The streets of Milwaukee, Wisconsin were dark and sparsely populated as Edwin Smith made his way home at a little past midnight on Saturday, August 23rd, 1960. But just as he steered his vehicle past the four-hundred block of North Plankinton Avenue, the quiet night was shattered by the sound of a woman screaming for help.
Edwin soon discovered the source of the cries in an alley: Ida Lowry, a seventy-six-year-old woman who was something of an eccentric fixture about town, was lying in a pool of blood. She had been raped, and severely beaten with a blunt object.
Ida was still alive when police descended on the scene, but all she was able to tell them was that her assailant had been a large white male who worked “at the bridge.” Sadly, she died of her injuries only an hour after arriving at the hospital.
Authorities were stumped as to who might have grabbed the harmless, elderly lady from the street and attacked her so savagely. Ida had been known around the neighborhood as something of a colorful character; after the death of her husband in 1950, she had become rather aimless, living alone in the Hotel Royal on Michigan Street and spending most of her time foraging through dumpsters for clothing, some of which she wore in a strikingly mismatched fashion.
During the course of the inquiry, investigators discovered that Ida had last been seen by the elevator operator at the hotel where she lived, leaving the building at around ten p.m. on Friday, April 22nd. The man told police that it wasn’t unusual for Ida to wander the streets at all hours of the day or night.
Ida did have two sisters living in the area, but neither had seen nor heard from her for weeks prior to her murder. Again, this was not unusual, as Ida had never kept in particularly close contact with either of them.
Several local men were brought in for questioning about the vicious crime. The first of these was a man who had been picked up for public drunkenness near the fateful alley about a week before the murder. He initially seemed a promising candidate, as he did work at a bridge on the railroad, fitting in with Ida’s vague description. Even more suspiciously, a police search of his home turned up a few articles of bloody clothing.
The man denied involvement in the crime, stating that he had been on a several-day drinking binge in his apartment, and that the blood was his, from a cut he had sustained while trying to open a bottle. And indeed, when the blood was tested, it did not match Ida Lowry’s blood type. The suspect was released.
Another drunk who had been brought in at about the same time actually admitted to police that he could have committed the crime, since he often had alcohol-fueled blackouts, and had previously been convicted of an attempted rape undertaken when he was so inebriated that he had no memory of his actions. This individual, however, was also eliminated by forensic evidence.
Though a few other men were considered persons of interest, all would eventually be cleared, and the murder consequently became one of Milwaukee’s best-known cold cases.
One strange detail contributing to the crime’s mystique was the fact that when authorities searched Ida’s room at the Hotel Royal, they found two keys to safe deposit boxes at nearby banks. One of these safe deposit boxes was empty, but the other contained $17,000 in cash, the equivalent to over $170,000 in 2022.
Why the quirky old woman chose to pick through garbage for a living when she was sitting on a small fortune remains as much an enigma as her horrifying death.
Crime Immemorial 