The Erie Strangler: Michigan's Accidental Pirate

hello everybody welcome back to another brand new episode of the casual criminalist i as always i'm your casual criminalist or as everyone points out whenever i say that no simon we know you're from your other channels you're the boy with the blaze i'm like okay but that doesn't really seem appropriate on this channel about terrible crimes uh this one is all about the erie strangler or callum today's writer always the writer has given me the alternate title the tragic tale of michigan's accidental pirate which sounds very interesting if you're new here what happens is callum will write me a script which i have in front of me uh if you're viewing this on youtube you will see the script which has a big misprint in it i see that my printer screwed something up so hopefully that won't affect things too much today uh if you're listening on podcasts as well welcome if you are uh watching i know that most of you are not subscribed but i look in the analytics and i'm like look i think it's like 70 of you are not subscribed to the casual criminals so get on it click that subscribe button if you're listening uh as a podcast or whatever leave me a review or as i always say if you watch if you're listening on spotify they don't have reviews or the option to subscribe so that is all rather disappointing anyway let's just crack on uh callum wrote it for me i'm going to read it i'm going to add some comments blah blah blah blah and yes that'll be all rather fun [Music] picture a pirate you're probably imagining a black tricorn is that the weird hat the pirates callum has such an extensive vocabulary and knowledge of words i'm like tricord so a pirate hat eyepatch cutlass and a cute little parrot on the shoulder their harmless halloween costume image is almost enough to make you forget that this lot were some of the most cold-blooded killers of all time dressing up as blackbeard now is basically like cosplaying saddam hussein in a few centuries time yeah i mean that is kind of true and then i saw that movie captain phillips with tom hanks and it's like oh yeah real pirates they're less fun what you should probably really be picturing is the mug shot of joseph kerwin one of the last people to fall foul of the usa's anti-piracy laws the murder and robbery ones not the ones that stopped you copying vhs tapes from blockbuster yeah yes stopped me well done anti-piracy laws you solved the problem it wasn't the market with spotify and netflix that solved the problem and i'm sure there is still piracy it's been it's been a long time since i allegedly not that i ever did allegedly did any piracy although nothing like a pirate in the traditional sense this 20th century serial killer provides a far more accurate image of the reality of crime on the high seas his sworded biography is far from the kind of kid-friendly pirate story you're used to see i i really think like when i think of pirates now i do think of that tom hanks movie rather than like blackbeard or some but just as interesting in its own right so without further ado let's dive right into the story of joseph kerwin aka the michigan pirate aka the eerie strangler he's got more names than puff daddy robbery on the western states the first little twist in our slightly more modern pirate story is that it didn't even take place at sea the main events take place on lake erie one of america's five great lakes with buffalo city on its eastern shore and detroit on the west on the 13th of september 1904 a ferry named the western states was making the crossing from east to west in a private cabin on board slept adelia sweeting a wealthy woman from the town of jackson m i michigan fingers crossed there was one i came across the other day i can't even remember what it was but i had no idea what state it was for i think it was me is there a state me memphis memphis is in tennessee see these things i don't know i'm not american please don't blame me i mean obviously i could look it up you could blame me for not looking it up but uh that's that's about it under the cover of darkness someone slipped open the door to her cabin unseen she awoke moments later with a stranger's hands around her neck throttling the life out of her a panicked adelia was only able to make out the silhouette of her attacker as he forced his weight down harder causing the blood vessels in her eyelids to rupture just as she began to black out her eyes are just enough to vaguely make out the features of the man the last face she'll ever see for about 10 minutes which is roughly how long it took her to regain consciousness very clever calum and yes i did have to read that twice because the first time i cut it out and i screwed it up miss sweeting had survived the attack with only some bruising and a killer headache however several of her belongings were missing from her room in person three pricey gold rings and 40 dollars in cash which is well over a grand in today's money and if there's a lesson there kids it's that inflation will destroy your money over time still dazed and terrified adelia was able to make it out of her room and onto the deck she managed to get the attention of a crew member who took her to see the captain bruce marks around her neck showed the force she had been choked with and her voice was reduced to a rough croak despite all of that the man in charge initially wrote off the whole thing as a hallucination clearly this hysterical woman was high on drugs or just suffering a bout of the vapors eventually the goddamn strangle marks on her neck convinced him to take the matter a bit more seriously very very negligent