It was the afternoon of Thursday, October 6th, 1921. A twelve-year old girl named Janette Lawrence had a babysitting job after school in her hometown of Madison, New Jersey. She was seen leaving the house on Fairview Avenue where she’d been babysitting, but an hour later, she still had not arrived at her own home, which was only a few blocks away. Her mother became frantic and summoned police, who immediately organized local search parties.
It didn’t take very long for a couple of young Boy Scouts to track down Janette Lawrence. She was lying dead in a pool of blood in the middle of nearby Kluxen Woods. She had been raped, her throat was slashed, and she had been stabbed more than two dozen times with what was thought to be a pocketknife. Her wrists were bound together behind her back with hemp cord, and a man’s handkerchief was knotted around her neck.
Almost from the beginning of the investigation, it seemed obvious that police were grasping at straws to try to apprehend a suspect. Though their first suspicion was that the killer was probably a greenhouse worker, since the hemp cord use to bind the girl’s hands was of a distinctive type used to tie rose bushes together for shipment, the first person they arrested was actually a fourteen-year-old boy named Francis Kluxen.
Francis had indeed been in the woods that afternoon shooting, but he claimed he had been some distance from the area where the body was found, and hadn’t heard anything unusual. Francis was not found to have any blood on his clothes, and even though he did carry a pocketknife, it didn’t have any blood on it either. As there wasn’t enough evidence to hold the teenager, he was summarily released.
The next candidate was a homeless man named Frank Felice, who supposedly fit the description of a man a witness had seen in the area at around the time of the murder. This dubious identification, however, was the only solid evidence police had, and Frank Felice was also quickly dismissed as a suspect.
Another rough-looking transient named Frank Ruke was arrested next, and he reportedly resisted being taken into Kluxen Woods, turning his head away from the exact spot where Janette’s body was found, but he was likewise let go for lack of evidence.
And then, in what was beginning to seem like a morbid comedy of errors, police arrested another man named Frank Jancarak, solely on the testimony of a former co-worker of his who told investigators that he had confessed to the murder. While it was true that Frank Jancarak had actually worked at a greenhouse, linking him back to the authorities’ earlier theory concerning the hemp cord, there was little other indication that he had been responsible for the crime. Though he did stand trial, he was promptly acquitted
Apparently at a loss, police arrested Francis Kluxen again about a year after the murder, and he was eventually put on trial, though he was also acquitted only a week later. Although the sentiment in Madison, New Jersey seemed sympathetic toward the teenager after his first arrest in 1921, the town essentially turned against him after his second release, perhaps due to his vilification in the media; and soon enough, most of the residents became convinced that he had been the killer all along. Francis was subjected to verbal and physical abuse every time he left his home, and on one occasion was even fired upon by four men in a passing car.
The revilement of Francis Kluxen got so bad, in fact, that a local millionaire named Monell Sayre apparently took pity on the boy and convinced Francis’s parents to let the middle-aged man adopt the teenager. Though obviously there was more than a hint of impropriety about the entire situation, especially by modern standards, the Kluxens agreed, and Francis went to live in Monell’s mansion.
In yet another outlandish development in a case rife with them, Francis Kluxen, who had gone on to join the Marines, was arrested in 1932 in San Diego for attacking two men with a meat cleaver and robbing them, though he was apparently only fined fifty dollars before being released.
In 1934, he shot a man in self-defense, and a year later, he was arrested again for a series of burglaries and for various weapons violations and possession of stolen goods. He evidently married later on and had a daughter, and although he and his benefactor Monell Sayre evidently had a falling out at some stage, Francis did adopt the surname of Sayre, and reportedly did receive all or a portion of Monell Sayre’s estate when he died.
Whether Francis Kluxen was indeed responsible for the rape and murder of twelve-year-old Janette Lawrence will likely never be known for sure.
Crime Immemorial 