The Murder of Paulina Duebbert
by Bob Brail

            For about one hundred fifty years Femme Osage Creek Road has meandered along a serpentine stream in southwestern St. Charles County.  As soon as a driver turns onto this road from Highway F, a few miles north of the Daniel Boone home, he is treated to a pastoral panorama of old farmhouses with their well-kept barns and fields.  Just before the road ends at Highway T, it leaves the creek side and wanders through the peaceful village of Femme Osage.  It is almost incomprehensible that tragedy could ever disrupt this tranquil countryside, but the incomprehensible happened in the summer of 1929 when Paulina Duebbert was murdered at her home on Femme Osage Creek Road.

Paulina Duebbert (courtesy of A. Schemmer)

            At approximately midnight on Thursday, August 22, 1929, Dr. L. E. Belding received a telephone call.  Because his phone was on a party line, every phone on that Femme Osage line sounded the doctor’s ring “with unusual intensity,” and several neighbors picked up their phones to find out what was happening.  When Belding answered the phone, he heard a badly wounded August Meier, who lived and worked on the Duebbert farm, ask for assistance.  Meier had been shot three times in the head, but the condition of his unmarried cousin, forty-eight year-old Paulina Duebbert, was much worse: she lay dead from a gunshot wound to the head. Dr. Belding immediately called Sheriff Isadore Grothe, who notified his deputy Les Plackemeier.  These men arrived at the Duebbert farm on Femme Osage Creek Road at about the same time as several neighbors, including August Becker and Otto Webbling, who had listened in on Meier’s call.  They found the body of Duebbert outside near a straw stack; she had been shot through the mouth at close range, the bullet exiting at the base of the brain.  Meier was found inside, near death; x-rays taken later indicated bullets in the center and at the base of his brain. 

August Meier

                   

            The initial investigation indicated that robbery apparently was not the motive, since nothing had been taken from either of the two houses on the Duebbert farm.  Within hours searchers in the woods near the murder site had found several articles of what appeared to be evidence: handkerchiefs tied together to make a rope, two pairs of stained overalls, two pairs of new cotton gloves, a flashlight with the price tag still on it, three handkerchiefs, and some .38-caliber cartridges.  Information stamped inside the overalls led investigators to a Cincinnati manufacturer, whose records indicated they had been purchased in St. Louis.  A few days after the murder, Otto Brinkman, one of Duebbert’s neighbors, found a .38-caliber revolver in the woods.  Shortly thereafter, a second .38-caliber was found.

           
             It would be a pair of sunglasses, however, that would be the criminals’ undoing. Found on a ridge on the Duebbert farm, the sunglasses were finally traced to a dealer in Booneville, Missouri.  Police discovered he had also sold the flashlight with the price still affixed.  When this news was reported in the papers, a lumber dealer from Crocker, Missouri, named Chester Hurt made a connection. Hurt had employed a lumber buyer who had proven so capable that Hurt had allowed him to write checks on his account for lumber purchases.  Eventually, however, Hurt had discharged the man.  Around the first of September the man apparently had forged Hurt’s name on checks worth over $1,000.  When Hurt saw the newspaper description of the sunglasses, he remembered that his former lumber buyer had worn sunglasses that matched the description.  Hurt called St. Charles County authorities on September 14.

           
            William F. Bloebaum, St. Charles County prosecuting attorney, immediately issued an arrest warrant for David A. Miller, a forty-five year old logbuyer and ex-convict from Swedesburg, Missouri.  A second warrant was issued for Norman Tanner, a twenty-one year old from rural Swedesburg, who had worked with Miller for several months.  On September 20, Miller was arrested at Buffalo in Dallas County, Missouri. Tanner’s arrest occurred the following day in Oklahoma.  By Tuesday, September 24, both men were being held in the St. Charles County jail.  In the weeks that followed the shootings, Miller and Tanner had to driven to Boonville, Missouri; Dayton, Ohio;   Richmond, West Virginia; Indianapolis, Indiana; Pitcher, Oklahoma; and finally Buffalo, Missouri.  When Miller was arrested, he told authorities he was on his way to St. Charles because he had heard he was the focus of a manhunt, and he wanted to explain his innocence.  A newspaper reporter wrote that authorities “accept[ed] his story with a broad margin of incredulity.”

David Miller and Norman Tanner

            The events that happened on the evening of August 22, 1929, eventually were made clear because Norman Tanner decided to confess and August Meier recovered from his wounds and was able to testify.  Both Miller and Tanner had been hired by Paulina Duebbert to cut walnut logs on her farm in late 1927 or early 1928, so they were familiar with the farm and the roads in the area.  Miller and Tanner heard rumors that Duebbert, “a shrewd and capable business woman,” did not use a bank, so she kept several thousand dollars in her house.  It was her practice to loan sums of money to her neighbors, and she conducted this business in the farm’s older home.  On August 21, the day before the murder, they had gone to East St. Louis and St. Louis to purchase various articles they intended to use in the robbery, including an Ivers-Johnson .38-caliber pistol for Miller and a Bull Dog .38-caliber pistol for Tanner.  On August 22, Miller and Tanner drove to the Duebbert farm and hid in the woods all day, occasionally sneaking to the home to observe Duebbert and Meier.  Finally, at dusk, Miller and Tanner commenced what they thought would be a robbery.

