Murder or accident? The unsolved Louisville mystery forgotten in the history books

A man was missing and presumed dead. His friend was also missing, his whereabouts unknown. When the friend was finally found, his story preoccupied Louisville for months during the Depression. But today it is long forgotten. It is not mentioned in any history of Louisville. It is as if it never happened. That may be in part because we don’t really know what happened. We will probably never know.

On Monday evening, February 17, 1936, 23-year-old drugstore clerk William Detchen disappeared from his workplace and was never seen again. A few days later, his employer, gay pharmacist George B. Aufenkamp, ​​​​32, also disappeared. Two weeks later, he was arrested in Miami, Florida, brought back to Louisville and charged with murder. The charges were ineffective, however, as no body was found. Since homosexuality was considered a mental illness at the time, Aufenkamp was committed to Central State Hospital. He was released twelve years later and died in 1959.

AP Wire photo, date unknown

March 1, 1936, p. 2, and William Detchen about the time of his disappearance.

That is all we know for sure. The rest is what most courts consider hearsay. We had only one source we could rely on, Aufenkamp himself, but his story was constantly changing. The Courier Journal did an admirable job of reporting, but there were errors. We may only know part of the story, and that’s all we know. Everyone involved is dead.

That Monday was fairly unremarkable. At about 6 a.m., William Detchen left his girlfriend Florence White’s house on Third Street near Main Street to go to work. He was driving a car owned by his employer, pharmacist George B. Aufenkamp, ​​Jr. Detchen was a clerk at Aufenkamp’s new store on the northwest corner of Market and Campbell (the building still stands). He told White he would be back at 11 a.m. He always kept his word.

At about 7:45 a.m., R.H. Young, who lived with his wife and son in an apartment above the store, heard moaning and groaning coming from the back room below. A moment later, he heard Aufenkamp come in and say, “Bill, Bill, what’s wrong?” Detchen, who sounded like he was in a lot of pain, mumbled something. Aufenkamp went to the front, locked the door, and turned out the light. A little later, the moaning stopped. Someone came to the front door but couldn’t get in. Aufenkamp yelled, “We’re closed,” and they left.

Aufenkamp’s father, George B., Sr., showed up shortly afterward. He later claimed he saw Detchen leave the store around 8:30 a.m. That may be true, but he was no longer alive. Over the next few days, several friends saw Aufenkamp downtown, but police could not find him. Then he, too, disappeared.

The dapper Aufenkamp was the scion of a wealthy local grocer. He was a self-important rascal with a bad temper and a loose streak. In 1928, he was arrested in New York City for robbery and assault. Three years later, he pleaded guilty to selling pawned jewelry. In 1935, he posed as a pharmacist and even opened his own shop, but he didn’t have a license. Still, he somehow managed to buy a lot of drugs legally. The industry was pretty lax.

Aufenkamp’s family knew their son was a double-edged sword. Perhaps he was bipolar. His father said he never thought his namesake would hurt anyone, but he could fly into a rage at times. His son had cost him thousands of dollars over the years.

Little is known about the handsome Detchen except his height, and a small photo that appeared in the Courier Journal. It is not even certain that he was gay. He may have been bisexual. He and Aufenkamp probably met sometime in 1935 and had a whirlwind romance. That summer they spent some time together in a tourist cabin on River Road. But by the time he disappeared, the affair had cooled. Detchen confided to a friend that he was afraid of Aufenkamp. And he wanted to marry: a woman.

Over the next few days, police scoured the city looking for both men. Unable to get into the pharmacy, they broke down the door and searched the premises. They even pumped out a backyard outhouse (many Louisville homes still had one). But by then, Aufenkamp was hundreds of miles away. He had jumped on a bus to Atlanta and then hitchhiked to Miami, where he found work at another pharmacy.

It was a coincidence that even the talkies couldn’t make believable: A woman from Louisville was vacationing there when she discovered him. She had newspaper clippings about the case with her. She showed them to the Miami police and they arrested him. When the Louisville police were alerted, they boarded a train to pick him up. It took them three days to get there.

Aufenkamp changed his story several times until he finally presented the version that seemed most plausible to him. Nevertheless, doubts remain.

