Image extracted from microfilm by Greg Hand
Among the most peculiar crimes ever recorded in Cincinnati was the mystery within a mystery spawned by breakfast at 912 Dayton Street on the morning of Friday, March 30, 1900.
Four generations lived in a two-story house at that address, owned by a renowned and aged Methodist minister, the Rev. Dr. Mordecai J.W. Ambrose. Doctor Ambrose was in poor health and was attended by a full-time nurse named Ellen M. Galvin. Also living under his roof were Ambrose’s daughter, Francephin, her husband Charles A. Aiken, their divorced daughter Susie Winold, and Susie’s two young children, Harold and Frances. A couple of weeks earlier, the Aikens had hired a servant girl who said her name was Violet Foster.
On the morning of March 30, Mr. Aiken arose early and left for his job at the American Book Company. Mrs. Aiken, Mrs. Winold, Harold, Frances, and Miss Galvin sat down to breakfast about 9:00 a.m. The new servant girl served an egg dish, but Mrs. Aiken sent it back and claimed the eggs were stale. The servant then offered oatmeal and served a portion to everyone except Mrs. Winold, who said she was not hungry. As the family got up from the table, everyone but Mrs. Winold complained of stomach pains and several became violently ill. Mrs. Winold ran to the kitchen to find the servant girl but she was not there. Mrs. Winold eventually located her upstairs in her room, apparently also ill.
Mrs. Winold called for a doctor who lived in the neighborhood. He immediately diagnosed arsenic poisoning. After caring for the obviously ill, he took one look at Violet Foster and determined that she was faking her symptoms. Someone called the police. The doctor’s suspicions were confirmed when a police detective ordered the servant girl downstairs and she got up immediately, showing no further evidence that she was in any sort of distress. Thanks to the doctor’s timely attentions, none of the poisoning victims died.
Police visited several neighborhood pharmacies. At the Overbeck drug store, employees identified Violet Foster as the woman who had purchased arsenic the evening before. Pharmacies at that time recorded the names of anyone who bought poisonous substances, and the young woman signed for the arsenic as Lena Heigh. It looked like a simple case of attempted homicide until Violet Foster, alias Lena Heigh, confessed.
The local newspapers swarmed to this story because Susie Winold and her children had created a front-page sensation in Cincinnati the previous year. Susie married a traveling salesman named Charles O. Winold in 1892. He was from Massillon, Ohio, and his job took him over most of the eastern United States. Over the years, the marriage soured. Charles blamed his mother-in-law. Whatever the cause, Susie moved out, taking her children, and relocated to South Dakota. Charles knew she was establishing residency to get an accelerated divorce, so he tracked her down and kidnapped their children. Charles first brought Harold and Frances back to his parents’ home in Massillon, then took them to Brooklyn. A nationwide search for the abducted children resulted in their discovery in Hoboken, New Jersey. Susie, now freshly divorced, and Charles met in a Brooklyn courtroom where she was awarded custody and he got weekly visitation. Charles made only minor efforts to see his children as his business kept him traveling, but neighbors began to report him watching the house on Dayton Street.
Violet Foster, under police interrogation, claimed that it was Charles Winold himself who forced her to buy the arsenic and that it was Charles Winold who had placed the arsenic in the oatmeal. Winold, the servant girl claimed, had appeared at the kitchen door on several occasions, explaining that he intended to kill his wife in revenge for taking his children away. As he was being dragged into this case, Winold was wending his way through his sales territory, making no effort to hide his location. He was apprehended in Baltimore and brought to Cincinnati for questioning.
Further investigation revealed that Winold had iron-clad alibis for every instance in which Violet Foster testified that he was threatening her at the Ambrose house. On the morning of the poisoning, Winold was in a Toledo hotel. The servant’s story crumbled further when police learned that her real name was Faltha Gilliam and that almost nothing she had told them about her past was true. Although she claimed her parents were dead, police found her mother, father and a handful of siblings living in poverty in Lower Price Hill.
Faltha Gilliam was tried and sentenced in Judge Rufus Smith’s courtroom in October 1900. She was sentenced to four years in the Ohio Penitentiary. At her sentencing, the newspapers reported that she had been flirting so indiscriminately with the male prisoners at the county jail that a couple of young men were ready to fight a duel over her.
Image extracted from microfilm by Greg Hand
Only a few newspapers looked beyond the version of the story assembled by the police and presented in court. Faltha Gilliam’s many and repeated lies called her credibility very much into question and enabled Charles Winold, confessed kidnapper, to totally escape blame. The Cincinnati Commercial Tribune [1 April 1900] published statements made by Gilliam to a reporter that suggest there might have been a very different motivation for the poisoning:
“The extraordinary creature admitted repeatedly yesterday that she has known and met Winold clandestinely since last December; that he knew when she secured the situation as a domestic at Dr. Ambrose’s residence in Dayton Street, and that he planned and she assisted for days in the arrangements for the commission of the crime.”
The Commercial Tribune reported that Gilliam had herself once worked as a traveling salesperson, met Winold on a train in Indiana, reunited with him in Cincinnati and that he had encouraged her to take the servant position at his ex-wife’s house. If true, Winold may have set her up to take the fall while he traveled to establish his alibis. It was never explained why Gilliam served poison oatmeal to Winold’s children after his ex-wife refused the deadly concoction.
Faltha Gilliam was released from the penitentiary a year early because of good behavior and she seems to vanish from the historical record. Charles Winold moved back to Massillon and remarried in 1905. He died from prostate cancer in 1914. Susie Winold lived a long life in service to the Methodist church and died in New Jersey, aged 80. Harold and Frances both recovered from their deadly breakfast. Frances married a man in Michigan in 1915. Harold served in the Navy through World War I, married and had a daughter. The nurse, Ellen M. Galvin, sued Dr. Ambrose, as head of the household, for hiring the poisoner without checking her background, and the pharmacy, for selling the arsenic, asking $10,400 from each. Both cases were dismissed. Although she claimed the poisoning left her unable to work, Galvin was listed as a nurse in the Cincinnati city directory for several more years.
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