On the night of Thursday, September 13, 1904, Mrs. Adelia C.B. Sweeting—a native of Jackson, Michigan, making the voyage aboard the Western States from Buffalo to Detroit—was jarred awake from a deep slumber by a squeezing sensation around her throat. She opened her eyes to see a figure standing over her, his hands encircling her neck. When he realized his victim had awakened, the perpetrator tightened his grip. His knuckles turned white, and Mrs. Sweeting’s eyes bulged slightly as blood vessels popped in her eyelids, forming hemorrhages that resembled flecks of red pepper. Through tear-filled eyes, she barely made out the man’s features before everything went black (she later alleged that her assailant drugged her after the throttling).
(mugshot of Joseph Kerwin at about the time he entered Federal custody, c. 1904. Author’s collection)
The figure then yanked three rings from Mrs. Sweeting’s fingers, rifled through her purse and fingered $40 in greenbacks, and then darted out of the cabin.
A few minutes later, Adelia Sweeting regained her consciousness. She staggered out of the stateroom onto the deck and gave her best effort at a scream for help. Although she could muster just a raspy whelp, an officer heard her cry and raced to her side. Peeling back the collar of her night dress, he could see discernible finger marks where the as-yet-unidentified perpetrator tried to squeeze the life out of her.
As the Western States neared Detroit, the captain kept the ship from docking until a detective could be called. Detective Frank Wilkinson took a stiff out the ship and conducted an investigation. He interviewed Mrs. Sweeting, who gave a sketchy description of the assailant. Wilkinson then summoned ship personnel into the engine room, where he interrogated each one. Joseph Kerwin (also spelled “Kirwin”), an oiler, appeared fidgety and nervous. Although Kerwin denied having anything to do with the incident, his demeanor raised Wilkinson’s suspicions. The crafty cop tailed Kerwin to his residence on Antoine Street, where he lived with his wife and child. Inside the apartment, Wilkinson found the smoking gun: Adelia Sweeting’s rings. Kerwin left Antoine Street in handcuffs.
The case wound up on the desk of Federal Prosecutor William D. Gordon, who did a little legwork and dug into Kerwin’s past. His investigation dredged up a sordid history and a lengthy rap sheet. A “product of the gutter,” as a journalist for Chicago’s Day Book described him, Kerwin grew up on the mean streets of Toledo. He first ran afoul of the law at age fourteen for strangling a girl, a crime that landed him an Ohio reform school. After a brief stint behind bars, he was released only to repeat the crime in Illinois. This second offense put him in an Illinois State Reformatory for four years.
Upon his release, he drifted back east to Cleveland, where police liked him as “Joe the Strangler”—an unidentified man who strangled a prostitute named Maggie Snedegar. The day before Valentine’s Day, 1903, Snedegar was found in her bordello crib throttled to death.
Police had few leads until ten days later, when two more Cleveland women—Helen Morris and Belle Anderson—were strangled and robbed in circumstances that mirrored the Snedegar case. Both women survived and reported the crimes. Police followed their description of the perpetrator to Kerwin. A search of Kerwin uncovered Maggie Snedegar’s pocket watch. Detectives also found a witness who saw Kerwin leaving the whorehouse that night.
Kerwin’s arrest made headlines throughout Ohio, prompting Toledo authorities to examine the similarities between the Snedegar murder and the unsolved slaying of Toledo prostitute named Anna Snyder (also strangled and robbed).
Kerwin, though, beat the rap when police could not manage to find enough evidence to justify a warrant.
As the “Erie Strangler’s” court date neared, Adelia C.B. Sweeting sued the shipping company for the whopping sum of $25,000. She based her case in part on the company’s alleged negligence: she said that both the cabin boy who heard her cries for help and the captain at first dismissed her story about the assault and robbery and accused her of suffering from a drug-induced hallucination. She ultimately won $12,000 in damages.
Joseph Kerwin’s future became a matter of geography.
Because the robbery of Mrs. Sweeting took place in a stateroom seventeen miles out in Lake Erie instead of in a boarding house on terra firma in Detroit, the crime became robbery on the high seas—piracy—rather than assault and grand larceny (the jewelry was worth $300) and a matter for a Federal court rather than a Michigan court. Michigan law mandated a life sentence for a convicted pirate, but Federal law put the death penalty on the table. Both penalties were much stricter than the five years Kerwin would have received for a similar crime committed on land.
Caught with his hands on Adelia Sweeting’s jewelry, Kerwin went into the courtroom of Judge Henry S. Swan on December 3, 1904, hoping for mercy. He pled guilty. In any other case, Swan would have been thrilled at the uncluttered conclusion, but not this time. He explained to Kerwin that he hated to accept a guilty plea in a case like Kerwin’s because the maximum penalty under Federal law was death. Nonetheless, Swan believed he could choose between Michigan’s penalty for piracy and the Federal equivalent. He decided to send Kerwin to prison for life rather than to the scaffold.
