Photograph courtesy of Roland Klose
Growing up in north St. Louis County in the early 1960s, Maureen Johnson did what many little girls do: She played with Mom’s cosmetics and dressed in Mom’s fancy threads. She also spent plenty of time rifling through her mother’s jewelry box, where one day she discovered a heavy gold wedding band that had belonged to her great-grandmother, Elizabeth Kane.
Scarred at the edges, the massive ring seemed out of place amid the tangle of dainty earrings, bracelets, and brooches. Elizabeth may have been zaftig, but this ring was clearly man-size. Maureen’s curiosity about the ring only grew as the adults in her family, usually quick to recount an ancestral tale, greeted her questions with a reticent shrug before quickly changing the subject. It wasn’t until Maureen put the question to her great-aunt, Claudia “Schnooks” Hunter, that she finally learned the true dimensions of the ring’s mystery: Elizabeth’s husband, her great-aunt told her, had killed a man to avenge his best friend’s murder. The remarkable part of the story? He shot him dead in a St. Louis courthouse.
“Aunt Schnooks made it sound as if he’d done something heroic,” Maureen recalls. “But she left so many questions unanswered.”
Whom did her great-grandfather kill, for instance? The murder took place in a courthouse, but Aunt Schnooks, who died in 1996, never said which one. She hadn’t even told Maureen the name of her murderous relation, leaving the young woman wondering whatever happened to him.
But these questions would have to wait. The ring faded from memory as Maureen moved away from St. Louis, got a job, married me, and we built a family. She wasn’t reminded of the ring until her father’s death, when she inherited it along with a poorly exposed photograph of her great-grandmother and a Catholic prayer card from 1937, the year Elizabeth died.
Maureen figured that if Schnooks’ account was accurate, the killing must have made the papers. After all, it’s not every day that a city witnesses a courthouse murder. Still, she didn’t even know her great-grandfather’s name. It was going to take a little detective work to track down the details, and so she headed to the St. Louis Public Library to look up Elizabeth’s obituary. There Maureen learned that her great-grandfather’s name was Thomas Kane and that, yes, he had made the papers well before the St. Louis Star ran this obituary for him on December 23, 1910:
Thomas Kane, known as Red Kane, who formerly was a leading figure in one of the most vindictive gang feuds ever existing in St. Louis, died Thursday evening of peritonitis. Kane was under sentence to serve a term in the penitentiary for the killing of Fred “Yellow Kid” Mohrle, whom he shot and killed in the corridor of the Four Courts Building on June 7, 1909. The killing, according to the theory of the police, was done to avenge the death of Constable S.J. Young, who was shot and killed by Mohrle in April 1909. Kane was a member of a gang known as Egan’s Rats and was a friend of Young.
So there we had it: My wife’s great-grandfather wasn’t just a killer, he was a Rat.
One of the most notorious criminal organizations in St. Louis history, Egan’s Rats owed its early success to Tom Egan and Thomas “Snake” Kinney, two Irish boys who came up wanting in the near North Side enclave known as Kerry Patch. Egan, a dark-haired thug with a scar across one cheek, established himself early as the leader of the Ashley Street Gang. Meanwhile, Kinney, a dapper charmer with a temper, found his calling as a political boss.
By the early 1900s, Egan’s squad had morphed into the eponymous Rats, a criminal organization of more than 100 men that, like its rodent namesake, lived on an omnivorous diet—only theirs included everything from petty theft and extortion to political intimidation, election rigging, and murder. As St. Louis author Daniel Waugh recounts in Egan’s Rats, Rats routinely hired out as strikebreakers. They raided freight cars by moonlight, bullied businessmen, and even worked for the Lemp brewing family, beating saloonkeepers who made the mistake of stocking Budweiser.
The Rats’ grip on several North Side wards made the gang a muscular force at City Hall. In 1904, however, the Rats’ influence reached all the way to Jefferson City, when Kinney, in an election replete with fraud, gunplay, and at least one murder, won a state senate seat.
The same year, a Rat named Sam Young became a constable. Young was one of Egan’s most trusted lieutenants, and he soon began the violent work of building a political base in the hotly contested 15th Ward, then on the city’s near North Side.
As Young labored to build Democratic support in the weeks before the city’s 1909 primary election, he learned that Fred “Yellow Kid” Mohrle, a fellow Rat who owned a midtown coal yard, was planning to defect to the Republican Party. The Yellow Kid, Young said, would pay dearly for his treachery.
Accompanied by several men, the constable arrived at Mohrle’s coal yard, which doubled as an after-hours watering hole, on the afternoon of Sunday, April 4, 1909. Young’s cronies would later claim that as the constable knocked at Mohrle’s door, he wanted nothing other than beer and banter.
Mohrle’s associates, on the other hand, would later allege that Young pounded at the gate while belligerently demanding the Yellow Kid show himself. When Mohrle failed to appear, they said, Young ambled up the fence and began waving his gun.
