A Grave Mystery

    Who doesn’t love a good mystery? From the story of the Loch Ness Monster, to the riddle of extraterrestrial life, and even the puzzle of the Zodiac Killer’s identity, they keep us spellbound, whether they happened yesterday or over a century ago. While Jack the Ripper never prowled the streets of Mokena, this writer can do you one better, for we have a mystery in our own midst. We have to turn back the hands of time 83 years, to the summer of 1939, and set the stage at the historic Front Street office of our town’s erstwhile newspaper, the News-Bulletin.  

   That first week of August, the paper was being assembled for its publishing date of the coming Friday. Various stories were laid out for inclusion in the issue, such as taxes to be raised in Marley, a series of nasty car crashes in Tinley Park, and the loss of Mokena’s only ball field to a property transfer. One column easily bested all the others though, and it was the one on the front page labeled Here is a Deep Mystery. The family of William and Margaret Semmler, the paper’s proprietors, even used a special bold, attention-grabbing typeface for the headline that they rarely used. 

 

      On Saturday, August 5^th, 1939, Local man Harry Barenz was busy on the Semmlers’ Front Street property digging a trench for a new cellar drain. He noticed something odd when the soil turned strangely soft after he had heaved through layer after layer of dark clay. As he stood in the five-foot-deep ditch, he noticed that the soft dirt was a mysterious dark shade that matched none of the others he had seen that day. As Barenz shrugged off the change and continued his work, he struck several pieces of wood. As he worked them loose, took them in his hands and picked off caked-on soil, he could tell that they weren’t pieces of root. Heavily rotten, he realized that one of them had a handle on it. A handle exactly like the kind used on old-fashioned coffins.

     This was something Harry Barenz couldn’t shrug off.

 

The office of the News-Bulletin on Front Street, the site of the mysterious grave unearthed by Harry Barenz in 1939. (Image courtesy of Richard Quinn)

 

     As a feeling crept over him that was probably a mixture of apprehension and curiosity, he kept digging, but this time a little more gingerly. Within a few minutes, he realized he was surrounded by pieces of something else. He picked up a brittle rib, some ancient pieces of leg bone, and fragments of what seemed to be a lady’s shoe, a type of antiquated square-toed shoe that hadn’t been popular since well before the turn of the twentieth century. 

 

    It became clear that in digging the trench for the new drain, Harry Barenz had happened across a grave. After also having recovered some large, rusted spikes and a few more planks, he hurriedly alerted Editor Semmler to his find. The two flabbergasted men examined the deep furrow that hugged the northwest corner of the News-Bulletin office, and seeing that there was more wood in the ditch’s wall, reasoned that Barenz had unknowingly broken into the lower side of the long-forgotten casket. Over five feet of soil sat on the rest of the coffin, and for the time being, Mr. Semmler decided not to have the rest exhumed. 

 

    The lot on which the bones were discovered in 1939 counts as one of the most historic in all of Mokena. Today the home of an apartment building at 10842 Front Street, local lore has it that a Hessian by the name of Johann Martin Heim may have built a small, two room house on that site as early as the late 1840s, predating the first plat of Mokena by several years. One of the area’s first German settlers, Heim ran a small store out of his home, and numbered the builders of the Rock Island railroad among his costumers. In 1852 he completed an addition to his home and opened a saloon. Due to the fact that Heim was Editor Semmler’s grandfather, many tales of happenings at the tavern have survived. As the Heim place became one of Mokena’s more well-known watering holes, members of the Semmler family later recalled that the building served as a hangout for Union soldiers during the grisly Civil War, and also a premiere ball location, where fiddlers serenaded boisterous parties that “ran into the wee small hours of the morning”. 

 

Pictured around 1870 in one of Mokena's oldest known images, is the saloon of Johann Martin Heim, who is visible in the doorway. This structure stood until the late 1970s, when it was removed to make way for an apartment building, which today stands at 10842 Front Street. (Image courtesy of Richard Quinn)

     Martin Heim seems to have run his saloon on Front Street until he died of pneumonia in 1886. Editor Semmler’s father, a Prussian cobbler by the name of John Semmler, worked from the building sometime after the turn of the twentieth century, and from 1919 until well into the 1960s, the Semmler family made the historic building the headquarters of our community’s voice, The News-Bulletin. In 1977, the old place was torn down, and Mokena lost one of its most meaningful landmarks. 

