On December 6, 1887, wealthy Wichita real estate investor J.E. Johnston shot and killed his wife Clara (née Black) and then shot and killed himself. The brutal murder-suicide left four orphaned children, a devastated father and grandfather, numerous grieving friends, and a shocked city.
There was no obvious reason why J.E. would kill his wife and himself, but the public would later learn that he was struggling with his mental health and his wife was terrified of him and feared for her life. J.E. was “crazy,” a “dangerous maniac,” and “mad as a March hare.” The headlines and accompanying stories contained sensational words and gory details.
One of the most horrible tragedies that was ever enacted in Wichita occurred at the corner of Douglas and Hydraulic. J.E. Johnston, of the firm Blackwelder & Johnston, one of the most prominent real estate firms in the city, shot and killed his wife and then committed suicide.
The Wichita Star, December 6, 1887 (transcribed)
Mr. Robert Black was in the sitting room of his palatial home of E. Douglas avenue when he heard two shots from a revolver coming from the room of Mr. and Mrs. Johnston. He rushed to the room and found his only child, Mrs. Johnston, lying at the west side of the room. She was unconscious and in a few moments died before his eyes. Blood and brainy matter … oozed from both sides of the head.
The Wichita Breeze, December 10, 1887 (transcribed)
[J.E.] told the physician that he believed everyone was his enemy and if not for his children, he’d rather be dead than alive. The doctor is firmly of the belief that Johnston was insane at the time.
The Wichita Weekly Beacon, Dec 14, 1887 (transcribed)
December 6, 1887 – The Murder-Suicide
Some of the more detailed newspaper articles written about the tragedy at the time have been transcribed into an easier-to-read format (and no subscription required). They can be found here and here and here and here and here.
The morning that J.E. would kill his wife and then himself, it was reported that he was “unusually communicative” at breakfast with his wife Clara and father-in-law, Robert Black, who later described J.E.’s mood as better than usual. After breakfast, Clara went upstairs to get ready for the day and J.E. went to the stable to alert the coachman he was ready to leave for work. The coachman said J.E. was whistling and joking with him down at the stable while getting the team of horses ready to take him to work. According to Robert, he saw J.E. leaving the stable that morning.
“I asked him if he was going downtown with the team and he said he was. He then went in the house, followed by me. I stopped in the library and he went upstairs. I was waiting for the team and Mr. Johnston when I heard two reports in quick succession and heard bodies fall on the floor. The reports seemed to come from Mr. Johnston’s room, which was over my head. I rushed up stairs and into the room. When I opened the door the first thing I saw was my daughter. She was breathing but seemed unconscious. I then also saw Mr. Johnston. He was dead and lying on the floor.”
The door was gently opened, and there was revealed as horrible a sight as was ever revealed to human eyes. Lying in front of her magnificent plate glass dresser was the victim, Mrs. Clara Black-Johnston, in a pool of blood and her brains gently oozing from the terrible wound which was just above her left ear. At her feet lay her dead husband, the murderer and suicide, with a bullet in his right temple. His face wore a peaceful and solemn expression notwithstanding it was covered over with his own blood.
The Wichita Beacon
Some initial reports claimed that J.E. was “wild with passion” and that “jealousy was the probable cause” because he was fearful his wife might leave him. Later a doctor who had been treating him in the days leading up to the crime would say that he found him paranoid, delusional, and dangerous. J.E.’s business associate said his business decisions had been erratic and unusual, and that he seemed agitated. The official inquest the afternoon of the murder-suicide determined that J.E. “was at the time laboring under temporary mental aberration of the mind,” i.e., he was temporarily insane.
Clara’s father Robert insisted that she not be buried beside her murderer, and even refused to allow them to be side-by-side in the vault while awaiting burial. Clara’s funeral was held in the Black mansion’s parlor, while J.E. had no funeral.
Clara’s body was eventually transported to Warsaw where she was buried beside her mother. J.E.’s body was also transported to Warsaw by his siblings and he was buried in the same cemetery in a nearby lot.
The Blacks & The Johnstons
Clara L. Black was born September 4, 1858 in Warsaw, Illinois, the only daughter of Jane (née Blair) and Robert Black. Robert had been married once before to a woman named Charlotte Hill, but she died in childbirth. Clara did have one sibling, a boy named Robert Fillmore Black, but he did not survive infancy. I couldn’t find out much about Clara’s childhood, but she did receive an education.
In adulthood, Clara was described as a “gentle, inoffensive, confiding woman” who was a kind and affectionate spouse and a respected member of the communities she was known in.
