A probation officer friend told me of a ‘client’ coming up for a parole hearing. The man had been convicted of killing his wife and putting her head in one of those concrete balls you find on smart driveways. Some sort of penitence might have helped. ‘No use asking me about it,’ he said, ‘I don’t know who put it there.’
Former Chicago lawyer Warren Lincoln faced a similar problem. In 1912 Lincoln married Lina Shoup but the union was not a success, particularly after her brother Byron moved in. In 1918 Lincoln had something of a breakdown and moved to Aurora, Colorado, where he became a horticulturalist. Byron and Lina went too.
Then Lina and Byron apparently moved out after Lincoln claimed his brother-in-law had tried to poison him. Four months later Lincoln disappeared.
In the middle of January 1924 he was discovered living near Lake Michigan. But where were Lina and her brother?
The answer was back in Aurora where Lincoln had burned their bodies in his greenhouse and encased their heads in concrete on the front porch. At first he denied recognition of them saying he had found them in his greenhouse and put them in concrete to preserve the evidence – something any right-minded lawyer would do.
Then came self-defence. Lina had shot her brother and was going to shoot Lincoln when he killed her with a poker. He burned the bodies but kept the heads. After variations on the theme he finally admitted he had tired of their endless chatter.
Was he sane? At the trial, acting for himself, he threw up the defence that he had the right to kill an unfaithful wife and her lover. Except possibly in France, it wasn’t a good defence and it was made even more difficult in that the lover was said to be Byron.
After the jury returned a verdict of guilty, Lincoln seems to have been perfectly content. He grew gladioli in the Joliet prison garden and gave interviews until his death in 1941.
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