 

     By the time the mysterious grave was unearthed in 1939, ownership of the property had been in the same family for nearly 100 years. In spite of this fact, not one of the Semmlers had a clue who the fragile remains could have belonged to. In a special issue of the News-Bulletin twelve years after the fact, Margaret Semmler theorized that they could have been those of an early Potawatomi inhabitant of our area. While this can’t be ruled out, the fact that the bones were originally housed in a wooden coffin, and the presence of the shoe from a recognizable, yet heavily outdated fashion makes this idea improbable, as they reflect European American burial practices of the time.

 

      The earliest pioneers of what would later become Mokena didn’t always use organized cemeteries. At least two German families in this area used family plots on their farms, and it was alleged that a few children of early settler Tilford Duncan were buried in the vicinity of today’s Woodland Circle. To this day there are undoubtedly ancient graves hidden all over what is now Mokena, their exact whereabouts and the names of those within lost forever to the ages. 

 

     Maybe the bones uncovered in 1939 on Front Street belonged to a member of the Heim family? Interestingly, a check of congregation death records from the then-named German United Evangelical St. John’s Church revealed that a 12-year-old daughter of Martin Heim named Anna Maria died of rheumatism in 1875. While the remains uncovered in 1939 seemed to be female, they did not appear to belong to a child.  

 

     The cellar drain on the Semmler place on Front Street was eventually finished. Not quite sure what to do with the bones that Harry Barenz dug up, Editor Semmler displayed them in his office. Days and weeks went by. Summer turned into fall. The bones eventually faded into history and were lost. As a born reporter, Bill Semmler asked himself the who, what, and where about who was in the inadvertently discovered grave, but he never got any good leads. 83 years later, Mokena still hasn’t gotten any closer. In the words of the News-Bulletin, it has truly stayed a “deep mystery”. 

 

     However, it shouldn’t be easily forgotten that the grave wasn’t completely removed on that day in 1939. No evidence has since come to light that it was ever was, which leaves us with one question: Is it still there? 

Stick 'Em Up: The 1924 Robbery of Mokena State Bank

    On dusty small town Front Street, the acrid smell of soot from coal-fed locomotives would have greeted a visitor to Mokena in 1924. Citizens doing business passed on the street, where every face was familiar and every personality known. The old Mokena State Bank, a beacon of stoic white Bedford stone and solid red brick, stuck out among a sea of wood frame buildings. Founded in 1909 by a group of influential Mokena businessmen, this institution came to reflect a rock of financial stability in the rural farm village. It was here on Tuesday, October 27^th 1924, that one of Mokena’s most audacious crimes was committed. 

     At 31 years of age on that autumn day, Karl Krapp was a lifelong resident of Mokena and the bank’s assistant cashier. The son of one of the bank’s founders, Krapp found himself occupied with some bookwork behind the bars of his cashier’s cage. Perched atop a high stool, in his periphery he would have been aware of two men entering the building’s front door. In the matter of seconds, a .45 Colt pistol was shoved through the bars into Krapp’s face, and a brusque voice barked “Hands up!” The young cashier laughed at what he took for a mischievous joke, not an unexpected reaction in a small town where not much of note happened. Upon seeing the rage of the armed man when his order was not complied with, and that at least one of the men had a handkerchief wrapped around his face, Krapp realized the deadly seriousness of the situation. The bank was being robbed. 

 

     Also present in the bank at this time were local blacksmith Albert Braun and his brother-in-law Harry Peterson, as well as George Hacker, who not only was the bank’s cashier, but also served as Mokena’s mayor. Having held the small building in their firm grip, the two robbers herded Braun, Peterson, and assistant cashier Krapp into a rear room, where the bandits forced them to face a wall with their hands in the air. 

     The lead thief jammed his pistol into Krapp’s side and vulgarly threatened him as cashier Hacker was forced into the bank’s vault. Karl Krapp would later recall that the criminal’s weapon “felt like a cannon” and with his senses at their highest level of awareness, he expected a shot to ring out at any second. At the vault, bundles of currency were scooped into the second thief’s burlap sack; such was the robber’s haste that a packet of bills containing $200 burst onto the floor where it was abandoned.