As he handed down the sentence, Judge Swan noted that Kerwin was a lucky man. Had he committed the crime seventeen miles off of Buffalo instead of Detroit, he would have certainly received a death sentence. Since New York law mandated death to pirates, the only choice open to the judge would have been the method of execution: hanging or the chair.
Joseph Kerwin thus became the first (and only) “pirate” convicted for robbery in the Great Lakes —a morbid tidbit not lost on sensational reporters, who reveled in crafting headlines about the Michigan “pirate.”
Kerwin began his sentence in the Detroit House of Correction, a facility that doubled as both a State and Federal penitentiary. In 1904, the building housed short-term local offenders (a majority serving stints for selling liquor without a license), female lifers (it was the only facility at the time to house women serving long prison terms), and Federal prisoners. So Kerwin rubbed elbows with horse thieves from the Indian Territory and saloon keepers who ran blind pigs (but not female convicts, who were kept strictly isolated and did not even enjoy yard privileges until a reform movement swept through Detroit in the mid 1920s.
Kerwin was a handful for his Detroit jailers (lifers often struggle at first to adjust to their new milieu). After seven years, the troublemaking pirate was transferred to Leavenworth in June 1912. While there, he became a model prisoner. He learned to play an instrument—the trombone—and studied mechanical and electrical engineering through correspondence courses. He eventually helmed the New Era, Leavenworth’s monthly newspaper, as editor-in-chief.
(Kerwin, pirate-turned-trombonist. Author’s collection)
According to Kerwin’s colleague at the New Era, the pirate was a veritable scion inside Leavenworth.
“Joe his talented,” waxed the editor, “he has for long been recognized as the institution’s poet laureate, he was a leader in prison athletics and a star of the base ball diamond. When holiday shows of local talent were the order of the day, Joe took a leading part as impresario and actor. His singing and acting contributed much to the success of many holiday minstrel and vaudeville entertainments.”
Meanwhile, friends and relatives of the prison “poet laureate” lobbied for his release, arguing that Kerwin’s life imprisonment was inconsistent with the severity of his crime. Not everyone agreed. Federal Prosecutor William D. Gordon cited Kerwin’s criminal history and alleged role in the murder of Maggie Snedegar.
Nonetheless, the pleas for the pardon of a pirate doing life for petit theft made it all the way to the White House. According to tradition, a pardon would not be granted without approval of either the prosecutor or the trial judge, but by this time, both Gordon and Swan had passed away. Both Presidents Wilson and Harding refused executive clemency.
It took years, but eventually Joseph Kerwin obtained a release from prison. He walked out of Leavenworth a free man in 1926.
(Joseph Kerwin in a Leavenworth mugshot taken around the time of his release. This image is from a copy in the author’s possession, but the National Archives has a digital image displayed here. The Archives mistakenly dates the image from 1912, but comparing this to the earlier mug shot displayed above, it appears that this was taken much later in his incarceration)
Following his release, Joseph Kerwin’s once again became a media sensation—a curio of criminality and a throwback to a bygone era. The mere mention of the word “pirate” by a reporter brought up romantic images of swashbucklers attacking Spanish galleons. In covering Kerwin’s release, one Detroit reporter summarized the case: “Kerwin’s crime, his trial, and his sentence form one of the most curious records in the annals of local jurisprudence.”
The reality of Joseph Kerwin’s robbery on the high seas, however, was far from romantic. Or was it?
Joseph Kerwin, street urchin (and later husband and father) struggling to make ends meet, may have been motivated by profit, but his history suggests the possibility of another, deeper, darker motive. Descriptions of the crime indicate that he never intended to murder Adelia Sweeting. His throttling of her may have served another purpose; he may have experienced a sexual climax from the act itself. Infamous bluebeard-style serial killer Harry Powers once remarked that the joy he felt in watching his victims die by asphyxiation was far more pleasurable than any one night he spent in a bordello.
And Kerwin had, in the words of one reporter, “a lust for choking women to death.” Before the attack on Mrs. Sweeting, “Joe the Strangler” had been linked to at least two fatal (Maggie Snedegar and Anna Snyder) and five non-fatal incidents (Adelia Sweeting, Helen Morris, Belle Anderson, and two unnamed minors from her youth) of strangling. It is possible that Kerwin, like Powers after him, experienced sexual satisfaction from watching his victims writhe beneath his grip.
Joseph Kerwin, “Joe the Strangler” and the only man convicted of piracy in Michigan, died on April 10, 1943.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2015 Tobin T. Buhk 
One Response
Karen
I came across the story about Kerwin in an old newspaper and wondered if he ever got released. Thank you for posting the rest of the story. I will be using just the dates in an upcoming book but will add a link to this page for those who want to read more information. This is a my kind of web site and I hope to get back soon to read more of your stories. Thank you!