When Clara Schweiger shot and mortally wounded her husband, Louis Schweiger, in May 1915, in the Jackson County courthouse in downtown Kansas City, a local newspaper suggested that readers might be familiar with Clara because of her "spotted adder snake fame." This was a reference to a strange incident involving a poisonous snake that was delivered to her home six months earlier, but whether the earlier incident factored into her shooting of her husband is not clear.
Louis Schweiger and Clara Dulle had married in 1902, and to all appearances, the couple seemed happy for the first ten years. They had no biological children, but they had an adopted son, Norman, to whom they were both very devoted. Trouble in the marriage began about 1912, when gossip spread in the Schweiger’s neighborhood that Louis was paying attention to another woman. The gossip preyed on Clara’s fragile mind, and she grew very jealous and anxious.
The friction in the marriage came to a head in October 1913, when Schweiger, Clara, and their son were taking a streetcar to church. When Schweiger spoke to a neighbor woman on the streetcar, his wife went into a rage, accusing him of being unfaithful. She jumped up and took Norman off the streetcar, and when Schweiger returned home, she and the boy were not there. He tried to get her to come back home, but she wouldn’t do it. So, Schweiger left his wife and filed for divorce.
The divorce was pending and Clara was back living in the Schweiger home with nine-year-old Norman when the postman showed up on November 10, 1914, to deliver the mail. Clara met him at the door, and he handed her a package. “Looks like a box of bon bons,” he remarked.
When Clara took the package, though, she felt something move inside it and said so to the mailman as she handed the parcel back. Together they opened the box, and a small, deadly adder poked its head out. The postman picked up a big rock and smashed the snake to death.
Suffering from “severe nervous shock,” Clara admitted to a newspaperman that she’d had trouble in the past with some of the neighbor women. She didn’t know whether the past trouble with her neighbors was related to the sending of the snake, but she was convinced that someone was deliberately trying to hurt her.
Schweiger’s divorce suit came up in court later that month, and it was granted over Clara's objection. Clara was further devastated when her husband was granted custody of their son.
After Schweiger’s divorce petition was granted, Clara hired Tiera Farrow, one of Kansas City’s first female lawyers, to file a motion on her behalf to annul the divorce. Unbeknownst to Ms. Farrow, her client was carrying an automatic revolver in her purse when the two women showed up at the courthouse for a hearing on May 1, 1915. Infuriated after the judge ruled against her motion, Clara approached her ex-husband in a courtroom corridor and shot him three times, then stood over him and pumped another round into him as he slumped to the floor. Schweiger was rushed to a hospital, where he died later that day.
Clara was charged with first-degree murder and waived a preliminary hearing. When the trial got underway in late February 1916, spectators filled the courtroom, drawn not only by the novelty of a woman defendant in a murder case but the even more unusual phenomenon of a woman lawyer as counsel for the defense.
Tiera Farrow gave a moving defense of her client, declaring that Clara’s passionate love for an uncaring husband drove her to madness, but Miss Farrow’s pleas were to no avail. The jury came back with a verdict finding Clara guilty of second-degree murder with a recommended sentence of fifteen years in prison.
Clara appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court, and she regained custody of her son while she was out on bond awaiting the high court's decision. In early 1918, the supreme court affirmed Clara's guilty verdict, and she was sent to the Missouri State Penitentiary.
However, she was paroled in 1921 after serving less than four years of her scheduled sentence. Then in 1925, she was granted a full pardon and restored to citizenship after many of her friends petitioned the governor.
The story above is a condensed version of a chapter in my latest book, Gangster Queen Bonnie Parker and Other Murderous Women of Missouri https://amzn.to/4tujpur.
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