American Found Dead in Paris: The Mysterious Death of Henry Collett

It was a small but intriguing notice, published in several northeastern papers on February 27, 1914. The New York Sun’s item was cabled to the paper, not taken from a wire service. In the Sun’s brief account, a modern reader might scent a lover’s quarrel gone wrong. The more worldly New Yorker of 1914 may have assumed the same. The Sun’s article:

AMERICAN KILLED IN PARIS
Man Found Dead In Room, His Companion Being Sought

Special Cable Dispatch to The Sun.

Paris, Feb. 26–Henry Collett, an American ship’s officer, 30 years of age, employed on the Hamburg-American liner Cleveland, was found dead in his room in a hotel here to-day. Death had been caused by a revolver shot. Mr. Collett arrived here from Marseilles on February 22 and hired a room at a cheap hotel for himself and an eighteen-year-old boy named Dubois. Tho man and boy made so much noise at the hotel last night that the landlord ejected Dubois. The latter called at the hotel early this morning and left shortly afterward.

At 11:30 o clock Collett was found dead in his room. The police are looking for Dubois.

The same day, the New York Times published its own item. It was the same story, but different.

From the New York Times, published 2/27/1914

Papers would put out morning and evening editions well into the 20th century (I can recall one of the 2 papers published in my hometown running two daily editions in my lifetime). The variation between the Sun’s possibly prurient tale and the Times’s less tawdry but sad story of Mr. Collett’s death being a suicide may have had more to do with when the papers went to press.

The Times story caught my attention for the headline. I was further drawn in by “In the pockets of the dead man were a letter bearing the name ‘Henry Collett, Worcester, Mass.’ and seven francs…”

I’m from the south but live in Worcester and threadbare as the tie was, I was still curious to know whatever else I could about the man who died in that Paris hotel.

I couldn’t really satisfy my curiosity the way I wanted, but I did find out a few things about a man named Henry Collett who lived in Worcester at the right time and was the right age.

In the 1910 Census, a Henry Collett in the right age range lived at 199 Hope Avenue in Worcester. He lived with the Mallett family and was listed as the head of household’s single brother-in-law. Collett was employed as an operator at a screw factory. He’d been born in Massachusetts, but his parents were French Canadian. Worcester’s population grew a great deal in the 19th and 20th centuries from Canadians crossing the border seeking better jobs.

I pass that address on Hope Avenue on a regular basis. It’s along the route to my kid’s school. At the end of Hope a traveler can follow the roundabout to the right and end up on Webster Street. Hope Cemetery is on Webster. Dedicated in 1852, it is the final resting place of luminaries such as poet Elizabeth Bishop the father of rocket science, Robert H. Goddard.

Part of me wants to find out if Henry Collett was taken from his shabby hotel room on Rue Aux Ours about 100 years ago and put in the hold of another ship. If he made it back to Worcester, and perhaps to Hope Cemetery. It seems improbable, but you never know.

Was it really suicide? A single man in his thirties traveling the world, partying too much with an 18-year-old frenchman… questions there, too. What really happened, Henry, before the war came and erased questions about so many things with gigantic questions we still ask today?

If Henry Collett is in Hope Cemetery I have unanswerable questions to ask his headstone.

100 Years Ago Today: Meteorite Destroys Houses in Polish City of Kielce–Maybe

Published in Washington Herald, 2/27/1914

In February, 2013 a small asteroid exploded in the skies above Chelyabinsk in western Russia. The Chelyabinsk airburst was major news, in part because the modern Russian habit of installing dashboard cameras in private vehicles provided dramatic videos of the event.

Coverage of the Chelyabinsk event stands in stark contrast to the item clipped in this post. I screengrabbed the article from the front page of the February 27, 1914 Washington Herald. It may be hard to read, so here’s the text:

METEORITE DESTROYS HOUSES.

Huge Aerolite Fell in Village in Polish Province of Kielce

Warsaw, Russian Poland, Feb. 26.–A number of houses were destroyed by a huge meteorite which descended today in the village of Jendkovitzy, in the Polish province of Kielce. The aerolite emitted sulphurous fumes.

So it’s clear: the damned thing didn’t just destroy houses, it emitted fumes. According to this report, anyway.

