Editor’s Note: In the spirit of the Halloween season, the Alliance Times-Herald searched through our archives to bring up this story from Alliance’s history. The article was written based on information from the Alliance Semi-Weekly Times, the Alliance Herald (both publications later combined to from the Alliance Times-Herald), and the Alliance News. The ATH would like to offer a special thanks to the Knight Museum and Sandhills Center for help with research into this story from 1919. Reader discretion is advised.
Although snow was on the ground, the promise of a spring romance hanging in the air for Charles Johnson as he headed to a fateful meeting, one which would turn out to be his last. At nine p.m., on April 7, Johnson left his post as commissary manager at the Greer Eating House at the Burlington, where he was last seen alive.
His body was found at the stockyards, where it was thrown by the murderer, only after the switch engine ran over his lower limbs, crushing them to a mass. Officers arrived on scene, ready to hunt down the assassins, when they discovered an axe with a broken handle sticking out from a bank of snow. When they removed the tool, they found clots of blood on the blade and determined it had been used to crush Johnson’s skull.
Officers located Johnson’s blood-soaked hat on the platform from which his body was thrown, as well as clumps of hair and blood clots. The sheriff called 20 deputies to the scene, and they rounded up 12 men to hold during the investigation.
Johnson’s pockets were turned inside out when officers found his body, which led them to believe the motive for the murder was robbery, as Johnson was known to carry between $300 and $400 on him at all times. Officers noted that his watch, which was valued at $50, was not taken.
At the commissary Johnson managed, officers noted that his desk had been broken into, though a small amount of money that was in the drawer was not touched. Bloodhounds were put on the trail, though they failed to take the scent, as the investigation went cold.
In the days following the murder, officers examined Johnson’s body, and determined there were two knife wounds at the base of his brain, indicating that he had been stabbed with a stilleto then struck with an axe. They turned their attention to a 16-year-old boy, Walter Reisenwever, who had been an associate of Johnson’s. It was believed that Reisenwever had set up a date for Johnson, whose wife was still living in Kansas City. Just two weeks prior to the murder, Reisenwever confessed to using an axe to break into a conductor’s way car, which tipped off officers on the case. It was not the first robbery he had committed.
They took Reisenwever to see Johnson’s mangled corpse, where they interviewed him, giving him the “third degree.” However, they were unable to eke out a confession, or any change in his story. They held him in custody, and noted that he seemed nervous. They seized money from Reisenwever, though not nearly enough to account for the money believed to be taken from Johnson.
A reporter from the Alliance-Times Herald at the time worked with officers on an idea to secure a confession from Reisenwever, providing an ink roller from the printing office, a piece of glass and sheets of paper ruled for fingerprinting before approaching a famous detective from Chicago who had just arrived in Alliance to assist with the case.
One week after Johnson was killed, Reisenwever confessed to the murder, pleading guilty to the charge of murdering Johnson in county court. The confession came after a small scar was discovered on Resienwever’s third finger of his right hand. Subjected to a grueling cross examination where he his finger prints were matched to the blood-stained prints on the axe handle, Reisenwever broke down and said, “Yes, I killed Johnson with the axe. I hit him in the back of the head as he passed me on the loading platform, and he fell on his face. He mumbled ‘Jim’ as he fell, but that was all he said.”
The boy confirmed that he acted alone in murdering Johnson and robbing his corpse, and the commissary. He would not tell officers how much money he had taken, though.
After exiting the commissary, Reisenwever crawled under a string of boxcars in the switching yards to reach the viaduct. There, he told officers, is where he took the money from the purse and placed it under the frame of the viaduct. He crawled through the cars to return to his room at the Nebraska Rooming House, where he remained until he went to work. He told officers that his hands were covered in blood, but that his clothes contained no trace.
Reisenwever told officers that he had waited for Johnson for at least 30 minutes at the platform where he murdered him. He said he saw someone coming down the platform and left the scene, scared. He denied rolling Johnson’s body onto the tracks, however, though he noted he may have done them in excitement and not remembered it clearly. The boy said he needed the money to pay for his board, and that he had not intended to kill Johnson, only to numb him.
Reisenwever’s parents arrived in Alliance to visit him in jail, where he was confronted by his mother. Walter told his parents that he made a false confession to officers after they wore him down with their questioning. Officers reminded Reisenwever that he had told the same story of Johnson’s murder to one of his associates. Reisenwever’s mother assured officers that Walter was making up the story, noting that he had back pay coming to him that would suffice for his debts.
After pleading guilty to second-degree murder, Reisenwever was sentenced to serve life in prison, where he nearly killed another inmate during a baseball game, striking him on the head with a baseball bat in a quarrel over who was up to bat. Multiple times, Reisenwever requested parole, but those requests were denied for several years. About the case, Box Butte County Attorney Penrose Romig said, “It takes more work to keep these criminals in the penitentiary than it does to put them here. If there was ever a case where a criminal should get the limit of the law, this is the one, and yet he will probably be paroled or his sentence lessened if we do not make an objection.” Romig promised to go to Lincoln to share his objections to Reisenwever’s parole in 1929.
In 1941, after spending more time in prison than outside prison in his life, Reisenwever received clemency from the Parole Board and was released after spending 22 years in prison.