testified that Baber had suffered a severe blow to his head when he was a child and had to have a hole cut in his skull to relieve the pressure on his brain caused by the swelling. A silver plate had been placed in his skull to cover up the place where the trephining was done, but his lawyers argued that the operation had not been properly performed and that Baber’s skull still pressed against his brain, causing him to have “spells.”
Unswayed by the insanity defense, the jury came back with a verdict of guilty as charged. Baber’s lawyers filed a motion for a new trial, which was overruled, but the verdict was then appealed. The Missouri Court of Appeals affirmed the verdict in October 1881, as did the Missouri Supreme Court shortly thereafter, and Baber’s execution date was set for January 13, 1882. The defense’s last-minute appeals to the Missouri governor for clemency were denied.
On the appointed day, Friday the 13th, Baber and another condemned man, William Ward, were marched together from the St. Louis jail to an enclosed gallows in the courtyard. Both Ward and Baber declined to make final statements, and they plunged to their deaths before a few hundred gawking witnesses at about 8:30 a.m.
This entry is condensed from a chapter in my book Yanked Into Eternity: Lynchings and Hangings in Missouri.