Her father Robert was in the lumber business and was considered Warsaw’s “lumber king.” Robert may have been elected mayor of the tiny town of Warsaw three times (though this fact is never mentioned about him later, so perhaps it was another Robert Black from Warsaw who had that achievement). The Blacks were the wealthiest family in Warsaw at the time they lived there and brought their wealth with them to Wichita.
As Robert’s only daughter, Clara wanted for nothing. Her father had the means to spoil her, and he did. It was once reported that her father purchased her an elegantly carved custom piano, said to be among “the finest pianos ever brought to Warsaw.” The Black mansion in Wichita, which was intended to be passed down to Clara, was “surrounded with all that money could buy and every comfort of life was brought to it.”
Clara was just 15 when she ran away to marry 23-year-old Warsaw local J.E. Johnston in 1874. Her father Robert would claim for the rest of his life that J.E. “stole” Clara to be his wife, and her mother Jane would refer to J.E. as Clara’s “abductor.” While they always welcomed Clara with open arms, they admittedly never forgave J.E. for taking their only daughter. The marriage was still proudly announced in the Warsaw Bulletin. The Blacks and the Johnstons were both well-known in the small town, so a marriage wasn’t the kind of thing that could be kept secret.
It was later revealed that Robert Black actually sued the clergy who performed the ceremony. The lawsuit dragged on for two years before being dismissed.
It was obvious that Clara loved J.E. Her father Robert would say that he never saw a woman do more for anyone than she did for him.
Clara became pregnant not long after she married and gave birth to her first child in April 1875 when she was just 16 years old.
After their son was born, Clara and J.E. moved to Seward, NE where their baby boy died died August 12, 1875. They came back to Warsaw to bury him.
Clara and J.E. had one other child that died and four more children that survived to adulthood: Grace (b. 1877), Clara Catherine (b. 1880), Kirk (b. 1881), and John Edward “Johnnie” (b. 1884). They eventually left Seward and moved to Kansas City, where J.E. was apparently successful in business. Then they moved to Wichita around 1885.
James Edwin (J.E.) Johnston was born in Hancock county, Illinois (though he’s accused by some of being born a few miles away in Keokuk, Iowa) on April 12, 1850 to Catherine (née Baldwin) and John Edward Johnston. He was born right in the middle of five kids – he had two older siblings, and two younger siblings. It was said that in his younger days he was “without character.” However, by many accounts, J.E. was an educated and respected businessman, perhaps because of the company he kept.
Before he moved to Wichita, newspapers reported his name as J. Ed. (which may have led to the nickname “Jed”). He may have went by J. Ed. so he wasn’t confused with his father, the elder J.E., with whom he ran a dry goods store in Warsaw and later in Seward, Nebraska.
The younger J.E. also found success in business in Wichita without his father. He entered the real estate business in Wichita selling prime plots of land in downtown Wichita and made a lot of money. It was estimated he earned around $200,000 (about $6 million in 2023) in about six months.
Later, he partnered with another wealthy real estate investor and Wichita capitalist, George Blackwelder. George would later serve as the executor for J.E.’s estate.
Robert Black moved to Wichita in 1884, the year before his daughter Clara and son-in-law came, and he also invested heavily into real estate. He built the Manhattan Hotel, which at the time was among the best in Wichita and with its prime location, it was a popular destination for travelers. Robert would later serve as the hotel’s proprietor.
J.E. may have recognized an opportunity for himself in Wichita, or maybe Robert encouraged them to come to keep Clara close. Opportunity in Wichita was booming at that time Clara and her husband moved to Wichita in 1885, the same year Robert opened the Manhattan Hotel.
There were plenty of signs that something might be wrong with J.E. In June 1887, he was reported to have “accidentally” shot himself in the chest. The incident was publicly brushed off as a stupid mistake, but in reality, it was a sign of the mental instability that people close to him were so aware of. He purchased several guns in the months leading up to the murder-suicide, and the family had taken two of them from him for fear of what he might do. They didn’t know he had a third.
J.E. had been despondent and “in ill health” for most of 1887. Clara confided in her father that J.E. had threatened to shoot himself multiple times, and once he attempted to slash his throat with a razor. Clara “was afraid of him and had frequently lost sleep at night, fearing for her life and those of her children.”
J.E. thought he was being followed, that everyone was against him, and that his wife was going to leave him. A few days before the murder-suicide, he approached a reporter and offered him $20 for information about a sensational divorce suit the newspaper was promising to report. The reporter said he wanted to know if his wife was going to divorce him, and was relieved when he learned they weren’t the subjects of the report.
