Was victim of ‘Torso Murder’ Anna Schrader?

EDITOR'S NOTE: This story started in one of the participating news publications that run the weekly Offbeat Oregon History newspaper column. If you have found your way here in some other way, the article might not make much sense, as the first 600 or so words will be missing!

Once in Portland, she took a room in a North Portland boardinghouse and started getting settled in. Young and pretty and vivacious in a town that still had far more eligible men than women, she had no trouble filling up her social calendar, and she was quite a social butterfly.

She soon found a sweetheart in Edward Schrader, a fellow resident in the boardinghouse she lived in. In 1915 they were married and set up housekeeping together in Southeast Portland.

Edward was, by all accounts, a real brick, to use the slang of the day — solid, good-natured, and dependable. He had a steady, well-paying job at the railroad yard. He worked nights, so Anna was left to her own devices in the evenings.

As a respectable married woman, Anna got settled in right away. She got active in her political party, joined the Portland Women’s Club, and the following year ran for Rose Festival Queen.

That same year, she accepted a bet on the outcome of a political election — probably betting on Charles Evans Hughes to beat Woodrow Wilson for President. When she lost the wager, she took her medicine like a good sport — which wasn’t easy; the terms of the bet were that the loser had to do that year’s Christmas Day Polar Bear Club swim in the Willamette River.

It worked out great for her, though. She was the only swimmer brave enough to get in the freezing water that year, and she looked fantastic in a swimsuit — so the feat got her plenty of positive attention.

Also in 1916, Anna met a dashing young Portland Police Department officer named William (Bill) Breuning. The two of them became great friends, and he introduced her around the police department, and pretty soon the vivacious little groupie was practically a police-department mascot.

And somewhere along the way, she and Bill became more than great friends. Later, when it all came crashing down, she’d be quoted in the newspaper saying their affair started in 1921 and, well, maybe it did.

“Eight years ago he used to call for me and ask me out to dinner and everywhere,” she testified, according to J.D. Chandler and Theresa Griffin Kennedy’s book, Murder and Scandal in Prohibition Portland (quoting from a Morning Oregonian article). “Since then he has hardly missed a night at my house. I know that I have done wrong. He was so nice to me in those early days, saying that he loved me, that I became infatuated with him. Many times he has taken his wife to a show and has come to see me. For weeks at a time he has eaten his evening meals at my house. In all that time my husband, whom I consider the best man I have ever known, did not know anything about it, for he was working.”

By 1921, Bill was an up-and-coming lieutenant in the force, and had become more or less the face of Prohibition enforcement by the department — which, by the way, was itself doing quite a bit of illegal liquor distributing at the time. Bill helped Anna get set up as a sort of Prohibition Mata Hari — her title was “Private Detective” — and sent her to infiltrate speakeasies and blind pigs that had not had the good sense to get “fixed” with the police department before starting into the business. She also, in the same year, joined the “Mayor’s secret police,” the paramilitary right-wing goon squad maintained by Mayor George Baker, mostly for union-busting purposes.

It was an exciting life, and for Anna the twenties really did roar. But it all came to an explosive and public end in the spring of 1929.

IT ALL BLEW up — or started to — in April of that year, when someone got Bill Breuning’s wife, Blanche, on the phone and told her that her husband was running around on her with some other dame. Actually, the tipster may have been Anna — Blanche later said she recognized her voice. And, of course, the fact that Edward Schrader had not gotten a similar tip-off call suggests she might have been right.

If it was Anna, and she was hoping to force Bill to dump his wife and make her official, the play backfired badly. Breuning promptly dropped her — as much as he could, given that she was always around the police station — and confessed his part in the affair to Police Chief Leon Jenkins. The cat was now out of the bag.

The smart play, as Jenkins was not slow in pointing out to both parties, was for both ex-lovers to slink back to their respective spouses with their tails between their legs and try to get on with their lives as quietly as possible. The resulting flurry of rumors would probably damage Anna’s social life severely, but she would get over it; they were, after all, only rumors at that point. And as for Bill, well, this was an era in which lots of men dallied with mistresses, sometimes even openly.

Interestingly enough, Anna’s rock-steady husband was OK with resolving it that way. Although obviously not happy to have been cheated on, he forgave his wife and accepted her promise to mend her ways.

But Blanche Breuning’s blood was up, and she wanted the Other Woman out of her husband’s life entirely. So she marched her straying husband into Chief Jenkins’ office for a super-awkward three-way conversation — apparently with an eye toward getting Anna dropped from all association with the Portland Police Department.

Word of this secret powwow got to Anna, and she was enraged by it. She started openly trash-talking Bill around the office, and he responded in kind. It all turned into a really divisive issue at the police department, as their feud boiled out more and more into the open and other cops started taking sides. Bill’s friends even started pulling stunts like raiding love-nest hotels to steal the guest registers so that Anna’s claims of furtive hot-sheet visits couldn’t be confirmed. (Bill continued doggedly denying there had been any affair.)

Several more tempestuous scenes ensued between Anna and Bill, including one in which (she later said) he got physically abusive with her.

So for the next little chat with her ex-side piece, Anna brought along her “sidearm piece” — a snub-nosed .38 Special. She claimed she had no idea of shooting him with it, but she wanted to use it to encourage him to be more civil.

And that set the stage for the very public events of Aug. 23, when Anna went to Bill’s house to confront him. She arrived at about the same time he did, and as he pulled up in his car, Anna pulled the .38 out and rushed at him.