isn't it satisfied that adelia had in fact been attacked he prevented anyone from leaving by anchoring the ship far from the port at detroit the culprit would have to be one hell of a swimmer to make a getaway from all the way out there one of the crew was sent to retrieve a detective from the city and the rest waited quietly for his arrival knowing an attempted murderer was in their midst if this hasn't been turned into a movie already hollywood you've absolutely missed a trick this is like murder on the orient express but and when's that movie set it's gotta be around 100 years ago maybe more than a hundred years i don't know and i know it was a book i know it was a book being a bit of simon theoretic the merger on the is a book it's a famous book it's like look i've not read it but i have seen the movie and now i haven't seen the old movie i've just seen the new one it was okay [Music] capture detective frank wickens and wilkinson arrived on board his own personal agatha christie novel did agatha christie write the did she write murder on the orient express uh in the middle of the night and gathered what little details he could from miss sweeting uh she only had vague memories of her assailant's appearance there was little chance of them catching them through a simple ship-wide id parade so he then went about interviewing everyone on board one by one the reason this hasn't been made into a movie is it's too close to murder on the orange express right they all did it oh spoiler alert do we have to give spoiler alerts for books that are over 100 years old or however old it is his makeshift interrogation cell was the engine room where he metaphorically cranked up the heat on his suspects the one who sweated the most was a greaser someone who oils the machinery that is named joseph kerwin like everyone else on board he denied any knowledge of what had happened but he struggled to maintain his composure as he said so he was fidgety and terse in his answers without dna cctv or anything else actually useful to an investigation all that old-timey detectives had to go on was hunches and wilkinson pretty had a pretty good hunch that had found his man he tailed the ship worker to his family home in detroit and when the detectives and his colleagues raided the abode of the fidgety greecer they discovered the missing rings hidden away inside ah that is i mean with lack of any other evidence that is that is gonna be a bad time for you and this was definitely during the times where they would kill you for such crimes the eerie strangler was arrested there and then in front of his wife and geared and carted off to jail you're probably wondering what does any of this have to do with pirate simon did he bury the rings in the back garden and draft up a treasure map did he shoot a flintlock pistol at the cops while shouting our mighty stick with me it'll all make sense in a moment i get the feeling and i don't know if this is a spoiler because as i've said already i read these this is my first experience with this uh as as well my guess would be my guess would be that there is some specific weird wording of the law which defines piracy so it could be like breaking and entering into a cabin and causing harm to someone and thieving while at sea and it's all like that will fall into the legal definition of piracy or something it's it's like burglary i think at least in the uk isn't actually stealing things burglary is breaking into a place with the intention to steal things or do damage or vandalism or something it's it's weird it's weird i guess i'm going to guess it's going to be something like that it could be something entirely different and that would prove to you that i don't read these ahead of time no one believes i read these ahead of time and accidentally if i did they'd be better and you know i'd be more prepared an accidental pirate i told you already that the eerie strangler was far from the archetypal pirate really he was only a pirate according to a very politic peculiar technicality such a big brain it's all to do with distance from sure that a crime is committed in this case it happened 17 miles out in the middle of the lake and maritime law may know that a country's territorial waters end 12 nautical miles from their coast according to modern legislation this is about 13.8 normal miles or 22 kilometers they had to make nautical miles different from regular miles didn't they because miles and distance aren't complicated enough already this used to be only three nautical miles in the olden days judged because it was roughly the maximum range of cannons back then wow you learn something new every day today i found out which by the way is another channel i do on youtube you can look it up if you want to but i'd rather you just continue listening to this thank you um ah is it is it is it like international waters this is on a lake right so surely the whole lake is like you at ah but maybe it's on the canadian border that would make sense anyway look i'm going to stop guessing and i'm going to get on with some actual facts like the good fact boy that i am past that line wherever it lies you're no longer within the country's territorial waters that's where the high seas begin essentially different laws apply depending on how far out you are and which part of the waters you're in so by a similar quirk of the 1904 legal code the main charge against joseph kerwin technically qualified as the fantastically dramatic robbery on the high seas laws originally intended to punish murderous sea dogs for attacking merchant ships when now suddenly being applied on an inland lake only connected