Louisville Murder & Mayhem by Keven McQueen

Author:Keven McQueen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Published: 2012-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Henry Zink. From the Louisville Courier-Journal of March 2, 1894. Reprinted courtesy of the Courier-Journal.

Zink was gone from Louisville, but in the meantime the identity of his partner, the “well-known” local photographer, was released. It was Walter Elrod, who not very convincingly denied the charge:

I have never made any obscene pictures, though I can safely say that nearly every other photographer in the city has done so. Some of them have large stocks on hand. Zink came to me about four months ago and wanted some pictures. I had three or four that were given me by a friend. They were works of art and I gave them to him, more to get rid of them than anything else.

Elrod invited police to search his gallery without a warrant. Two officers did so, but the Courier-Journal editorially berated their methods of evidence gathering: “When the Louisville police search a photograph gallery for obscene pictures they saunter in, pick up about twenty negatives out of several hundred, saunter out again and proclaim that there is no ‘case.’”

The case degenerated into a blame game. The police said they were ready to arrest the photographer Elrod if Inspector McAfee gave them proof he was guilty. McAfee said that he could not do so unless two unnamed “reputable citizens” who claimed to have seen pornographic negatives in Elrod’s studio stepped forth and swore out a warrant. McAfee finally left town without revealing the names of these citizens. One of them may have been Joseph Hutti, a photographer who told the Courier-Journal that he used to work for Elrod but had quit his job in a fit of moral indignation in August 1893 because his employer printed dirty pictures for customers—including a judge, who wanted forty-five dollars’ worth. The disgruntled former employee claimed that Elrod had hundreds of such negatives, some of which he bought from other distributors, some of which he made himself using local women as subjects. Hutti also said he was willing to swear in court to the truth of his statements. If his story was true, it seems inconceivable that the police who searched Elrod’s studio could have missed all those pictures unless they weren’t looking very diligently. (Or, possibly, Elrod destroyed them as soon as he heard that his partner Zink had been caught. Hutti pointed out that the negatives were so small, a couple hundred of them could be hidden in one’s pockets.)

And yet, for all his burning desire to see justice done, it seems Joseph Hutti didn’t swear out a warrant against Elrod.

It seems that all this fuss and bother was being enacted to keep the public and press happy, since Kentucky had no laws against manufacturing and distributing pornography in the first place. The police’s lack of interest was unmistakable, but they could hardly be faulted for lacking zeal in pursuing a case that could not be successfully prosecuted in local courts. On November 26, the Courier-Journal ran a column publishing the opinions of a number of prominent

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