           
            Paulina Duebbert and August Meier were butchering a hog that evening.  Duebbert was in the hog lot and Meier in a barn when Miller and Tanner approached, so the killers decided that Tanner would accost Duebbert and Miller would confront Meier.  As Miller approached Meier, they heard Duebbert scream; Tanner had struck her.  Miller, with his pistol pointed at Meier, told him to walk in the direction of the hog lot.  Meier asked, “What does all this mean?”  When the four people came together near a straw stack, Duebbert, with blood on her face, shouted at Meier in Low German, “He hit me.” Suddenly Miller shot Duebbert in the head because, he said, she had tried to strike him with a knife, and he thought she had recognized them from their previous employment on the farm.  Tanner then shot Meier in the head.  When Meier fell to his knees, he began to yell so Tanner shot him in the head a second time.  Tanner rolled Meier over, thinking he was dead, but Meier mumbled something.  When Miller saw that Meier was still alive, he told Tanner, “Dead men tell no tales”; Tanner shot him a third time in the head.  Tanner maintained that Miller then wanted to “get the money,” but Tanner talked him into leaving as quickly as possible.  The men returned to their car, discarding their overalls, guns, handkerchiefs, gloves, and flashlight in the woods, and fled.  About four hours after being shot, August Meier managed to crawl fifty yards to the newer house and telephone the doctor.  He had lapsed in and out of consciousness during that time, afraid to enter the house for fear of encountering the robbers.

The straw stack beside which the body of Duebbert was found

A view of the farm from the north of the barn toward the direction of Femme Osage Creek Road.  The farm's newer home is visible to the right of the photo.  The murder occurred on the left side of the photo; the large tree in the foreground obscures the view of the straw stack.

          The trial of Miller commenced on Tuesday, January 28, 1930; Tanner was later to be tried separately.  Miller’s lawyers were Osmund Haenssler and Claud Tuttle.  By Thursday, January 30, a major problem threatened to produce a mistrial.  Juryman Dalgo Boettler developed a kidney ailment and, on the advice of a doctor, was taken to a hospital.  In other words, he was removed from a sequestered jury.  On February 6 Judge Woolfolk declared a mistrial.  Haenssler immediately made a motion to free Miller; the judge, not surprisingly, overruled him.

                  

             The second trial of David Miller began on Wednesday, April 9.  The jurors selected were W. J. Hamilton, Fred Robbins, L. W. Schemmer, William Bergfeld, Oscar Linneman, Edward Leimkuehler, Charles Hallemeier, William Finek, Ernst Schulte, Clifford Goodfellow, Ed Burns, and Henry Hinnah.  On the afternoon of April 10, as the trial was in session, prosecuting attorney William Bloebaum dramatically announced that Norman Tanner “was ready to turn state’s evidence” and plead guilty.  The trial was over by Saturday, April 12, when the jury returned a verdict of guilty of murder in the first degree and that David Miller should hang.  Then the judge sentenced Norman Tanner to spend the rest of his life in prison.  According to a newspaper reporter, “outside of turning a little pale, Miller gave little evidence of emotion. . . . After being taken back to the jail, however, he gave way under the strain by bursting into tears and crying like a child.”

           
           Another potential problem for the prosecution quickly materialized.  Someone discovered that one of the jurors, Henry Hinnah, was a distant relation of Paulina Duebbert.  Hinnah’s wife, Mathilda Duebbert Hinnah, “was related to Paulina Duebbert within the seventh degree of consanguinity”: Mathilda’s great-great-grandfather was the great-grandfather of Paulina.  Hinnah, however, testified that neither he nor his wife knew of this relationship until a few days after the trial ended.  The appeals court ruled there was no evidence that Hinnah knew of the relationship.  Miller’s appeal was rejected.                    

           
            Norman Tanner would spend the rest of his life in the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City, where he died in 1943 of pulmonary tuberculosis at the age of thirty-four.  He spent his last three and one-half years in the prison hospital.  David Miller’s lawyers would finally reach the end of all appeals processes in January of 1933.  On February 10, 1933, at 6:15 AM, David Miller was hanged on the third floor of the St. Charles County jail.  Miller’s execution would be the last to occur in the jail.

            
            Four years after the murder, five area men were still contending in St. Charles County courts for the reward of $250 offered for the arrest and conviction of Miller.  C. E. Hyde was awarded $250 for Tanner’s arrest and conviction.

The Duebbert Graveyard

            In 1962, thirty-three years after the murder, August Meier died in his Cappeln home.  Although two bullets had been removed from his brain shortly after the shooting, one was too dangerously situated to be removed.  Meier would live for over three decades with this bullet lodged in his brain.              

            
           Today the Duebbert farmhouse is a beautifully maintained home on Femme Osage Creek Road.  A few hundred feet away, on the side of a hill overlooking the house, is the Duebbert family cemetery.  Here, only a short distance from where her life was brutally ended, Paulina Duebbert was buried in an unmarked grave.  Although it is hard to imagine a murder in such a picturesque setting, the facts tell the horrible story.

Sources: Bloebaum, William F. “How I Snared the Slayers of Paulina.” Master Detective.  March 1934; The Boone-Duden Historical Society Newsletter (Mar./Apr. 1998); Margie Heman, Arlie Schemmer, and Mollie Schemmer interview (25 July 2010); The Marthasville Record (4 Oct. 1929; 31 Mar. 1933); “Missouri Death Certificates” (www.sos.mo.gov/archives); St. Charles Banner News (microfilm); “State Vs. Miller, 331 MO. 675 (www.loislaw.com); “Sublunar” (www.sublunar.info/cellblock13.html).

The author would like to acknowledge Cathie Schoppenhorst and Gene Ahmann for providing newspaper articles, and Ahmann for arranging the interview and providing  photographs.  The author would also like to thank Margie Heman for allowing access to the Duebbert farm.