The Strange Case of Infant Wolf

Note: The following account was taken from the book Play the Yellow Tape by Bobbie Lee, published in 2006. This is a very rare and excellent collection of historical criminal accounts from the Fort Wayne area in Indiana.

Mr. Joseph Harter heard a sound not unlike groaning coming from outside his bedroom window. Getting up, he went to the casement, threw the drapes wide, and stared out into the illimitable darkness. And what, do you suppose, he saw there?

It was a young woman with an infant, curled up on the grass. Mr. Harter was quite too stunned for words, but, for some strange reason, didn't move to immediately investigate. (Note: this might have had something to do with him still being in his nightgown.)

As the world lightened around him, he saw the inert figure stir, rise, take up the infant bundle, and make for the receding shadow. He went out to examine the place where the mysterious girl had lain. It was a spot marked by a trail of blood—one that led, eventually, to New Haven, Indiana. But first, it led to the Wabash & Erie Canal, which ran, snake-like, quite close to Mr. Harter's house.

And there, on the edge of the water, lapping it like the dismal tongue of some drooling beast, was the bundle of poor Nameless Wolf—the infant child that had been murdered, strangled, and dumped unceremoniously at the water’s edge. A baby that had died—been killed, rather—the moment it took its first breath of good, God-fearing Hoosier air.

The town marshal (here nameless, but let's call him Smith) traced the bloody trail back to New Haven, to the doorstep of the Wolf family. Mrs. Wolf answered the door.

“Ma’am,” said Smith, “we have reason to believe that a young woman responsible for a heinous crime made her way back here. Has anyone entered your home, or have you seen anything suspicious in the past few hours?”

He may have said something very like this, although, of course, this is our personal recreation of the dialogue. Mrs. Wolf, stunned to her core, said: “Only my daughter Maggie has returned from one of her early morning walks. She took to her bed right after, saying she felt poorly.”

Maggie Wolff was arrested and taken back to Fort Wayne. Along the way, she confessed to having given birth right there under Harter’s window. (What did she do with the umbilicus, one wonders? Bite it in half?)

She was taken by Town Marshal Smith to Oyster Bay Restaurant, where she could eat and recuperate (they were all softies toward miscreant young women in those bygone days). Alas, history does not provide us with any details as to what she ordered.

It was here that she confessed once again to giving birth to the baby, which she immediately strangled and then left at the water’s edge.

She likewise confessed that the father was the scion of a prominent Fort Wayne family—one that had, we may assume, endeavored to have poor, manipulated, and exploited Maggie keep quiet, or perhaps even abort; we cannot be sure. But surely the young man did not think she would ever stoop to murder.

Facing death, surely, it fell to four different doctors to “examine” Maggie, to determine if, in fact, she was the mother of the murdered tot.

Each did so, and it was soon assessed that she, in point of fact, while apparently having given birth, was free from the taint of having ever engaged in sexual congress. Miraculous, surely.

She was hastily acquitted, although the account does not make clear exactly what befell the unhappy damoiselle, or the final dispensation of her earthly affairs.

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Read my book: Theater of the Worm: Essays on Poe, Lovecraft, Bierce, and the Machinery of Dread. By Tom Baker