Near midnight on Sunday evening, December 18, 1881, John Powers, night watchman in the exclusive Lucas Place residential district of St. Louis, heard the sound of a gunshot come from near the corner of Seventeenth and Lucas Place (i.e. Locust Street). Rushing to the scene, he found Fred Thomkins (aka Tonkin) lying mortally wounded in a grassy plot just outside the enclosed churchyard of the Second Presbyterian Church with a bullet wound to his gut. Thomkins, according to the St. Louis Post Dispatch, was known about the neighborhood as a voyeur and “amateur blackmailer” who was in the habit of spying on people who resorted to the churchyard for “immoral purposes” and then extorting those he found in “compromising situations.” Powers had warned Thomkins his perverse curiosity was going to get him in trouble, and now it had seemingly got him killed.
Taken to a hospital, Thomkins died a couple of days later but not before describing a young man and young woman he said were responsible for shooting him. Suspicion quickly centered on Kitty Mulcahy, and she was arrested on December 20 at a bordello on Eighth Street run by Lou Allen, who implicated Kitty as the shooter. Early Wednesday morning the 21st, eighteen-year-old Billy Scharlow was rousted out of bed at his mother’s home on Biddle Street and taken into custody as Kitty’s suspected accomplice.
Interviewed later on Wednesday, Lou Allen told a Post-Dispatch reporter that Kitty had previously been married but was only eighteen and was “a nice sweet-tempered little girl.” Billy Scharlow, her lover, frequently called on her at Lou’s place, and the two had been out together Sunday night. Lou said the girl’s real name was McCabe, although she went by several different names, including Mulcahy and Lamont.
After talking to Lou, the reporter went to the jail to see Kitty. The newspaperman thought she was “not a bad looking girl,” but her short, tangled hair gave her an appearance that was “not exactly what a fastidious man would demand of his lady love.” And Kitty’s expletive-laden answers to the reporter’s questions suggested she was not at all the sweet-tempered girl Lou had made her out to be.
Angry that Lou had turned her in after she’d confided in her, Kitty called the madam a damned bitch and refused at first to talk about what happened Sunday night. “What the _____ and _____ do you want to know for, you ____ _____ _____?” she swore.
She finally calmed down enough to tell her story, which the reporter related, “stripped of its curses and vulgarity.” Kitty admitted that she was near the church on Sunday night and heard the shot that killed Thomkins. However, she claimed that she was not the person who fired the shot and that Billy was nowhere near the scene. Instead, she tried to implicate a girl from the Irish neighborhood named Mollie Maloney, who was her rival for Billy’s affections.
A coroner’s inquest began Wednesday afternoon, but Kitty did not testify until Thursday, when she “came in smiling, dressed in a showy red dress, with a red hood and black cloak. She smiled pleasantly at Billy Scharlow, winked at the reporters, flung herself into a chair, and crossed her legs.” Kitty kept her eyes fastened on Billy, but he seemed to ignore her.
When Kitty took the stand, there was a stir of interest among the jury, and all listened intently as the coroner questioned her. She introduced herself as Kitty Lamont but added that she had “half a dozen” other names, one of which was Mulcahy. Kitty repeated essentially the same story she’d told the reporter the day before, admitting that she heard the shot that killed Thomkins but that she didn’t fire it and that Billy was nowhere near.
The police believed some of Kitty’s story, but they thought she was covering for Billy, whom they now believed was the one who had actually shot Thompkins. In a move that lent credence to the police theory that Kitty was trying to protect Billy, she broke down the next day and admitted that she had fired the fatal shot. She claimed, though, that the man she was with was not Billy Scharlow but rather a stranger she’d met on the street.
Both Kitty and Billy were released after initial questioning, but Billy was soon returned to custody on a prior assault charge. Then, on December 28, Kitty was charged with murder for the Tonkin killing. Upon her arrest, she said that, since Billy was going to the penitentiary, she didn’t care if she did, too. “If he was to go to hell, I would want to go,” she declared.
Interviewed in her jail cell, Kitty recanted her confession, saying the detectives had coaxed it out of her by plying her with whiskey and cigars. “I was drunk when I gave that confession,” she said.
In mid-January 1882, Billy was sentenced to two years in the penitentiary on the assault charge, and Kitty’s trial followed in April. Almost from the time she was arrested, many people felt the case against Kitty was weak, and it fell apart when her attorney presented the defense on April 12. He argued that her confession had been coerced and cajoled out of her, that the case boiled down to her word against Lou Allen’s, and that Lou’s testimony was just hearsay at any rate. Kitty was found not guilty later the same day, and no one else was ever charged for the Thompkins murder.
This entry is condensed from a chapter in my latest book, Show-Me Atrocities: Infamous Incidents in Missouri History, which, by the way, I'll be having a book signing for at Always Buying Books in Joplin on Saturday, June 30.
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