Will Higgins

will.higgins@indystar.com

One hundred and three years ago Friday, Dr. Helene Knabe was found lying lifeless on her bed. The cause of death, the coroner's report said, was "hemorrhage and shock following a cutting wound of throat at the hands of unknown person or persons — murder."

Knabe's assistant, Katherine McPherson, described to officers what she had found. "The doctor was lying on the bed," she said, according to an account in The Indianapolis Star. "She was lying on top of the bed clothing, that was folded neatly under her body. Her head was thrust far back, and it was almost severed from her body by that horrible cut in her neck."

The crime shook Indianapolis. It dominated the news. The mayor authorized a $1,000 reward and assured residents the police would find the monster or monsters responsible.

But the police were flummoxed.

"Many Rumors Are Investigated Without Result and Case Remains One of Most Puzzling in History of City," said one Indianapolis Star headline. "Development of No Incriminating Evidence Leaves Detectives at Loss to Explain Motive for Fiendish Crime," said another.

Detectives long ago stopped looking for an explanation.

Now the murder is about to have another moment. Two writers, neither aware of the other, have been working on books about the crime.

Nicole Kobrowski, an education consultant and paranormal investigator, has researched the case and Knabe's life since 2005 and expects to begin pounding out the story this winter.

The other writer is retired psychologist Arthur Sterne. He only lately has begun his legwork, though he has been interested in the murder since the 1960s when he read about it in a look-back story in a local newspaper.

The truth about any murder is difficult to ascertain. The Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department's homicide "clearance rate" is 71 percent, and that is with a warm trail and a battery of trained detectives. Only occasionally does a cold case get solved. In August, Michael Ackerman was sentenced to life in prison for a murder he committed in 1977.

The Knabe case would seem to be iced over, especially considering Indianapolis police records of homicides committed before 1924 were destroyed in a flood of the City-County Building in the 1970s.

But neither passage of time nor a lack of much in the way of primary documentation can bury Indianapolis' interest in just who killed Indiana's foremost expert on rabies, and why.

Both Kobrowski and Sterne are laying out an explanation for what happened. The writers will be forced to do some speculating. Any dialogue obviously would have to be made up. Kobrowski is thinking "historic fiction." Sterne prefers roman à clef.

Sterne, 79, spent most of his career on the staff at Larue D. Carter Memorial Hospital, where people with psychotic disorders are treated. He was among the first to interview and study Tony Kiritsis, the Indianapolis man who in 1977 took banker Richard Hall hostage and paraded him Downtown on live television, a shotgun affixed to the back of Hall's head.

Sterne, whose previous book was a 2009 memoir, says he is interested in Knabe partly because she was a doctor and he is a doctor but mostly because he is obsessed with fact-finding and story-telling.

One of the first things he did was track down Walter Knabe, the well-known Indianapolis artist, to see if he was related to the victim. He wasn't.

Sterne considers sleuthing after the Knabe case "not too different from being a psychologist." "In both cases," he says, "it's getting to the truth, it's figuring out puzzles."

Kobrowski, who last year published a history of Central State Hospital, a former psychiatric hospital, has long-held admiration for Knabe, even affection. The doctor's grave, in Crown Hill Cemetery, went unmarked until only a few years ago when Kobrowski and her husband bought her a headstone with money raised from the ghost tours they conduct. The scene of the killing, a building at the northeast corner of East Michigan and North Delaware streets, is a popular stop on the tours. She even visited the town where Knabe was born, which was then part of Germany and is now part of Poland.

Knabe was "ground-breaking in her own life as a woman doctor," Kobrowski says, "and (her story) also appeals to people outraged by injustice. And who doesn't like a good murder story with a little who-done-it?"

Journalists have revisited the Knabe murder now and again for generations. Among the revisitors was Donna Mikels Shea, whose 60-inch recap appeared in the now defunct Indianapolis Times in 1950. "I was on the police beat and had idle time so started checking into the Helene Knabe case," says Shea, 90. "What I found intrigued me and the editors. I think they ran that story on the front page."

