Poisoned Pie and a Plea from Jail: Lost Minneapolis Murders Resurface

Delve into the dramatic stories of Olga Kangas and Mary Showers, two women whose alleged crimes offer a glimpse into a turbulent past.

Why do some crime stories live on in history books while others fade into yellowed obscurity, hidden in newspaper archives? It can’t be because the stories are boring, as the two forgotten tales of murder I am about to relate to you are anything but.

Olga Kangas (left) in 1915 and Mary Showers (right) in 1939. Images courtesy of the Hennepin County Library.

Girl Says Murder Charge is Climax of Troubled Life

That’s the headline that ran in the Minneapolis Journal on July 8th, 1915. The “girl” was 24-year-old Olga Kangas, who stood accused of attempted murder after her “escort,” Fred Henderson, died on the porch of the boarding house where she lived. From her jail cell, she wept and said, “I don’t see why anyone should want to cause me all this trouble.”

She told reporters that she’d come to Minneapolis at the age of 14, where she worked as a waitress, a cashier, and in factories. With the money she saved, she was able to pay for her sisters’ education and buy her parents “a farm and some horses.”

And yet, her efforts to make other people happy allegedly ended with Fred Henderson. Fred’s brother, W. G. Henderson, who lived in the same boarding house as Olga Kangas, testified that she’d said, “I’d rather see him dead than go with any other woman.” W. G. Henderson said his brother went out with “several other girls.”

On June 21, 1915, Fred and Olga went to a movie. Afterward, Olga suggested they go for lunch, but Fred refused, complaining of a headache. That night, Olga rushed into the rooming house where she lived and asked her landlady, Mrs. Evelyn Brown, for the telephone number of a cab company. Olga complained that the cab took too long to arrive. When it did, the driver came inside and called for an ambulance on Olga’s instruction. That’s when Mrs. Brown saw Fred on the porch “lying there, rigid, his arms thrown back, froth at his mouth.”

First responders would later testify that Fred died on the stretcher, between the porch and the ambulance. At autopsy, the city chemist declared Fred had died of strychnine poisoning. On Saturday, July 3, 1915, Detectives Crummy and Brunskill arrested Olga on murder charges.

Olga insisted that while she and Fred had quarreled during their six-year courtship, she was not responsible for his death. She said on the night of his death, he’d proposed to her and asked her to go to Kansas City with him. “I never hated him,” she said, “and one would have had to hate him to kill him.”

Olga said, “I never saw him take any poison and I certainly didn’t give him any.” The first part of that statement would eventually take a 180-degree turn, but Mrs. Brown seemed to corroborate the second half. She told Olga’s attorneys that it would have been impossible for Olga to bring any “food, water, candy or anything like that” to Fred without her knowing, as the only taps were in the bathroom and the kitchen, and Olga would have had to pass Mrs. Brown’s room to get to either location.

Later, Olga directly contradicted her previous statement, insisting that Fred had a history of manipulating her by taking pills. “He took a white pill of some sort and it made him sick. After he was better, he told me he had done it just to bluff me. I told him if he ever did it again, I would not have anything more to do with him. I believe he intended to bluff me this last time and he must have taken too much.”

This reversal — from “I never saw him take any poison” to “he took a white pill of some sort” — is the sort of shift that should’ve aroused suspicion. The idea that he’d “bluff” her with strychnine, a poison that can kill at a relatively low dose, is strange too. None of that mattered, though, because she made that statement after the grand jury voted “no bill.”

Olga was released on July 12, 1915.

Eater of Poison Pie to Recover; Daughter Held

The Sunday edition of the Star Tribune reported on December 10th, 1939, that while the “slender brunet [sic]” Mary Showers sat in the matron’s ward of the city jail, she was told her father, whom she’d tried to poison, would recover. She showed no emotion during this revelation.

Mary, who was 24, wanted to free her mother from her father, 64-year-old William Showers. Before he went off to work at Fort Snelling on a WPA project one winter day, she sprinkled rat poison under the crust of his blueberry pie and sent him on his way, execution in hand. But Mary changed her mind and called the police from a Lake Street drug store.

An officer went out to Fort Snelling to warn William not to eat the pie, but by then it was too late. William was admitted to the hospital at Fort Snelling, where doctors pumped his stomach. From his hospital bed, he told authorities he didn’t want them to prosecute his daughter. He also denied that he’d had any “trouble” with his wife.

While initially doctors believed William Showers would recover, and that the teaspoon of poison Mary had used wasn’t enough to kill a person, he died on December 16, 1939. The Hennepin County Grand Jury voted not to charge Mary, though they felt that she needed “institutional care” and were dissatisfied with the way police had handled the case.

Contrary to William’s statement that he’d had “no trouble” with his wife, the Star Tribune reported that Mary and her mother both told the grand jury that he’d “long terrorized them with his brutalities.”

Mary’s attorney, Arthur Conley, alleged that the police officer who was dispatched to Fort Snelling to warn William about the pie went without knowing his name or description, and only found William at the Fort by accident.

Mary Showers shows up again in the Star Tribune archives in December of 1948. Under a listing of applications for marriage licenses, it shows a Walter P. Kline marrying a Mary Showers. Could it be another Mary Showers? Quite possibly. A deep dive through Ancestry.com, which I don’t subscribe to, could answer that question. But it stands to reason that a young woman who attempted to murder her own father might not be ready for marriage for a long time.

Ripped From the Library Archives

While the stories of these two troubled, working-class women are largely forgotten today, the digital trail that led me to them keeps their testimonies alive. I was searching for something completely unrelated in the Hennepin County Library’s digital collections when I saw “poisoners” in the item description of one of the photos. Okay, so it was a little anti-climactic when I clicked on “poisoners” and found that there were only two entries in the category. But the stories I found in newspaper archives (thank you, newspapers.com!) are not short on drama.

Whether or not you sympathize with these women, it’s clear that poverty and violence drove their actions, and because of that, their stories are timeless.

Historical fiction tip of the week