Charred bones, buttons and buckles

When I left you on Wednesday, Emil Schutte of Haddam had been arrested on May 18, 1921, for threatening his wife Marie with a shotgun. Once he was locked up, his sons went to the police to tell them what they knew about their father’s activities over the years.

 Two days after Schutte’s arrest, on a tip from Schutte’s sons, the authorities picked charred bones, buttons and buckles from a brush pile on property belonging to Emil Schutte atop Cremation Hill. Authorities claimed the remains belonged to Dennis LeDuc, an older French-Canadian man who had been working for Schutte as a farm hand.  Evidence suggested the fire had been set with kerosene.

 During a pre-trial hearing to determine if there was sufficient evidence to try him for LeDuc’s murder, three Schutte boys testified that their father and LeDuc had argued loudly on the evening of April 21, 1921. Rudolph Schutte, aged 17, claimed that he had seen a wounded Dennis LeDuc the next morning “with a hole in his head through which the brains seemed to beat.”  When Rudolph asked him about it, he said he’d never been so drunk in his life and had no idea what had happened to him.  Mrs. Schutte dressed his wounds. 

 William Schutte, then 20 years old, testified he saw LeDuc dead on his cot in the barn the following day. Several people recalled a large brush fire was reported later that day atop Cremation Hill, and LeDuc was subsequently noticed missing.  The state claimed the motive for the killing was money; Schutte owed LeDuc $100 for a season’s work.  

In early July, the court determined the state had enough evidence to try him on the murder of Dennis LeDuc. The Haddam court was overturned and charges were dropped against Schutte in regards to LeDuc’s death. 

 The state turned its efforts to the deaths of the Balls. In 1915 a tragic fire had claimed the lives of three members of the Joseph Ball family and their deaths had been attributed to asphyxiation.  With information from the Schutte boys, the bodies of the Ball family were exhumed from the Haddam cemetery and within the caskets examiners found several spent shells, verifying that they had been shot. In September Schutte was bound over for trial, scheduled to begin on October 4, 1921, at the Middlesex County Superior court in Middletown. 

 As the state built its case against Schutte, a horrified public followed every detail released in the press and gossiped about the brutal man living amongst them.  Meanwhile, Schutte sat in the Haddam jail awaiting trial. The Haddam jail, located on the Middlesex Turnpike (Route 154) at the intersection of Jail Hill Road, was built in 1845 at a time when Haddam and Middletown shared the county seat.  By 1920, Haddam no longer had half-shire status, but its jail continued to serve the lower part of Middlesex County until the 1980s. 

 When the trial started, the state’s star witness was Julius Schutte, aged 22.  Julius testified that in the wee hours of the morning of December 10, 1915, he and his father had sneaked up to the Ball’s shack in the north end of the Tylerville section of Haddam, less than a mile from Schutte’s house. Julius carried a 38-caliber rifle and oilcan, while his father brought along a shotgun, a bag of kindling, and two bags of shavings.

While on their way to the Ball property, Emil soaked the shavings in the oil. Julius stated that his father ordered him to put the bags of shavings next to a rear entrance to the Ball house and light them with matches. After the fire began near the back of the house, screams could be heard within. Emil opened fire on the Balls as they fled out the front door. First Mrs. Ball was shot and tumbled down an embankment in front of the house.

Jacob Ball, eighteen years old, came out with a revolver in his hand and was shot. The elder Joseph Ball was shot as he ran around the house looking for the source of the fire. Only the boy seemed to remain alive. Julius fired two shots at the boy, but both missed. Emil Schutte walked up to Jacob Ball, put his foot on his shoulder, and fired point blank into the back of his neck. Together, Julius and Emil dragged the bodies back into the burning house.  As they left the scene, Emil turned back to watch the house now engulfed in flames and commented to his son, “The fire is burning fine. It looks pretty.”

 What was the root of this venomous hatred Schutte felt? A feud had been brewing between the Balls and the Schuttes for several years.  Both were immigrant families who had arrived in America about the same time, but their experiences could not have been more different.  The Balls were Bohemians, from the western province of modern-day Czechoslovakia, near eastern Germany.

The Balls resided in the Moodus section of East Haddam for several years where they became wards of the town. In about 1909, the town of East Haddam bought them a house in Tylerville, on an unused road that ran from the turnpike to the Camp Bethel grounds (off present-day Ferry Road) to give them a fresh start and remove them as a burden on their community. Their one-room house, barely more than a hut, provided them with merely a roof over their heads.

 The Balls were considered undesirables and their neighbors greeted their arrival with disdain. Probably none more than neighbor, Emil Schutte. Joseph Ball’s house stood adjacent to a small building he used to house woodchoppers in his employ, including Dennis LeDuc.  Schutte wanted to sell this piece of property south of the Ball place, but was ordered off the land by a shotgun-toting Joseph Ball.  Schutte commented several times that he felt he would never be able to sell the land as long as the Balls lived next door.

There is no doubt that life had been hard for the Ball family. Numerous accounts refer to them as an elderly couple. However, Joseph and his wife were barely 50 years old when they moved to Haddam. Just prior to leaving East Haddam, the local probate court judge committed their two sons, Michael, just nine, and 12-year-old Jacob, to the county orphanage in Haddam because the parents were unable to properly care for their children. For almost two years, the boys lived in the county home, less than two miles from the Ball house in Tylerville.

 The Ball children were allowed to attend the Haddam center school, at least for a time. William Meyer, who I interviewed in 1990 about his early life in Haddam, was asked by his teacher to tutor Michael Ball, in about 1910.  It seems the teacher felt Michael’s New York accent was unacceptable and William was charged with tutoring him in a Haddam dialect of the English language. 

Stay tuned:  The final installment will walk you through the last days of Schutte’s trial for the murder of the Ball family.