His business partner George Blackwelder said that J.E. suffered from chronic throat and lung disease, and that “at times he was crazy” from the symptoms. Others close to him said he was “a perfect gentleman in every respect,” but in bad health, mentally and physically.
Robert did not have a good relationship with his son-in-law, and they argued a lot. Robert harbored resentment over the marriage and his “stolen” daughter for over a decade. Arguments over business transactions, whether related to real estate or the mansion, were said to be “numerous and often.” Every disagreement, Clara took her husband’s side.
Clara confessed to her father that she stayed awake at night, scared of what J.E. might do to himself, her, or the children. She wrote to an aunt shortly before she was killed and stated that J.E. was “undoubtably insane” and to take care of the children if anything should happen to her. Robert said he knew J.E.’s mind was affected, but that he did not consider him to be dangerous. J.E. had been under a physician’s care in the days leading up to the murder-suicide, and that physician determined that J.E. was not just displaying signs of paranoia and mental illness, but that he was a dangerous maniac, and he wanted him “put in irons.”
The family experienced other tragedies that may have contributed to J.E.’s mental breakdown. His father died August 3, four months prior to the murder-suicide. And Clara’s mother Jane, who had a stroke in 1886 and was found by J.E., died from heart failure September 3, one day before Clara’s birthday and three months before the murder-suicide. Robert and J.E. argued about Jane’s death, funeral, and burial, too. Different reports made it sound like her body was transported to Illinois without Robert’s blessing, or in a way he was uncomfortable with.
The House That Robert Built
In addition to investing in commercial real estate, Robert purchased the160-acre farm originally homesteaded by pioneer Samuel Hoover. He had plans to make money off the land, but also built an eleven room mansion for his wife, daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren. When purchased, the land was considered east Wichita and on the edge of town.
The mansion that Robert built for his family at the corner of Douglas and Hydraulic was intended to be a suburban dream home where he and his wife would live out long, happy lives in peace. It was often referred to as palatial and was “the most expensive and luxurious of any in the city at the time it was built.”
The brick mansion would later be described as “dark and foreboding” and it was difficult to keep it occupied. It held a haunting reputation after “the black winged messenger of death hovered over it.”
Robert and his wife Jane were living in the Manhattan Hotel while the Black mansion was being built, and that’s when Jane had her stroke. She was alone when it happened, and J.E. was the first to come to her aid.
Robert continued construction on the mansion while his wife attempted to recover from her stroke. They were able to move out of the Manhattan Hotel and into the Black mansion in the fall of 1886. Robert put the finishing touches on the house a year before Jane died inside the home he built for her on September 3, 1887.
Three months later, Clara was murdered by her husband inside the Black mansion, leaving Robert alone inside the huge mansion he built, left with four grandchildren to raise on his own (and several ghosts) at age 65.
“The stillness which prevailed was only broken by the now and then deep, heart-broken wail of the bereaved father. The old gentleman, who is just turning gray, was past shedding tears, and seemed totally oblivious to his surroundings. Only once did he speak while the reporter was in his hearing, and that was when he gathered Johnston’s two little boys, aged about 3 and 5 years, into his arms and told how he loved them.”
The Wichita Beacon, Dec 6, 1887
Robert Black died in 1894 at the Manhattan Hotel. His estate was estimated to be worth over $1,000,000 (over $36,000,000 in 2023), among the largest in the county at the time. In addition to the family mansion and the land surrounding it, he owned hundreds of acres in and around Wichita. Robert left everything he owned to his third wife and grandchildren, including all his farm property, his real estate property, and the Black family mansion.
Robert requested to be embalmed and enclosed in a steel casket “similar to that in which my dear daughter and her mother are buried.” He is buried at Oakland Cemetery in Warsaw, IL with his first wife Charlotte, second wife Jane, and his children, Robert and Clara.
Robert’s granddaughter Grace moved into mansion when she married in 1896. Later, the mansion held numerous different tenants, including the Sisters of St. Joseph and The Lennox Sanitarium. All of Robert’s land was sectioned off and sold by his heirs. The farmland south of the Black mansion was sold to J. Hudson McKnight in 1896 for a fraction of its value (and he has a story of his own).
The Black mansion was demolished in 1915 and the land it sat on served as car lot for Buchanan Motor Company for many years. Today, the former Black mansion address is the current address of Tanya’s Soup Kitchen.
What Happened to the Children?
At the time of their parents deaths, the children were said to be “bright and intelligent little folks, and formed a strong contrast to their unnatural father.” They were raised by their grandfather until he died in 1894. After that, the two younger boys were cared for by their older sisters and lived either in the Black mansion or the Manhattan Hotel until adulthood.
