Alice’s new attitude had penetrated into John Charles’s general understanding of the area in which he lived; or perhaps that understanding, responsive only to sharp variations, had failed to contain Hermie; or perhaps it had slowly, finally, failed to contain anything that was not already defined by it. Somehow within this labyrinth of understanding one single action became necessary. This action, by itself, is opaque and bleak, as if there had never been an infidelity charge against Hermie — never had been a desperate confusion in John C: just as though there had never been a Chief Black Hawk living on the Rock River, only someone who had built a huge monument resembling an Indian and called it that: just as though there had never been a world full of people thirty years ago. The stone remains and fantasy is the only way of memory. John Charles called Alice Van Hooser on the telephone while she sat eating dinner with her mother, August 16, 1939.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hello, Lil?”
“Yes.”
“This is John.”
“Where are you?” she asked. (This must have been unexpected. John C. had used the phone before, many times, to call Alice. Unusual, I believe it was, but not important enough to be exigent.)
“I’m in the hospital. Hermie has been seriously hurt. She got out of the car to shoot at a crow with my shotgun and it exploded. She is in critical condition and they don’t know if she will live.”
“What?!” And John Charles retold the story — his wife was dying from an injury she had received when an old shotgun she was firing exploded. Alice stayed home that day with her mother and talked again to John C. that afternoon. He said that there was no change in Hermie’s condition and asked her to come to Dirty John’s that evening. She did and John C. closed the bar early in order to visit his wife before visiting hours were closed.
The following afternoon Alice Van Hooser went into downtown St. Louis after work to buy a piece of material for her mother to make draperies with. From the front window of Woolworths she saw Hermie Sledge carrying her baby and walking toward the post office. She, Alice, changed a quarter and telephoned John C. at his home. He answered and he sounded tired. “She was in the intensive care ward and they wouldn’t let me see her,” said John Charles and added that the divorce proceedings were complete and that he only had to go to his lawyer’s office and sign them. Alice was not able to find a suitable color of material and drove home. John Charles was in some way surprised by the phone call.
He bought a box of twelve-gauge shotgun shells — Nitro Long Range Express No. 4 Shot — and a stick of dynamite. He cut open one of the shells and poured the shot down the toilet in his basement. He placed the shotless shell in the firing chamber of a single-barrel gun and cut open the stick of dynamite. With a kitchen spoon he poured two and a half large spoonfuls of dynamite down the barrel of the gun and poked a piece of wadded paper after it with a cleaning rod. He carried the weapon outside and laid it on the floorboards of the back seat of his automobile.
Two days later he asked Hermie to bring the baby and come for a ride in the country. She consented and they drove out of St. Louis. After two hours of leaning over the steering wheel and looking up into the sky John Charles stopped the car and asked Hermie if she wanted to take a shot at a crow. Hermie at first couldn’t see the crow, then she didn’t want to shoot at it because the noise would frighten the child. John C. offered to take the child away, but by this time the crow was gone. They stopped at Dirty John’s on the way home and went inside for a beer, though Hermie complained. John C. then wanted her to go outside and shoot bottles in the dump behind the tavern but she didn’t want to. He asked her to come outside and throw bottles in the air for him while he shot, but she declined again and demanded to be taken home. Hugh Carson, the daytime bartender, said he’d throw some bottles up in the air for him, and John C., irritated, asked if he wouldn’t rather shoot them himself. The baby was screaming at the top of her lungs by then and John Charles and Hermie and the baby went home.
He took the shotgun out of the car and put it in the basement, where he carried it from room to room, first putting it down and going upstairs, then coming down and moving it again, not sleeping well. Three days later he was sitting on the toilet in the basement and called upstairs to his wife. She came down and he pointed to the shotgun standing against the wall, indicating that there was something wrong with the firing pin, and asked Hermie to try it out. She did and the gun worked, decapitating Hermie and splattering huge pieces of her around on the basement walls, running blood on the floor. John Charles got off the toilet and vomited. He ran upstairs and met a boarder, told him to call the hospital, that a gun his wife was shooting had exploded, and ran outside.
The police held an investigation and reporters took pictures of the room in which the calamity took place. The paper wrote “A HORRIBLE ACCIDENT.” But John Charles was not out dancing in the streets. He was sitting in an uncleaned corner of Dirty John’s drinking bourbon and raving internally. He wanted nothing but to go back to his basement and reconstruct the act again and again, and vomit till exhaustion came over him. But he was hiding from the reporters — it was all he could do to be coherent enough to telephone Alice and tell her what had happened, and that didn’t take much.
But Hermie’s death was not an accident of that kind, and it was a short time before the investigators noticed that no shot could be found in the walls, and that no Nitro Long Range Express No. 4 Shot known could blow holes in water pipes from six feet away, holes in concrete. More careful inspection showed the missing shot lying in the bottom of the toilet, its weight too heavy to be moved by the force of the water. The sheriff was notified and he brought John Charles to the St. Louis station house for questioning.
Thirty-six hours later, without sleep, the sheriff again reconstructed the supposed murder for John Charles who still sat in his chair saying: “No . . . No . . . That isn’t true.... Give me a cigarette, you bums.” But this time the sheriff brought in a blown-up picture of his wife after the explosion, severed fingers and eye-gell in perfect focus, and John C. gave up. He confessed putting the dynamite in the shotgun, getting his wife to shoot it, and wished he had died with her. The sheriff let him go back into a cell, where he fell asleep and slept for three hours, when he was awakened to retell the story to the County Attorney.
The stupidity of the shot in the toilet, of removing the shot at all, and the confession afterward were not grossness or even depravity. John Charles was not a killer by any estimation or in any extent except that he had killed his wife — an accident within his mind, a slight oversimplification that he might have avoided if he had only stayed in bed later one morning or had a little less to drink some afternoon. If only he hadn’t thought about it, the killing. If only he hadn’t killed Hermie. And I must remind myself again in order to get through this next part, he did kill Hermie.
On September 3, 1939, Howard Vendermarken, County Attorney for St. Louis County, filed the County Attorney’s True Information statement at the State Court House, wording the charge as follows: “That John Charles Sledge, in the County and State aforesaid did on or about the twenty-second day of August, 1939, A.D., unlawfully, feloniously, and with the intent thereof, murder Mrs. Hermie Sledge, his wife.” John Charles was brought into court and asked by Judge Garnold if he had legal representation; to this he answered no. Asked then if he wished legal representation; to this he answered yes. Asked if he had preference he answered no. Asked if Wayne B. Hanek met with his approval and he answered yes. Newspaper reporters asked Wayne B. Hanek if there was a special reason he had been chosen and he answered no, that it was not in his power to refuse to act as legal counsel when appointed to do so by the court. Asked to make further comments on the “dynamite murderer” and he declined.
Two days later John Charles was in court with his lawyer. He sat on a wooden chair, highly varnished, and listened to Howard Vendermarken’s motion to change the wording of the County Attorney’s True Information by inserting the words “willfully