Though it remains unclear precisely what happened next, Mohrle apparently panicked. He began shooting blindly through the wooden fence, and by the time police finally arrived, officers found Young face down in a bloody puddle, his hand still clasping a pearl-handled revolver.
Arrested that day and charged with murder, Mohrle and his sidekick, William Wright, stood trial in June—a mere two months after the killing. Justice moved swiftly in early 20th-century St. Louis, but the defendants must have known they had more to fear from the Rats than from any judge or jury.
Just days before the trial began, Mike Kinney—Snake Kinney’s brother—deputized Thomas “Red” Kane, a ruddy-complexioned son of Irish immigrants who’d joined the Rats with his older brother, John. Close-mouthed and stocky, Kane was in poor health, and contemporary portraits show a man aging fast on the mean streets of St. Louis. Still, Kane was young. He was a good soldier, a deputy constable, and perhaps most important, a close friend to Sam Young. Now permitted to carry a gun freely through the Four Courts Building, Maureen’s great-grandfather wore the badge with a singular purpose: Shoot the Yellow Kid.
His opportunity arrived during a break on the trial’s opening day. As Mohrle spoke with a friend outside the courtroom, Kane calmly walked up to him. He pulled his slain friend’s revolver from his side and before dozens of witnesses blew a hole through the Yellow Kid’s head. Kane nearly emptied the cylinder as he pumped four more bullets into Mohrle’s body. He then dashed from the building and hid in a shed behind the police station on Clark Avenue.
Never before had the city witnessed such a brash murder—carried out by an officer of the court, no less—in front of judges, cops, and reporters. Just hours after the slaying, the Post-Dispatch had illustrations of the killer and victim, as well as a “photo-diagram” depicting the crime scene. The St. Louis Republic ran an even more detailed illustration the following morning, showing how Kane fled the building while dozens of witnesses watched. Wire services carried news of the slaying across the country, and the story dominated the front page of every local newspaper for several days. It was the first time many St. Louisans had ever heard of “Egan’s Rats,” and reporters struggled to explain the organization and operations.
“I burned the Yellow Kid,” Kane reportedly told investigators when he was arrested later that day.
The press breathlessly reported that Kane’s motivation was personal: He and Young had been like brothers growing up in the same neighborhood. One writer went so far as to describe Kane as a peace-loving Romeo who was driven to avenge his dear Mercutio: “When Young was shot down, Kane—gentle, quiet, courteous, a boy that had never been mixed up in any disreputable brawl of any kind, civil or political, became a raving avenger.”
The Yellow Kid’s widow, however, asserted that no Rat acted on his own initiative. “Red Kane was detailed to kill my husband,” Marie Mohrle told the Post-Dispatch.
Daniel Waugh, whose history of the Rats details the gang’s political affiliations and malefactions, notes that killing Mohrle at the Four Courts Building signaled to other gangs that the Rats were ascendant and unafraid.
“It sent a powerful message to all the town’s tough guys,” says Waugh.
There were plenty of odd twists in the aftermath of the Four Courts shooting. William Wright, later acquitted of Young’s murder, remained so spooked by the Rats that he shot two innocent men in separate incidents and ended up in a mental institution.
Mohrle’s widow never recovered from her loss. She blamed the police and Republican bigwigs for failing to protect her husband and later shot herself in a suicide attempt. “I hoped to cheat the gang killing me as they did my husband,” she said by way of an explanation. (Marie Mohrle would eventually get her wish: The bullet missed her vital organs, but she died months later of blood poisoning.)
For his part, Kane was sentenced to 12 years for the murder. He went to the penitentiary in Jefferson City, but soon became so ill that he was released on $12,000 bond while he appealed his conviction.
But the Reaper expedited the ruling: Kane died after four agonizing days at Baptist Hospital, when bacteria from a chronic bladder infection spread to his kidneys. He was 27.
Like so many criminal organizations, the Rats eventually grew overconfident. A shooting war with another gang in the early 1920s landed many of its leaders in prison, and Egan’s minions began to disband. Many left St. Louis to join other criminal groups, and several former Rats were reportedly gunmen in Al Capone’s infamous St. Valentine’s Massacre of 1929. By the 1940s, however, the Rats were history.
The story of the Rats may have been written, but for Maureen the quest to discover her great-grandfather’s story leaves several questions unanswered. She still wonders, for instance, why Kane, a married father of two, was reportedly living in a boarding house at the time of the murder. Were her great-grandparents estranged? If so, what did the Rats do for Red’s widow, if anything? Even more important, perhaps, is the question of Red’s health. Had he, as Waugh speculates, agreed to assassinate Mohrle because he didn’t think he had long to live? Or had he avenged his friend’s death out of a sense of loyalty? Could it be that he was merely a dutiful Rat?
“The ring led me to look for the story of my family,” Maureen says. “I learned I had a wild and woolly family that was more interesting than I could have ever imagined.”
We may never know the answers, but that’s OK. After all, family histories are a bit like marriages: A little mystery keeps it interesting.
Roland Klose is the former editor of Illinois Times. He lives with his wife, Maureen, in Springfield, Ill.