Accompanying Shea's front-page story was a photo of the Oct. 25, 1911 front page, with its sensational headline: "Woman physician's body is discovered lying in pool of blood by her office girl." The 1911 front page also showed a photo of Knabe looking prim in a high-necked blouse and wire-rimmed spectacles, her hair tightly coiffed.

Shea's story told of theories and confusion. One suspect was a "German revolutionist" with whom the dead woman "recently had violent political arguments" at the Atheneaum. Others theorized the killer was some sex fiend Knabe might have been treating. Knabe was an expert on, among other things, sexual health. Suicide was considered but ruled out because the wound was too severe and no weapon was found.

Knabe graduated from the Medical College of Indiana in 1904. She began researching rabies and became the state's leading expert, according to a brief history written recently by Gail Grainne Whitchurch, who teaches communications at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.

Later Knabe was named the state board of health's acting superintendent of the bacteriological laboratory and authored the lab's monthly reports, "in which she was blunt, such as scolding owners for not muzzling dogs, and criticizing physicians for incorrect preparation of records and blood specimens for analysis," according to Whitchurch.

"Although she was Indiana's expert on rabies, she was not promoted beyond 'Acting' Superintendent and was chronically underpaid until, in November 1908, she resigned in disgust."

In the days days after the murder, journalists fell over themselves to report what appeared to be bits of evidence. A neighborhood grocer had seen "a rough looking young man lurking," The Indianapolis Star reported. A bartender walking past heard screams. A janitor in the building where Knabe lived and worked was arrested then released.

The difficulties encountered by police may have been compounded by the behavior of the "office girl," McPherson, upon discovering Knabe's body. She did not call the police for more than an hour. Instead, she called other doctors, apparently believing there was still something to be done for her boss. She called Knabe's relatives, too, and others. By the time police arrived the crime scene was full of people. The janitor had been in and emptied the waste basket.

Shea recalled that years after she wrote her Knabe story she was at a party with Ian Fraser, a retired art professor at the Herron School of Art and a socially well-connected bon vivant, who told her it was his understanding Knabe had basically been bumped off because of a scandalous romance she supposedly was carrying on with a high-born 19-year-old Indianapolis woman named Janet Flanner.

"There seems to have been no other reason to kill the woman," says Fraser, who is retired and living in Florida. "Her home didn't seem to have been ransacked, she didn't have money. Janet Flanner immediately was whisked away to Europe. I put two and two together. I write about this in my book."

Fraser's 2013 memoir, "A Sow's Ear: Digressions and Transgressions of a Gay Humanist," is a gossipy, insider's look at Indianapolis in the later half of the 20th century. But the bit about Knabe's death is obviously flawed. Fraser dates the crime to "the nineteen twenties or thirties." He claims Knabe's body was never found.

He is not the first to suggest a link between Knabe and Flanner, who was a lesbian and who would live most of her life in Paris as a respected writer for The New Yorker. Flanner's pre-World War II profile of Adolph Hitler is considered a journalism classic.

Kobrowski investigated the rumor. She discounts it. "For me it's a non-issue," she says. "I have documentation, and also I doubt a 19-year-old would have enticed (the then-35-year-old Knabe). She was a strong woman and would have (been drawn to) an equal."

Besides, Kobrowski says, Knabe had a boyfriend.

She and Sterne both believe Knabe's killer was William Craig, a physician with whom she was romantically involved.

"The weekend before she died," Sterne says, "his housekeeper heard them arguing. She wanted him to marry her, and he wanted her to give up her job. But she was ambitious and didn't want to."

Two years after the murder, Craig was arrested, along with a funeral director named Alonzo Ragsdale. They were tried in Shelbyville and acquitted. Kobrowski has searched Shelby County for the trial transcripts, but they appear to be lost. Sterne learned the names of the lawyers involved and intends to try to find if they left behind any relevant private papers or records.

"I don't have scientific evidence" of Craig's guilt, Kobrowski says, "but I do think he did it. Dr. Craig would have known a sheep's cut, the way they used to slaughter sheep, so there wasn't a lot of spatter."

Is it fair for a writer, even a century later, to convict a suspect of a crime who was acquitted?

"I'm going to suggest readers make up their own minds," Kobrowski says.

Contact Star reporter Will Higgins at (317) 444-6043. Follow him on Twitter @WillRHiggins.