Jody A Callahan

Memphis Commercial Appeal

However No one knows how Charles C. Harl came to be on Downtown's Market Street that cold and wet February night almost 100 years ago, his life hadn't been an easy one.

He was 45 years old, and was a member of what newspaper reports at the time called the "working class." He likely hadn't bathed in some time, and he was wearing shabby clothes, including a woman's fur coat. Around 9:15 p.m. that night of Feb. 13, 1917, as the temperature dipped into the 40s and drizzle fell, Harl found himself was in front of a house at 191 Market Street. Another man was there with him, too, and he was-- armed with a .32-caliber pistol.

That man fired three shots, striking Harl in three places, including the chest. in the chest, the armpit and the fingers on his right hand. A priest called Father Leo rushed over from nearby St. Mary's, and police officers Joe Robertson and Red Davis responded within minutes, but nothing could be done. Harl died there on Market Street that night, one of 58 murders homicides in Memphis in 1917.

Despite police efforts, at the time, despite eyewitness testimony and a possible motive, Harl's killer was never caught. Based on research by the Memphis Police Department, Harl's is the oldest unsolved murder homicide in the city.'s history, at least based on available records. Feb. 13 will mark the 100-year-anniversary of his killing, an event remembered with only a single-page report, back and front, in a bound book collectingcontaining all the city's murders between 1917 and 1936.

"It’s the first one (that says) Name Accused: unknown." Everyone else has somebody's name there. They arrested someone. It was the first one I ran across that said unknown," said Sgt. Joe Stark, one of MPD's two detectives assigned to cold case homicides.

Of course, Stark isn't working this case. The killer and anyone else involved are long dead, making this little more than a curiosity for homicide detectives and true-crime junkies. But it remains an interesting anecdote, a deeper look into a killing and what police did to try and solve it, nearly a century ago.

History doesn't have much left to say Records don't tell much about Harl, including his exact birth date. He may have been from St. Joseph, Missouri, having moved to Memphis about 10 years before his death. He was involved in real estate as a sales manager for the Acklena Land Company, which was then based in the former Goodwyn Institute building Downtown but now lives on only as the name of a Whitehaven neighborhood. Harl lived in a succession of rooming houses Downtown, the last one a building at 86 Madison, just across Main Street from what is now Walgreens.

Detectives discovered that, on the night of his death, from 5 to 8 p.m., Harl spent the hours from 5 to 8 p.m. was in a rooming house at 73 Monroe, now the spot of the Bardog Tavern. Police never figured out determined where he was from 8 p.m. until 9:15 p.m., when he found himself was on Market, several blocks away. Police also never discovered exactly why he was in that area.

One A boy saw the shooting, police discovered, and several others saw events that led up to or immediately followed after the killing. But as accounts from The Commercial Appeal made clear, police found they couldn't trust all those witnesses.

The eyewitness, Claude Bills, who the newspaper referred to as a "white boy." He told police that he was approaching the alley, about 100 feet away, when he heard three shots. Bills saw Harl fall and the other man run away, then ran to a nearby house to call police. But Bills wasn't able to tell police much about the suspect —- including his race. —- beyond the fact that he was "tall and well-built."

J.L. Wheat was also nearby, and he heard a man call out, "I'll get you! I'll get you!" before the shots were fired. He didn't see the shooter either, though. A.J. Matthews lived at 191 Market, where the shooting happened. He told police that he was awakened by the sound of someone gasping, as if they were being choked. Second later, he hear three shots, but didn't go outside to investigate for fear he'd be targeted next.

Police found $1.40 that had fallen out of Harl's pockets after he collapsed. He had a "cheap watch attached to a gold chain," the newspaper said, and was wearing cufflinks marked with his initials. Those same initials were found on his clothes, put there by a laundry service. Harl was wearing a blue pin-striped suit, a dark overcoat and what appeared to be a woman's coat with a fur collar. He had no identifying papers on him.

The body was taken to Thompson Brothers undertakers on nearby Union Avenue. There, morticians told police that Harl "had not bathed in months and was evidently a bum or of a low station in life," according to the police report. In fact, for the first 12 hours Harl was at the mortuary, no one had any idea who he was. It was only when an insurance agent identified the body that police had the name of their victim.

So the police got to work, as Chief Perry and Detectives Hurst and Turner —- no first names given —- began their investigation. They found another supposed witness, a Mrs. B. Parsons, who lived near the crime scene. She told police she was certain she saw the shooter running away, and identified him as a "negro." Police soon doubted her claim, though.

Investigators then found a "negro" chauffeur who had been parked outside the former Presbyterian Hospital, about four blocks from the scene. He said that around 7 p.m. that night, he saw two men, one of whom was carrying a pistol, walk by.

"I'll kill him!" one of them said, according to the chauffeur. "I'll get him when he comes out of the house."

Police never identified the race of those suspects, or whether they were even involved in the killing.

But theyPolice soon hit on a possible motive behind the murder.

"Police incline to the belief, however, that Harl, who was alleged to have been intimate with a number of women, was slain by a man actuated by a desire for vengeance," a CA reporter wrote colorfully a couple of days after the murder.

It seems that Harl had a tendency to bed married women, much to the chagrin of their cuckolded husbands. Police interviewed one such husband, but he said the incident had happened two years earlier and besides, he'd already divorced the woman. Police had plans to interview another such husband, but it's unknown what came of that.

Police also discovered that, on the night of his death, Harl apparently called up several women while he was at the rooming house and canceled plans with them ... all for that night. His former landlady, who ran a rooming house on Court Avenue, told police that someone beat Harl badly just before he moved out. He refused to talk about the incident, she told police.

And that's about where the investigation stood. Police ran out of leads, and the case soon faded, apparently not even meriting another newspaper mention. It was one of 11 cases that went unsolved that year, out of those 58 total homicides.

Stark doesn't know much about the case, but if he'd been the investigator, he'd have started with the man's name and worked out from there.

"You identify who the person is who was killed. You find out where he lives, whom he lives with. You find out his best friends, you find out his girlfriend, you find out everybody that knows him. You find everybody that could have gotten him into whatever he got into, that’s now why he’s dead. Somebody’s gonna know. That’s what we do normally in homicide. We go to their friends, their loved ones, and they usually have an idea of what happened," Stark said.

It's possible, even likely that the Memphis police of 100 years ago did just that. It's also possible they identified a likely suspect, but never had enough evidence for an arrest. But since no one was ever charged in the killing, Charles C. Harl goes down in history as the city's oldest unsolved homicide.

Seven days after he was slain, Harl was buried in Elmwood Cemetery in an area reserved for pauper's graves. He remains there still, without a headstone to mark his final resting place.