Gruesome Illinois: Murder, Madness, and the Macabre in the Prairie State

The first room they searched was thirteen-year-old Georgia Dawson’s. “She was lying on her back with her head turned to the right and the entire left side of her skull crushed,” reported one of the men. Her body was lying in the center of the bed, below her blood-spattered pillows. The girl’s head was “so badly mutilated that recognition was impossible.”

For some unexplained reason, the girl had decided to sleep in her sister’s bedroom. She got undressed in her room, dropped her clothes in the middle of the floor, then walked into her sister’s bedroom. Detectives found an open book on the dresser, so they assumed she read for a while before going to sleep.

After viewing the body, the men pulled the bedcovers back over her and moved onto the next room.

William and Charity Dawson appeared to have died not knowing what happened to them. “The work of the murderer had been so well done that the wife did not awaken when the blow that killed her husband was struck. Her hands were folded across her bosom as though in peaceful repose.” William Dawson’s hands were also folded across his chest, and his pocket watch was still in his pajama pocket—helping to rule out robbery as a motive. And yet, “their heads were almost mashed to a pulp.”

The Chicago Tribune named the ax murderer the “Sunday Night Murderer,” because he killed every other Sunday. Fourteen murders were attributed to the maniac, and more were expected unless he was captured before October 29th.

On Sunday night, September 20th, he butchered two families in Colorado Springs—the Wayne and Burnham families.

William E. Dawson, his wife, Charity, and thirteen-year-old daughter, Georgia, died at Monmouth, Illinois on September 30th.

Two weeks later, on Sunday, October 15th, the Sunday Night Murderer killed Will Showman and his family at Ellsworth Kansas.

Gruesome Illinois is a collection of true-life stories - most of them rescued from old newspaper accounts published over 100 years ago. Only a few of the events in this book - such as the Monmouth Ax Murders have ever made it into print. Except maybe in musky-old county histories. Even then, they are lucky to rate a paragraph.

Read them now, if you dare!

Book 2 in the Gruesome Series.