Mokena State Bank on a better day. Pictured here around 1910 are, left to right, bank secretary W.H. Bechstein, John Cappel, cashier Frank Liess, and president Christian Bechstein. (Image courtesy of Richard Quinn)

 

    As quickly as they carried out their brazen task, the criminals bolted from the bank and into a large touring car, where three comrades awaited them, one of which was said to be armed with a shotgun. The auto disappeared as it roared westward down Front Street. The robbers’ loot equaled slightly more than $4,000, consisting of paper bills as well as gold and silver. Measured by the standards of today, the value of the heist would equal approximately $50,500.

 

    In the immediate aftermath of the robbery, Mokena and the surrounding countryside became alive with law enforcement personnel. After being notified by local telephone office manager Clida Deadmore, Will County Sheriff John Walker and deputies from Frankfort, Joliet, New Lenox, as well as Mokena took up the chase. Initially these men were unsuccessful in getting ahead of the robbers, until the tread of the getaway auto’s tires was followed in Front Street’s dust over rural roads to an abandoned farm outside New Lenox.

 

    Approaching the light brown touring car with trepidation, attending deputies found the auto to be devoid of life. Inside were discovered the empty billfolds of George Hacker and Karl Krapp, which had been snatched from them during the robbery, as was the handgun which had been employed in the attack. The thieves’ loot was nowhere to be found. Most ominously, more tire tracks along the dumped vehicle indicated that a second car escaped with the wanted men, from which all traces dissolved into oblivion. In a last attempt to nab the fugitives, two police German shepherds were used to track down the men.   While promising at the outset, the presence of farmers in the surrounding fields quickly threw dogs off the target scent. 

 

     The trail seemed cold until shortly after the robbery, when Sheriff’s Deputy Walter Fisher, a Front Street storekeeper, took George and Vernon Touzen into custody. Newcomers to Mokena and initially claiming to be brothers, Vernon supposedly had been held at gunpoint outside the bank during the raid. During questioning, he eventually confessed that his actual surname was James. Their kinship wasn’t the only part of their story to be bogus; a claim of being prohibition agents also fell apart under scrutiny.   

 

    Having made what were deemed “suspicious statements” about the robbery by our town newspaper, the News-Bulletin, James and Touzen were summarily locked up at the county jail. In their absence, authorities removed suitcases from their temporary place of residence in Mokena, inside which were found not only matching ammunition for the robbery gun, but also piquant letters from local girls. 

 

    The issue of James and Touzen intensified when it was discovered that the pair were known to be friendly with John Frisch, a Mokena railroad worker and the village’s constable. Many in town openly wondered about Frisch’s involvement in the robbery, as one of the suspected twosome had recently swapped pistols with him. So loud was the mistrust against Frisch that the Mokena Village Board was forced to investigate him until Deputy Fisher vociferously defended him, stating that James and Touzen had “pulled the wool over Frisch’s eyes as to their intentions.”

 

     As history notes, no charges were ever formally leveled against James and Touzen. There was simply no conclusive evidence, no smoking gun tying them to any involvement in the robbery of the Mokena State Bank. After their release from jail a short time later, James threatened to exact revenge on Deputy Fisher, and promptly disappeared along with Touzen into the untraceable void of time. 

 

   Mokena was a changed place after the heinous robbery, with all strangers looked upon with suspicion. An unknown face would be asked to explain his business in town, and if a satisfactory answer wasn’t becoming, would be hustled out of the village. The bank was quickly stocked with firearms, and the building itself was fortified. Within a year of the robbery, the cashier’s cage was completely surrounded with bulletproof glass, while all woodwork in the bank was backed with steel, not to mention the windows that got bullet resistant screens. The doors to the cashier’s space and the president’s office also got a treatment of steel, as well as an apparatus that allowed them only to be opened from the inside by means of an electric button. The directors of the bank weren’t about to take any chances on the supposedly bulletproof glass, and invited Deputy Fisher to give it a test. On the afternoon of Tuesday, November 24^th, 1925, the deputy fired three rounds from his .38 caliber revolver into the glass. Not a single one made it through. The News-Bulletin was there, and noted that “the only effect on the glass was a whitening of the surface, same as seen on a piece of ice when it is struck.”

 

     Mokena may never know who was behind the robbery of October 27^th, 1924. Loose ends existed that were never followed up on, and ringers for the crime were released without charge. What is sure, is that the crime resonated so deeply in the collective psyche of this sleepy railroad village of decades past, that it is still remembered with dread to this day.