Grace Johnston married Mason Nevins in 1896, and gave birth to an infant that died in 1898. Grace died suddenly at the Manhattan Hotel in 1901 at age 23 from what was reported to be uraemic poisoning (kidney related). Her death certificate lists some type of poisoning, but it’s not clear what kind. Grace and her husband Mason lived in the house that her parents died in. She didn’t have a will, and her husband sued her siblings to be given her share of the family estate. He was awarded her one-quarter ownership, which he sold. She is buried in the Nevins family plot at Maple Grove Cemetery in Wichita.
Clara Catherine Johnston married lawyer Charles Carroll Marsh, son of a congressman, in 1899 in the Black mansion. They moved to Oklahoma and then back to Warsaw to raise fancy chickens. They had two children together, Frances and Catherine. Charles was said to suffer from melancholia and was under a doctor’s care when he shot himself with a shotgun in the family barn in 1908. Clara married again, a man named Charles Lindmueller in 1910. They had a daughter, Elizabeth, in 1911. Clara’s daughter Frances died in 1919 at age 15, and Clara shot and killed herself at Hyde Park Hotel in Chicago in 1925 at age 44. She is buried at Oak Woods Cemetery in Chicago, Illinois.
Kirk Johnston was just five when his parents died. He married Naunetta Wampler in November 1908, and she filed for divorce within two months and asked for alimony. She cited drunkenness, failure to provide, and improper relations with women. Ultimately they stayed together, but she filed for divorce again later that same year, this time only citing adultery and requesting no alimony (the Wichita Eagle suggested the divorce would be uncontested since she wasn’t asking for alimony this time). As Johnston Bros., Kirk and his brother lived at the Manhattan Hotel and ran a pharmacy here, then they moved to Kansas City where Kirk ran a pharmacy and got in trouble for selling liquor there. Later he ran a saloon on Kansas City’s 12th Street, known for “sex workers and speakeasy bartenders slinging bootleg hooch,” where he and his little brother would spend most of their time. Kirk died in 1927 at age 45 and is buried at Forest Hill Cemetery in Kansas City, Missouri.
Johnnie was just three when his parents died, and likely had no memory of them (but a few memories of a sad grandfather). He and Kirk lived with their older sister Grace until they were adults and then moved into the Manhattan Hotel for several years. Johnnie was a business man, lightly involved in real estate and other business transactions he could make with the inheritance that he got. He probably married Belle Maude Stockman in 1917 (they were living together on the 1920 census), and she may have died before 1930 (Johnnie was living alone and says he was widowed,). “Friendly Johnnie Johnston” died in 1937 at age 53, and and his death certificate says he was a widow who died of chronic interstitial nephritis and bronchitis. He is probably buried with Kirk at Forest Hill Cemetery. Johnnie had a nice, descriptive obituary written about him that mentions the murder-suicide that shaped his life, which I transcribed here.
Resources
Warsaw Community History Archive
Fine East Side Property (The Wichita Beacon, May 2, 1887, Wichita, KS)
MURDER AND SUICIDE (The Wichita Beacon, Dec 6, 1887, Wichita, KS)
Horrible Tragedy! (The Wichita Star, Dec 6, 1887, Wichita, KS)
The Daily Double Tragedy (The Champaign Daily Gazette, Dec 7, 1887, Champaign, IL)
A Wichita Tragedy (The Evening Reflector, Dec 7, 1887, Abilene, KS)
A Wichita Tragedy (The Sun, Dec 7, 1887, Leavenworth, KS)
Shipped Tomorrow (The Wichita Eagle, Dec 8, 1887, Wichita, KS)
Final Disposition (The Wichita Star, Dec. 9, 1887, Wichita, KS)
The Horrible Tragedy (The Arrow, Dec. 10, 1887, Wichita, KS)
Revolting Murder and Suicide (Wichita New Republic, Dec 10, 1887, Wichita, KS)
MURDER AND SUICIDE (The Wichita Breeze, Dec 10, 1887, Wichita, KS)
The Last Adieux (The Wichita Beacon, Dec 14, 1887, Wichita, KS)
MAD AS A MARCH HARE (The Wichita Weekly Beacon, Dec 14, 1887, Wichita, KS)
An Insane Real-Estate Man (LeRoy Eagle, Dec 15, 1887, LeRoy, IL)
The Johnston Estate (The Wichita Eagle, Dec 17, 1887, Wichita, KS)
Lindmueller Funeral (The Times, Mar 30, 1925, Munster, IN)
“You Kids Get Off My Lawn!” (The College Hill Commoner, March 2010)
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