After a man’s body was found on the morning of April 14, 1885, stuffed inside a trunk in Room 144 at the Southern Hotel in St. Louis, detective chief John Burke conducted an initial investigation and announced that he thought the dead man was Charles Arthur Preller, a well-to-do Englishman. Burke said he thought Preller had been killed by the man assigned to Room 144, another Englishman, who had registered at the hotel as Walter H. Lennox-Maxwell, M.D.
The murder was baffling because Preller and Lennox-Maxwell had seemed to be intimate friends during their stay at the hotel. The inscription “Thus perish all traitors to the great cause” had been written inside the trunk, and the shape of a cross had been cut on the victim’s chest. However, Burke thought this evidence might have been staged to make investigators falsely believe the crime was a political assassination. An empty bottle of chloroform found nearby was thought to be an actual clue, because the dead body showed signs of poisoning. The body was naked except for a pair of undershorts with the name “H. M. Brooks” printed on them. Burke could offer no motive for the murder except the possibility that the victim had been killed for his money.
As it turned out, Detective Burke was on the right track. Except that greed might not have been the only motive.
Charles Arthur Preller and Hugh Mottram Brooks, traveling under the name Walter H. Lennox-Maxwell, M.D., had sailed from England together in late January and had become fast friends during the journey. The twenty-seven-year-old Preller was a successful traveling salesman for a London textile company, while twenty-four-year-old Lennox-Maxwell was a lawyer who had also studied medicine. The two made plans to travel to Auckland, New Zealand, together, but Preller had business calls to make in North America first. They landed in Boston, and Lennox-Maxwell stayed there while Preller traveled to Canada.
The two met in St. Louis at the Southern Hotel in early April. Preller was assigned to Room 385, but he spent much of his time in Lennox-Maxwell’s Room 144. In the immediate wake of the murder, investigators learned that the hotel staff considered Lennox-Maxwell and Preller good friends and that the two men were “much remarked about the hotel for their dudish, dandified airs.” Lennox-Maxwell, in particular, was considered very effeminate.
All clues seemed to confirm Detective Burke’s initial speculation that the dead man was Preller and that Lennox-Maxwell was the murderer. A small man fitting Lennox-Maxwell’s description had twice purchased chloroform from a nearby drugstore on Sunday, April 5, and that night Maxwell had come to the hotel dining room alone, asking odd questions such as how much it would cost in America to hire a lawyer to beat a murder rap. The next morning, Monday, April 6, Lennox-Maxwell spent money extravagantly even though he’d previously said he was low on funds. Among his purchases were two luggage chests that were delivered to his room at the Southern Hotel, and he also had his beard shaved at a nearby barbershop, where he seemed nervous and in a hurry. Later the same morning, a porter helped him load one of the new chests, now heavy with clothes and other personal belongings, into a carriage outside the hotel, and Lennox-Maxwell left for the train station without checking out of the hotel. At the station, he purchased a ticket for San Francisco and left on a westbound train.
It was concluded that Lennox-Maxwell had taken his belongings out of a large zinc-covered trunk he’d brought from Boston and placed them in the new trunks, then used the old trunk to stash Preller’s body on the late afternoon of April 5. The body was not discovered until nine days later, on the morning of April 14, when hotel employees were attracted by a putrid smell emanating from the trunk.
By April 15, lawmen were virtually certain that Preller was the victim and Lennox-Maxwell the murderer, and they concluded with some certainly as well that the dead man had been poisoned with chloroform. On the same day, confirmation reached St. Louis that a man fitting Lennox-Maxwell’s description in almost every detail had arrived in San Francisco on April 11. When the ticket he’d purchased in St. Louis was taken up at the San Francisco depot, it bore the name Hugh M. Brooks, the same name inscribed on the dead man’s underwear. Subsequent investigation revealed that Brooks was Lennox-Maxwell’s real name. Brooks checked into the Palace Hotel, giving his name as T. C. D’Auquier from Paris.
Upon his arrival in San Francisco, Brooks promptly purchased a steerage ticket for Auckland, and the ship sailed the next day, April 12. Authorities in New Zealand were promptly notified by telegram to be on the lookout for Brooks, and he was arrested when he disembarked at Auckland in early May. Brought back to St. Louis, Brooks was charged with first-degree murder. The prosecution sought to show that Brooks had killed Preller for his money, while the defense, with Brooks testifying on his own behalf, maintained that Preller had died accidentally while Brooks was performing an operation on him to relieve what was described as a “private disease.”
The state painted Brooks as a chronic liar, and few people believed his sensational story. He was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to hang. The execution on August 10, 1888, took place inside a stockade at the city jail, but hundreds of spectators climbed trees or gazed out the windows of nearby buildings to try to get a glimpse of the proceedings.
The case of the Little Chloroformer, as Brooks was often called in the press, made headlines across the country and was considered one of the most sensational crime stories in Missouri history.
This story is condensed from a chapter in my latest book, Show-Me Atrocities: Infamous Incidents in Missouri History.
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