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Travel, History, and Henry Mead in America's Dairyland |
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Headless Henry Mead |
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Henry Mead did not show up for dinner.
As peculiar as Mr. Mead was -- he refused to consume food until it cooled, for example, believing that hot food was unhealthy -- he nevertheless took every meal at the boarding house located one block from his business, the Exchange Bank of Waupaca, before returning to work.
Having no family or close friends, Mead usually stayed inside the tiny bank where he worked around the clock and slept on a cot in the back room. The bank was reliable, unlike many others of the day, and its founder was generous when it came to charity. So when the dependable “H.C.” Mead failed to show up for dinner that October day in 1882, two boarding house waitresses walked to his simple white bank building and knocked on the front door. One of the girls cupped her hands around her eyes and peered through the front window. The other walked around to the living quarters in back. She found a wooden box and boosted herself to the window. The scene “was of the most sickening character,” reported the local newspaper. “The room was spattered with blood, the floor smeared with gore, and pools of blood had collected against the baseboard.” Another account described “great chunks of oozing flesh” driven into the wall by a shotgun blast. “One of (Mead’s) eyes was carried nearly to the bed, his head was shot to pieces.” The crime haunted Waupaca for generations -- not only the shocking murder committed on a stormy night, but tales of courtroom dramas, conspiracies, threats, deathbed confessions, and for nearly a century, the evidence held inside the old county courthouse.
The city of Waupaca, pop. 5,700, typifies the area. Named after Native American words meaning “clear water,” the community resembles a Norman Rockwell print. There’s a vintage bandstand on the town square. Cafes and storefronts line the business district. Around the corner, standing proud in its old age, is the historic Exchange Bank, built in 1862. Henry Mead started the bank and can be credited with bringing financial stability to early Waupaca. Mead’s trademark dependability -- working all alone late into the night -- made him an easy mark. Still, the banker’s violent slaying unleashed a torrent of emotion and press coverage. Justice was demanded. First, a pioneer pimp named Alfred Vandecar was tried and acquitted.
Finally, in 1892, with accusations and innuendo at fever pitch even after a decade, a grand jury investigation indicted ten local men, three as principals (Pryor included) and seven as accessories. One was a well-connected businessman and politician. Prosecutors believed they needed a certain piece of evidence to help present their case. On a winter day months before the trial, three men trudged to Mead’s final resting place with shovels in hand, dreading their chore and not just because the ground was frozen. Their labors resulted in a stunned courtroom as prosecutors held aloft the exhumed skull of Henry Mead, the frontal lobe blown clean off from a shotgun blast. The trial dragged on for six weeks in a sweltering courtroom. The jury dragged on far less. The men were acquitted after 24 minutes of deliberation.
With the acquittals on the books, the case remained open. The evidence stayed in the courthouse. In 1929 it was reported that one of the accused men made a deathbed confession twenty-two years earlier in which he identified seven participants -- some of whom were named in the 1892 trial, others who were never implicated -- who robbed the bank after a night of drinking on the Waupaca town square. The case, however, never officially closed. Succeeding generations told the story of the murder. School-age children learning about local history made the rite-of-passage field trip to view the grizzly evidence held in the courthouse. Mead’s name was whispered during backyard campouts when the evening produced strange sounds.
But can anyone who knows the story rest comfortably knowing that justice was never served…and that inside the old Exchange Bank of Waupaca, the “Mead Bank,” hidden underneath decades of paint and dust, exists the mark of Cain left by the perpetrator on that stormy evening, Oct. 7, 1882. Crimson stains made indelible as only the blood of the innocent can do.
Classic Wisconsin |
“A fearful strain, and sort of a horrid dread seemed to hang like a cloud over the town,” reported the Oshkosh Northwestern. “The feeling was general that the perpetrators were daily mingling with the citizens; that a small conclave of those within the secret was ready to adopt any means in their desperation to throttle the discovery of the guilty parties.” |
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Eight years after the murder, just as the reward kitty was about to expire, Tab Pryor, the night watchman on the fateful night, was taken into custody then released.