According to Aufenkamp, ​​Detchen was suffering from a bad cold and was taking medication for it. When he got to the pharmacy that evening, he decided to lie down in the back. The building had a rat problem, so Aufenkamp had bought potassium cyanide from a downtown store and brought it back to mix with sugar and sprinkle on bread. He left it carelessly on the prescription counter next to some ear medication.

AP Wirephoto, date unknown

George Aufenkamp

Aufenkamp had taught Detchen how to make capsules in an emergency when he was not there: probably another violation of the law. Detchen was not a licensed pharmacist. He said Detchen accidentally poured the cyanide into a capsule while Aufenkamp was standing in front, swallowed it and lay down. Aufenkamp later realized what had happened, but it was too late. Detchen died soon after. Aufenkamp panicked.

He later claimed he found a “bum” and paid him $10 to dispose of the body. He said the man took Detchen and threw her in the Ohio River. But that wasn’t true. Aufenkamp disposed of the body himself, probably with a little help from his father.

Late that night, Aufenkamp (and his father?) stuffed Detchen’s body into the back seat of his blue sedan and sped off. He chugged down the Dixie Highway, which was then just a two-lane country road, to the banks of the Salt River near West Point, threw the body off a bridge into the icy water, and then headed for Miami.

After returning to Louisville, police searched the banks of the Salt River for the body. A double-breasted gray coat turned up, but Detchen’s father could not identify it. At one point, Aufenkamp himself was led to the Salt River bridge to show where he had dumped the body. It was never found.

Aufenkamp’s scandalous case played out in the courts and newspapers throughout the summer of 1936. He was accused of three charges: murder, obstruction of justice and forgery. In June, two psychiatrists concluded that he was legally competent but “abnormal and dangerous.” However, the only evidence of Detchen’s death was Aufenkamp’s own words. The court was forced to drop the murder charge, but instead opted for an insanity charge.

At the time, “homosexual insanity” was considered a real illness. Around the same time as Aufenkamp’s arrest, a doctor in Lexington was imprisoned for it. Psychiatrists of the time assumed that homosexuality was a mental illness because so many gay men came to them for help. But as Evelyn Hooker pointed out two decades later, a homosexual who was mentally stable and living a normal life was unlikely to see a psychiatrist. Psychiatrists ignored a large portion of the homosexual population.

Aufenkamp’s trial ended on October 7, 1936. Two psychiatrists told the court that he suffered from an abnormal and diseased mental state and would stop at nothing to satisfy his perverse desires. A criminal court jury committed him to Central State Hospital for the rest of his life.

Twelve years later, in late 1948, Aufenkamp, ​​now 44 years old, applied for his release. By this time, doctors had confirmed that he was no longer insane. The prosecution still wanted to charge him with murder, but without a body, there was nothing they could do. On December 10, he was released and returned to Louisville.

That might have been the end of his story, but Aufenkamp was very sexually resilient. On July 10, 1951, he and another man were arrested at a downtown hotel. Detectives had followed them and heard Aufenkamp making an indecent proposition to the other man. He was sentenced to 50 days in jail and fined $100. Shortly thereafter, he was arrested again for loitering after he was seen wearing only satin shorts, talking to a soldier in the doorway of his father’s house on Sixth Street near Oak. In October, a judge promised to drop all charges if he left the city. He moved to New York City.

At the end of 1959, Aufenkamp became ill and returned to Louisville. He died on November 27 and is buried next to his parents in Calvary Cemetery.

Doubts remain about Aufenkamp’s story. He had a manic temperament. Detchen wanted to end the relationship. In his anger, did Aufenkamp give him a contaminated capsule and tell him to take a nap?

It seems strange that Detchen did not notice a bottle labeled “cyanide” and did not know that it was allowed to be used to fill a capsule. Aufenkamp’s father did not believe his son could kill, but parental love is sometimes blind. Murder is not out of the question, but without a skeleton to examine, Detchen’s death will remain a mystery.

David Williams is the founder of the Williams-Nichols Collection, one of the largest LGBTQ archives and libraries in the country. It is housed in the University of Louisville’s Department of Archives and Special Collections. His full report on this case can be found there.

“After returning to Louisville, police searched the banks of the Salt River looking for the body. A double-breasted gray coat turned up, but Detchen’s father could not identify it. At some point, Aufenkamp himself was taken to the Salt River bridge to show where he had dumped the body. It was never found.”