Free Killer Colt by Harold Schechter

into Colt’s room.
    From his highly restricted viewpoint, he could make out “a man with his coat off bent over a person who was lying on the floor.” According to his later accounts, he watched for a full ten minutes, until the stooping figure straightened up and moved to a table “on which there were two men’s hats.” 2
    Quickly, Wheeler rose and—instructing Seignette to keep a close eye on Colt’s door—hurried up to the top floor, where he knocked on the door of the landlord, Charles Wood. Receiving no response, Wheeler tried the doors of several other occupants, but no one was in, “it being the dinner hour.”
    As he was descending the stairs, he encountered Law Octon. An elderly African-American fellow who resided on the third floor with his wife, Mercy, Octon worked as the building superintendent and served as a deacon in the Zion Baptist Church. 3 At Wheeler’s urging, Octon accompanied him to Colt’s office and—using the pen to open the drop—looked through the keyhole. Octon, however, could see nothing and, after a few fruitless minutes of peeping, returned to his apartment.
    Convinced that Colt was inside, Wheeler tiptoed down the flight of stairs, then returned with a heavy tromp and rapped sharply on Colt’s door—a ploy, as he subsequently explained, “to make Colt think he had a caller and open the door.” The stratagem did not work. No one answered.
    By then several more of Wheeler’s students had shown up, along with John Delnous, a twenty-six-year-old bookkeeper who was interested in renting Wheeler’s second room at the end of Colt’s tenancy. Wheeler immediately explained what had happened. At first, Delnous laughed off his suspicions. True, there had evidently been a strange commotion in Colt’s room, followed by a peculiar, prolonged silence. Still, there might be an innocent explanation. Wheeler was so convinced that something was seriously amiss, however, that when he asked Delnous to go find a police officer, the younger man agreed.
    He returned to say that the “officers were all presently engaged but one of them, named Bowyer, promised to come within a half hour.” 4
    In those days, before the creation of a professional police department, the city was “inadequately protected” by an “archaic system” that had barelyevolved since colonial times. Thirty-one constables and a hundred city marshals made up the bulk of the daytime force. At night, the policing of the city fell to a “patchwork corps” of watchmen, made up of moonlighting day laborers—stevedores, mechanics, teamsters, and the like. These part-time defenders of the public order—who patrolled the streets after dark and stood guard in sentry boxes—wore no uniforms. Besides a thirty-three-inch wooden club, their only badge of office was a distinctive leather helmet resembling a fireman’s old-fashioned headgear and varnished to the hardness of iron. While not precisely laughingstocks, these amateur lawmen were, as one early historian puts it, not held “in especial reverence or dread” by the city’s criminal element, who derisively referred to them as “Leatherheads” and made them the butt of assorted pranks. A favorite was “upsetting a watch-box with a snoring Leatherhead inside it or lassoing the sentry-box with a stout rope and dragging it along with the imprisoned occupant inside it.” 5
    Along with Delnous and a pair of students named Riley and Wood, Wheeler waited in his office for Bowyer’s arrival. Given the dismal state of law enforcement at that period, however, it is no surprise that Officer Bowyer never showed up.
    When dusk fell, Wheeler tried again, sending the two students out into the streets in search of a policeman. They returned a short time later with a message from the neighborhood officers, who explained that they had no authority to enter Colt’s room and suggested that Wheeler continue to keep watch. Soon after, Riley and Wood left for the night. Delnous went out to