ALBANY - As society continues to grapple with the issue of punishment for youthful criminals, the Winter issue of "New York Archives" magazine features one historian's examination of the case of seventeen-year-old Charley Miller who was executed for murder in 1892. See story below.
The Boy Murderer
The nineteenth-century murder trial of fifteen-year-old “Kansas Charley”,
a New York orphan, leads a prominent social historian to explore the crimes
and punishments of juveniles.
by Rachel Dickinson
Joan Jacobs Brumberg, a social historian and professor at Cornell University, has always been fascinated with the history of childhood. Author of two books about girls (Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa and The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls), Brumberg knew she wanted to tackle a "boy" topic for her next book, but needed an angle.
She found it in a provocative question. "It was the day after the Jonesboro schoolyard shooting and one of my students asked if there were examples of boy killers in the past," says Brumberg. "That got me thinking, but outside of the Leopold and Loeb case [teenage boys convicted of murder in 1924 but not executed], I couldn't come up with any others."
For the next two years, she and her students built a data set of 125 boys who had committed homicide between 1865 and 1917. Combing major newspapers for names, crimes, and trials, Brumberg decided to focus on an adolescent killer who had wrestled with the classic issues of poverty, family breakup, and abuse, eliminating obvious psychopaths who were serial killers or sexual predators. She chose Charley Miller.
A Brief, Murderous Life
Charley Miller was born to German immigrant parents in New York City in 1874.
Orphaned by age six, Charlie, along with his siblings, was raised in the New
York Orphan Asylum. He was then "placed out" at age twelve and sent
west on an orphan train, the invention of Charles Loring Brace, founder of the
Children’s Aid Society in New York City. At age fourteen, Charley began
tramping and riding the rails on his own , and a year later, while heading for
Wyoming, he murdered two young men in a boxcar.
The trial of "Kansas Charley" — the name he liked to be called, in imitation of popular dime novels and his hero, Jesse James — was sensational, covered in newpapers coast to coast. Charley was found guilty of the murders and hanged in April, 1892, at the age of seventeen.
When Brumberg found the Miller case, she was intrigued: here was a juvenile murder that had been committed in Wyoming, a brand-new frontier state, and yet the trial had made national news. Brumberg knew that if she could put the pieces of Charley's life and trial together she would have a story that would resonate with contemporary readers and might stimulate people to think about the continuing use of the juvenile death penalty in the United States.
"Being a historian is a bit like being a detective," says Brumberg. She lucked out with Charley Miller because of the availability of documentary evidence. Charley's "voice" survived because of the poetry and songs he wrote, and the fact that he liked to grant interviews to the press. These interviews provided Brumberg with descriptions of Charley, his crime, his cell and diet in the Cheyenne, Wyoming jail, and key people in his life after the murders.
A transcript of the trial also existed, and this, in combination with the newspaper accounts, gave Brumberg a way to reconstruct a sound chronology of the last two years of Charley's life, as well as his psychological development as he faced death on the gallows.
Reconstructing a Child
But what took legwork was reconstructing his first fifteen years. In New York,
Brumberg had to struggle with the fact that Charley's documentary trail was
very slim: "Although there are published annual reports of the New York
Orphan Asylum, there are no surviving records of individual children, and there's
no explanation of the disappearance of these records."
As a result, she had to read the annual reports very carefully to get a sense of who the trustees were and what the asylum routine might have been like for Charley and his siblings in the 1880s: "The reports are a telling commentary of what the trustees thought about the future of the kids they had in custodial care."
In the still-preserved ledgers of the Children's Aid Society (CAS), Brumberg found reports on Charley and his brother and clippings about the murders. "Their individual histories were mapped out," she says, "including some affectionate commentary by the adoptive parents of the oldest Miller boy."
The CAS records also identified what had happened to Carrie Miller, Charley's sister, leading Brumberg to Ilion, New York and its local newspaper. In 1882, twelve-year-old Carrie had been selected from among the age-appropriate girls at the New York Orphan Asylum to become a domestic servant in the home of George Weaver, then editor of the Ilion Citizen.
Weaver and his growing family had moved to Rochester in 1889, so Brumberg visited the Rochester Public Library and the University of Rochester's Rush Rhees Library in search of local materials, such as city directories, census records, maps, and photographs.
Then, she says, "I went from George Weaver the newspaper editor to George Weaver the inventor, who gets stolen away from the Ilion paper to become a publisher of law books in a successful Rochester firm. The connection becomes important because when I looked at the clemency files in the Wyoming State Archives, there was George Weaver, organizer of the most powerful legal appeal for clemency for Charley Miller."
Without the archival sleuthing that took her to four states, Joan Brumberg could not have unraveled the complexities of Kansas Charley's short but historically significant life. And through her book about him, Kansas Charley, The Story of a 19th-Century Boy Murderer (Viking, 2003), Brumberg has been able to address the efficacy of the death penalty for juveniles — a complicated moral and legal issue that is as relevant today as it was in the nineteenth century.