A more precise title would be “Murder Victim Under the Prairie Path.”
In 1889, Carl Gentner, who worked as a cobbler out of his home on Duane Street, was sent to jail for 30 days for stealing coal from the Bathke-Newton lumber and coal yard. When he returned home from jail, he had reason to suspect that his wife and his business partner had taken advantage of his absence. In a rage, he hit his partner with a cobbler’s hammer, killing him. Then he dumped the body in an abandoned well at the back of his property and told people that his partner had left town. Gentner also caused his wife’s death by pushing her into the kitchen stove where she experienced fatal burns. This he explained away by claiming that she had fallen against the stove while drunk.
The truth behind these murders didn’t emerge until 1904, by which time Gentner had become a recluse who still harbored a grudge against those whose testimony sent him to jail fifteen years earlier. He burned down the William C. Newton house and attempted to do the same to the William H. Luther home a month later. When caught, Gentner not only confessed to arson but also talked about the murders he had committed in 1889. However, by 1904 the abandoned well at the back of Gentner’s property had been covered over by the recently built tracks for the Aurora, Elgin & Chicago Railroad. No effort was made to dig up the body and Gentner spent his remaining years in the Joliet Penitentiary.