I searched other American papers (including the New York Times) for further mentions and found the same item. I tried some searches of European publications, but they’re hard to access without paying. So I went to the English website for Kielce, today a city of over 200,000, and its history page has zilch on a 1914 meteorite powerful enough to destroy homes and dispense mysterious fumes.

Did it happen? There may be some Polish geologists or historians who know. I just think given the “sulphurous fumes” bit, we may be lucky some otherworldly gas didn’t cause World War Z in place of World War I.

Which was bad enough.

The Mysterious Disappearance of Catherine Winters

[YouTube]

I hadn’t planned on another post tonight. Then in a last look at some Feb. 25, 1914 newspapers I happened on the now little-known story of Catherine Winters. This image caught my interest:

The story was about how an abandoned girl who called herself Rosie Davis was thought by some to be a missing child, Catherine Winters. According to the news brief, Catherine’s father, Dr. William A. Winters, had come to see the girl. He had confirmed she was not his daughter. The girl cried when he denied it was her.

This part of the article set me off on a search for more information: “… his missing daughter Catherine, for whom a nationwide search is being made…”

I’ve long been interested in missing persons cases and read a great deal about them. I’d never heard of Catherine Winters, who long ago vanished from the town of New Castle, Indiana. As the video at the beginning of this post may indicate, Catherine’s was perhaps one of the first cases to truly go nationwide.

Writer Colleen Steffen runs a website about Catherine’s disappearance, WhereIsCatherineWinters.com. The following is from Steffen’s timeline of the case:

1913

March 14: Eight-year-old Helen Millikan is abducted by an unidentified man in a rented buggy, driven out of the city, assaulted, then set free. The man is never found.

March 20: Nine-year-old Catherine Winters disappears sometime in the early afternoon. She had been selling sewing needles door to door to raise money for a church missionary society and was seen by many witnesses around New Castle. Her family raises the alarm that evening when she fails to come home for dinner and the search begins. Gypsies are the first suspects.

March 21: Catherine shares headlines with an overnight storm that wrecked buildings around the city. It’s the first of a historic system of storms that will cripple the Midwest for weeks to come, flooding entire cities and killing hundreds of people.

March 22: Dr. Winters is forced by doctors to rest after 60 straight hours of searching.

March 23: On Easter Sunday, churches across New Castle fill with prayerful petitioners for Catherine’s safe return. Afterward, “City Councilmen, business men, professional men, mechanics and laborers worked side by side all day Sunday, in the fields, woods, cemeteries, railroad and mill yards. All were devoting their best efforts, with but a single object in view—that being to locate the body of the missing girl, for it is feared she is dead” (New Castle Daily Times).

March 24: New Castle’s city council calls for the first town-wide meeting concerning the disappearance, and a far-reaching, highly organized and publicly funded search begins.

According to a newspaper quote later in the timeline, by June 6, 1913, “Pictures of the little girl have been published in newspapers and magazines from coast to coast. The telegraph and telephone lines have been burdened with stories of the Winters case for weeks.”

I don’t know if milk came in cartons yet (I suspect it was still delivered each morning in bottles) but it seems that the effort to find Catherine went almost that far. As the video indicates–as the fact the film in the video was even made indicates–attention to the case at the time was intense.

The story grows more tragic. Eventually, Catherine’s father, Dr. Winters, her stepmother and a one-armed man who boarded at their home were arrested. They were charged with “conspiracy to commit a felony by conspiring to kill the child by strangling or otherwise, and to destroy the body by burning.” Evidence found by investigators included, according to Steffen, “a hair ribbon, a child’s red sweater with what appear to be burn holes, and a man’s blood-stained undershirt behind a concrete block.”

In the end, that wasn’t enough. Charges were dropped in July, 1914, for lack of evidence. People would claim to be Catherine over the years, but the case ultimately faded from the news, unsolved.

As for the video, which is a fascinating and perhaps unusual document for the time, Steffen writes that it was kept by the Winters family, one of whom eventually rediscovered it in 1990.

Catherine Winters is the coldest kind of case. Her disappearance will remain unsolved. At least whenever someone grabs hold of the thread anew and brings light to the story, she’s never completely forgotten.