From "St. Louis Globe-Democrat," May 26, 1897
There is no question but Thomas G. Campbell was a bounder and a cad. He treated two wives shabbily and his several girlfriends worse. In addition, Campbell was a poseur who fooled no one at all. It is absolutely understandable why someone would want to shoot him.
Throughout his adult life, according to the city directories and the census, Campbell held a variety of respectable, if modest, occupations. He ran a confectionery for a bit, and then a fruit stand. He was a gas fitter and collected debts for a Cincinnati clothing store. But he really wanted to be a star, to strut and fret his hour upon the stage, or the boxing ring, as the case may be. According to the Cincinnati Enquirer [May 26, 1897]:
“Campbell was generally regarded as being ‘daffy’ on the subject of boxing. He was given several opportunities to make a success in other walks of life, but wanted to be mixed up in pugilistic or theatrical affairs.”
For a time, Campbell ran a gymnasium on Freeman Avenue, but he lacked any skills himself and none of his boxers had any luck in the ring. His second wife was an actress and Campbell attempted to promote her as a female boxer by training her in secret while challenging a professional woman gymnast and distaff pugilist named Madame Zorella to a match. Madame Zorella declined to dignify Campbell’s proposition with a response. Campbell, not wanting to waste his investment in training, created an act in which he and Mrs. Campbell sparred with each other on stage. Per the Enquirer:
“Later he and his wife traveled in a joint boxing turn and other vaudeville specialties. They did not make a brilliant hit.”
Those other “specialties” included a blackface domestic comedy sketch. Campbell drifted west, ending up in St. Louis peddling some sort of patented gas fixture without much success but charming a local prostitute named Maude Devere. While romancing Miss Devere, who seems to have financially supported Campbell’s residency in St. Louis, he sent to Cincinnati asking his wife to join him on the stage as he had booked their act for a week at the Globe Theater.
From the "Putnam County (Unionville, Missouri) Leader," June 25, 1897
The second Mrs. Campbell was May Schwaab, daughter of a Cincinnati saloonist. As a teenager, she had run away with a vaudeville troupe and married a gambler named John Hart in Texas. Hart abandoned May for another woman. She returned to Cincinnati, divorced Hart and married Campbell, a widower with a young son, in 1894.
Campbell was no prize. Newspapers reported one incident in which he wandered Cincinnati’s streets with a pistol, aiming to shoot May because she accused him of infidelity, based on a newspaper report that he had beat up his girlfriend who confessed their affair to Mrs. Campbell.
Still, May Campbell followed her man to St. Louis, and the couple found rooms on Chouteau Avenue. When Campbell disappeared for a couple of days, then returned home in the depths of a hangover, May searched his pockets and found Maude Devere’s card. She visited the courtesan and they had an educational chat. Maude told May that Campbell claimed to be unmarried and wanted to elope with her. May told Maude that she had suffered enough and wanted a divorce, needing only enough evidence to satisfy the court. Maude offered a plan: She would invite Campbell to her house while May hid in a closet and gathered her evidence. May would get her divorce and Maude would get her man.
Unbeknownst to Maude, May arrived with a five-shot .38-caliber pistol. She later claimed it was for protection; Maude’s brothel on Center Street lay in a rough part of town, after all. May hid while Maude awaited Campbell. Maude told the St. Louis Post Dispatch [May 25, 1897]:
“He sat down and made love to me in his usual way. The closet door was partly open and I’m sure his wife heard a good deal that was pretty bitter to her. He said she did not love him and he couldn’t get along with her and he wanted to make arrangements with me to light out next week.”
The St. Louis Globe-Democrat picked up the tale as May Campbell seethed in the closet:
“Finally it became more than she could stand, and, throwing open the door, sprang into the center of the room. With a cry of, “Oh, you dog,’ she raised her weapon and, pointing it directly at Campbell, she began to pump lead at him as fast as she could pull the trigger.”
Emptying the revolver, May ran out of the house down to the new City Hall, where she surrendered to the police court. Campbell staggered after her, bleeding from a gunshot to the jaw and a through-and-through to his chest. He whipped out a pocketknife, yelling threats at his wife, then remembered he had forgotten his hat and returned to Maude’s to get it. As Maude gave him the hat, she realized that she had been shot as well, an apparently mild wound just above her knee. Both she and Campbell ended up at the infirmary.
From "St. Louis Post-Dispatch," May 25, 1897
Told that her husband lay at the brink of death, May was taken by police to the infirmary where she alternately kissed the wounded man and bragged that he got what he deserved. Maude underwent surgery to remove the bullet.
Despite a horrendous chest wound and a shattered jaw, Campbell recovered completely. Maude Devere died five days later. May was charged with murder—or killing her accomplice, not attempted murder of her husband. A coroner’s inquest eventually cleared May completely, after testimony from two interns revealed that a senior surgeon had botched Maude’s operation and treatment. Maude succumbed to a combination of sepsis and blood loss inflicted by the doctor.
Thomas Campbell returned to Cincinnati and moved in with his well-to-do mother, who had apparently financed his pugilistic and theatrical fantasies. Two years after surviving May’s assault, Campbell sued for divorce, claiming his wife had deserted him. It seems May went back on the road, assuming the stage name of May Foster.
Campbell drowned his sorrows. He died in 1905 and the cause of death was cirrhosis of the liver. He is buried at the Vine Street Hill Cemetery.
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