to the sea by a canal for the eerie strangler this was very bad news until that point he had only been looking at michigan state assault and grand larceny charges five years behind bars was the expectation oh yeah he didn't kill anyone so i said he was that you know he's gonna be killed or whatever but he didn't murder the the lady so okay five years seems pretty light ah seems fair that seems fair he found himself becoming an accidental pirate a group of people who the law treated much more harshly life in prison was the maximum possible punishment under michigan law for piracy but this was far enough outside the bounds of their regular jurisdiction the case was thrown up the chain to the federal courts this proved even worse for kevin because the standard federal penalty for piracy was death our strangling scallywag was well and truly screwed oh you've got a lawyer out of this one right i mean this is like getting caught on a technicality but the the wrong way around you're not gonna be executed for this surely surely not i kind of hope not even though this guy is obviously a bad dude [Music] his criminal past oh god maybe he's got a horrible criminal past he got away with murder loads of times a noose around the neck seems like a pretty disproportionate leg up from five years in prison so do we think that the eerie strangler was being treated unfairly before you decide for sure let's take a bit of time to dive back into his past as it turns out he had committed a fair few stranglings before this one the first was at the age of 14 still just a school-aged street urchin on the town in the town of toledo ohio after a few years spent confined to a reform school he did the exact same thing in illinois serving four years in prison before being released to start over in cleveland when in 1903 a prostitute named maggie snedergaard was found dead in a brothel strangled to death by an anonymous customer dubbed joe the strangler our future pirate naturally ranked fairly high on the list of suspects investigators initially caught his scent because two more women came forward reported being strangled and robbed in the days following the murder both were able to give matching descriptions of the man when the police eventually caught up with him they found the murdered woman's pocket watch in his jacket uh oh see this is why proper pirates buried their treasure twice in his career the strangler could have avoided implicating himself if he had just hidden his loot when the arrest hit the news the police in his hometown of toledo linked him to a cold case in which another prostitute named anna snyder was robbed and killed in an almost identical fashion frustratingly there wasn't enough evidence to move forward with either this crime or the maggie snedegar murder so joe the strangler ended up walking free to inflict that same violence upon others that is unfortunate some have speculated based on the nature of his crimes in which he never really bothered to hide his face from the victims preferring to look them in the eye as he assaulted or killed them that is psychomate there was very possibly a sexual motivation behind the crimes his carelessness had cost him several times already and that latest brush with the law was an extremely close call the strangler knew that himself so he decided to ease up on his crimes for a while he moved on to start a family in detroit he took a job on a certain ferry which ran along erie lake but once a strangler always a strangler by the time we caught up with him on that fateful night out on the lake his urges had resurfaced and kevin couldn't refrain from adding one more crime to his sizeable tally [Music] life in prison given that his latest crime was identical to those he had been suspected of in the past and he had been caught with the victim's rings in his possession the eerie strangler decided it would probably be best just to plead guilty this didn't preclude judge henry swan from issuing the death penalty there was still every chance that the strangler would find himself hanging from a rope before the end was out however swan decided that it was only fair he should be able to choose between the state and federal penalties on the table if you remember that meant a choice between life in prison or death swan decided on the former strangler i mean i i think like well that's not a hard decision but i do think there are people and i think we've covered at least one person who did choose death maybe it wasn't on casual christmas maybe it was on another channel but they chose to be hanged rather than accept a pardon um because they it's a pardon and not a pardon a commutation which would reduce the sentence to life in prison rather than execution because they just didn't want to spend the rest of their lives in like 18th century prison i mean who can blame them but i'd always choose like yeah no i'd rather live like i feel that's very ingrained in our biology the the desire to live not in everyone's biology obviously um suicide is a thing but in most people's biology so undecided on the former and the strangler was sent to the detroit house of correction a mixed state and federal institution to start his penultimate stint behind bars oh he's getting out and he's going back in again the case became a sensation in papers across the region partly because of the bizarre piracy designation that was anachronistic even for the early 20th century that's why the eerie strangler's life behind bars is relatively well documented he remained a popular curiosity for decades cohen was hardly a model prisoner at first and gained a reputation among the jailers for violence