Dec. 2--Editor's note This is an excerpt from the new Post-Dispatch book, "Mobs, Mayhem & Murder: Tales from the St. Louis Police Beat" by veteran reporter Tim O'Neil.

Today: The Ghastly Secret in the Trunk Wednesday: The Mob War Thursday: Blinded but Not Defeated

Hugh Mottram Brooks was the son of a schoolmaster in suburban Manchester, England. He had dabbled in the study of law and medicine and was restless to see America.

Charles Arthur Preller was a well-born adventurer who traveled the world as a salesman for London upholstery weavers.

Preller had the means and success that Brooks lacked. Brooks stepped into Victorian culture by creating his own pedigree, passing himself as "Walter H. Lennox-Maxwell," a physician from London.

They met in Liverpool in January 1885 and struck up a friendship aboard the steamship Cephalonia, bound for Boston. Preller and "Maxwell" agreed to travel to Auckland, New Zealand, where Preller was to end a lengthy sales tour.

While Preller tarried in Montreal, Maxwell arrived in St. Louis on March 31 and took a room in the swank Southern Hotel, at 410 Walnut Street, where the Stadium East parking garage now stands. Awaiting him was a telegram from Preller, who was on his way. He arrived three days later and settled into his own room. The two young English gentlemen were together constantly.

In the polite phrasings of the time, a relationship deeper than friendship was hinted at. Preller was 32, Brooks 24.

Chambermaids and hotel porters soon noticed that Preller had money, but not Maxwell, who tried to sell some belongings, including his early slide viewer, known as a "magic lantern." The men spent most of Easter Sunday, April 5, in Maxwell's room. That night, Maxwell drank heavily in the hotel bar, mumbling about having killed a man during the Russo-Turkish War. He asked the bartender, "What is the penalty for killing a man in this community? Would $500 get a man off?"

It was the first hint of what was to become, one week later, a gruesome international sensation, fed by the fast-growing urban press and increasingly high-speed telegraphic news services.

On Monday, April 6, Maxwell bought a new trunk, had his beard and mustache shaved and let it be known that his friend had gone out of town for just a few days. Maxwell suddenly had money. He used a $100 bill to buy a first-class accommodation on the St. Louis & San Francisco train to California that night, traveling as Hugh Brooks. On board, he became T.C. D'Auquier, a French general who spoke in broken English. He embarrassed himself in conversation with a French newspaper vendor, but stuck to his tale. On April 12, he sailed from San Francisco on the steamer City of Sydney, bound for Auckland.

Two days later, a gathering stench from Maxwell's Room 144 in the Southern became too much for the maids, who summoned head clerk Eugene Hunt.

Workers hauled Maxwell's reeking trunk out a back door. Afraid to open it, they called for Charles Bieger, a trunk dealer at 16 South Broadway who had, by coincidence, sold Maxwell his new trunk the week before.

"Horrible. Ghastly Discovery Made at the Southern This Morning," said the Post-Dispatch front page of April 14, 1885.

Inside the trunk was a blackening, swollen body. Its only garment was underwear bearing Maxwell's initials. Investigators soon determined the remains were of Preller and, too late, followed the trail of Maxwell to the San Francisco pier. A St. Louis coroner's inquest, extensively covered by the local press, established cause of death as poisoning by chloroform, used then as an anesthetic. "Dr. Maxwell" had made two purchases of that chemical on the weekend of Preller's death.

Reporters in Hyde, England, interviewed Brooks' mortified parents. St. Louis police arranged for their Auckland brethren to hold Maxwell upon arrival, and dispatched detectives James Tracy and G.W. Badger for the 10-week round trip to retrieve him. The trip cost $3,000, an enormous sum for a 506-man force with an annual budget of $561,200.

Public reaction explained the expense. A large crowd met Tracy, Badger and Brooks at the San Francisco dock when they returned on the Zealandia. At small depots along the route back to St. Louis, crowds gathered for a glance.

St. Louis' old Union Depot, beneath what is now the Tucker Avenue viaduct, was mobbed for the returning Frisco train Aug. 16.

"Well, well," said an Irish immigrant when the slightly built Brooks stepped off the train. "To think av' it requirin' two big man loike Tracy and Badger to bring back a little bit av' a chap loike that."

A police wagon whisked them uphill to the block-square Four Courts building, at 11th and Clark streets, now the site of the downtown fire station and city garage. The detectives took Brooks into their bureau where, the Post-Dispatch noted, "the newspapermen fell upon him (and) numerous prominent citizens called to see him." Tracy said their prisoner had been pleasant during the voyage, but had divulged almost nothing about the crime.

Brooks' three-week trial in May-June 1886 filled the newspapers with extensive, stenographic testimony -- the Gilded Age's version of Court TV. The press ran biographies and woodcut drawings of the jurors.

Prosecutors stunned the jammed, sweltering courtroom with a surprise witness: Missouri Pacific Railroad detective John McCullough, who had been planted in the jail on a fake charge and became friends with Brooks. McCullough testified that Brooks admitted to anger that Preller wouldn't pay both of their fares to Auckland and decided "on account of his meanness to fix him."

The detective said Brooks told him that Preller had complained of a "private disease," which "Maxwell" said he could cure with an operation requiring a catheter. Thus the chloroform. Outraged defense attorney P.W. Fauntleroy objected to the entrapment but was overruled, leaving him only with bitter cross-examination.

"Do you think it's right to lie?" Fauntleroy asked the undercover witness.

"We may lie," McCullough said. "When we're working with criminals, we've got to meet them."

Brooks, by then known as "The Little Chloroformer," took the stand May 26. He admitted to his real name but didn't explain the aliases. "No special reason," was his response. He called McCullough's tale "an infamous lie."

Brooks testified that his effort to treat his friend quietly in Room 144 went horribly wrong through accidental overdose of chloroform. He said he desperately tried to revive him.

"I was in a strange land, a stranger," Brooks said, weeping. "I then thought the only thing to do was to get away."

He said he put his own underpants on Preller's nude body "for decency's sake," then put him in the trunk. He said he was drunk much of time before his departure.

The jury deliberated for 14 hours overnight and returned its verdict of guilty at midday June 5. As the condemned man sat in jail at the Four Courts, his parents, Samuel and Hannah Brooks, traveled to America and appealed personally to Gov. Albert Morehouse, who was not moved.

Brooks was hanged in the backyard of the Four Courts on the morning of Aug. 10, 1888, as 50 police officers held back the crowd. The day before, he released a lengthy statement repeating his story of the accidental death. His mother visited him in the holding cell. Brooks, a jailhouse convert to Catholicism, spent much of his last night with the Rev. J. Henry Tihen. As the executioner lifted the black hood over Brooks' head, he said only, "goodbye."

The newspaper said Brooks "died hard," writhing after his neck was broken and gashed by the rope. Tihen called the death "barbarous."

Brooks was buried that day in section 11 of Calvary Cemetery, the city's main Catholic cemetery, in a plot his father had bought. Preller's unmarked grave is barely 100 yards away, just across Calvary Avenue, in neighboring Bellefontaine Cemetery.

toneil@post-dispatch.com -- 314-340-8132

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