Bill hit the gas and popped his door open so that the door frame hit her gun hand. The gun went off, but the bullet went wild.

Then Bill jumped out, struggled with her for the gun — another wild shot — and then he got the piece away from her and held her at gunpoint with it while some of the bystanders went to call police.

So Anna Schrader went to jail. And when the newspaper reporters came to get her story, she told them everything.

This, of course, was a disaster for everyone involved. Bill Breuning maintained that it was all lies, and that he had never been intimate with Anna Schrader; but nobody believed him. Anna was, of course, expelled forthwith from the Portland Women’s Club and declared persona non grata at the police station. And, of course, she was also expelled from the ranks of the Mayor’s Secret Police.

But Anna wasn’t ready to give up. Promptly she sued the Portland Police for false arrest, and Edward sued Bill Breuning for Alienation of Affection. She got very outspoken in public criticism of the police department, feeling betrayed by both Chief Jenkins and Mayor Baker. She claimed she had a “little black book” full of incriminating evidence that could take down some very highly placed people in the city government in general, and the police department in particular. She became an absolute gadfly.

The cops — or somebody in sympathy with them — didn’t take this easily. Shortly after her lawsuit was filed, someone put a pistol bullet through her front window; several times bricks were thrown through windows at her house, and her car was soon battered and dented from numerous hit-and-run accidents that the cops declined to investigate. Her car also became a magnet for parking tickets.

It was pretty clear a message was being sent. And it was equally clear that that message was inspiring her to fight back even harder.

When a petition to recall Mayor Baker was launched, she joined the committee and worked very hard to get him fired, making public speeches and radio broadcasts and generally pouring her very considerable energies into making life as hard as possible for the mayor and police chief … and metaphorically waving that little black book around every chance she got.

Until, one day, she stopped, and just went radio-silent (literally as well as figuratively). Sometime in 1932, she just went home, and pretty much stayed there quietly for the rest of her life.

“The question of why she never revealed the secrets she claimed to have is the great mystery of her life, and of the Baker administration,” Chandler and Kennedy write. “At this date, we’ll never know.”

We can speculate, though. Could she have been bought off? It’s possible, although from what we know of her it would have taken a pretty impressive wad of dough to convince her to stop fighting. Could she have been threatened with something? We know very little about her history in Montana; maybe there was something early in her life that she was running from, something they could hold over her. But then, reputations don’t get much more trashed than hers already was at that point!

It's hard to say. But something must have happened. Because she just stopped, and vanished from the public eye. She lived a quiet life in her Southeast Portland house. Edward Schrader died in 1941, and she remained in the house as a widow.

As for Breuning, the whole thing ended very badly for him. The public scandal put so much heat on the police department that Chief Jenkins decided he needed to make an example of him, and fired him for “conduct unbecoming a police officer.” His formerly promising law-enforcement career ended on the spot, leaving him scrambling to find a way to support his wife and children as the Great Depression started unfolding around him. He ended up losing the family home to foreclosure, a disaster for which he clearly blamed Anna Schrader.

And that’s basically all there was to the story — until 1946, when some very interesting things happened.

First, Leon Jenkins was brought back into office as chief of police. He’d been out of the office since 1933, when Mayor Joseph Carson, newly elected to replace George Baker, appointed Burton Lawson to the job.

Then, on April 5, those mysterious classified ads started.

And, of course, two weeks later, that torso was found at Wisdom Island Moorage. The torso was a close match to Anna Schrader in measurements. The head, when it was found, had hair of a similar color and style, and like Anna, wore dentures. The body parts were a woman in her late 40s or early 50s; Anna Schrader would have been 54 years old in early 1946.

The Oregon State Police worked diligently for a good 10 years to try and figure out who the Torso Murders victim was. They examined the cases of dozens of vanished women from all over the Northwest. They never seriously looked into Anna Schrader, though.

Chandler and Kennedy, having looked extensively into the case, put forward this theory — which they freely acknowledge is far from proven, but which they consider pretty likely, and I think they are right about that:

Anna Schrader hears Leon Jenkins is coming back as chief. The news brings back all her old resentment of how he handled her feud with Bill Breuning — she had thought of him as a father-figure type before the “betrayal.” So she comes out of obscurity again with the “little black book” she used to talk about so much.

Someone hears about this — someone whose interests Anna’s black book could threaten. That could be a police official, or it could be one of several organized-crime characters that were active at that time — someone like Al Winter or “Big Jim” Elkins.

Whoever it is decides he needs to shut her up, and for some reason, thinks it’s important to do so in a fairly spectacular way. So he smashes her skull in with something heavy and blunt, cuts her up, and arranges for her torso to float and her head to sink. (Clearly, the head was never intended to be found; just the torso and legs.)

As a message, if it was intended as such, it surely worked pretty well. Who it was intended for is another of the great mysteries of this case.

It's a good theory. It fits the available information very well. But, of course, we’ll never really know.

(Sources: Murder and Scandal in Prohibition Portland, a book by J.D. Chandler and Theresa Griffin Kennedy published in 1916 by The History Press; “The Wisdom Light Murder,” an article by J.B. Fisher published Feb. 28, 2017, on J.D. Chandler’s blog, The Slabtown Chronicle; Portland Morning Oregonian archives from April, August, and October 1946)