and unpredictability what a surprise the guy who was violent and unpredictable goes to prison and continues to be violent and unpredictable who knew that a convicted pirate with a pension for strangling prostitutes would have anger issues yeah i don't know why that is any like it's worth documenting at all he was violent no shh but perhaps it was just his environment that he was acting out against because seven years into his sentence he was transferred to a medium-security prison usp leavenworth in kansas prison psychologists there diagnosed him with constitutional psychopathic inferiority and noted evidence of frank psychosis i don't know what frank psychosis is but it sounds bad but despite all that long john strangler blossomed into the model prisoner prison citizen he became the conductor of the prison band mastered the trombone starred in musicals became their number one athlete ran the prison newspaper studied engineering and even went above and beyond to help out help put out a fire that broke out there a few years into his bid yeah i mean if i was this dude and you got to go to prison for like a long long time i'd just be like you embrace it like you don't i mean don't become like horribly violent and stuff like learn to engineering this is way better this is way better what a guy probably the most upstanding prostitute murderer i've ever had the good fortune of knowing that's what some who knew him thought anyway believing the strangler to be well and truly reformed his associates campaigned had been pardoned by president woodrow wilson then president warren g harding both of the appeals were denied kerwin would serve a full 22 years behind bars before finally tasting freedom again when he was paroled in 1926 that is a long stretch the papers wrote once again about the refined and reformed pirate boosting him to minor celebrity states once again so did our hero go on to become michigan's number one band leading poem writing tech savvy leading man no calum i know because you said penultimate stint behind bars so second to last well no actually he was caught in the act during another burglary and sent back to lenworth where he died in 1943. ho ho a pirate's life for all and that just about wraps up the story of the one and only inland pirate in american history it's for sure among the more unusual legal cases which the country has ever produced due to one little legislative quirk joseph cohen was able to swagger into prison as a modern-day blackbeard rather than the common killer that he was his case remains the only piracy conviction on america's great lakes although that could be a fun summer project for anyone with a kayak and a shotgun don't do that don't do again here at cash criminals we don't recommend doing crimes okay just remember that as long as you get really really good at the trombone the public will apparently forgive you for your sins and campaign to have you pardoned yeah that is a bit ridiculous isn't it was it perhaps all the hype and fanfare around the piracy designation which made this possible for joseph kerwin it's certainly true that it adds a bit of a quirky veneer to distract from an otherwise awful story essentially this accidental pirate was little more than a common crook who got a kick out of strangling women often to death and funded his lifestyle by stealing their possessions i hope all you disney executives out there have been taking notes for pirates of the caribbean 17. the curse of the sexually deviant serial killer will take our royalties in check thank you ah pirates of the carrot i think i saw the first pirates of the caribbean and i didn't see any of the others but i was looking them up the other day oh i think we made a video or something and i was like i found out that one of the pirates of the caribbean movies like pirates the gabby and four or whatever it's one of the most expensive movies ever made and i'm like people actually saw this and then you look at the box office take and it's like wow yeah people really go to see pirates the caribbean like 19 with johnny depp who's become progressively more weird as his career's gone on dismembered appendices number one one thing which hasn't changed in the hundred odd years since the days of the eerie strangler is that americans sure do love a good lawsuit while the stranglers court date was approaching adelia sweeting sued the ferry company over her treatment alleging that the captain dismissed her as a drug addict and a cabin boy ignored her pleas for help she initially pursued them for twenty five thousand dollars but ended up winning twelve thousand dollars which how much 364 thousand dollars in today's body good lord number two despite his bad fortune in committing his crime way out on the waters of the lake it could have been much worse for kevin had he strangled his victim closer to the departure port of buffalo the judge would have had to choose between the federal penalty and the new york state penalty that would have been a coin toss between death and death well wasn't he a lucky chappie only getting 22 years in prison this has been an episode of the casual criminalist i do hope you enjoyed it as always as i say if you're watching this on youtube you have a like button to smash and a subscribe button to gently click on if you're listening as a podcast remember also subscribe leave me a review if you can that would be grands and i'll see you next time thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: The Casual Criminalist

Views: 196,619

Keywords: true crime

Id: wlQ1havLZDM

Length: 20min 53sec (1253 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 09 2021